It turned out they meant very little at all. When Frankenstein's sister and Father died early on, I knew that the plot was not going to match the original story and I wondered what these changes would mean in the new plot. I also enjoyed being reminded of the story of the golem of Prague which took place maybe a century earlier and (maybe) was known to the intelligentsia of the time and thus an influence on their thinking about the creation of life. Nor was I aware of the politics of Bysshe and Byron and Polidori and the cultural taboos around anatomists and knowledge in general. Still, I hadn't known much of the science of the times and how electricity being a fluid which could potentially give life to dead matter made a kind of sense then which my modern sensibilities hadn't fully appreciated. Shelley created life on the page while Ackroyd was just stitching lifelike parts together. I was pleased to be gaining a historical perspective but it was immediately obvious that Mary Shelley's writing was in a whole different class from that of Peter Ackroyd. I also (so I hoped) got to continue Frankenstein which I missed reading having unfortunately already finished it. I read this right after reading Mary Shelley's original and at first was excited because a historian was telling me what I didn't understand about reading a book written nearly 2 centuries ago whose story took place some years before that.
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