twenty-eight

NOTES

twenty-eight

This is the first indication of the age of a character in the novel, but a careful tracing of its chronology would prove that Mary Shelley maintains a shrewd sense of the relative ages of all of them. The emaciated figure of Victor Frankenstein who will appear before Walton four months after this letter ("I never saw a man in so wretched a condition"— I:L4:9) is actually Walton's junior by a year.