The Frankenstein Frontispiece (1831)

 

Before there was cover art there were frontispieces. The actual cover of a book would be plain, either boards or more expensive bindings in leather; but a woodcut or engraving would occupy a whole page opposite the title page—usually to the left as the book is opened (that is: occupying the verso of the previous page, with the title printed on the recto of the next) although sometimes these positions are switched. The word derives etymologically from the Latin frons, ‘forehead’, as if the first illustration of a book is in a sense its brow—in fact the term ‘frontispiece’ was originally applied to architectural embellishment: a pediment or gable over a doorway that included bas-relief design or sculptural addition was in a clearer sense the ‘forehead’ of the building. By the nineteenth-century the word had migrated to books.

Here is the frontispiece to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the novel Brian Aldiss claims as the first properly science-fictional book. The first edition of this famous tale, in 1818, had no illustrations of any kind. But the book was popular and was reprinted to meet demand, first in 1823, and then, in a revised edition, in 1831. This version included both a frontispiece and an extra illustration on the title page.

The title illustration, on the right, is the less interesting of the two. It shows a scene from early in the novel (chapter 3) as Victor Frankenstein leaves his family home, and his fiancée Elizabeth, to begin his studies at Ingolstadt University. But the frontispiece on the left  is much more striking. It captures the moment immediately after Frankenstein has ‘imparted a spark of life’ into his creature, the monster that is never given a name (although, in popular parlance, he has assumed the name of his creator). Having constructed the being—the novel does not tell us how, or from what, although in later cinematic adaptations of the story the monster is stitched together from dead body-parts—Frankenstein brings it to life by means of ‘galvanism’ (that is, electricity) and is immediately horrified by what he has done. ‘Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room.’ He later suffers traumatic amnesia and forgets what he has done, until, months afterwards, he hears reports of murders in the neighbourhood, and reports of a stalking horror, and begins to remember.

It is an engraving by the English artist Theodor Von Holst (1810-1844). Born to German-Latvian parents in London, Holst was a child prodigy, exhibiting his art from the age of ten, accepted into the Royal Academy at fourteen, where he studied under the great Swiss-born Gothic artist Henry Fuseli (1741-1825). He was much sought-after for paintings and also his book illustrations, though he died of a liver complaint at the tragically early age of 33 (the composer Gustav Holst was his grand-nephew).

As was typical of 19th-century frontispieces, the image carries a quotation from the text to situate it: ‘by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull, yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive agitation seized its limbs…I rushed out of the room.’

To the right Victor exits, his horrified wide-eyes mimicking the gape-stared eye-sockets of the skulls arranged atop his bookcase: relics of the grave that he has been studying, along with the books of medical and philosophical learning, in order to construct the monster. As he opens the door a shaft of light breaks through, the bold diagonal leading our eyes down to the monster, newly alive, sprawled on the floor. 

This sunbeam is not true to the text—the scene as Shelley describes it is specified as taking place at 1am ‘on a dreary night of November’—but it makes for a striking composition. The monster is less obviously hideous, and rather more naked, than the Boris Karlof film version, in James Whale’s celebrated 1931 movie. The novel does say that Frankenstein ‘selected’ the elements that made-up his creature ‘as beautiful’. It’s not those elements themselves that are horrific so much as their juxtapositions, the way they are put together. Holst captures this by drawing the creature’s head askew upon its body, wrenched and awry, and its muscular limbs akimbo, disposed into three quarters of a swastika. He sprawls, his legs, tangled up in a skeleton, another book open on the floor beside him—more evidence of Frankenstein’s grisly study. Above him, to the left, are various laboratory-type items: a glass jar and a bottle with a tube emerging from it, as well as horn-like doublet of galvanic electrodes.

The novel itself does not specify electricity as the mean by which the creature is animated—indeed, Frankenstein specifies that he won’t tell us how he brought the monster to life, for fear that people would try to copy him and unleash other such horrors on the world. But Shelley added a preface to the 1831 edition in which she included this hint: ‘perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things; perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together and endued with vital warmth.’

One odd detail is this device affixed to the wall. This is an astrological chart, or horoscope, indicating the positions of the planets at the birth of the monster. Not all the astrological and planetary symbols are represented but you can see the sigil for Scorpio (October 23 – November 21) in the middle panel, and the sign for Saturn on the bottom right. For comparison, here is the horoscope of George IV, drawn up for his birthday (12 August 1762), monarch whilst Shelley wrote and reworked her novel.