, is disappointingly absent. It was an
argument between Byron and Shelley about Erasmus Darwin's
theories that brought before Mary Shelley's sleepless eyes the
vision of the monster miraculously infused by its creator with
the spark of life. _Frankenstein_ was begun immediately,
completed in May, 1817, and published in 1818.

Mrs. Shelley has been censured for setting her tale in a clumsy
framework, but she tells us in her preface that she began with
the words: "It was on a dreary night of November." This sentence
now stands at the opening of Chapter IV., where the plot begins
to grip our imagination; and it seems not unfair to assume that
the introductory letters and the first four chapters, which
contain a tedious and largely unnecessary account of
Frankenstein's early life, were written in deference to Shelley's
plea that the idea should be developed at greater length, and did
not form part of her original plan. The uninteresting student,
Robert Walton, to whom Frankenstein, discovered dying among
icebergs, tells his story, is obviously an afterthought. If Mrs.
Shelley had abandoned the awkward contrivance of putting the
narrative into the form of a dying man's confession, reported
verbatim in a series of letters, and had opened her story, as she
apparently intended, at the point where Frankenstein, after weary
years of research, succeeds in creating a living being, her novel
would have gained in force and intensity. From that moment it
holds us fascinated. It is true that the tension relaxes from
time to time, that the monster's strange education and the
Godwinian precepts that fall so incongruously from his lips tend
to excite our mirth, but, though we are mildly amused, we are no
longer merely bored. Even the protracted descriptions of domestic
life assume a new and deeper meaning, for the shadow of the
monster broods over them. One by one those whom Frankenstein
loves fall victims to the malice of the being he has endowed with
life. Unceasingly and unrelentingly the loathsome creature dogs
our imagination, more awful when he lurks unseen than when he
stands actually before us. With hideous malignity he slays
Frankenstein's young brother, and by a fiendish device causes
Justine, an innocent girl, to be executed for the crime. Yet ere
long our sympathy, which has hitherto been entirely with
Frankenstein, is unexpectedly diverted to the monster who, it
would seem, is wicked only because he is eternally divorced f