The Frankenstein Varorium is an online tool which allows the user to explore the iconic Science Fiction novel’s text through its various incarnations, allowing the user to select individual passages and see how they have evolved through different revisions of the work. “In the case of Frankenstein, the substantive changes that MWS made in her revised edition are so extensive that many teachers and students of Frankenstein consider 1818 and 1831 as two different novels.” Scholars do not agree on a single authoritative text, though the 1818 edition became more available from the 1990s onward in teaching editions, reflecting increasing interest in the earlier versions of the text. With this project, we offer a way to explore not just two but five distinct moments in the novel’s writing and re-writing, and they do not proceed in orderly stages. The following diagram summarizes the relationships among the manuscript and published versions of Frankenstein composed between 1816 and 1831 that we worked with for this variorum project.”  One does not need to be an English lit major or Sci-Fi fan to really want to get deep into Frankenstein,

Following are details on the origins of each text represented in this Frankenstein Variorum:

• MS The manuscript notebooks at the Bodleian Library thought to be a “fair copy” of the novel preparing it for publication, drafted in 1816-1817. Facsimile views and manuscript encoding of each page surface are provided by the Shelley-Godwin Archive (S-GA), and the TEI encoding from this project provides one of the five bases for our machine-assisted collation. The Variorum Viewer provides deep links into each page of the intricate S-GA edition.
• 1818 The first anonymous publication of the novel, published by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones in London, 1818. We worked with the 1990s HTML code of The Pennsylvania Electronic Edition of the 1818 text, transformed it to XML and corrected it against a photo facsimile of the 1818 edition so its markup would form the basis for locating chapter and paragraph boundaries in our collation.
• Thomas MWS’s handwritten edits and marginal notes inscribed in a copy of the 1818 edition that MWS left in Italy with Mrs. Thomas nearly a year after the death of Percy Shelley in July 1822 and before she returned to England in August 1823. It is now stored at The Morgan Library & Museum. As we have indicated, since the notes in this book were not available to MWS later, the “Thomas copy” represents a divergence in the version history and raises interesting questions of how much it differs from her later revisions.
• 1823 Inspired by the success of Presumption! or, The Fate of Frankenstein, the first staged melodrama adaptation of his daughter’s novel, William Godwin prepared a lightly edited version of the 1818 text for publication. Godwin’s 1823 edition, prepared before his daughter returned to England and without her assistance, is the first time the name of the author, “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,” appears on the the title page. With the help of Carnegie Mellon library with OCR page images, we prepared the 1823 XML text for incorporation in the Frankenstein Variorum.
• 1831 MWS heavily revised the novel by 1831, and this revised version was first published in volume 9 of Bentley’s Standard Series of Novels (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, 1831. As with the 1818 edition, we again worked with the code of The Pennsylvania Electronic Edition for preparing our XML text and corrected that text by consulting a photo facsimile.

You may access and download the texts in various stages of preparation for this edition from the Data page of this website and from our GitHub repository for the project.