Frankenstein Contextual Notes

Page 1. " THE MODERN PROMETHEUS "

Detail from 'Prometheus creating man in the presence of Athena', Jean-Simon Berthélemy (1802)
  
The titan Prometheus is most readily pictured chained to a rock with an eagle gnawing daily at his immortal
insides - his theoretically eternal punishment for defying Zeus on humanity's behalf.  However, the most
obvious reference for Frankenstein's subtitle is his depiction in some versions of the Greek myth as
mankind's creator as well as its benefactor; Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, has him crafting the bodies of men
from clay, before stealing for them the life-giving fire of heaven.  The figure of Prometheus is often invoked
with a mixture of meanings.  Frankenstein's title echoes that applied to Benjamin Franklin in the previous
century by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who hailed him as a "Prometheus of modern times" for
his famous experiments with electricity.

George Cruikshank cartoon, 'The Modern Prometheus, or Downfall of Tyranny', (1814)

The myth of Prometheus has inspired the works of artists and writers for millennia, including the English
Romantics.  The figure of a heroic rogue, struggling against an oppressive established order in pursuit of
divine truth, allowed poets like Shelley and Byron to express their mixed feelings towards the bloody
aftermath of the French Revolution.  The connection between Prometheus and Napoleon Bonaparte was
made not only by Byron himself (see below), but by several satirical cartoonists depicting the leader's
downfall (as pictured).
 
Page 3. " The circumstance on which my story rests was suggested in casual conversation "

Incoming storm over Lake Geneva, (2010) - Credit: Danimal1802

The book's preface, by Percy Shelley writing from Mary's perspective, originates the legendary 'ghost-story
competition' account of Frankenstein's conception.  In 1816 the couple had travelled to Switzerland to
summer with celebrated philanderer and poet George Byron, along with and at the urging of Mary's
stepsister Claire Clairmont who was pregnant with his child.  Byron rented one 'Villa Diodati' on the scenic
shores of Lake Geneva, but worldwide atmospheric disturbance from the volcanic eruption of Mt. Tambora
in Indonesia caused an abnormally "cold and rainy" (p.4) season which forced the party to stay indoors and
amuse themselves by composing ghoulish horror stories. 

Although the preface describes Shelley's novel as the only completed product of the contest, a year later
Byron's physician John William Polidori expanded his patron's fragment into a novella of his own - one of
the first works to depict The Vampyre as a suave, mysterious aristocrat.
  Page 6. " you cannot contest the inestimable benefit I shall confer on all mankind to the last
generation "

'Ship in the ice-sea', Caspar David Friedrich, (1798)

Walton's grand ideas concerning the far north are exactly those of his time - the early nineteenth-century saw
a surge of speculation and exploration into possible Northern sea-routes allowing swift travel between the
Atlantic and Pacific oceans.  In one of the great examples of wishful thinking clouding scientific judgment,
it was argued by some that successful navigation into the region around the North Pole might reveal an open
Arctic sea, relatively free of ice, which would provide safe passage along the northern coasts of America and
Asia, revolutionising global trade routes.

Covered by shifting ice for much of the year (See note to page 174), the Arctic Ocean's use for commercial
shipping was extremely limited, a fact gradually revealed by numerous voyages like Walton's over the years
– the Northeast Passage was not fully traversed until Finnish explorer Adolf Nordenskiöld's expedition of
1878.  However, some observers claim that global warming is responsible for the Arctic ice-reduction
which, in recent years, has made continuous trade through the Northwest and Northeast Passages a realistic
possibility. 
Page 10. " I am going to unexplored regions, to 'the land of mist and snow;' "

Illustration by Gustave Doré, Plate 6 - 'The ice was all around', (1876)
 
A quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's darkly allegorical Rime of the Ancient Mariner; the tale of a
wizened seafarer, whose voyage into the unknown regions of the Antarctic leaves him with
a unique insight into the secrets of nature, and a heavy burden of guilt for disturbing them.  Coleridge was
among the literary men who had visited Mary Shelley's father William Godwin when she was a young girl
and, although quoted directly only twice, the poem's influence runs throughout Frankenstein.
 
Coleridge's chief contribution to his and Wordsworth's seminal anthology Lyrical Ballads (1798), the
poem fulfils his goal of heightening the depiction of supernatural situations by maintaining "the dramatic
truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real". 
This ambition is echoed in the preface to Frankenstein, which sets out the novel's intention "to preserve the
truth of the elementary principles of human nature" despite its fantastical subject matter.
Online edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner',(D. Appleton & Co., 1866)

Page 20. " a desire to bind as close as possible the ties of domestic love, determined my mother to consider
Elizabeth as my future wife; a design which she never found reason to repent "

Frankenstein's arranged marriage to his first-cousin Elizabeth Lavenza would not have raised as many
eyebrows in 18th-century Switzerland as it does among today's readers, such matches having a long history
within noble bloodlines.  Their possible degenerative result only became a serious topic of concern towards
the end of the 19th century, and remains hotly contested in some quarters.  However, the fact that the two
are also raised as siblings from a young age makes their relationship socially as well as genetically
incestuous.  Even in the1831 edition, in which Shelley severs the lovers' blood ties, the domestic
introversion of Victor's relationship with Elizabeth suggests the misguided, self-destructive egotism which
defines his character. 
Page 21. " these favourite books, the principle characters of which were Orlando, Robin Hood, Amadis, and
St George "

'Saint George', by Gustave Moreau, (1889/90) Engraving by Gustave Doré, from

'Orlando Furioso', (1877)
  
Clerval's youthful preference for "books of chivalry and romance" is typical for his time, Orlando
Furioso (See note to page 46) and Amadis de Gaula being prime examples of a genre which had been both
beloved and maligned throughout the early modern period, associated by many with a reckless idealism in
the face of reality.  The presence of St. George and Robin Hood on his roster of favourites seems to reflect
the popular reading of Mary Shelley's England more than Victor Frankenstein's Geneva. 
 

Frontispiece engraving of Montalvo's Robin Hood statue near Nottingham, Castle

'Amadis de Gaula', (1508)
James Woodford, (1952) - Credit:Olaf1541
Page 23. " Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash "

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Holzschnittportrait

  
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) was a German scholar whose writings blended theology
and astrology with an interest in the occult.  By the time of the Enlightenment his ideas had been discredited,
and his post-mortem reputation tainted by rumours of Faustian occultist practices.  Yet, despite his later
condemnation by sceptical rationalists, Agrippa's best known work De Occulta Philosophia constitutes an
early attempt to explore the same questions of mortality that concerned early nineteenth-century scientists. 

Of particular relevance to Frankenstein's experiments are those passages which explore the
connections between body and mind, theorising the soul as a force which charges the physical frame; "first
infused into the middle point of the heart, which is the centre of man’s body, and from thence it is diffused
through all the parts and members of his body" (Book Three: Chapter xxxvii).  Even more suggestive is
his theoretical contemplation of necromancy, speculating on the impossible, godlike knowledge which
would be needed to discover "by what influences the body may be knit together again for the raising of the
dead" (Book Three: Chapter xlii). 
Page 24. " he made also a kite, with a wire and a string, which drew down that fluid from the clouds "

The experiment performed by Frankenstein's father, and his description of electricity as a 'fluid', are
references to the work of American polymath Benjamin Franklin.  He conducted a similar experiment in the
1750's to prove that lightning was electrical in nature, his research leading not only to the widespread use of
protective lightning rods for tall buildings, but to an explosion of popular interest in the possible applications
of electric power.  In later editions of the book Frankenstein's electrical education is provided by an
anonymous scientific visitor, and this passage includes a telling mention of 'galvanism' (See note to page
38).

Benjamin Franklin on the $100 bill

Page 25. " I became disgusted with the science of natural philosophy, although I still read Pliny and Buffon
with delight "

Imaginative 19th Century portrait of

Pliny the Elder

'Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon',)

François-Hubert Drouais, (18th-century
Pliny the Elder's 1st-century 'Natural History' is one of the largest ancient Roman works to have survived
intact into the modern day.  Covering art, zoology, botany and minerology, it constitutes one of the earliest
attempts at an encyclopedic catalogue of scientific knowledge.  Georges-Louis Leclerc (1707 – 1788), the
Comte de Buffon, published his ownHistoire naturelle, générale et particulière in thirty-six volumes over
four decades.  Hugely influential for turn-of-the-nineteenth-century natural philosophy, his work highlighted
areas, such as the divisions between species, and enormous age of the earth, which would go on to play an
important role in the development of evolutionary theory. 
 
Page 28. " these were 'old familiar faces;' but I believed myself totally unfitted for the company of
strangers "

The Old Familiar Faces was a popular verse composed in the late 1790's by English essayist and
sentimental poet Charles Lamb (1775-1834), an acquaintance of the Shelley’s.
Reading by Tom O'Bedlam:

Charles Lamb, (1775-1834

I HAVE had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
 
I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
 
I loved a Love once, fairest among women:
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
 
I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man:
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.
 
Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood,
Earth seem'd a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.
 
Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces—
 
How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

Page 35. " I was like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead, and found a passage to life "

A reference to one of Sinbad the Sailor's more gruesome adventures from the well-known Arabian
Nights cycle - buried alive in a cavern of rotting corpses, in accordance with the arcane marriage laws of an
otherwise idyllic island, he survives by murdering his fellow prisoners for their provisions.

Page 38. " I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless
thing "

Engraving from Giovanni Aldini's 'Essai

théorique et expérimental sur le
galvanisme', (1804)
  
Despite Frankenstein's refusal to explain in detail his life-giving discoveries, for fear of their catastrophic
results being repeated, they have become inextricably linked to the contemporary electrical experiments of
Italian scientist Luigi Galvani (1737-1798).  Shelley herself identifies them in her introduction to the 1831
edition as among the topics of conversation at Byron's villa (See note to page 3).  Galvani demonstrated that
an electric charge could be used to animate a disembodied frog's leg, theorising the existence of a motivating
'animal electricity' produced by the muscles themselves.  While this was swiftly disproven his research
heralded the very real science of electrophysiology, and inspired a popular fascination with the possibility
of returning dead tissues to at least a semblance of life. 

This lust for spectacle was more than satisfied by his nephew Giovanni Aldini's public demonstrations with
the reanimation of both animal and human body parts.  The most famous of these was presented to London's
Royal College of Surgeons in 1803 when the freshly hung body of murderer George Forster was made to
grimace, blink, breathe, and convulse its limbs through the application of conducting rods attached to a
powerful battery.  Some observers reputedly believed that with enough electric current a dead body might
actually return to life (a myth still perpetuated by televised medical dramas).  Despite there being no
explicit mention of galvanism in this edition of the novel (See note to page 24), the popular connection
between Frankenstein's experiment and electricity was cemented for all time by James Whale's famous 1931
film adaptation.
                             
Page 39. " now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust
filled my heart "

'Execution of Louis XVI of France', engraving by Georg Heinrich Sieveking, (1793)

Although the French Revolution is conspicuously absent from Frankenstein's narrative, it roughly spanned

the 1790s when several literary references place the novel (See note to  page 95), and was fresh in the
memory of a Europe still reeling from its impact in Mary Shelley's time.  In its early stages the
Revolution was an ideological touchstone for radical observers, including Romantics like Wordsworth and
Coleridge (See note to page 10), who saw established power as out-dated and corrupt.  For many however,
breathless excitement gave way to horror at the frenzied executions of the 'Reign of Terror' and
warmongering expansion of a new, militarised French Empire.  Mary Shelley, who had seen firsthand the
devastation left by the Napoleonic Wars on her trips to several European nations, shared the ambiguity of
her peers towards an event which they felt, despite the "bloodshed and injustice with which it was
polluted...produced enduring benefits to mankind"

Page 39. " I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! "

T.P. Cooke as the creature, playbill for Richard Brinsley Peake's theatrical adaptation (1823) (See note
to page 91)

Theodor von Holst's frontispiece engraving for 1831 edition

The physical appearance of Frankenstein's 'monster' is at the heart of the novel, the fear and disgust it
inspires in others being the main reason he becomes a monster at all.  A fairly complete picture can be
assembled from Frankenstein's descriptive glimpses but, as he discovers, it is only the sight of these
elements combined in a living, moving being which renders them insupportably hideous.  Artists,
playwrights and filmmakers have produced a wide variety of depictions over the years, some more faithful
to the novel than others, but all sacrificing one of its central ambiguities: the reader can never directly
observe the creature's monstrosity, only the prejudice it provokes in others.
 
Page 40. " when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even
Dante could not have conceived"

Engraving by Gustave Doré, 'The Severed Head of Bertrand de Born speaks', (1857)
  
A reference to Dante Alighieri's epic 14th-century poem The Divine Comedy - an allegory of medieval
Christian philosophy, represented by Dante's own imagined journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven in
the poem's three parts.  This passage refers to the first and most famous, Dante's Inferno, which draws on
both Biblical scripture and classical myth to vividly depict the monstrous wardens of Hell and the graphic
torments visited on its inmates.  Besides the complex political and religious subtext it contains, Dante's
work has long functioned in popular culture mainly as a ready source of macabre imagery.
 
Page 41. " Like one who, on a lonely road, Doth walk in fear and dread "

A slightly misquoted passage from Part VI of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(See note to page 10), in which the isolated seafarer is surrounded by the supernaturally reanimated corpses
of his shipmates. 

Page 41. " the same as that of the Dutch school-master in The Vicar of Wakefield "

A reference to the passage in a popular sentimental novel of late 18th-century England in which the titular
Vicar's son George is denied a teaching post by the principal of a university.   A further example of Clerval's
oddly British taste in literature (See note to page 21).

Page 46. " for the same reason that Ariosto gives concerning the beauty of Angelica "

'Ruggiero Rescuing Angelica', Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, (1819)

Page 54. " Those maxims of the Stoics, that death was no evil, and that the mind of man ought to be superior
to despair "

'The Death of Cato of Utica', Guillaume Guillon Lethière, (1795)

Stoicism was a popular strand of philosophy in the ancient world, originating in Athens around 300 BC. 
Among its chief tenets was the insistence that a true philosopher should be in total control of their emotions,
accepting hardship and death without complaint.  Clerval repeats the popular account in which famous
follower Cato the Younger, a politician in the 1st-century BC, broke his stoical facade with a heartfelt
display of grief at the funeral of his beloved half-brother Quintus Servilius Caepio. 
 
Page 54. " the snowy mountains, 'the palaces of nature,' were not changed "

A description of the Alps from Canto III of George Byron's semi-autobiographical poem Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage (LXII).  This is the first of several strange instances in Frankenstein of characters quoting from
works which, while well known to Mary Shelley, had not yet been written at the time the story is set (See
notes to page 75, page 104, and page 130

Page 68. " I, the true murderer, felt the never-dying worm alive in my bosom, which allowed of no hope or
consolation "

Frankenstein here references a passage from Chapter 9 of the Gospel of Mark, in which Christ describes the
wicked undergoing eternal torment in Hell "Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched".  The
novel's re-wording is identical to that found in 18th-century minister Matthew Henry's six-volume
commentary, which fittingly interprets the immortal 'worm' as representing the sinner's "remorse of
conscience and keen self-reflection".
Page 75. " We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep "

This lengthy quotation is from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Mutability, published in Alastor, or The Spirit of
Solitude in 1816, well after the period in which the novel is set (See note to page 74)
From The Lyrics and Shorter Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, (J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1907):

'Percy Bysshe Shelley', by Alfred Clint, (1819)

 
We are the clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost forever:
   
Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings            
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings        
One mood or modulation like the last.  
  
We rest.--A dream has power to poison sleep; 
We rise.--One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;   
Embrace fond foe, or cast our cares away:  
   
 It is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:  
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.
Page 76. " For some time I sat upon the rock that overlooks the sea of ice "

Engraving from 'The glaciers of the Alps', John Tyndall, (1896)

   
The glacier Montanvert, where it fills a narrow valley on the northern slopes of Mont Blanc, is known as the
'Mer de Glace' and has been a popular tourist destination for centuries.  It was one of the sights visited by the
Shelley’s during their European travels with Claire Clairmont, described in Letter IV of their joint journal.

 
 Page 81. " the little winged animals who had often intercepted the light from my eyes "

The creature, either through miseducation or his own faulty reasoning, has apparently subscribed to the
ancient misconception that the human eye projects rays of light out into the world, rather than receiving
them from it.  What is now called the 'emission theory' of perception was articulated and upheld by ancient
writers including Plato and Ptolemy, but fell out of favour early in the second millennium AD.

Page 83. " it presented to me then as exquisite and fine a retreat as Pandæmonium appeared to the demons
of hell "

'Pandemonium - a print', John Martin, (1825)

The capital of Hell in John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost (1674), suddenly erected at the end of Book I
as a meeting place for a council of demons to debate a second war on Heaven (See note to  page 103).
Online edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost, (1674)

Page 91. " My organs were indeed harsh, but supple; and although my voice was very unlike the soft music
of their tones, yet I pronounced such words as I understood with tolerable ease "

The ability to speak is the key element which distinguishes Mary Shelley's creature from the hulking, flat-
headed mute we know so well from films and costume parties, although his traditional depiction was already
well-established in Shelley's lifetime by several melodramatic stage adaptations.  It became an inseparable
part of the novel's modern image after James Whale's 1931 film version, which depicts both the mental and
moral deficiency of the creature as the result of him being given an abnormal, "criminal" brain rather than a
healthy one.  Always limited by an unspoken agreement to making the occasional savage, monosyllabic
outburst for either sentimental or comic effect, this popular portrayal reduces Frankenstein to a simplistic
moral parable at the expense of its more radical side, most of which is grounded in the almost absurdly
eloquent creature's lengthy self-defence. 
 

Normal Brain jar from James Whale's 'Frankenstein', (1931)

Abnormal Brain jar from James Whale's 'Frankenstein', (1931)

 
 
Page 92. " It was as the ass and the lap-dog; yet surely the gentle ass, whose intentions were affectionate,
although his manners were rude, deserved better treatment "

Illustration by Harrison Weir, John Tenniel, Ernest Griset, et.al. (1881)

 
The Ass and the Lapdog' is one of the ancient fables attributed to the classical fabulist Aesop: the ass, tired
of working in the fields, decides to try living like its master's pampered lapdog instead, with predictably
messy results.  The moral of the story, that none can escape the destiny to which their form fits them, closely
resembles the simple, conservative shape into which Frankenstein has often been forced, but stands against
everything the creature's education tells us.
Online edition of the complete 'Aesop's Fables'

Page 95. " Through this work I obtained a cursory knowledge of history, and a view of the several empires "

The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (1792) by French orientalist Constantin François de
Chassebœuf, who called himself 'Volney', was partly a travelogue of his trips to several eastern nations, and
partly an account of their ancient history.  Upholding libertarian values, the book imagines a coming
revolution in which all world religions join as one, throwing off the shackles of tyranny and forming a
utopian world government.  Like the rest of the creature's library, the book gives his education a decidedly
radical, Romantic bent (See note to  page 103).

Page 103. " the books were written in the language the elements of which I had acquired at the cottage "

Paradise Lost (1674) by John Milton is an epic poem recounting the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the
garden of Eden, considered a work of great importance in English literature.  The creature understandably
subscribes to an interpretation popular at the time, particularly among the Romantics, in which Satan is not
the villain but an eloquent and solitary antihero, rebelling against the injustices of his creator. 
Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans (late-1st century AD) is a work of biography recounting
the lives of famous men in Greek and Roman culture, and would provide the creature with a more or less
continuous history of classical civilisation from the 2nd millenium BC to the 1st century AD.  However, the
work freely mingles fact with fiction, containing biographies of mythical characters such as Theseus and
Romulus as well as real historical figures, meaning that the picture it provided would be rather skewed.
The Sorrows of Young Werther (1787) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is a semi-autobiographical novel
depicting a young German writer's unrequited love and resultant suicide.  The adolescent creature's
identification with Werther reflects the book's enormous popularity amongst the contemporary youth who
saw themselves in or styled themselves after its hero – this following included many of the Romantics and
Napoleon Bonaparte (See note to  page 39), who would later carry a copy with him while campaigning
abroad.
 
Page 104. " The path of my departure was free; "

Revealing that he shares his creator's taste for literature which does not yet exist, the creature here
impossibly quotes Percy Bysshe Shelley's Mutability, published in Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude in 1816
(See note to page 75). 

Page 107. " When his children had departed, he took up his guitar, and played several mournful, but sweet
airs "

Fernando Sor lithography, by Gottfried Engelmann and Joseph Bordes, (Circa. 1825)
 
While something more-or-less like the guitar has existed for centuries, the 1790's saw the emergence of the
'early romantic' model, which closely resembled the recognisable modern instrument.  Its use grew in
popularity throughout Europe during the early 18th century spurred by high-profile figures like Spanish
player Fernando Sor, whose relocation to London in 1815 caught the public's attention. 
 
 
Page 111. " All, save I, were at rest or in enjoyment: I, like the arch fiend, bore a hell within me "

Satan in 'Paradise Lost', Gustave Doré, (1866)

Reference to Book IV of Milton's Paradise Lost (See note to page 103) in which an envious Satan, like the
creature in this passage, declares war on all mankind, driven by his own envious torment:
 
The hell within him; for within him hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from hell
One step, no more than from himself, can fly
By change of place...

Page 123. " The promise I had made to the demon weighed upon my mind, like Dante's iron cowl on the
heads of the hellish hypocrites "

Engraving by Gustave Doré, 'The Hypocrites Address Dante', (1857)

 
A reference to Canto XXIII of Dante Alighieri's Inferno.  The heavy cowls which weigh down 'hypocrites'
confined to the Eighth Circle of Hell are in fact described as comprising an outer skin of gold over a thick
layer of lead.

Page 127. " Elizabeth approved of the reasons of my departure, and only regretted that she had not the
same opportunities of enlarging her experience, and cultivating her understanding "

'Mary Wollstonecraft', by John Opie, (1797)

Shelley's reference here to the unequal opportunities open to men and women echoes a central tenet of her
mother's 1792 essay A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.  In it Mary Wollstonecraft insisted that rather
than being naturally less capable of rational thought, the vast majority of women at the time were kept in a
state of general ignorance through being denied the same education provided for men.  She attacks those
values of her society which encouraged men to take a dynamic role in society while women assumed the
role of decorative accessories, deriving worth only from their physical beauty and domestic passivity. 
Although brief, this reference to gender inequality is out of character for Victor's unfailingly docile
betrothed – in the 1831 edition Shelley removed it, leaving Elizabeth "mute" as she bids Victor "a tearful,
silent farewell".
 
Page 130. " He was a being formed in the 'very poetry of nature.' "

Admiring description of a prince from Canto II of The Story of Rimini by Leigh Hunt, a member of Percy
Shelley's poetic circle.  The tale is derived from an episode in Canto V of Dante's Inferno (See note to page
40) and, like most of the poems quoted in the novel, was published well after the period in which it is set
(See note to page 54).
Page 130. " The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood "

Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire, (1993) - Credit: Hotlorp

 
This passage is quoted from William Wordsworth's poem Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,
published in the collection Lyrical Ballads in 1798.  The poem was inspired by a ruined abbey located on the
Welsh bank of the River Wye.  Shelley gives another nod to the early-Romantics' importance for her own
writing several pages later when, visiting the Cumberland Lake District, Victor suggestively describes
meeting "some acquaintances, who almost contrived to cheat me into happiness" (p.134).

Page 135. " the beauty and regularity of the new town of Edinburgh, its romantic castle, its environs, the
most delightful in the world "

'Edinburgh Castle from the north-east', John Slezer, (1675)

The reformist rationalism of Enlightenment thinking provided the perfect motivation for Edinburgh to solve
its problem of overcrowding by extending northwards into a 'New Town', constructed throughout the second
half of the 18th-century.  Based on a design by James Craig it was patterned on an even, regular grid,
ultimately providing the city's wealthy with an escape from the disorganised squalor left to its less mobile
citizens.  For two long periods, in 1812 and 1813, Mary Shelley was sent to live with the Baxter family near
Dundee; in the introduction to her 1831 edition of Frankenstein she attributed to this period her first
attempts at writing, as well as "occasional visits to the more picturesque parts" of Scotland.

Page 136. " I traversed the northern highlands, and fixed on one of the remotest of the Orkneys as the
scene "

Orkney Islands, UK, (2006) - Credit: Pixie

The Orkneys are a windswept archipelago of small islands off the north coast of Scotland – approximately
70 in all, of which 20-odd are currently inhabited.
 
The islands have a long history of habitation, holding the remains of Skara Brae, Europe's most completely
preserved Neolithic village. Although Frankenstein describes his island as "barren", most of the Orkneys are
highly fertile.  As the most remote of the islands is more than fifty miles from mainland Scotland, we must
either assume that Victor's "five miles distant" is a miscalculation, or that he is measuring from the largest of
the Orkneys, which is colloquially named 'Mainland'. 
   
 

 
Page 144. " It had a wild and rocky appearance; but as I approached nearer, I easily perceived the traces of
cultivation "

Incredibly, Frankenstein's small skiff has drifted a distance of several hundred miles, from the Orkneys to
the northern coast of Ireland, while he slept.  By a coincidence which is never explained he lands at the same
remote coastal village where Henry Clerval has been murdered by the creature.  Victor's timely jaunt does
provide him with an alibi for Clerval's murder, committed while he was still in the Orkneys, but the
incident's usefulness as a plot device is surely outweighed by its sheer improbability. 
This sense of unreality can be seen as the passage's goal, coming at a point when Frankenstein himself starts
to question the coherence of his narrative: "my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if
indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality" (p.149).
 

Page 148. " Of what materials was I made, that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning of
the wheel, continually renewed the torture "

The cyclical nature of Frankenstein's torment suggests that the darker implications of his role as a 'Modern
Prometheus' have come into effect (See note to page 1).  Although he is allowed temporary periods of
healing and rest, his tortuous punishment is inevitably resumed by the return of the creature, who comes to
assume the role of Zeus' avenging eagle. 
 

Prometheus Bound - Credit: Peter Paul Rubens

Page 154. " or longed, with a devouring maladie du pays, to see once more the blue lake and rapid Rhone,
that had been so dear to me in early childhood "

'Lake Geneva as seen from Montreux', Joseph Mallord William Turner, (1810)

'Maladie du pays' or 'mal du pays' are French terms for homesickness which recall its perception and
treatment by many, from the late 17th century to the late 19th, as a potentially dangerous nervous disorder. 
In 1678 physician Johannes Hofer coined the term 'nostalgia' for the condition, which became most widely
diagnosed in soldiers fighting abroad, far from home and exposed to relentless psychic trauma.  The
common presence of Swiss mercenaries across Europe at the time led some to term this disorder 'the Swiss
illness', often seen as a precursor to more serious mental derangement and occasionally, as in Frankenstein's
case, suicidal tendencies.

The Rhone is one of Europe's major rivers, running from a glacier in the Swiss Alps through south-eastern
France, and into the Mediterranean Sea.

Page 155. " I had been in the custom of taking every night a small quantity of laudanum; for it was by
means of this drug only that I was enabled to gain the rest necessary for the preservation of life "

Opium poppies, (2005) - Credit: SuperFantastic

Laudanum is a solution of opium and alcohol with pain-relieving properties, first invented in a rough form
by 16th century alchemist Paracelsus.  Rediscovered in the late 17th century, by Shelley's time it was widely
available and prescribed enthusiastically as a treatment for various physical and psychological ailments,
including insomnia.  Opium's highly addictive properties were not yet fully recognised; its medicinal
formulation as laudanum allowing respectable members of society to dabble in its recreational use.

Some quietly nurtured lifelong habits, like Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (See note to page 10),
whose work is consequently sometimes regarded as having emerged from a drug-fuelled haze.  The alluring
myth of the artist using exotic substances as a swift pathway to inspiration has remained popular, although
Frankenstein's "double dose" probably had darker associations in his creator's mind - her half-sister Fanny
Imlay, following Mary's flight to Europe, had killed herself with a lethal overdose in October 1816.
Online edition of Thomas de Quincey's 'Confessions of an English Opium Eater', (1822)

Page 155. " My father, who was watching over me, perceiving my restlessness, awoke me; and pointed to
the port of Holyhead, which we were now entering "

Engraving of 'PRINCE ARTHUR', mail packet serving the DunLaoghaire-Holyhead route (1850-60)
  
Holyhead, on the Isle of Anglesea in northwest Wales, has long been the main departure point from southern
Britain for Ireland.  The sea-route remains in active use by a popular ferry service.

 
 Page 163. " it was agreed that Elizabeth and I should pass the afternoon and night at Evian, and return
to Cologny the next morning. As the day was fair, and the wind favourable, we resolved to go by water "

Postcard of Evian-les-Bains, Detroit Publishing Company (1890-1900)

   
Évian-les-Bains is a town on the southern French shore of Lake Geneva (or 'Lac Léman').  It's reputation as a
source of health-giving mineral water began in 1789 after a local nobelman, the Marquis of Lessert,
proclaimed his kidney trouble had been cured by drinking from a local spring.

Page 168. " they had called me mad; and during many months, as I understood, a solitary cell had been
my habitation "

Bethlem Hospital in William Hogarth's 'The Rake's Progress', (1732-1735)

  
 Victor is here declared insane, shifting from an inherited position of respectability to the isolated social
region into which his inhuman creature was born. 

In the 18th century insanity was often seen as a sign of moral failure as much as medical affliction,
memorably depicted as the end result of a sinful, selfish lifestyle in English satirist William Hogarth's
popular morality play The Rake's Progress. 

   Of all the hints we receive throughout the novel that our narrator may not be entirely reliable, this brief
mention is perhaps the most damning.  Victor downplays his reclassificiation, emphasising that he was
"called" mad rather than admitting that he actually was.  However, it is hard not to feel ambiguous about
such claims from a man surrounded by unsolved murders for which he blames an enormous, superhuman
monster that, mysteriously, no-one else has yet reported seeing.

Arthur Belefant's Frankenstein: the Man, and the Monster (1999) radically reinterpreted the entire story as
being narrated by a madman.

Page 169. " I now related my history briefly, but with firmness and precision, marking the dates with
accuracy, and never deviating into invective or exclamation "

If we assume that Frankenstein's narration to the magistrate is anything like his narration to Walton has
been, this passage can only be taken as an ironic comment on the novel itself.  At this point in the story its
numerous chronological inaccuracies (See note to page 54), and Victor's frequent flights into
hysterical hyperbole, are becoming increasingly hard to miss.

Page 169. " if he has indeed taken refuge in the Alps, he may be hunted like the chamois, and destroyed as a
beast of prey "

Chamois, Piz Beverin GR, Switzerland - Credit: Paul Hermans

 
The chamois is a species of goat-antelope native to the mountains of several European nations, including the
Swiss Alps.  They are still popular game for hunters in countries where they are not protected, such as New
Zealand.

Page 172. " To you first entering on life, to whom care is new, and agony unknown, how can you understand
what I have felt, and still feel? "

   At the time of their meeting, both Frankenstein and Walton are in their mid-to-late-twenties.  This remark
can be taken either as Frankenstein asserting that his nightmarish experiences have aged him beyond his
years, or as further evidence of his boundless capacity for self-pitying egotism.
Page 174. " I continued with unabated fervour to traverse immense deserts, until the ocean appeared at a
distance, and formed the utmost boundary of the horizon. Oh! how unlike it was to the blue seas of the
south! "

'The Explorer A.E. Nordenskiöld', by Georg von Rosen, (1886)

  
The vague proportions of Victor's travels in pursuit of the creature are given sudden clarity by his arrival at
the Arctic Ocean, the great mass of shifting ice that surrounds the North Pole. The pair have travelled
thousands of miles across the European and Asian continents, finally entering the uncharted region being
explored by Walton and his crew (See note to page 6).  Early cartographers were divided over whether to
depict the area as land or sea, an ambivalence captured as the shipless Frankenstein continues his pursuit out
onto the ocean's surface. 
Page 175. " The Greeks wept for joy when they beheld the Mediterranean from the hills of Asia, and hailed
with rapture the boundary of their toils "

Black Sea near Balaklava, (2006) - Credit: Argenberg

  
After an unsuccessful attempt to unseat King Artaxerxes II of Persia in 401 BC, an army of roughly ten
thousand Greek mercenaries was forced to march across hundreds of miles of hostile terrain to get home. 
The journey was later recorded by one of their leaders, a scholar named Xenophon, who famously recounts
their sighting of the Black Sea from a mountaintop – named 'Theches' in the text, it has been identified as
modern-day Turkey's 'Deveboynu Tepe'.

Page 175. " Some weeks before this period I had procured a sledge and dogs, and thus traversed the snows
with inconceivable speed "

   Dog sleds have been used for centuries by the native people of snow-bound nations, both to carry heavy
loads great distances or as a means of personal transport. 

Dog sled race, Flin Flon, Manitoba, (1954)

Page 181. " We may survive; and if we do not, I will repeat the lessons of my Seneca, and die with a good
heart "

'La mort de Sénèque', Luca Giordano, (1684)

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman philosopher of the 1st-century AD.  He belonged to the Stoic school
of thought, which saw the control of one's emotions as a prerequisite of civilised life. Many of his popular
writings focusing on the correct way to accept and prepare for the inevitability of death. 
Online edition of Seneca's essay 'De Brevitate Vitae' (1st-century AD)