Frankenstein Day

What the day is

Frankenstein Day celebrates Mary Shelley and Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. It is most often kept on August 30, her birthday, and also appears on calendars near the end of October, where it sits comfortably alongside Halloween.

The first correction the day usually has to make is the name. Frankenstein is the scientist, Victor Frankenstein. The being he assembles is never given a name at all, and is referred to in the novel as the creature, the daemon, or the wretch.

Origin and background

The book came out of a specific, well-documented summer. In 1816, later called the year without a summer because a volcanic eruption had disrupted the climate, Mary Godwin was staying near Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori. Kept indoors by relentless bad weather, the group agreed to each write a ghost story. She was eighteen. Her contribution grew into the novel, published anonymously in 1818, with a revised edition under her name in 1831.

It is frequently described as the first science fiction novel, and the claim is defensible. The horror in it is not supernatural: the creature is made by a man using chemistry and anatomy, and the book's real subject is what the maker owes to the thing he has made. Victor's failure is not that he creates life but that he abandons it.

The popular image came later and mostly from cinema. The flat head, the neck bolts, the lumbering walk and the inarticulate groaning are inventions of the 1931 Universal film and its sequels. Shelley's creature is agile, physically powerful and strikingly eloquent, and teaches itself to read.

How to take part

• Read the novel rather than watch the film. It is short, and the creature's own account in the middle section is the part nobody expects.
• Compare the 1818 and 1831 texts if you want the literary version of the day. Shelley's revisions notably soften Victor's culpability.
• Watch the 1931 film afterward and count what it changed.
• Read about Mary Shelley herself. Her biography is as eventful as the book, and considerably sadder.