This may be the single case in the novel where one can sense Mary Shelley reacting
to a reaction to her novel. She could not have revised this passage, adding such inflated
self-deprecation by Victor, without being conscious of the title of the first dramatic
redaction of her novel, Richard Brinsley Peake's Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein,
which she saw with her father upon her return to London in 1823. The word is never
uttered in the play, but the title clearly established a context in which Victor Frankenstein's
researches were from then on to be conceived; and Mary Shelley herself responds by
subsuming it within the third edition.