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
Magnus Hirschfeld number, C33, as a way of symbolically linking his fate to theirs, to read out aloud Wilde's poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol". Hirschfeld found the reading of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" to be ""markerschütternd"" (shaken to the core of one's being, i.e. something that is emotionally devastating), going on to write that the poem reading was "the most earth-shattering outcry that has ever been voiced by a downtrodden soul about its own torture and that of humanity". By the end of the reading of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", Hirshfeld felt "quiet joy" as he was convinced that,