The legend that surrounds Mary Shelley’s creation of her most famous creature has overtaken even the actual story of her pale, complexed student and his monstrous creation.
But yesterday, a first edition of her seminal gothic horror classic, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, has set a record for the highest price paid for a printed work by a woman, selling at auction for £856,000.
This edition was one of only 500 copies printed in 1818, when she was only twenty-one years of age, and only two years after the mythical stormy night of ghost story competition on Lake Geneva attended by John Polidori (who dreamed up The Vampyre that night), her lover Percy Shelley, and Thomas Byron.
The price the ‘exceptionally rare’ edition went for was around seven times Christies’ estimate, comfortably taking the baton of the record previously held by a first edition of Jane Austen’s Emma (published only two years before Frankenstein), sold by Bonhams for £150,000. A copy of JK Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard sold for £1.95 million at Sotheby’s in 2007, but it was handmade and illustrated, as opposed to printed.
Christie’s spokesperson elaborated on the value of the edition, saying: “The first edition in its original boards is incredibly fragile and as a result very scarce, so a copy like this, particularly in fine condition, is highly desirable to collectors. Overall it’s a very strong market and we are seeing increased demand for fine examples of literary high spots.”
A story which would ‘speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror’
The story of Frankenstein was quite literally dreamed up by Shelley after the Lake Geneva group had been reading French translations of German ghost stories through the “wet, ungenial summer”, where “incessant rain often confined us for days to the house”. They were challenged by Byron to “each write a ghost story”, and Shelley busied herself to the task, a story to rival those of the men she was spending her days with. A story which would “speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror – one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart”.
The story that became Frankenstein was published anonymously on the 1st January 1818, having been turned down by several other publishers. “These were not good times for controversial works and the manufacture of a creature from human parts without divine assistance was highly controversial,” according to Miranda Seymour, author of a biography of Shelley.
The original publication went without wide success, and remained quietly under the surface until a revised edition of the novel was published in 1831, under her own name. This edition, with the now-famous frame narrative of the novel, gave the story it’s deserved fame and notoriety, one which has inspired, and continues to inspire, countless retellings and adaptations.
