The following introduction and annotated list of twenty four editions of Frankenstein represented in the Frankenstein Meme database over its two hundred years since the novel’s publication represents the successive iterations of the novel presented in historical context. Scroll down to find the bolded text to read about the entry you looked up in its place on this list.

On Key Editions of Frankenstein, 1818-2018

How does a story spread to become a cultural touchstone? How did Frankenstein become a “meme”? Before clever allusions to a “classic” text in a story—before other authors can use story elements of Frankenstein to build their own works—before any adaptations at all—Mary Shelley’s story had to be published in a  first edition, and then frequently republished. We begin with authorial editions, the differing texts overseen by Shelley herself, and move past hundreds of editions to note standard reading editions and milestones like the first paperback edition, to find increasingly annotated or academic editions with their apparatus of criticism, explanations, and chronologies. The following commentary on twenty-four editions of note over two hundred years charts an incredible rise in popularity and importance for Mary Shelley’s startling conception.

For a fuller list of editions through the year 2000, see Romantic Circles online “Editions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” They count 281 different texts; however, experience compiling the Frankenstein Meme database suggests that the rate of production of editions, as with all other Frankenstein-related materials, has only increased. I would not be surprised to find the number of editions from the millennium through the bicentennial year to have increased the total by another hundred.

Here are some numbers. This list focuses on six editions from the nineteenth century and two from the early twentieth century. The rest appear from the 1950s forward, including six editions from the 1990s and six more from the past five years.

1. Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus appeared in three volumes, in London, January 1818, published by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mayor and Jones in 500 copies (Robinson, 19). A few copies may have been distributed at the end of December 1817 (Lyles, 6, 155). The author is anonymous; however, the work is dedicated to William Godwin, narrowing the choices for authorship considerably (most will guess Percy Shelley). Percy Shelley, uncredited, writes the Preface. The famous writer Walter Scott reviewed the work positively and insightfully, and the novel received a total of “eight reviews, a very respectable number” for an anonymous work in a modest print run (Robinson, 19). We can note that the novel did not receive a reprint in 1818, however, and, in fact, years would pass before more copies of the novel appear. Still, many have noted the strikingly prescient comment of Thomas Love Peacock, a friend of the Shelleys, in a 1818 letter: the novel, he writes, “seems universally known and read” (147). The meme, somehow, had begun to spread.
2. Frankenstein, ou le Prométhée moderne, published in Paris by Corréard in 1821, as by “Mme. Shelly” (sic), translated into French by Jules Saladin, represents the first, but far from the last, translation of Shelley’s book into another language (Lyles, 6).
3. William Godwin, using the same plates as the first edition (Lyles, 6), prompts a reprinting in 1823 from G. and W.B. Whittaker in London, in two instead of three volumes. Godwin rushed the reprinting while his daughter was still out of the country because of the success of early stage adaptations (Robinson, 20). The novel is credited for the first time to “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley” (Robinson, 20). Mary Shelley will return to London from Italy to her book republished and, before year’s end, will view one of the first stage productions of her work, Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; Or the Fate of Frankenstein at the Lyceum Theatre, With the celebrated Cooke as the Creature, declaring in her journal “lo & behold! I found myself famous!” (Bennett, 378).
4. Mary Shelley oversees the 1831 revised edition at London with Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, No. 9 in the Standard Novels series, with editions simultaneously released in Edinburgh and Dublin. The text moves from a three volume library edition to a one volume version that will become the standard text for future editions, reprinted directly in 1832, 1836, 1839 and 1849 (Robinson, 21) and serving as the basis for most reprintings until quite recently (Glut, 5). Mary Shelley, as “M.W.S.”, adds an Introduction that for the first time tells the story of the famous “ghost story contest” with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley in 1816 that inspired her story, adding a level of myth to her novel’s conception. The original 1818 Preface is now credited to Percy.
5. In America, 1833, Carey, Lea & Blanchard release the first known pirated edition of Shelley’s novel, as by “Mary W. Shelly”, in Philadelphia (Lyles, 7). They use the 1818 text, though in two volumes. A work, to be pirated, must be worth pirating–in short, popular.
6. The key Victorian era edition of Frankenstein is the 1882 edition by Routledge and Sons. The edition will be reprinted in 1886 and 1888, and in slightly different form in 1891 and 1899. The 1831 Colburn and Bentley revisions overseen by Shelley had meant that the new edition of the novel could be copyrighted. Mary Shelley had sold her copyright at that moment, and no other publisher could bring the work out until the 1860s, when a number of new editions by different publishers appear. But Routledge’s five reprintings easily make its edition  the standard in the late Nineteenth century. The Victorian era will also see the first translations of the text into something other than French when the first German editions appear.
7. The first significant edition for the early twentieth century, judged by its many reprintings, is the standard Everyman’s Library edition, series No. 616, published by J.M. Dent & Sons in London and Toronto in 1912. This edition is widely reprinted, with minor changes, though the century up to 1973. (For a list of reprintings of this edition, see Lyles, 9, 13, 14, 19; See also, Romantic Circles.)
8. Lynd Ward’s striking illustrations in the 1934 Harrison Smith and Robert Haas edition released in New York, are an important visualization of the story, coming in the wake of Whale’s successful movie and proceeding numerous illustrations and comics (and many more movies) to come. Ward’s physically imposing, sometimes threatening, engravings on wood intimate an erotic interplay between the male characters of Shelley’s novel largely ignored until more recently. The queering of Frankenstein had been noted in this edition. Modern visualizations of the story continue in Ruth A. Roche’s Classic Illustrated Comics adaptation, the first comic book version of the story, in 1945.
9. Shelley’s story will appear in Horror Omnibus and World’s Popular Classics editions, surely signs of its continued rise in fame, but the next edition of note is the first paperback edition released by Pyramid Books in New York in 1957. Many more cheap paperback editions will follow.
10. There had been hints of increasing academic attention through the middle of the twentieth century, as snippets of Shelley’s novel appear as a prose example in Romanticism college readers or the appearance of a Harold Bloom afterward to the text, but the 1969 Oxford edition, edited by M.K Joseph, published in London and New York as part of the Oxford English Novels series, represents a new academic seriousness for Shelley’s novel and establishes the academic standard for the 1831 version of the text going forward. Joseph includes a chronology, appendices, notes on the text and more, all the apparatus of academic inquiry and attention. Many more academic editions will follow in the next fifty years.
11. James Rieger edits a new academic edition of the 1818 edition of Shelley’s novel for Bobbs-Merrill in 1974. Joseph’s academic edition, and most other earlier editions generally, had been based on the 1831 text overseen by Shelley for the Standard Novels series. This opens up arguments between the two texts as to which is better. Anne Mellor’s compelling arguments in her scholarship in the late 1980s and 1990s arguing for the value of the earlier “original” 1818 version as closer to Shelley’s conception of the work will continue to animate discussion on which of these two major texts to use today. This is the first standard academic version of the 1818 text.
12. Leonard Wolf supplies an edition for the “true” fan with his The Annotated Frankenstein in 1977, adding notes, appendices, maps, a chronology of events, a filmography and more for the obsessed general reader. Published by Clarkson N. Potter in New York. Shelley’s text had become not only popular, but a cultural nexus of meaning.
13. The numerous translations over the twentieth century, from many European languages to Arabic, Japanese, Hebrew, and many more, attest to a story that had become well known around the world. Following the increased academic attention to Frankenstein, both in its 1818 and 1831 versions, attention finally turned to Mary Shelley herself and what else she might have done: Betty T. Bennett and Charles Robinson edit The Mary Shelley Reader which includes Frankenstein (1818) along with still relatively unknown other works: Mathilda, other stories, essays, and reviews, published at New York and Oxford by Oxford University Press, 1990.
14. Critical work on Frankenstein increased exponentially from the 1970s on. Johanna M Smith edited the first edition collecting various “takes” on Shelley’s novel from differing crucial positions in her Frankenstein: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives, from Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, released in Boston and New York in 1992, as part of the Bedford Critical Editions. This, too, will be a trend as many more works exploring Frankenstein from a host of critical perspectives will appear.
15. Frankenstein had its first CD-ROM edition, released in plain ASCII, in 1991, but Frankenstein truly invades cyberspace when it receives its permanent online edition, archived on the web for free use by Project Gutenberg, based in Lisel, IL, in 1993. Shelley’s story had already served as an important touchstone for stories of emergent computer intelligences in science fiction since the mid, even early, twentieth century.
16. Charles Robinson edits The Frankenstein Notebooks, uncovering the genesis and process of Mary Shelley’s novel writing and identifying unknown “versions” (including a lost “ur-text”) that precede the publication of the 1818 first edition. Robinson plays close attention to Percy Shelley’s contributions, calculating his additions but also affirming Mary Shelley’s singular achievement. He will edit what he calls The Original Frankenstein in 2009 and his work will be housed on the the online Shelley-Godwin archive, released 2013, listed below.
17. The Romantic Circles listing of editions in 2000 claims editor Nora Crook’s 1996 edition of Frankenstein from Pickering & Chatto, relseased in London and Brookfield, VT, to be the “most thorough and detailed edition to date,” so I include it here as what some consider the best at the turn of the millennium.
18. Frankenstein receives a prestigious Norton Critical edition in 1996, titled Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Nineteenth-Century responses, Modern Criticism, edited by J. Paul Hunter, released in New York.
19. The first permanent online academic edition is the Stuart Curran edition released in 2009, housed at the University of Pennsylvania, with annotations and numerous links, it is a great improvement on the open source Gutenberg edition.
20. Scholars Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald Levao work up a new The Annotated Frankenstein, presenting a thorough academic version of the kind of annotated work Leonard Wolf first brought forth for the public in 1977. Published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2012.
21. The Shelley-Godwin Archive is released online in 2013. This is a digital resource collecting works of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley—including a digital copy of Shelley’s manuscript of Frankenstein, under editors Neil Fraistat, Elizabeth Denlinger, and Raffaele Vigilanti. Some works, like the manuscripts of Shelley’s novel, once only available to a handful of scholars are now widely accessible: a leap forward in Shelley Studies. Charles Robinson’s work, noted above, is important to the Mary Shelley section of the archive.
22. On the eve of the bicentennial of publication, Marc Laidlaw’s version, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Now with Extra Monsters) attests to the fame of Shelley’s novel. The copy for this Kindle-only edition promises “At Least One Monster Per Paragraph! This is Our Guarantee!” No words of Shelley’s have been removed, but new words about new monsters have been added. This extended joke, as Laidlaw himself says, is not meant to be read straight through. We already know what happens and don’t need to read all of it as a story—we can just have fun with it. Who doesn’t know—or doesn’t think they know—the story?
23. Leslie S. Klinger releases The New Annotated Frankenstein in 2017 from W.W. Norton, indicating the expectation of a wide audience for a popular edition of Frankenstein with more discussion of events and ideas in the work on the eve of the bicentennial.
24. Finally, Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds, edited by David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason Scott Robert, argues for the continued relevance of Shelley’s novel to current science, just as, two hundred years earlier, her novel represented a view of cutting-edge science, and so became the first science fiction novel ever published.

Works Cited

Lyles, W.H. Mary Shelley: An Annotated Bibliography. Garland: New York, 1975.

Glut, Donald F. The Frankenstein Catalog. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1984.

Peacock, Thomas Love. The Letters of Thomas Love Peacock. Ed. Nicholas A. Joukovsky. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.

Robinson, Charles. “Frankenstein: Its Composition and Publication.” The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein. Ed. Andrew Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Romantic Circles. “Editions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” University of Maryland, 2009, rc.umd.edu. Accessed 12 January 2018.

Shelley, Mary. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Ed. Betty T. Bennett. Vol. 1. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.