not hunt
Neither the Creature nor members of the De Lacey family hunt for food (2.4.2). Similarly, for the most part, the
Shelley household existed on a vegetarian regimen. It is unlikely that such
a pronounced abstinence from a meat diet can be discerned in any other
major novel in English.
In 1812, three years before
the summer in which Frankenstein was conceived, Percy Bysshe
Shelley published the first of this couple's reinterpretations of the
Prometheus myth, suggesting that the significance of the titan's carrying
fire to earth was as a means of introducing flesh-eating to humanity.
From that point on the pristine human civilization was ravaged by disease.
This seventeenth of the sometimes very long endnotes to his "philosophical
poem" Queen Mab (a note to VIII.211) was republished as
a pamphlet called A Vindication of Natural Diet in 1813.
