Frankenstein: The 1818 Text (Penguin Classics)
The novel as it was first published, in a paperback you can find anywhere.
Read the book as Mary Shelley first published it, before she revised it, with a short introduction to tell you who she was.
You have never read it, you want the version Mary Shelley first published, and you want a copy you can buy anywhere tonight.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: the 1818 first-edition text.
Changes: nothing in the novel. Charlotte Gordon writes the introduction; Charles E. Robinson, a Shelley scholar, adds a chronology and an essay.
Whose story is it?
Victor’s, told to a ship’s captain in the Arctic, with the creature’s own account in the middle.
How much time does it ask?
288 pages in paperback.
Penguin Classics paperback, 16 January 2018, 288 pages; introduction by Charlotte Gordon, chronology and essay by Charles E. Robinson.
Where to find it
Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
Common questions
Should I read the 1818 or the 1831 Frankenstein?
They tell the same story. The 1818 text is the novel as first published; the 1831 text is Mary Shelley’s revision, with her introduction about the ghost-story contest at Lake Geneva. Some details change: in 1818 Elizabeth is Victor’s cousin, and in 1831 she is an orphan the family takes in. Penguin sells both, as separate editions.
More Frankensteins: Frankenstein: The 1818 Text (Oxford World’s Classics) · The Norton Critical Edition, third edition · Frankenstein: the 1831 text (Penguin Classics, ed. Maurice Hindle)