The Frankenstein Ratio

Everyone knows what Frankenstein (the novel) is about.  Lots of people know (and take delight in telling others) that "Frankenstein" is the name of the scientist, not the monster.  But how many people have ever read Mary Shelley’s novel?

Thinking about this, I arrived at the concept of a book’s “Frankenstein Ratio”, or FR for short.  The FR is the ratio between (a) the number of people who could tell you what the book is about, and (b) the number of people who have actually read it.  The FR for Frankenstein is, I would guess, at least 50:1, i.e. at least half the population knows what it is about, and less than 1% have read it.

Other books with a high FR include Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Dracula.  Less extreme examples might be Oliver Twist and Les Misérables.  But not all classics have a high FR.  For instance, I doubt if many people who haven’t read Middlemarch could tell you that the heroine is called Dorothea and that much of the plot stems from her disastrous marriage with a much older man called Casaubon. 

How does a book come to have a high FR?

One very successful film or stage adaptation can do it.  Two of my examples – Oliver Twist and Les Misérables – largely derive their FR from hit musicals.  Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, and Never Let Me Go, were both filmed:  the former made a much more successful film, and the book’s FR is correspondingly higher.

In the case of Frankenstein or Dracula, the FR comes from an entire genre of film (and other forms of entertainment), not from a single work.  For Robinson Crusoe, the FR seems to be derived from the abiding appeal of the thought experiment as to what it would be like to be stranded on a desert island:  everyone from Shakespeare to Roy Plomley has got in on the act, but somehow Robinson Crusoe has become the culturally dominant manifestation.  And Jekyll and Hyde has primarily given us, not a specific adaptation, but rather a catchphrase or “trope” -  a way of talking about our anxiety as to whether we are really the unified selves that we would like to imagine.

A little-known book is likely to have an FR of one, or something close to it: think of the first novel that sells a few hundred copies.  

An interesting question is whether a book can have an FR of less than one.  That would be the case if even some readers of the book don’t know what it’s about.  Finnegans Wake, perhaps?