Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Dundee Edition

On New Year’s Day, 1818, Mary Shelley unleashed on the world one of the most iconic works of fiction ever written: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Her story begins further back than that. Ensconced in the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva during the so-called Year Without a Summer, 1816, the teenage author experienced a feverish dream. The tragic tale of the God-like scientist and his sentient Creature was born. Shelley completed her draft by the spring of 1817, and it finally appeared in print, anonymously, a few months later. But our story goes back further still. Between 1812 and 1814, Shelley (then known as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) spent many months in the home of the Baxter family near the banks of the River Tay in Scotland. As she later reported in the 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein, Shelley’s eerie imagination first took flight here in the industrial city of Dundee.