I

Abstract

The first visual images of Frankenstein are a poster of ∗Cooke as a tall, athletic creature in ∗Presumption, and the frontispiece of Milner’s The Man and the Monster (1826) showing O. ∗Smith’s creature with long, curly black hair. Neither these pictures nor Theodor von Holst’s frontispiece for the 1831 edition of the novel suggest the brutish figure of later tradition. In Holst, says The London Literary Gazette for 19 November 1831, he is ‘more gigantic than frightful, and the face is deficient in that supernatural hideousness on which the author so especially dwells’ (p. 740). While the frontispiece contains skulls, a skeleton and a Gothic arch, Moreno and Moreno (2018) point out, its emphasis, like that of the novel, is on the ‘fact of the abandonment of the creature and its social costs, not the creation itself and its possible ethical consequences’. Frankenstein’s irresponsibility is established because, as Shelley (2012) notes, he both runs from his creature here, and parts from Elizabeth in Holst’s title-page illustration (p. 329).