Editor’s Note

This edition follows the revised text of 1831, the one most readers know, and the same text from which our Korean translation was made. In it Mary Shelley revised the novel throughout and added an Introduction telling how the story came to be written at Geneva in 1816. The original Preface of 1818, written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, is printed after it. The source is a public-domain transcription of a photographic reprint of the 1831 edition; its transcriber corrected two printing errors of that edition, and those corrections are kept.

The order follows the 1831 edition: Introduction, Preface, Walton’s four letters, Chapters I to XXIV, and Walton’s letters “in continuation,” which in the original run on from Chapter XXIV and are given their own heading here so that they can be found in the contents. The author’s three footnotes are kept. Spelling and punctuation are those of the source (honour, Genevese). Straight quotation marks have been set as curly ones, and underscores marking italics as italics; this is typography only. We have made no corrections to the words.

Removed from the source: the transcription’s header and license, its title page and table of contents, and all distributor notices.