On 22 October 1831, page 724 of the Court Journal gave readers an advance look at something new: Mary Shelley’s own account of how Frankenstein began. The book it introduced wouldn’t be on sale for another nine days.
That book was a revised Frankenstein, published on 31 October as No. IX of Colburn and Bentley’s Standard Novels. It cost 6 shillings and came bound with the first part of Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer. The Court Journal was Henry Colburn’s paper too, and Colburn, the Shelley-Godwin Archive notes, was a master of the “puff,” the advertisement dressed up as news.
The introduction is where the legend lives. Every morning came the same question: “Have you thought of a story?” Every morning the answer was a “mortifying negative.” Then, finally, the waking vision of “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” And the sign-off: “I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.”
She signed it “London, October 15, 1831,” fifteen years after the summer it describes. It is a memory, written by a working author for a reissue. It may all be true. It was also there to help sell a book.
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