Leader comment: Mary Shelley's immortal monster can inspire Dundee

Dundee '“ already dubbed 'Scotland's coolest city' and one of the best places in the world to visit this year '“ just got even cooler.

For local school children are to be given a free, special Dundee edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, described as “one of the most influential novels ever written”.

Many people may be unaware of Dundee’s connection to the London-born writer.

But, according to Shelley herself, it was “beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house” in the city’s South Baffin Street or “on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains” nearby that the “airy flights of my imagination were born and fostered”.

The story she produced from that prodigious imagination and the novel as a work of literature have stood the test of time for two centuries and our fascination with Victor Frankenstein and his “monster” looks set to continue for centuries to come.

Dundee’s landscape may have changed considerably, but perhaps children there can take inspiration from the new edition of Frankenstein, an immortal story created by someone not much older than they are now.