Frankenstein: The 1818 Text by Mary Shelley
Published 1818 · 86,608 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Horror, Science Fiction, Modernist & Experimental Fiction
How hard is Frankenstein: The 1818 Text to read?
Frankenstein: The 1818 Text scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Shelley's prose is formal Romantic English with latinate words and archaic spellings like 'shewed' and 'phænomena', plus references to Agrippa, Paracelsus and Plutarch. It is more elevated than The Great Gatsby but far plainer than Moby-Dick.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Long periodic sentences with stacked clauses run through Victor's and the creature's speeches. They remain orderly and readable, closer to Anna Karenina in translation than to Faulkner.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- The plot is concrete: a creation, murders, a trial, a pursuit. The creature's speeches and Victor's reflections on knowledge, responsibility and the Miltonic fall add philosophical weight, like Crime and Punishment on a smaller scale.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Three narrators, nested letters and a steady supply of incident keep the pace brisk but manageable. Natural-philosophy digressions and the De Lacey backstory add layers, but nothing approaches the density of Moby-Dick.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- Walton, Victor and the creature each give their own account, and Victor's self-justification invites readers to read against him. Events are told plainly, so readers infer moral judgments more than facts, as in The Great Gatsby.
- Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
- Fire, the Alpine sublime, Paradise Lost, the Arctic ice and the Promethean subtitle give the novel a strong symbolic layer. It is more openly signposted than Moby-Dick, closer to 1984 in clarity.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Victor's self-exculpating narration contrasts with the creature's eloquent case, and the 'monster' label cuts back on the speaker who uses it. The irony is real but not sustained, as in The Great Gatsby's gap between Nick and events.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- The creature's fate and Victor's moral reckoning are weighed in a nested structure, but the plot is tightly resolved. The story leaves open who is to blame, though less than The Great Gatsby leaves open its meaning.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- Letters from Walton frame Victor's narration, which in turn frames the creature's long tale, with further letters nested inside. It is a Russian-doll structure, simpler than Absalom, Absalom! but more intricate than The Brothers Karamazov.
How Frankenstein: The 1818 Text is regarded
Frankenstein: The 1818 Text holds a literary regard score of 90 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.
Where the story of Frankenstein: The 1818 Text takes place
- Geneva and the Arctic, 1790s (1790 to 1800), the main setting