Neo-Gothic and Neo-Romantic Features in Peter Ackroyd’s "The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein"

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus has been the object of multiple afterlives since Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein was staged in 1823. Over the past two centuries, literary, dramatic, and multimedia adaptations of the novel have certainly fulfilled Mary Shelley’s hope that her ‘hideous progeny’ might ‘go forth and prosper’. In both highbrow and lowbrow revisitations, however, it is usually the Creature that undergoes various metamorphic processes. This article focuses on a different metamorphosis of Shelley’s novel, Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008), which refashions the story of the creator. Victor’s ambition and his downfall abandon Ingolstadt and the sublime landscapes of Mont Blanc to be re-located in nineteenth-century England, where the scientist finds his alterego in Percy Bysshe Shelley and meets his own creator, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. After discussing the novel in the context of postmodern theory, I contend that Ackroyd’s taste for pastiche has several implications. His Casebook rests on a complex narrative palimpsest made of allusions, which transforms the conventions of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Gothic novels and provides a negotiated version of their tropes that is simultaneously ‘Neo- Gothic’ and ‘Neo-Romantic’.