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Mary Godwin was (as we continuously discuss) the daughter of two celebrity literary figures: William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Sadly, Wollstonecraft “died eleven days after giving birth to [Mary Godwin] in 1797, the year of the last major gothic novels” (Gaull 248). From there on forth, “raised by William Godwin, the resourceful but impatient Mary Jane Clairmont whom he married, Mary’s childhood was confused and unhappy, beset by financial and familial difficulties“ (Gaull 248). In polite terms, her relationship with her stepmother was dubious and cold; “it is reported to have been a fractious and crowded household. Mary admired and loved her father, but he was a cold and rational character, often preoccupied with his writing. She hated her stepmother, who lacked sensitivity and gave preference to her own children. During her childhood, Mary therefore built up an idealized picture of her dead mother. She was rebellious, proud of her exceptional parentage, and divisively hostile to her step-mother while turning to her father for comfort”  (Marsh 184). In fact, “in May 1811 Mrs. Godwin took Charles, little William (Mary's step-brothers), and Mary to Ramsgate for a seaside holiday. The others returned to town in June, but left Mary at a girls’ school in Ramsgate where she remained until December” (Marsh 184). From here, through mutual friends in London “by age sixteen [when] she was sufficiently educated and charming to win the love of Percy Shelley, age nineteen, a disciple of Godwin, an atheist, a vegetarian, with a small income, a pregnant wife, a child, and a history of dedicating himself to idealistic but losing causes” (Gaull 248).

Mary and Percy’s relationship, however, was not easy. After they fell in love:

Shelley told Godwin of their love. To his surprise, the famously anti-marriage philosopher was antagonistic. He urged Shelley to overcome his passion for Mary, and patch things up with Harriet (Shelley's wife). There followed a time of tension. The Godwins tried to suppress the love between Mary and Percy, but probably succeeded only in strengthening this particularly rebellious young couple’s determination and passion. Shelley paid a historic visit to Skinner Street: he gave Mary a bottle of laudanum, and produced a pistol for himself, declaring that they would die rather than endure separation. This tense time could not, and did not, last very long. At four o’clock in the morning on 28th July 1814, Mary left her father’s house and met Shelley, who had a couch waiting (Marsh 185-6)

The pair of them struggled, they “eloped, endured separation, poverty, and the death of an infant child, before retreating to Villa Diodati with their second child” (Gaull 248). They took with them Mary’s stepsister, who changed her name from Jane to Claire Clairmont. Mrs. Godwin attempted to retrieve her daughter, and indeed found the three, but while ignoring Mary and Percy was unsuccessful in convincing Claire to return home. Moreover, William Godwin was furious with Mary for her elopement; once again Mary's life becomes a scale, while she gained the love of Shelley, her relationship with her family became colder than ever.

Here the famous tale of Frankenstein begins:

In Villa Diodati on Lake Leman in Switzerland, temporary residence of Lord Byron, now a notorious outcast from English society; Percy Shelley, a poet who was hardly known at all; his mistress, Mary Godwin and their six-month-old son; Claire Clairmont, Mary’s half-sister pregnant with Byron’s child; John Polidori, a precocious young physician and Byron’s travelling companion; and, for a brief visit in August, “Monk” Lewis. There they passed the long rain days and nights in conversation about philosophy, science, religion, and literature; they rowed, walked, told tales, and proposed a contest in which each would write his own ghost story. Two major gothic works resulted: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus (1818) and John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), both exploring the perpetuation of biological as opposed to spiritual life. (Gaull 245)

Though the particularities are uncertain, “we know is that [Shelley] began writing the novel in June 1816, and that it was completed on 14th May 1817” (Marsh 190). During this time, upon “returning to England [from Italy] with an unfinished Frankenstein, [the Shelleys]  encountered two suicides, Fanny Imlay, Mary’s other half sister, and Harriet Shelley, several months pregnant, drowned in the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Within less than a month Mary and Percy were married, and while awaiting the birth of their third child, she completed Frankenstein, published the following March (1818). Over the next five years, Shelley drowned; two more children died, and Mary, a widow at twenty-five, returned to England with their one surviving child. Frankenstein had already been adapted for the stage” (Gaul 248) Mary Shelley’s life remained a constant struggle; her marriage to Shelley suffered many hardships, and  “Mary’s pregnancy ended in miscarriage on 16th June 1822, and she nearly died from the consequent hemorrhage. She was saved by her husband’s timely action, sitting her in an ice bath. Only a month later, Shelley himself was dead. After Shelley’s death, Mary suffered terribly from remorse because the last few months of their married life together were soured by her own fouled temper” (Marsh 190). It has consequently been articulated that in the 1823 edition of the novel's preface, Mary “Shelley’s reference to the novel as “my hideous progeny” may reflect on her 1822 miscarriage, although she follows by bidding that literary progeny to go into the world and prosper, claiming that it represents for her that happier time prior to experienced the “death and grief” that characterized her novel” (Brackett 104) With only one of her five children surviving the age of adulthood (Percy Florence Shelley), Frankenstein takes a personal approach. Shelley knew better than most, “the cycle of birth and death, a circle in which death was repeatedly overtaking birth, in which one life was gained at the expense of another” (Gaull 248).

    To resume specifically on the publication history, “the 1818 edition of Frankenstein, published by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones, printed 500 copies at the expensive price of the standard three volume novel. The 1823 edition was a small one in terms of print size. One would imagine, then, that it was with the Bentley edition of 1831 that Frankenstein gained a wider, mass audience” (Allen 96). Recall, it was also the 1831 edition that Percy Shelley had edited, with “a rough estimate of 4,000 words which can be traced to [his] pen, as he helped his wife improve and develop the draft and then the fair copy” (Allen 89), erasing the epigraph, altering the title pages, and editing facts in the plotline throughout the narrative. It seems, Percy Shelley appeared in want to tame his wife’s radical novel, and most notably he edited the later edition so that “Elizabeth is no longer directly related to Victor, instead of being his ‘cousin’ she is in 1831 a ‘foundling’ brought into the Frankenstein household. This change, for Mellor, indicates that Shelley is domesticating her representation of the relationship between Elizabeth and Victor, taming the radical ‘incestuous overtones’ of 1818, with a more conventionally acceptable portrayal of Elizabeth as ‘the Victorian “angel in the house’’ (Allen 93).

      Graham Allen does a wonderful job in speculating some edits and alterations between the first three editions of Frankenstein:

A recognition that readers need to register the differences created by the changes in the text by its republication in 1823 and 1831 is of longer standing and has created a far more diverse critical discussion. The 1818 edition...was the product of the collaborative labour of the Shelleys. The 1823 edition, brought out perhaps to try and capitalize on the first theatrical production of the novel, was managed by Godwin and includes over 120 small changes made by him to the text (see Crook, ‘Defence’, p. 18). The Thomas copy, referred to by many scholars of the novel’s history, concerns the annotated copy Shelley left behind her in Italy in 1823, a copy which demonstrates that she did intend from an early period to produce a revised version of the novel. The 1831 edition was published in Bentley’s Standard Novels series and included Shelley’s famous introduction. This edition used the 1823 version as copy text and so retained the vast majority of Godwin’s minor alterations. It also presented significant major and minor changes by Shelley herself and has been read by many modern critics as radically altering the novel....Shelley, like Wordsworth, underwent a personal movement towards conservative politics which significantly altered her great masterpiece and produced what are in effect two novels: the politically radical 1818 and the politically conservative 1831. The comments also make it clear that the critical debate about the two versions of Frankenstein do not simply rest on interpretations of the specific changes Shelley made to her novel; they also rest on a reading of Shelley’s biography and the question which has coloured the critical reception of her work since her own lifetime: did Shelley reject the political radicalism of her circle after the deaths of P. B. Shelley and Byron in the early 1820s? Those critics who argue that she did move towards forms of political quietism or conservatism invariably favour 1818 over 1831. (Allen  91-2)

To conclude, Frankenstein (and Shelley) suffered hardships; “Frankenstein being out of print, with the odd exception, throughout the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s” (Allen 97). It seems it was “not until the 1880s, when it came out of its previous copyright restrictions, [that] Frankenstein finally reach the reading public it was always destined to find. As St. Clair notes: ‘In its first year, the first reprint of Frankenstein sold more copies than all of the previous editions put together”, and only “at the turn of the nineteenth century, eighty years after its first appearance, Frankenstein at last became accessible to the whole reading nation" (Allen 97)

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Useful resources on publication history:

• Listing of all the major editions of Frankenstein since 1818: https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/textual

• A more detailed comparison between the editions, with a direct comparison between the 1818 and the 1831 editions https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein

• Specific list of all the word edits and alterations in the 1831 edition: http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/murray.html