Percy Bysshe Shelley, feigning the author's being abroad, handled the negotiations
for a contract to publish Frankenstein, thus preserving Mary Shelley's anonymity.
That he first sought out John Murray, Byron's publisher, may indicate that Byron himself
suggested such an avenue to the Shelleys. Whatever the case, Murray declined the manuscript,
upon whose refusal Shelley reverted to his own publisher Charles Ollier. When Ollier,
too, declined to accept the book, the Shelleys were in something of a quandary. They
resolved it by turning to a publishing house—Lackington's—that had a large inventory
and specialized somewhat in sensational materials. In the two-page advertisement sheet
accompanying the novel when it was published in 1818 are representative works that
the Lackington firm apparently thought might interest the reader of the novel: these
include Francis Barrett, The Magus; or Celestial Intelligences; a complete System
of Occult Philosophy, being a Summary of all the best Writers on the subjects of Magic,
Alchymy, Magnetism, the Cabala &c. (1801); Francis Barrett, Lives of the Alchemystical
Philosophers with a Critical Catalogue of Books on Occult Chemistry (1815); Thomas
Heywood, The Life, Prophecies, and Predictions of Merlin Interpreted (1813); Joseph
Taylor, Apparitions; or, the Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted House (1814);
John Toland, A Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning; containing an
account of the Druids (1815); and—though officially published by another house, White,
Cochrane, & Co.—Sarah Utterson, Tales of the Dead (1813), the English translation
of Jean Baptiste Benôit Eyriès's Fantasmagoriana, the volume of ghost stories that
served as pretext for the ghost-story contest from which Frankenstein eventually came
into being (see 1831:I:Intro:6 and note).