UpDate - Vol. 16, No. 9
October 31, 1996
Frankenstein lives in prof's work on classic

     Just in time for Halloween, The Frankenstein Notebooks: A
Facsimile Edition of Mary Shelley's Manuscript Novel, 1816-17, by
Charles E. Robinson, English, was published Oct. 30 by Garland
Publishing of New York City.
     The two-volume book reproduces for the first time the
holograph text of the manuscript of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein;
or, The Modern Prometheus as it survives in draft and fair copy
in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.
     Robinson's book consists of 400 manuscript photofacsimilies,
each facing one of an additional 400 pages of "diplomatic"
transcriptions that reproduce the words and the subtleties of the
manuscript.
     Using this technique, Robinson, one of the world's leading
scholars on Frankenstein, graphically recreates the process by
which the novel was composed, especially as it relates to the
involvement of the author's husband, the poet Percy Bysshe
Shelley. Many people do not realize that he read the entire
draft, made alterations in the manuscript draft, wrote part of
the fair copy and even oversaw some of the printing of his wife's
book.
     To illustrate the collaboration between the Shelleys,
Robinson employs different fonts for their often similar
handwriting. He also uses different fonts for smear deletions and
for other hands in the manuscript. He provides extensive
footnotes that explain everything from word cancellations and
variant spellings to the way that the Frankenstein notebooks were
assembled and disassembled.
     In this unique edition, the exact 1818 text can be seen line
by line in comparison with manuscript transcription. The reader
can  see at a glance on one page the text Mary Shelley originally
wrote, the text as altered by both Shelleys and the text as it
was published a few months later. It also puts to rest the long-
held belief that Percy Shelley wrote certain passages of the
novel, when, in fact, he worked merely as an editorial adviser to
his wife, Robinson said.
     The text makes known for the first time that Mary Shelley
drafted her novel in two notebooks and conceived and wrote
Frankenstein as a two-volume novel. Only after completing her
draft in the spring of 1817 did she reconfigure her text into the
three-volume novel that was published in January 1818.
     Additionally, by imaginative use of running heads and of the
de facto collation that records volume and chapter and page
numbers as well as the printing errors in the 1818 text, Robinson
further reveals the last stages by which Mary Shelley brought her
"hideous progeny" to life.
     Robinson is the 1995 recipient of the Distinguished Scholar
Award from the Keats-Shelley Association of American. His other
books include Mary Shelley: Collected Tales, and The Mary Shelley
Reader. He has appeared as an expert on Frankenstein on the Arts
& Entertainment network and the BBC.
     Mary Shelley "eloped" with married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley
when she was 16, and she began to write Frankenstein two years
later.
     The idea was conceived in the summer of 1816 when the couple
vacationed at Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and other writers and
intellectuals of the day.
     The group passed rainy days and nights telling ghost
stories, and Frankenstein was conceived after a night of such
storytelling when Mary struggled to sleep.
     With her husband's encouragement, she kept developing the
story that was eventually published anonymously.
     Today, her tale, which Robinson describes as the story of
"men of reason who pursue knowledge to the destruction of their
own hearts," remains one of the most widely read of all 19th-
century novels.
                                                     -Beth Thomas