Two hundred years after its publication, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus more than retains its place in modern culture. The 20-year old author’s novel has made its mark on what one might call the global imagination, and its relevance is likely to endure. Begun when she was 18, Shelley’s work has been adapted for the stage as well as the screen, and it has shaped art and literature worldwide: translated into French shortly after its publication, it can be read now in nearly every language. The novel’s story first appeared on film in 1910 in J. Searle Dawley’s Frankenstein and has inspired the work of many other cinematographers throughout the world, including Ishirō Honda’s 1965 Japanese-American coproduction Frankenstein Conquers the World, the Spanish director Victor Erice’s 1973 The Spirit of the Beehive, and Mel Brooks’s 1974 Young Frankenstein.

In the preface, Eileen Hunt Botting tells us how she first came to Frankenstein as a child in the 1970s by watching the Creature Double Feature on a local television station, then reading the novel once in high school, and finally appreciating its “philosophical richness” at university when Victor Frankenstein’s murderous creation, the Creature, ceased to be merely a horrendous fictive miscreation in her eyes. Instead, she saw “the Creature’s double identity as a superman avenger and a hideous monster to be a dangerous psychological fiction, foisted upon his self-image by his father’s and society’s horrified reaction to his features.” Behind this façade, she discerned “the Creature for who he really was: a stateless orphan, abandoned by family, abused by society, and ignored by the law” (p. xi). For all his hideous crimes, the Creature deserved sympathy for having been made as repugnant as he was and then neglected for it. This is the sentiment that sets the tone of Hunt Botting’s book on Shelley’s masterpiece, which she wishes to consider not through the lens of science but through that of politics.

Reading Frankenstein in this light has a long pedigree, Hunt Botting acknowledges; indeed, the book was said by Mary’s husband Percy Shelley to show how injustice was not only inflicted on but also increased by its victims. “Treat a person ill,”’ Hunt Botting quotes Percy Shelley, “and he will become wicked … by neglect and solitude of heart, into a scourge and a curse” (p. 2). What distinguishes her account from others who have similarly placed the text within its early nineteenth-century political context—namely, the social and political unrest of the post-Napoleonic Wars period—is that Hunt Botting takes the novel to be a “profound work of speculative fiction designed to engage philosophical questions concerning children’s rights to the means for their healthy development and well-being – fundamentally, rights to warmth, food, water, clothing, shelter, care education, family, community, and, most crucially, love” (p. 3). Although she insists that her interpretation does not exclude others and is not intended to brush them aside, for Hunt Botting, the entire structure of Frankenstein forces on its readers a moral consideration of the question of the rights of children. It is constructed, in her view, through a series of thought experiments that ask such questions as the following: What if the scientific creator of a child were repelled by his or her creation? What if a neglected child claimed a fundamental right to a female companion from its nonbiological creator? What if this creator refused? Thus Hunt Botting is not only offering a particular interpretation of Frankenstein but is also using her reading of the work as a platform for some moral philosophical probing.

The four chapters that make up her book take us from the 17-year-old Mary Shelley’s discovery of the dead body of her infant daughter Clara; the nightmares that followed; through to the status of children in the social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant; then an examination of Shelley’s own mother Mary Wollstonecraft’s views on children, followed by reflections on the various aspects of the thought experiments that Hunt Botting sees in Frankenstein. It ends in a form of plea that we think through the rights of post/human children engendered by the exponential developments in fertilization and genetic modification being made now or in the future. As Hunt Botting sees it, “Frankenstein leads readers to see that the justification of a fundamental right to love is the same for a post/human child as it is for a child deemed human.” The issue is pressing, given the “immanent possibility of making post/human children en masse through gene editing and other biotechonologies” (p. 179).

This is a provocative work. Although one may question aspects of its account of the Hobbesian state of nature; Kant’s views on illegitimate children, duties, friendship and more; or Wollstonecraft’s pronouncements on rights or attempts to qualify them in some way or other, there is no doubt that it raises interesting questions about the nature of rights; parent–child, society–child, and state–child relationships; and, most importantly, the nature of love. It is a book for the philosophically inclined, but the issues it raises are of general concern: even if a world of genetically modified or entirely artificially created children were not to come into existence, we need to think and rethink what may be deemed to be owed to children by their parents, families, society, and the state. Expectations of these rights vary between cultures and change with time, just as what children may be deemed to owe their parents, families, society, and the state changes.

That children should be granted rights, indeed have rights, is not a novel claim. In book I, chapter 16 of his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), Sir William Blackstone stated that the duty of parents to provide for the maintenance of their children is a principle of natural law; he called on the authority of Samuel Pufendorf to support his view that this obligation did not just emanate from nature but also from parents’ own agency in bringing their children into the world. This obligation gave children a perfect right to maintenance from their parents. One can take it from this that neither Blackstone nor his seventeenth-century predecessor, Pufendorf, would be unwilling to grant that Shelley’s Creature or any post/human child created by twenty-first-century science might produce a similar right. The difficulty would reside in the extensiveness of this right of maintenance. They might well accept the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1924), which specifies that children must be given the means for physical and spiritual development, nursed when ill, helped when in distress or need, protected from exploitation, and put in a position to earn a living—as well as the UN’s subsequent conventions on children’s rights. The right to be loved may be another matter. Actions can be commanded, but not so feelings. They are moreover unlikely to develop in response to entitlements to them by others. In any event, who would or could determine whether being tucked into bed and read a story was done out of duty or love?

Frankenstein provides a warning of the fatal consequences of the failure to attend to a scientific creation’s affective needs. The lesson is an important one, more generally speaking. But is fear of consequences a basis for love? And is love necessarily allied to good nurturing and care? The medical profession is trained to perfect a kind of emotional detachment from patients partly so as to ensure their best possible care. Among the merits of Hunt Botting’s book is that it makes us ponder the complexity of the phenomenon of love and reminds us of its centrality to Western philosophical inquiry since at least Plato.