Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on Frankenstein, the Creature’s Humanity, and the Modern Prometheus

Frankenstein is known to millions of people who have never opened it, usually as a film monster with a square head. Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett treat the novel as an argument. Sandbrook calls it arguably the first true science fiction, and says its genius is the interplay of ideas rather than the plot. Syrett’s case is that the chapters in the creature’s own voice are the moral heart, and that Mary Shelley, at eighteen, was writing about what a maker owes the thing he makes. Syrett gives the book seven. Sandbrook gives it eight.

Key ideas

1. The novel is the idea, and the creature is not the film. Sandbrook opens on a foundational text, known to millions who have never read it, and calls it ‘arguably the first true science fiction novel.’ The creature, as the book calls him, is routinely given his maker’s name. Syrett’s first reply is that Victor is the scientist, and that the two share a dualistic relationship: foils, and two sides of the same coin. The icon — square head, green face, bolts — has been used for opponents, for the danger of progress, for hubris, and for plain horror. Sandbrook puts most of that on Hollywood. The first film was 1910. He cites Wikipedia for 433 films and concedes he has not counted them. Most, he says, bear no relation to the novel. He names a Guillermo del Toro film, with Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, from the end of 2025, as the latest. He read the book at university and was surprised. It is un-horrifying. There is landscape, late-eighteenth-century description, and a great deal of philosophising about enlightenment and romantic ideas. He had expected storms, castles, and dungeons. Syrett read it as a teenager, liked the idea more than the book, and was already in awe of Shelley and of her marriage to Percy. His thesis, which she agrees with mid-sentence, is that the idea is more powerful than the narrative. ‘I think the genius of Frankenstein as a book is the concepts and the interplay of ideas rather than the propulsive narrative.’ The making itself is offstage. There are no jars and no lightning in the novel. Syrett reads the moment Victor looks at what he has made: limbs in proportion, features chosen as beautiful, yellow skin, lustrous black hair, pearly teeth, watery eyes, a shrivelled complexion, straight black lips. He had wanted a beautiful being and is repelled. Sandbrook adds Walton’s later sight of him, ‘gigantic in stature, yet distorted and uncouth in proportions,’ and compares that distortion to Tolkien’s orcs. The point Hollywood misses, which he states and then hands to her, is that the creature is articulate, sensitive, and reflective. She is a massive fan and sees herself in him. The seven central chapters, the creature telling his own story, are for her the moral heart, and they are the chapters films cut, because they are quiet and because they humanise him.

2. Knowledge makes him wretched, and Milton will not say whether he is Adam or Satan. After Victor flees, the creature wakes in a wood like a man in Eden: berries, a cloak, delight, an attempt to copy the birds. He is a child. He hides by a poor and noble family, listens, and learns to speak and, less plausibly, to read. Syrett does not see how listening teaches reading. Sandbrook supplies the books he takes: Plutarch’s Lives and Paradise Lost, books Shelley loved. He will speak only to the blind father. The others return, see him, and he runs. Rejection is what turns him to violence. The line Sandbrook quotes, in the same stretch as the pool, is the Rousseau sentence: ‘Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat.’ He looked in a pool and could not believe the face was his. Syrett ties this to Rousseau, and to Geneva, which is not a coincidence of setting. People are born good and are corrupted by society. Godwin thought the same, and Godwin formed Shelley. The more the creature learns, the worse he becomes. He kills a child. The strangling is what stayed with Syrett on the reread. He is also full of remorse, calls himself a wretch, and has no name. The name he is given is his maker’s, which would be the last insult, because the maker does not want him. Sandbrook reads the epigraph, from Paradise Lost: ‘Did I request thee maker from my clay to mold me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?’ Shelley read the poem twice, in 1815 and in 1816. Milton had stayed at the Villa Diodati. The creature steals the poem, decides he is a worse Adam, and says Adam was happy and guarded, while ‘I am wretched, helpless, and alone.’ Syrett adds that this is a Manichaean Adam, chastising his maker. She also reads the Satan alternative, which the creature states himself: ‘Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition,’ because envy rose in him when he saw his protectors’ happiness. The question they leave open is whether he is an innocent Adam or a rebellious Satan. Sandbrook’s deeper reading, in the turn after that question, is that the creature is us and Victor is God, and that the story is man’s horror and rage at his own creator. Blade Runner’s replicants, made with a shelf life and furious at their maker, are his example. Syrett answers that this is a cynical view of the human heart: the longer we live among people, the fouler we become. He ties that back to Shelley’s father. The radicals idealised natural innocence and at the same time believed the world was fallen, a prison built by institutions. She then asks the question the reading requires. If the creature is man, is Victor God, or is he the institutions?

3. A maker owes a duty, and the subtitle is Prometheus. Syrett’s answer is that Shelley is not only warning against ambition. ‘If humanity does use science to create, we have to be shepherds of our creation.’ Victor feels guilt and feels none of the obligation. He is ambitious, a glory seeker, described by the creature as self-devoted, brave and loving enough to be a tragic figure rather than a villain, and undone by hubris. The novel gives him no body except wild eyes. Sandbrook reads the meeting on the glacier. The creature asks for recognition. ‘Do your duty towards me and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind.’ Victor refuses. The creature says he ought to have been Adam and is the fallen angel, and that if Victor makes him happy he will be virtuous again: ‘Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous.’ Sandbrook’s nutshell is that the creature was born good and was driven to evil, and that Victor can never offer the affection that would reverse it. Syrett turns from duty to hubris. Sandbrook names the subtitle, the modern Prometheus, and asks her for the myth. There are two Prometheus stories. The Greek Titan steals fire and gives it to man, whom he has modelled from clay. Byron and Percy loved that hero. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which Mary was reading in 1815, has a Prometheus who kindles men into life from clay. Victor does with science what that Prometheus does with magic. The science that belongs here is the science around the book, not the science in the film. Victor, like the young Percy, wants the secrets of heaven and earth, in the mood of curiosity and progress at the end of the eighteenth century. People argued in public about what separates life from death, and whether the animating thing is a spark. Shelley went to the lectures. Syrett tells the experiments. In 1781 an Italian surgeon, whom they do not name, was dissecting a frog beside a static-electricity machine, and the leg twitched. His nephew Aldini, in 1801, toured Europe trying to animate the corpses of murderers and criminals. Rods in the jaw, a quiver, a left eye opening. She says the del Toro film does that scene well. Aldini’s stated aim, as Sandbrook gives it, was to bring back the drowned. Victor’s stated aim is cures for disease. The book never shows the rods. Sandbrook would have liked to see them, and says so. Syrett’s conclusion, after he refuses the phrase ‘science per se’, is that the threat is arrogance, the thirst for mastery and for knowledge at any cost. In that same stretch she has already read Walton, who would sacrifice fortune, existence, and every hope for the dominion he might win over ‘the elemental foes of our race.’ Sandbrook hears Tolkien in that, Saruman plundering, and then a run of later stories: Stranger Things, Jurassic Park, The Terminator. He adds that the excuse now offered for AI, that it will revolutionise medicine, is the same shape as Aldini’s excuse and Victor’s. Syrett’s phrase for the book, in the following stretch, is that it is one of the two or three foundational science-fiction texts. His opening line was that it was arguably the first. Any story of a made being that turns on its maker comes back, in her formulation, to a teenager on a wet holiday trying to impress irritating companions.

4. She wrote it at eighteen, and Percy is the model for Victor rather than the author. The life, as Sandbrook says when he hands it over, is as good as the novel, and Syrett is the one who tells it. Mary Shelley was born in London in 1797, to William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is 1792. Both parents were marked by the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft went to France. Syrett names their English circle the English Jacobins, and includes Thomas Paine and William Blake. Godwin had been a dissenting minister, then an atheist, and a celebrity for an attack on law, government, and marriage as chains. Sandbrook calls the picture of natural innocence Rousseau. He had read Godwin’s Caleb Williams at university and thinks it a precursor: a pursuit across the world after a secret, which becomes Victor and the creature. He quotes her own note that she had expected him to dislike Godwin: ‘I suspect that Dominic Sandbrook would not care for him.’ She had meant the hypocrisy of a man who denounced marriage and then married Wollstonecraft because she was pregnant with Mary. He thinks that charge is harsh. Wollstonecraft died of the birth. A half-sister from an earlier affair is left unnamed. Godwin married the neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont, who had said, ‘Is it possible that I behold the immortal Godwin?’ The stepmother’s daughter Jane, later Claire, is the person Mary said had ‘the faculty of making me more uncomfortable than any human being.’ Coleridge reciting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and begging that the girls be allowed to stay up, is one sentence of household, as is Godwin’s sketch of her: castles in the clouds, singularly bold, somewhat imperious, active of mind, desire of knowledge great, perseverance almost invincible. The additional ‘My daughter is, I believe, very pretty’ strikes Syrett as slightly sinister. Sandbrook thinks a father might simply think it. Percy Bysshe Shelley appears in the house probably about 1812. She is 14 or 15. He is 19 or 20, rich, expecting a baronetcy, and useful to Godwin as a lender. He is already married to Harriet, about 19, who later drowned in the Serpentine at 21. They say it was because he left her. On 28 July 1814 Mary and Percy eloped, with Jane, now Claire. The rumour that Claire was also his lover is raised and closed: there is absolutely no evidence. They were not married. The tour was penniless. A daughter died after a few days. Syrett tells the dream from the journal: Mary by the fire, the baby dead, the corpse rubbed until the heat brings it back. That is the reanimation already in her head. They say she had four children, and that only one survived. A son, William, at the beginning of 1816, then Geneva, Byron at the Villa Diodati, Claire now Byron’s lover. 1816 is the year without a summer, after a volcanic eruption in the Dutch East Indies. They read German ghost stories. Byron proposes that each write one. Percy’s, about himself, fizzles. Byron’s vampire tale is later Polidori’s story, which they call The Vampire. What Shelley wants is a tale that makes the reader dread to look around, that curdles the blood, and that quickens the beatings of the heart. Percy and Byron talk about the principle of life, electricity, and galvanic experiment. She has a waking vision, not a sleep. Syrett reads it: a pale student of unhallowed arts, a hideous figure of a man, a powerful engine, an uneasy half-vital motion. The vision frightens Shelley where it excites the two men. ‘Frightful must it be’ to mock ‘the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world.’ Shelley calls the maker the artist, not the scientist. He would rush from his handiwork, and the creature’s yellow, watery, speculative eyes would open the bed-curtains. Then Shelley’s own relief, which Syrett also reads: ‘Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. I have found it. What terrified me will terrify others.’ The story begins ‘It was a dreary night of November,’ the phrase the novel uses. Percy tells her to make it a book. In 1818 it appears anonymously, with the subtitle the modern Prometheus. The reviews remind them of Wuthering Heights. William Beckford, himself a gothic writer, and unwilling to count this as gothic: ‘the foulest toadstool that has yet sprung up from the reeking dunghill of the present times.’ Walter Scott was kind. Reviewers assumed Godwin or Percy. The 1823 edition named a woman, and Blackwood’s wrote, ‘For a man it was excellent, but for a woman it was wonderful.’ The suspicion that a man guided her hand is still around, including on social media. They mean to close it. Byron called it a wonderful work for a girl of 19, which is patronising and, from him, high praise. She was 18 when she wrote the story, and 19 in Byron’s line. One of them has seen the manuscript in the Bodleian. Percy’s notes are on the pages, and there are places she ignored them. They agree the words are hers. Where Percy does enter the fiction is as Victor. His poetic heroes fly too close to the sun. As a boy he called himself Victory, and she was going to give Victor that name. He lay in the bottom of boats looking at clouds, which Victor also does, and he later drowned. At Eton he was hunted for being a science obsessive, a story Sandbrook remembers from The Rest Is History. A friend’s account of Percy’s jars, batteries, and thunder matches the films, and the birth in the novel is not that scene.

Context

The story a stranger needs

The novel is told in letters, because that is what a reader of the 1790s expected, and because Shelley had been reading Richardson’s Clarissa. Captain Walton, an Englishman bound for the North Pole, writes to his sister that he has taken aboard a sick man, Victor Frankenstein. Victor is from Geneva, happy and well off, with parents, two brothers, the younger of them called William, and an adopted sister, Elizabeth, raised to be his wife. At Ingolstadt the obsession shifts from the philosopher’s stone to the secret of life. He builds a being out of the bodies of criminals, looks at it, collapses, and abandons it. William is murdered. Victor knows, almost at once, that the creature did it. An innocent woman is hanged. He pursues the creature through a long mountain passage and confronts him. The creature’s narrative sits inside Victor’s, which sits inside Walton’s. A mate is promised, then refused, because Victor fears what their children would do to the world. He sinks the female body in the sea. The creature kills Victor’s best friend. Victor marries Elizabeth. The creature kills her on the wedding night. The hunt runs north. Walton finds Victor frostbitten and finished. Victor dies of cold, misery, exhaustion, and illness. The creature is found hunkered over the body, mourning, repentant, and intending to burn himself on a bonfire so that nothing like him can be made again.

How the book sits among kinds of book

They ask in the opening whether it is gothic or something else, and they answer at the end. It is romantic: nature as bliss and as a healing force, emotion, and the shock by which the romantics thought emotion could be jarred out of a reader. A child’s neck in those hands is one of the shocks. It is gothic: The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk, suspense, storms, isolation, graveyards, the chase. It is more pensive and more ideological than those novels, and it is driven by ideas rather than by plot. The films play up the gothic and leave the thinking out. The hour’s judgement is that a merely gothic Frankenstein would have been forgotten, and that the ideas and the science fiction are why it is still read. Edward Scissorhands, Ex Machina, and Never Let Me Go are the later examples: melancholy and romantic, creatures suffering at the hands of their makers and looking for them.

The scores, and what happened to her

Syrett gives it seven, on a scale Sandbrook lets her name as murderous reanimated corpses out of ten. He calls that harsh. She finds the self-flagellation exhausting, the chasing dull, and the people thin: they are stances more than characters. She still thinks it an extraordinary thing that a reader can hate and sympathise with both Victor and the creature, she loves the nature writing, and she is staggered by the idea itself, eighteen-year-old author included. Sandbrook gives it eight. The cottager chapters feel very eighteenth-century to him, and too slow. She likes that part. He finds the chases and the murders repetitive, and he dislikes the overwrought romantic prose. She thinks the book is barer, and less anguished, than much of its moment. He is willing to grant the period, and he is marking the idea. Paradise Lost, Prometheus, a core book of the Western canon, popular culture that would be unthinkable without it. Surprisingly un-scary, and still a book everybody should read. ‘I think there’s no question Frankenstein is one of the core books of the Western canon. I think so much of our popular culture will be unthinkable without it.’ Syrett asks after Percy’s drowning in 1822. Sandbrook gives the years that follow. Mary kept his ashes and his calcified heart, did not remarry, and spent years editing him. He left her nearly penniless, with one living child, Percy Florence Shelley. Back in England in 1823 she was an outcast, her parents infamous and the marriage irregular. Percy’s father, a baronet, would not meet her and paid a small allowance on the condition that she write nothing controversial, which she accepted in order to protect the boy’s inheritance. In 1844 the son inherited the baronetcy and the money eased. She died in 1851, aged 53, probably of a brain tumour. Syrett adds that she wrote for the rest of her life. His point is that she never matched this book.

Related

• Dominic Sandbrook — co-host
• Tabitha Syrett — co-host