THAT FRANKENSTEIN WAS A MONSTER 217 



of literary men! The assertion that the majority of 

 fairly well-read men, not to speak of men whose profession 

 is literature, are ignorant of the general outlines of the 

 story of Frankenstein is certainly incorrect, and to say 

 that if we only give a mistake or a falsehood circulation 

 enough it will be converted into a truth is to propound a 

 system of ethics which few will be willing to accept. 



" Frankenstein," as many of the readers of this page know, 

 is the title of a romance written by Mrs. Mary Wollstone- 

 craf t Shelley, the wife of the famous poet. It was written 

 under very peculiar circumstances, which Mrs. Shelley 

 herself has detailed in the first and second prefaces to the 

 book and which have been so frequently quoted that it 

 is unnecessary to do more than allude to them here. Mrs. 

 Shelley was but nineteen when she began this story, one 

 of the most remarkable in the literature of the nineteenth 

 century. The substance of it is as follows: 



Frankenstein was a student of science at Ingolstadt, 

 and the question "Whence did the principle of life pro- 

 ceed?" occupied his thoughts beyond any other. At 

 length he thought he had solved it and he set about con- 

 structing a human being into which he could infuse life. 

 To avoid the great difficulty of working on very minute 

 organs he made his man eight feet high and large in pro- 

 portion. After two years' hard work he finished the con- 

 struction of this being and succeeded in vitalizing it. 

 When he had accomplished his task and the creature 

 showed signs of life he was horror-struck at the sight of 

 the fearful monster he had created and he fled from it in 

 terror. The monster escaped to the woods and was the 

 terror of those who saw it, and the account which the 

 creature afterwards gave to Frankenstein of the way in 



