How Frankenstein drew on Plutarch's Lives
A documented line of influence: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley demonstrably engaged Plutarch’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Plutarch's Lives
Plutarch · c. 110
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley · 1818
RomanticismRelevance
6/10
On Frankenstein’s page
- Plutarch's Lives is named on the page — one of the three books the creature discovers and reads in the De Lacey woods, alongside The Sorrows of Young Werther and Paradise Lost
- Shelley has Plutarch give him 'high thoughts,' teaching him of the lawgivers and rulers of antiquity and waking his love of virtue
- Read it and you read what the creature read — the source of the moral ideals it measures its own abandonment against
On Plutarch's Lives’s page
- Plutarch's Lives doesn't just influence Frankenstein — it appears inside it, one of three books the creature finds and reads in the woods
- Plutarch gives him 'high thoughts': from the rulers of ancient Greece and Rome he learns of public virtue, and his moral sense begins to form
- Of the creature's three teachers — Plutarch, Goethe, Milton — Plutarch is the one that turns him toward virtue rather than grievance