“... are just mysterious. Why is Frankenstein, called Victor in most versions of this story, including Mary Shelley’s, here called Henry? Why is his friend called Victor? The bereaved father of the little girl drowned by the monster because he thought she would float like a flower – something seems to have happened to the abnormal criminal brain he is ...”

“... adaptations. Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823) turned Mary Shelley’s book into a moralistic tale of hubris, as well as making the creature mute and introducing Victor Frankenstein’s pantomimic assistant (here called Fritz). The production of Dracula that Stoker’s widow licensed to the actor-manager ...”

“... the mystical feeling for water and immersion of other Romantic poets, notably the non-swimmer Shelley. Byron promised to teach him but never got around to it. It is an odd fact that many sailors in those days deliberately refused to learn (Trelawney, who had been in the Navy, was an exception), maintaining that the hazards of their calling made a ...”

“... can I have a mind of my own in another’s body? This wasn’t something that very much bothered Mary Shelley at the end of the 18th century. Frankenstein doesn’t suggest that the Creature inherits any of his miscellaneous forebears’ characteristics through the genes of his stitched-together parts. Only a few years ago, the sale of kidneys for ...”

“... of the Gods to Shakespear’, is every bit as Gothic as anything written by his half-sister, Mary Shelley. The key divinity here is once more Nature, though this time the goddess has been fitted with a biomechanical device to make Shakespeare’s access to unmediated truth especially convenient: ‘Nought now remains,’ she cried, ‘to grace my ...”

“... past, not just of the medieval period, but of the Romantics. William was a passionate admirer of Shelley, ‘decidedly the greatest figure and phenomenon in English poetry since Milton’. He edited Shelley’s poetry and was chairman of the Shelley Society; Lucy wrote a biography of ...”

“... and ‘understand’ the Paris killings, it is also totally misleading. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley allows the monster to speak for himself. Her choice expresses the liberal attitude to freedom of speech at its most radical: everyone’s point of view should be heard. In Frankenstein, the monster is fully subjectivised: the monstrous murderer ...”

“... editor, William Maginn. It was a vitriolic anonymous review of Keats by J.W. Croker which Shelley considered to have caused the ruptured blood vessel that eventually killed the poet. There was, however, profit as well as peril in anonymity. Tobias Smollett was almost certainly the author of an unsigned complimentary review of his own Complete History ...”

“... world, yet there is enough in his works to remind us that the ‘last man’, as celebrated by Mary Shelley and later 19th-century writers, is a megalomaniac as well as a tragic figure. There is a kind of Faustian exhilaration attached to the last man. Knowing nothing, he is in a position to know everything, and though he can do nothing – or very ...”

“... It was a world where high thinking went with ramshackle living. Haydon’s friends, Charles and Mary Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt and the young Keats were all, like him, mostly self-educated and chronically short of money. Haydon had also come to know Wordsworth, who was in London in December 1817. On the 28th Haydon invited him to dinner to meet ...”

“... style, involving much heavy flirting and the consumption of many raw onions. According to Mary Berry, who considered herself a supporter of the princess, ‘such an over-dressed, bare-bosomed, painted-eyebrowed figure, one never saw.’ Her detractors could scarcely say more. In time Caroline withdrew to the Continent, where she continued to career ...”

“... like these go to the heart of a novel and its author – to its viscera too perhaps in the case of Mary Shelley and her monster, which may have produced misunderstandings akin to those of Wuthering Heights. Frankenstein’s monster, as Sutherland brilliantly implies, was at once and blandly taken over by the male science fantasy establishment, with ...”

“... sympathy. There have been many literary treatments of the story, the most famous of which is Shelley’s verse-drama, The Cenci, written in 1819. Other writers drawn to the subject include Stendhal, Dickens, Artaud and Alberto Moravia. The appeal of the story is partly lurid – a pungent mix of Renaissance sex and violence; a sense of dark deeds behind ...”

“... or under. This ration cramps the editors, and sometimes tantalises the reader. Take the entry on Mary Kennard where the Companion records that she was the daughter of one Charles Faber ‘not Samuel Laing, as sometimes claimed’. The Laing claim is made in my Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (which also has a grotesquely wrong date of death for ...”

“... patriot and member of the London Corresponding Society, became friends with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft around the time of the French Revolution. One of the few – haunting – pieces of biographical information we have about Fenwick, indeed, is that she was present at the birth of Wollstonecraft’s daughter – the future ...”