Mister Creecher
Page 23
In 1823 – without Mary’s permission – Frankenstein was turned into a successful play (given the very Jane Austen-like title of Presumption). The play departs from the book in many aspects – most significantly, the intelligent, articulate creature of the novel becomes a shambling mute.
Many movies have been made of the book, the first being a silent by Edison Studios as early as 1910. The most famous is the 1932 James Whale version, starring Boris Karloff as the creature and Colin Clive as Frankenstein.
The Romantic poet, John Keats, and his friend Charles Brown, went on a tour of northern England and Scotland in the summer of 1818, stopping off at the Castlerigg stone circle near Keswick on their way – a few days before Billy arrived. Keats didn’t seem very impressed and passed this description into his poem ‘Hyperion’:
Scarce images of life, one here, one there,
Lay vast and edgeways; like a dismal cirque
Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor
Keat’s ‘Endymion’ (which Billy passes off as his own work) was published in 1818 but was panned by the critics. Keats was diagnosed with consumption (tuberculosis) – a disease that had already killed his brother Tom – and he moved to Italy in the hope that the climate might help him. He died in 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, in a grave not far from where Shelley’s ashes were eventually laid to rest.
Victor Frankenstein and Henry Clerval continued their journey north after leaving the Lake District. If you want to know what happened next, then you will have to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . . .
Charles Dickens was five years old when Frankenstein was published and had been living in London since he was three. His father was in a debtor’s prison and, as a boy, Dickens worked ten hours a day pasting labels to cans of shoe polish to help his family.
Oliver Twist – about a boy who is born in a workhouse and is eventually rescued from a life among the thieves of London (thieves that included Bill Sikes and Fagin) – was Dickens’ second novel, published in monthly instalments from February 1837, a few months before Queen Victoria came to the throne. If you want to know what became of Billy Sikes, then you will have to read Oliver Twist . . .
Also by Chris Priestley
The Tales of Terror Collection:
Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror
Tales of Terror from the Black Ship
Tales of Terror from the Tunnel’s Mouth
The Dead of Winter
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney
First published in Great Britain in October 2011 by
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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This electronic edition published in October 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Chris Priestley 2011
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ISBN 9781408825471
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