Notwithstanding the state of the law, Shelley’s family was able to take advantage of the publicity surrounding Peake’s play to print and sell a revised second edition of Frankenstein.
Elliston), that the play was a “ fair abridgment” of his work over which he had no say. The year before, her buddy Lord Byron had gone to court to enjoin an unauthorized theatrical version of one of his own works, only to be told by the King’s Bench (in Murray v. Shelley reportedly enjoyed the play, but her approval wasn’t important, because at the time she had no rights to assert against it. In 1823, the first stage version of Frankenstein (called Presumption, or The Fate of Frankenstein ) was produced by Richard Peake. The first edition of Frankenstein was printed by the London publishing house of Lackington & Co., which agreed to give Shelley one-third of the profits from a 500 copy run. Shelley sold the Frankenstein copyright for £ 30.The actual publication date of the first edition was January 1, 1818, but the Halloween season is as good a time as any to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of Frankenstein and its relationship to copyright law. Incredibly, twenty-year-old John Polidori was simultaneously inventing the vampire genre just down the hall in the same Geneva villa. Shelley had written the work on a rainy day in 1816, when she was only nineteen. The public did not learn until years later that this masterpiece had been penned by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Originally offered to the public as an anonymous work, Frankenstein was both the apogee of the gothic horror novel and the birth of the science fiction genre. The first edition of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, was published in 1818, two hundred years ago.
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