The Carnival of the Animals and xylophone. From the beginning, Saint-Saëns regarded the work as a piece of fun. On 9 February 1886 he wrote to his publishers Durand in Paris that he was composing a work for the coming Shrove Tuesday, and confessing that he knew he should be working on his Third Symphony, but that this work was "such fun" (). He had apparently intended to write the work for his students at the École Niedermeyer, but it was first performed at a private concert given by the cellist Charles Lebouc on Shrove Tuesday, 9 March 1886. A second (private) performance was given
The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein is in Mary Shelley's handwriting does not show that she composed the work. However, while he agreed with Lauritsen that Percy Bysshe Shelley had homoerotic feelings and deep friendships for men and that "Frankenstein" "contains potential homosexual relationships", he disagreed with Lauristen's view that "Frankenstein" was primarily written for gay men. Kennedy wrote that Lauritsen was "unafraid to go against accepted opinion and the entrenched literary establishment" and that his work was "intriguing and very readable", based on a careful review of the relevant evidence, and a welcome contribution to literature on the subject. He endorsed Lauritsen's argument that the