Beschreibung:

SHELLEY, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797-1851)]. Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus . London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones, 1818. 3 volumes, 12 o (176 x 103mm). (Lacks half-titles and advertisements, title and H4 in vol. II with lower corner restored, occasional light spotting.) Contemporary half calf and grey boards, flat spines with black morocco lettering-pieces, red speckled edges (vol. I with wax drips on upper cover, and with spine torn across and lifted, vol. III with wear at head of spine and with one inch spine section lacking at foot, all three vols. rubbed at extremities, later green endpapers). Provenance : John Murray Aynsley (armorial bookplate; possibly of John Murray Murray-Aynsley, 1795-1870). FIRST EDITION OF THE GREATEST 19TH-CENTURY TALE OF TERROR, begun in Geneva when the author was less than nineteen and completed in Marlow. Suggested sources for Mary Shelley's story about the artificial creation of a human being are Godwin's novels, Madame de Genlis' Pygmalion et Galatée , and not least Milton's Paradise Lost . There were also non-literary precedents in 18th-century France which Polidori and Shelley may have discussed in the Villa Diodati in 1816. As Mary Shelley's introduction to the third edition of 1831 relates, the party in the villa also read ghost stories, translated from German into French, during the "wet, ungenial summer", and it was Byron who famously proposed that "'We will each write a ghost story.'" However, the plot of Frankenstein only took shape after Mary had experienced a hideous dream, the outcome of a conversation the evening before about live vermicelli, galvanism and the re-animation of corpses. Although her literary fame rests on this one novel, and the Abinger manuscripts make Shelley's editorial role clear, Frankenstein is one of very few tales which have achieved the same mythic cultural status as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe . Ashley V, 29; Lyles B1a; Tinker 1881; Wolff 6280.