2 Pounds - Elizabeth II Frankenstein, Silver Piedfort

Issued to mark the bicentennial of Mary Shelley's novel, published anonymously in 1818 when Shelley was just twenty years old. The piedfort format — double the thickness of a standard strike — has been a Royal Mint specialty since its modern revival in 1982, originally reintroduced for collector sets accompanying circulating commemoratives.

Shelley began the story as part of a ghost-writing competition at the Villa Diodati in 1816, the same Geneva summer that produced Polidori's *The Vampyre*.