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Two centuries ago, on March 11, 1818, the most celebrated of all monsters was born with the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. That novel has since inspired an avalanche of plays, movies and critical studies, and the mere utterance of its title has social impact. Yet there is a problem here: the book is an over-rated jumble that has actually obstructed the advancement of knowledge.

The basic storyline, in which mad scientist Victor Frankenstein creates a humanoid being that eventually destroys him, has been notoriously distorted by Hollywood for generations. The monster, who is nameless and well-spoken in the book, has often been called “Frankenstein” and rendered mute, among other errors, on film.

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However, Hollywood may have been right all along, because attempts to render the novel into other forms frequently produce the same result. One of the top Frankenstein experts, Radu Florescu, pointed out that stage productions in the 1820s already portrayed the monster as a grunting brute. Two annotators of the novel, Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald L. Levao, have noted that British prime minister William Gladstone (no less) denounced mules (of all things) as “Frankensteins” in 1838, so the mix-up over the name was occurring by that early point.