I’ve always found the story behind the book to be more interesting. Trust me, after the 1992 release of Coppola’s take on Dracula, I tried to read Mary Shelley’s opus. Holy crap! It is boring! Frankenstein probably took off because there was little competition in the popular fiction category and literate people would gobble up anything if they found it. I don’t mean to insult the author but by 1820, most of the Western world remains illiterate, books are still expensive and the choices were the bible, newspapers, Shakespeare and all the old English gobbledegook (Milton, Chaucer, Beowulf). The better stuff was another generation away: Hawthorne, Melville and Poe namely.
The Economist called Frankenstein the first Science Fiction novel. Pish posh! More Brits trying trick the world into thinking they invented something. Long form? Maybe, brevity was never Shelley and her circle’s strength. First? Bullshit. The official juries remain out on who is first. I read that A Thousand and One Nights is Sci-Fi, it’s really Fantasy. My vote is for Lucian of Samosata who lived during the 2nd century. His story about traveling to the moon is mostly a satire but he pitched the idea FIRST.
Frankenstein falls into Sci-Fi via Horror and it’s more philosophical. When I took a class on Karl Marx, one continuous argument in the 1800s was the Nature v. Nurture with the human race. Do people inherently do their thing (make “civilization) despite being on a desert island or are they truly a tabula rasa in which many things are possible. This is one question Shelley raises about the monster Frankenstein constructs. Marx’s essays weighed this in with the other popular book Robinson Crusoe.
Shelley’s perspective was also colored by what scientist were trying figure out with electricity and its relationship to life. According to Stuff You Missed in History Class, it was fairly common to go to a show in which you’d see demonstrations of dead animal parts twitching when power was sent coursing through them. We know now they were on to something, thus we have defibrillators to revive heart-attack victims and our nervous system does send little pulse of electricity to communicate to voluntary systems.
I personally think Shelley was writing a cautionary tale regarding what was to come from the rapidly shifting Industrial Revolution and its unholy alliance with Science. The nouveau riche threatened her social standing for starters. Today it can be extrapolated as a warning about the development of artificial intelligence. Will AI decided we’re an obstacle as per SkyNet, HAL, the M-5 and Demon Seed or can we bring AI into being our ally as per Altered Carbon (Poe), Aliens (Bishop) and Data.