We All Know The Story Of Frankenstein's Monster,

mainly from films, but how many of us know how well read the ‘monster’ really was?

in one film we see the monster looking through a gap in a wall, and watches, hiding in an unused structure connected to a cottage, Frankenstein’s monster becomes transfixed by the written word, through a chink in the wall, in the book he watches Felix read to his foreign lover and teach her how to speak his language, and piggybacks off of these lessons in language and letters. “I discovered that he uttered many of the same sounds when he read as when he talked. I conjectured, therefore, that he found on the paper signs for speech which he understood, and I ardently longed to comprehend these also”, soon after, while searching for his humanity or its lack, the monster stumbles across a “leathern portmanteau” containing three books: Milton’s Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Noble Lives of the Greeks and Romans, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, all of which are illustrated with links to the originals if you wish to read them, above Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther; Elective Affinities, ed. Nathan Haskell Dole (Boston: Francis A. Nicholls, 1902) just click Source to read them,

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther; Elective Affinities, ed. Nathan Haskell Dole (Boston: Francis A. Nicholls, 1902) Source,

John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Robert Vaughan, illustrated by Gustave Doré (New York: Cassell, Petter, Galpin, ca. 1866) Source, the above begs the question, how much of a monster was he really? I doubt many of us have read all three books, speaking of which if you want to read the original, written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, this is the influential 1831 edition which most people know the story by (there were two previous versions, substantially shorter), the link is here.