service of Charles I. He died at the Battle of Newbury on 20 September 1643. His name
and exalted notion of honor were, it would appear, used by William Godwin as models
for the hero-villain Count Ferdinando Falkland of The Adventures of Caleb Williams.
Today Falkland's fame is sustained by his serving as one of the subjects of Ben Jonson's
enduring tribute "To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Nobel Pair Sir Lucius
Cary and Sir H. Morison," one of the first true odes in the English tradition.
The somewhat surprising emphasis on royalist values in this paragraph is suggestive
of a historical politics far removed from that elsewhere insinuated into Frankenstein
(see, for instance, II:5:16) or shared by Mary Shelley with her father and Percy.
These references are perhaps best explained within the context of the novel William
Godwin published about a month before Frankenstein appeared, Mandeville: A Tale of
the Seventeenth Century in England. The protagonist of that novel is an ultra-Royalist
who, as his cause deteriorates, retreats further and further into morbid self-obsession.
The emotional dynamics of Mandeville, if not the portraiture itself, are consonant
with the psychological makeup of Victor Frankenstein.