The two hundredth anniversary of Frankenstein’s publication marked a big year for books about Mary Shelley's creation of one of the most memorable monsters of all time. Over the years, Shelley's masterpiece has been examined by scholars of literature, medicine, science, and ethics who explore (among other things) the gender, race, and class dynamics of the text and its critique of scientific experimentation run amuck. In Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in “Frankenstein,” Eileen Hunt Botting proposes that Mary Shelley's speculative fiction was not just speculation; rather, she argues, Shelley “structured her novel around a series of five interconnected thought experiments” (3) that force readers to consider essential questions about children's rights. Botting's book provides a thorough review of the parenting and education debates that simmered around Mary Shelley; through Botting's review of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant on obligations and rights of parents and children, we can see how these intellectual debates are imaginatively reframed in Shelley's novel. Indeed, given her parents’ writing on these topics, it is impossible to imagine that Shelley was not engaging in the debate through her imaginative exploration of failed parenting.

Botting's second chapter, on Mary Wollstonecraft, is excellent at providing the background understanding of Mary Shelley's mother's impact on her. While many readers connect Shelley with her famous father (and his novels, especially Caleb Williams and St. Leon), her mother's role is often underexplored except in feminist and psychological readings of her work; this chapter brings appropriate value to Wollstonecraft's contributions to philosophical, educational, and political ideas of her time, and specifically to her daughter's thinking. Chapter 3, which runs down the five thought experiments, can become a bit repetitive. The claim that Shelley literally and intentionally set up these five thought experiments pushes a bit far on authorial intention; after all, Shelley chose to write a novel, not a political treatise. Nonetheless, the questions that Botting raises are intriguing and challenging, and they are well worth the exploration.

In the final chapter, Botting applies the results of the Frankenstein thought experiment to three of today's real-world scenarios, including the rights of children born with birth defects, the rights of migrant children and child refugees, and the rights of genetically modified children. On the latter, Botting provides an eye-opening overview of what has been accomplished in the area of three-parent in vitro fertilization and what may soon be done (or possibly has already been done) with CRISPR-Cas9 technology. She suggests that we consider the possibility of “posthuman” children, “who (will) have been altered or made or will have eventually evolved as a result of interventions in science and technology such that they are strikingly different in features and/or capacities from their human ancestors/creators” (161). While there are obviously scientific, moral, legal, and ethical questions about whether such scientific projects should be considered, Botting cuts to the more pressing questions, in light of the fact that these children may already be among us: “Which obligations do parents, adults, groups, societies, and states hold towards such children? Which rights do such children hold in relation to those obligations?” (173). Furthermore, these questions, notably, can be applied to all children, whatever the status of their disability, nationality, or the specifics of their biological creation.

Botting's exploration of these crucial issues through the novel is engaging and nuanced; what is missing, though, is sufficient attention to the literary nature of the text and to its literary contexts. Moreover, Botting is highly selective with evidence, even within the narrow scope she defines. She focuses exclusively on the creature's case, whereas the novel addresses the difficult situations of many children, including orphans such as Victor's mother, Caroline, and his beloved Elizabeth. Although these children are adopted, it is under severely problematic circumstances: Caroline is adopted by one of her father's friends, who then marries her; Elizabeth is adopted by Victor's parents, and her new mother (Caroline) raises Elizabeth and Victor as siblings, and plans to marry them to each other. While this is not the same dreadful plight as that experienced by the creature, it is clear that all the book's orphans are abandoned, abused, and damaged in significant ways. Indeed, yet another orphan character, Justine Moritz, lacks the support of any parent or parental figure, and because of her position as an unprotected servant of the Frankenstein household and her Catholic faith, she is framed for the murder of William Frankenstein, a crime she did not commit and for which she is executed. The obligations of parents and the rights of children are relevant to understanding the novel, but that debate is larger than just the fate of the creature.

In the larger literary context, in addition to being a founding text of science fiction, Frankenstein is also a central text of the gothic genre, which is filled with numerous orphaned, stateless, abandoned, and abused children. Throughout the gothic, in the place of loving parents, we have villainous parent figures: men (and sometimes women) who try to molest, marry, or murder their wards. The gothic both before and after Shelley was engaged with questions of power and responsibility inherent in parenting. It is true that Shelley's orphan creature is unique among gothic orphans, being the child of only one parent (Victor), who then abandons him. In addition to the fact that the creature's only parent utterly fails in all duties, all other humans who might step in to assist are too horrified by appearances to provide suitable support. Frankenstein does illustrate the utter failure of the creature's creator, and all of society, to provide appropriate support for a living creature. Botting is surely right to note that such issues are all too enduring. In Frankenstein’s bicentennial year, 2018, the United States government caused its own crisis of children's rights, creating “stateless orphans” by separating asylum-seeking families. The question of the stateless orphan—and what to do when the state is the cause of a child's orphaning—has never been more relevant. We should be afraid of what we are creating, and as Shelley's novel shows, and Botting's argument highlights, we are failing in our responsibilities, likely with dire consequences to follow.