"There never was a wilder story imagined," wrote one reviewer on the
first publication of Frankenstein in 1818: "we do not well see why it
should have been written." The admiring Sir Walter Scott felt that
Frankenstein's "unexpected and fearful events... shook a little even our
firm nerves". The prophetic power of novel's imagery in reflecting the
dehumanising effects of science, technology, empire, business and the
mass media has never abated. Writing in 2002, Jay Clayton said: "As a
cautionary tale, Frankenstein has had an illustrious career; virtually
every catastrophe of the last two centuries - revolution, rampant
industrialism, epidemics, famines, World War 1, Nazism, nuclear
holocaust, clone, replicants and robots - has been symbolized by
Shelley's monster. Perhaps more than any other novel, Frankenstein has
been interpreted as a warning impeding events." For some readers these
warnings have produced a monstrous creation in place of Mary Shelley's
own. "Frankenstein is a product of criticism, not a work of literature,"
argues Fred Botting. Yet if the metaphorical interpretations of the
novel appear to exceed the adolescent fantasy which gave rise to them,
this is in itself a tribute to the original work, concludes Levine: "The
book is larger and richer than any of its progeny and too complex to
serve as mere background... The novel has qualities that allow it to
exfoliate as creatively and endlessly as any important myth." In this
book, Josie Billington looks at the story and its legacy, and sifts the
vast repertoire of critical opinion to give us the most interesting
verdicts on the novel.
