delirious emotionality to an impassive lethargy. Laudanum, a form of liquified opium,
was a narcotic freely available in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In those
days its usage lacked the social stigma that would be attached to it by later cultures
and it was commonly employed in all stations of society. Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater was published in its first version in two installments of
the London Magazine in 1821, three years after the publication of Frankenstein, making
his literary reputation overnight. Percy Bysshe Shelley seems to have used laudanum
to dull the pain of the chronic nephritis from which he suffered. Mary Shelley, however,
was also well aware of the more consequential abuses to which laudanum lent itself.
Her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and the American
Gilbert Imlay, committed suicide by an overdose of laudanum in November of 1816, while
Mary Shelley was still in the early stages of her novel. Thus, this detail must be
seen as colored by that tragic event. At the very least, it is a further indication
of the deep instability of Victor Frankenstein's mind at this juncture of his career.