"TO CURDLE THE BLOOD AND QUICKEN THE BEATINGS OF THE HEART": IMPORTANT FIRST ILLUSTRATED EDITION OF FRANKENSTEIN, 1831, WITH SHELLEY'S REVISIONS AND HER ACCOUNT OF THE NOVEL'S CREATION

SHELLEY, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus. Revised, Corrected, and Illustrated with a New Introduction by the Author. BOUND WITH: SCHILLER, Friedrich. The Ghost-Seer. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831. Small octavo, contemporary three-quarter red morocco, elaborately gilt-decorated spine, raised bands, marbled boards, endpapers, and edges.

Third edition of Mary Shelley's masterpiece of horror, the first with her own revisions and introduction—prepared especially for this edition, relating the circumstances surrounding the novel's creation—and the first edition with illustrations.

First published in 1818, Frankenstein is not only the "most famous English horror novel" but also, by some critics' reckoning, "the first genuine science fiction novel" (Clute & Nicholls, 1099). In her introduction to this edition, Shelley recounts how, on that famous night in Switzerland, Lord Byron proposed that he, Mary and Percy Shelley, and physician John Polidori all write a "ghost story." Polidori penned The Vampyre and Byron began a never-finished narrative, but Mary Shelley, in creating Frankenstein, "bequeath[ed] to the present age its most compelling myth" (New York City Public Library, Visionary Daughters of Albion). This edition features the first illustrations of a story and character who would, in time, come to haunt the popular imagination as few others. The engraved frontispiece depicts the creature coming to life. The vignette title-page portrays Victor Frankenstein's departure for the university. This edition of Frankenstein, complete in itself, is Number 9 in Bentley's "Standard Novels" series. "The second portion of the volume is occupied by Volume I of Schiller's The Ghost-Seer, of which the second portion is in [Number] 10 of the series, also including Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly" (Wolff 6280a). Without publisher's advertisements. Sadleir 3734a. Summers, 330. See: Anatomy of Wonder II-997; Fantasy and Horror 1-136.

Engraved frontispiece and vignette title-page with expert cleaning, mild foxing mainly to preliminary and concluding pages, small closed tear to pages 37 and 137-39 of The Ghost-Seer. expert restoration to contemporary morocco binding. An attractive and most desirable copy.