NOTES

self-educated

Mary Shelley is so insistent on this point that she has Walton repeat it to Victor Frankenstein (I:L4:6), whose formal education, by contrast, is extensive. It could be that she is trying to make a point about the primacy of moral education or the essential importance, in a novelistic tradition one associates with Henry Fielding, of a good heart. But it is more likely that she is establishing a perspective by which to engage larger questions concerning the means and ends of education. Victor Frankenstein's Creature is also self-educated and likewise has his identity strongly molded by what he happens to read.