Is Frankenstein the Doctor or the Monster? Why Everyone Gets the Name Wrong, and Why the Book Half-Agrees

Somebody says “Frankenstein” meaning the tall one with the square head, and somebody else says “actually, Frankenstein is the scientist”, and everybody within earshot has now had this exact conversation for the fourth time. The correction is right about the novel. It has also been losing to ordinary English for about a hundred and eighty years, and the novel itself is partly to blame.

• ✅Frankenstein is the maker. Victor Frankenstein, a student from Geneva.
• ✅The creature has no name. Not one, in either edition, from anybody.
• ✅He is not a doctor. The phrase never appears in the book.
• ✅The slip is Victorian. A Punch cartoon was already doing it in 1843.

A different question, which sounds the same and is not, is whether Victor is the real monster in the moral sense. That one has its own essay on this hub, and it is a reading of the book rather than a fact about a word. If you would rather meet him than argue about him, the playable Frankenstein opens the night he wakes as one of its doorways, and calls him what the novel calls him.

📖 The short answer, and the part that never sticks

In the novel, Frankenstein is a Genevan family. Alphonse Frankenstein is a magistrate, Victor is his eldest son, and there are two younger brothers, Ernest and William. Victor goes to the university at Ingolstadt, spends nearly two years assembling a body out of collected remains, and animates it. The being he makes is not a Frankenstein by blood, adoption or naming, and the whole tragedy turns on the fact that nobody ever treats him as one.

So the correction is accurate. The reason it never sticks is that English already moved on. Here is what the dictionary has, today.

“A person who creates a monster or a destructive agency that cannot be controlled or that brings about the creator’s ruin.” And, listed immediately under it: “Also called Frankenstein monster. The monster or destructive agency itself.”

The same entry adds a usage note saying people often mistakenly refer to the monster rather than his creator as Frankenstein, and dates the word “first recorded in 1830–40”. A dictionary that records a usage and simultaneously calls it a mistake is telling you the argument is a hundred and eighty years old and unresolved.

🕳️ The creature has no name, and that is the book’s doing

The vacuum is real and Mary Shelley made it. Across the whole 1831 text the words used for him are creature forty-four times, fiend thirty-five, monster thirty-one, wretch twenty-five, dæmon eighteen and devil ten. The 1818 edition runs almost identically. Every one of those is a category, and none of them is a name, and no character in the novel ever offers him one.

Victor’s own vocabulary is worth watching, because it never settles. His first word to the creature’s face on the glacier in chapter 10 is “Devil”. Sixteen lines later he has reached “Abhorred monster! Fiend that thou art!” Walton, who meets him only at the very end, opens with “Wretch!” Even the narration hedges: Walton writes in his fourth letter that Victor asked about the route “which the dæmon, as he called him, had taken”, quietly declining to adopt the word himself.

The creature notices. He asks for a name once, in the only terms he has, which come from the copy of Paradise Lost he taught himself to read.

“Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”

Adam is the request. It is refused, along with everything else he asks for, and he goes to his death in the Arctic still unnamed. A character with an empty slot where his name should be is a character the language will eventually fill in with whatever is nearest, and what was nearest was his maker.

The playable Frankenstein calls him what the novel calls him, which is the creature. You can be in the room at The Spark of Life, on the night he opens his eyes, and decide whether the first thing he hears is a word for him. Role-play Frankenstein →

🎓 He is not a doctor either

This is the part the corrector usually gets wrong while correcting somebody else. Search either published edition for “Doctor Frankenstein” or “Dr. Frankenstein” and you get nothing. Not once, in either text.

Victor arrives at Ingolstadt as an undergraduate, is laughed at by M. Krempe for having read the alchemists, is converted to chemistry by M. Waldman’s lectures, and then vanishes into private work for nearly two years. He never qualifies in anything, never practises, and never holds a post. He is a gifted student who dropped out of sight to build something in a rented room, which is a far more modern figure than the man in the white coat everyone pictures. The doctorate arrived with the films, along with the laboratory, the assistant and the storm.

📰 How the name moved across, from 1843

The usual story is that Hollywood did this, and Hollywood only finished it. The earliest slippage on record is Victorian and political. In 1843 Punch ran a cartoon called “The Irish Frankenstein”, held in the University of Otago’s Punch archive, in which the monster is the repeal movement and Daniel O’Connell has lost control of it. A year later, according to Wikipedia’s account of the novel’s reception, a story in The Rover referred in passing to “the maker of poor Frankenstein”, a phrase that only works if Frankenstein is the creature’s name rather than his maker’s, twenty-six years after publication.

Punch did it again in 1882, and this time it stuck to the wall. John Tenniel’s second “Irish Frankenstein”, held by the British Library, drew Charles Stewart Parnell beside a hulking masked figure captioned with a Shelley quotation, after the Phoenix Park murders. The Irish Times, writing about the cartoon in 2018, describes it as confusing the creature with his creator. By 1908 Rossiter Johnson was complaining in print, in the Author’s Digest, that “well-nigh universally the term ‘Frankenstein’ is misused, even by intelligent people, as describing some hideous monster.”

Then came 1931. Wikipedia’s articles on James Whale’s Universal film and on Colin Clive record that the film renames Victor to Henry Frankenstein, and its article on Jack P. Pierce credits him with the flat head and the neck electrodes. That is the only sourcing this page could find for either fact, so take them as Wikipedia’s. What is not in doubt is the effect: the word FRANKENSTEIN went up on posters over a face that was not Colin Clive’s, and a slippage that had been a literary joke for eighty-eight years became the default. What those posters did to the creature’s appearance is a separate post.

🤷 So is the joke wrong?

Half of it. If you are talking about Mary Shelley’s novel, the name belongs to Victor and the correction is simply true. If you are talking about the thing on the Halloween mask, you are using a second sense that entered English in the 1840s, has been in dictionaries for generations, and carries a meaning the first sense does not: a creation that turns on the person who made it. Both speakers are using real words correctly and only one of them is being told off.

There is a better use for the correction than winning it. The reason the creature has no name is the reason the book is still worth reading: he is the only character nobody bothers to name, in a novel about what happens to the things we make and then decline to be responsible for. Say that instead of “actually”, and you will be quoting the book rather than policing it. It is free and complete at Project Gutenberg, and the rest of the cast, all of whom do have names, is set out here.