• Wide margins that you can annotate in
• Illustrated Original text, word for word.
• Background information
• Designed for the new English GCSE
• Approved and tested on students!

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.

Summer, 1816. The Summer That Never Was. The same clouds, rain and pitchy darkness that had enabled Wellington to triumph at Waterloo a year previously still hang low over Europe. Byron, Polidori, Clairmont and the Shelleys gather at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, and in the obscurity of the days filled with night, compose horrific tales of the fantastic. From Polidori comes "The Vampyre", the first romantic work of vampire fiction. From Byron, a "Fragment of a Novel", another vampiric narrative. But Mary Shelley's offering is remembered above any of them: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the harrowing story of, not the monster within the man as in so much Gothic possession literature, but the man within the monster. Dispel all thoughts of Boris Karloff here and now. This book is something else entirely.

Following Frankenstein's inclusion upon the new specification for GCSE English Literature (first examinations 2017), CBy Publishing hereby publishes the full 1818 text, complete with annotation-friendly margins and a plethora of background material.