Full platinum and graphite fair calf with alum tawed calf backpared onlay, pen and ink, all edges rough platinum and graphite, triple silk sewn endbands, doublures are paste resist, cracked and dyed alum tawed calf.

Much of the action takes place in the snowy and icy wastes of the Arctic and the Alps particularly the Mer de Glace glacier in Chamonix. Shelley and her husband Percy Bysshe undertook the arduous journey to see this wonder. In “History of a Six Week’s Tour“ (1817), they wrote of “a scene in truth of dizzying wonder... On all sides precipitous mountains, the abodes of unrelenting frost... they pierce the clouds like things not belonging to this earth”.

The novel was written in the year that Mount Tambor, a volcano in Indonesia, erupted and plunging Europe into a mini Ice Age. The front endpaper shows an early 19th century woodcut of the glacier, “a mass of undulating ice... as if frost had suddenly bound up the waves and whirlpools of a mighty torrent.” The rear endpaper shows the glacier today. It is predicted that it may have disappeared by the end of this century. A stark visual reminder of the speed at which climate change is affecting our planet and a warning to mankind, as Shelley’s Frankenstein was, that terrible things happen when we believe in our own superiority over Nature.

Shelley was writing at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution when the Romantic movement was gazing in awe at the wonders of nature whilst questioning the relentless onslaught of science and progress, of mechanisation and the move to urban living. The subtitle ‘The Modern Prometheus’ refers to the Titan Prometheus of Ancient Greece, who gave fire to mankind and later represented human striving, particularly the quest for scientific knowledge, and the risk of overreaching or terrible unintended consequences.