The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
City urged to whip up Frankenstein fever
Dundee collector obtains rare first edition of book that inspired Shelley
A copy of the 200-year-old book which was the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been secured by a Dundee collector in a cultural coup for the city where she lived as a teenager.
Specialist John Gray has added a first-edition Fantasmagoriana to the remarkable collection he has built up after becoming fascinated by Shelley and her time in Tayside as a teenager.
He hopes the latest acquisition will be the springboard for a new drive to shed light on the author and her city connections and to properly seize what Mr Gray believes is a “missed opportunity” to draw fans of Shelley and her most famous work from across the globe.
Fantasmagoriana was the ghost book read aloud by Lord Byron to the Geneva circle at Villa Diodati in June 1816, which inspired the famous ghost writing competition from which both Frankenstein and The Vampyre were created.
Mr Gray has amassed one of the country’s best Shelley collections of rare editions within just a couple of years of becoming intrigued by her tie to Dundee, forged when the young Englishwoman came north to live with the family of jute baron William Baxter.
Born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, she would begin writing Frankenstein just two years after leaving Scotland while on holiday on the shores of Lake Geneva, and the seminal work was published when she was just 20.
Shelley acknowledged Dundee’s importance in her writing career and Mr Gray is hopeful moves may be made to give her story greater prominence.
“As a city we need to do more to raise awareness of our cultural ties to Shelley and the tragedy is that there is nowhere people can currently go in Dundee to see a first edition copy of Frankenstein.
“Since I secured Fantasmagoriana people have been messaging me from all over the world. There is such an opportunity here, but at the moment it is a missed opportunity.
“The book is so rare that even the Bodleian library, the holders of the best Shelley collection in the world, do not own it.”
Mr Gray added: “Very few people have ever seen this, it is one of probably only two copies in Britain.”