‘Frankenstein’ Manuscript Comes to Life in New Publication

LONDON — A facsimile of Mary Shelley’s manuscript of “Frankenstein,” written when she was just 18, will be published in March by SP Books to mark the bicentennial of the novel’s publication in 1818.

The draft version, written in two large notebooks, is full of annotations by both Mary Shelley and her future husband, Percy Shelley, showing his corrections to her spelling (“enigmatic o you pretty Pecksie!” he wrote next to her “igmmatic”) and suggested changes to vocabulary.

SP Books suggests on its website that Mary Shelley’s own revisions show that she slowly made her monster more human, changing a description of a “creature” to a “being,” replacing “fangs” with “fingers,” and making his hair (at Percy Shelley’s recommendation) a “lustrous black.”

In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, Jessica Nelson, a founder of SP Books, said what was “moving about this manuscript is that you can see the literary work mixed with something tender and emotional.” (The similar handwriting of Mary and Percy Shelley gave rise to the 2007 book “The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein,” which claimed that Percy Shelley wrote the novel. Writer Germaine Greer riposted that the novel was too bad to have been written by the poet.)

“Frankenstein” had its origins in a lighthearted ghost-story competition suggested by Lord Byron, whose Lake Geneva villa the Shelleys were visiting in the summer of 1816. Initially unable to come up with an idea, Mary Shelley then had a “waking dream” in which she imagined a corpse reanimated by “galvanism,” or electricity.

“How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?” Mary Shelley wrote in her preface to the novel. Lucky she did; it’s been an inspiration to writers, directors, filmmakers and choreographers ever since.