Frankenstein’s Monster is to be brought back to life for a new generation of Dundee schoolchildren.
A new city edition of Frankenstein celebrating Mary Shelley’s links to the city is to be published and given free to pupils later this year.
Edited and introduced by Dr Daniel Cook, of the University of Dundee’s English department, the book will comprise the complete 1818 text of the ground-breaking science fiction novel as well as dozens of commissioned images produced by award-winning local comics artists.
Broadcaster Billy Kay, who is currently working on a BBC Scotland radio documentary exploring Mary Shelley’s Dundee, will provide the foreword.
Dr Cook said: “Frankenstein is one of the most influential novels ever written.
“It is studied in schools and universities across the English-speaking world, and everyone is in some way familiar with the story of the god-like scientist and his monstrous creation, through movies, caricatures or popular culture more generally.
“We are very excited to build on the existing scholarship around Mary Shelley’s time here and to bring out this special edition.
“By circulating free copies in print and online we hope even more people will be inspired by the novel, and connect it more firmly with the place where it all began for the young Shelley – Dundee in 1812.”
Shelley spent two years living in Dundee’s South Baffin Street as a teenager after her father William Godwin sent her to live with the wealthy jute baron Baxter family.
This spell would profoundly influence Shelley, as she later acknowledged, writing: “It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.”
The new edition of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus will be released online while thousands of hard copies will be printed and given to schoolchildren.
