Journal · Frankenstein

Why Frankenstein's creature reads Paradise Lost

Halfway through Frankenstein, a creature hiding in a forest finds three books and teaches himself who he is from them. One is John Milton's Paradise Lost. It isn't a random choice: Mary Shelley put Milton's poem on the title page before a single word of her story.

The poem on the title page

When Frankenstein first appeared in 1818, in three volumes and with no author's name, each title page carried three lines from Paradise Lost, Adam's complaint to his Maker after the Fall:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

Read those lines again after you've met the creature, and they sound like his voice.

What Paradise Lost is

Milton's epic poem of 1667 retells the Bible story of Satan's rebellion against God and of Adam and Eve's fall and expulsion from Eden. For Mary Shelley's first readers it was the great poem about creation, rebellion and the loss of paradise, and one most educated readers knew well. Its shadow falls across the whole novel.

Three books found in the woods

The creature's education comes from three books: Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives (the Greek biographer's paired lives of famous Greeks and Romans) and The Sorrows of Werter (Goethe's novel in letters of a young man's hopeless love). He reads Milton as true history, seeing himself now in Adam, now in Satan. That double image is the key to him: made like Adam, by a maker, but alone and shut out like the fallen angel.

What to listen for

• "I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel." The first time we hear the creature speak for himself, he reaches for Milton.
• Pandæmonium. He compares a shepherd's hut to Milton's palace of the fallen angels, built in hell as their capital. Milton coined the name; it means "all the demons".
• "I bore a hell within me." Victor says it too, echoing Satan, who carries hell with him wherever he goes. Maker and made keep borrowing the same lines.
• "The archangel who aspired to omnipotence." Satan, cast down for his ambition. Watch who the novel gives that phrase to.

Two more books inside the book

The subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, points to the figure of Greek myth who stole fire from the gods for humankind and was punished for it; in some tellings he also shaped the first people out of clay. And early on, the explorer Walton jokes about "the land of mist and snow", a line from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the tale of a sailor who kills an albatross near the polar ice and brings a curse on his ship. Mary Shelley's first readers would have caught both at once.

Catch every echo

Our edition prints the 1818 text as first published. The note before each of the 27 letters and chapters tells you whose voice you're in and flags the Milton lines as they come; it may say what happens in its own chapter, but never what happens in a later one. The glossary of over 100 terms covers the poems, the alchemists young Victor reads and the places from Archangel to Chamounix, and the introduction tells the story of the wet summer and the dare that began it all.