Neither the Creature nor members of the De Lacey family hunt for food (II:4:5). 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.