The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein might be accepted by readers with no vested interest in the issue, it would be "vehemently rejected out of hand" by the "literary establishment". Sadownick wrote that Lauritsen confirmed his view that "Frankenstein" is a gay work in the same sense as Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" (1855) and Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (1897), and offered a commendable psychological analysis, and a sensitive line-by-line reading, of the work. Charles E. Robinson rejected Lauritsen's thesis in "The Original Frankenstein" (2008), arguing that the testimony of authors such as Lord Byron, William Godwin, Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont, and Leigh
The Ballad of Reading Gaol the poem, "He did not wear his scarlet coat"—because Wooldridge, as a member of the Royal Horse Guards, had a blue uniform—but justified this poetic licence because the second line would make no sense if it said "For blood and wine are "blue"". Several passages from the poem have become famous: <poem>Yet each man kills the thing he loves Some do it with a bitter look, The coward does it with a kiss, The line is a nod to Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice", when Bassanio asks "Do all men kill the things they do not love?" A passage from