I’m still researching the life of Fred Loring — the forgotten Boston writer who died in the so-called “Wickenburg Massacre” in 1871 — and I keep stumbling over more of his stories and other works.

A few weeks ago I discovered some book reviews he wrote for The Harvard Advocate, the newspaper he edited when he was a student there from 1866-1870. One of them was a review of the novel Frankenstein.

Originally published in England in 1818 by Mary Shelley, it also went through a number of American printings. In 1869 the Cambridge publisher Sever Francis & Co. came out with its edition and Fred took the opportunity to read the book and pen his opinions.

He praised the publishers for making the book available but the story didn’t work for him.

It is intended to be frightful and impressive, as are generally accounts of goblins, djinns, vampires, and such pleasing beings. To us, however, it seems to have lapsed from the sublime to the ridiculous. We say this boldly, since the author is dead, and we cannot reasonably suppose that our remarks will hurt her feelings.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was the daughter of the feminist scholar Mary Wollstonecraft and journalist and novelist William Godwin. She started writing Frankenstein at Lake Geneva during the summer of 1816, while traveling with her lover and future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the man once described as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” Lord Byron.

In his review Fred then summarized the plot, beginning with:

Frankenstein is a student, who, by tremendous application to the charming study of chemistry, becomes enabled to create a man.

He was impressed that Mary was the wife of the poet Shelley and the daughter of William Godwin (he didn’t mention her mother), but not enough to recommend her book.

However, he did draw a lesson from Frankenstein for himself and his fellow students.

The principal moral to be derived by Harvard boys from this book is, that dangerous proficiency in chemistry should be carefully avoided.