In what year was Frankenstein first published?

Frankenstein was first published in 1818.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus appeared in London on 1 January 1818. The publisher was Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, and the first edition was issued anonymously in three volumes, following the popular nineteenth-century “triple-decker” format.

Shelley began developing the story in 1816, during the famous summer she spent near Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. Byron’s ghost-story challenge, discussions about galvanism, and Shelley’s vision of a scientist creating life all helped shape the novel. She completed the manuscript in 1817.

A common mix-up is 1831, the year of the first major revised edition published under Shelley’s name. That edition included a new preface and substantial revisions, but it was not the novel’s first publication. The 1818 text is the original edition and is often studied separately from the later revision.