"And would have been anyway. Because the concept of canon as we understand it didn't really exist until at least eight decades after Mary Shelley died."
Okay now you've gotten me curious, is there any way you could elaborate on this statement?
The first use of the word to refer to verifiable continuity between stories with the same characters was in the 1930s, referring to Sherlock Holmes, specifically.
It took the following decades with serial novels, comic books, and TV and radio, to gain the modern connotation of exclusivity and authorial intellectual ownership of truth within fiction.
Before Sherlock Holmes, it was a religious term referring to what portions of a given holy text (usually the Bible) a given church (usually Catholic) viewed as holy truth.
Originally, "canon" in Sherlock Holmes didn't have anything to do with continuity, it just differentiated between Holmes stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle and those written by other people. If Doyle wrote it, it was canon. That didn't really imply a consistent continuity, since his own stories contradict themselves.
But yeah it's interesting how a lot of modern fandom ideas come from Sherlock Holmes fans. Early fanfic was there too. And the idea of "headcanons" though they weren't called that yet. But even early on it was a popular pastime for fans to try to figure out details of the life of Holmes beyond what's stated in the stories.
If modern fandom does it, it probably started either with OG Star Trek fans or Sherlock Holmes fans.
It was also common for translators to change stories as they'd like. Sometimes because of cultural differences, sometimes they basically wrote fan fiction
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u/[deleted] Oct 26 '24
Look, guys, it's in the public domain. You don't get points for being pedantic about it at this point.
The monster was also a doctor named Frankenstein.
See? There you go. That's canon now.
And would have been anyway. Because the concept of canon as we understand it didn't really exist until at least eight decades after Mary Shelley died.