• To you first entering on life In regard to this curious reminder of the present tense in which Victor narrates
    the story of his life, it is important to recall that, far from being Victor's junior,
    Walton is 28 years old at this point in the account, one year older than Victor. A
    useful point of comparison is the exchange between the simple Chamois Hunter and Manfred
    in the second act of Byron's Manfred, the dramatic poem he began in the summer of
    1816 and set in the same Alpine wilderness as the second volume of Mary Shelley's
    Frankenstein.