It would appear once more that Victor has read and inculcated the wisdom of one of
his most celebrated countrymen in the eighteenth century, Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801),
whose Physiognomische Fragmente (1775-1778)—translated into English in 1789-1798 as
Essays on Physiognomy— purported to show how character could be inferred from facial
features and proportions. Here "open" carries moral connotations, indicative of the
"frankness of disposition" with which this sentence ends. See I:3:1 and note for an
earlier instance where physiognomy appears to enter into his discourse.
Mary Shelley was aware that her own character had been predicted from her infant physiognomy
by her father's close friend, the scientist William Nicholson.
Nicholson (1753-1815), from an initial meeting in 1786, became one of William Godwin's
closest friends, a major influence on the conception of his Enquiry concerning Political
Justice, and his source during more than a quarter-century for up-to-date knowledge
in the sciences. He and his wife were among the most attentive of friends during the
fatal illness of Mary Wollstonecraft. On the infant Mary Godwin's nineteenth day,
Godwin persuaded Nicholson to write a lengthy prediction of his daughter's character
based on her physiognomy, according to the system popularized by Lavater.
Nicholson's most important contribution to chemistry was the discovery of the process
of electrolysis of water, using the new advances in electricity developed by Alessandro
Volta and others. He discovered that the application of electrical currents to water
causes the water to break into its component elements, hydrogen and oxygen — the first
chemical reaction produced by electricity.
In addition to being a practicing chemist, Nicholson was instrumental in propagating
knowledge in the field. His introduction to Natural Philosophy (1781) was widely known.
He founded The Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts in 1797, the
first scientific journal not under the aegis of a scientific institution. And in 1809,
he published the British Encyclopedia; or, Dictionary of arts and sciences. Comprising
an accurate and popular view of the present improved state of human knowledge in six
volumes, from which the extracts concerning galvanic experimentation in the first
decade of the nineteenth century, a process of which he was among the major exponents,
are invaluable. This consolidation of the contemporary scientific scene has long been
understood to have been instrumental in making Percy Bysshe Shelley "a Newton among
poets." What should be equally clear is that the acquaintance of Mary Shelley with
this remarkable man, thus begun in infancy, would have amply provided her with a theoretical
understanding of the scientific bases on which her novel purports to rest.
As Nicholson's account emphasizes (C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and
Contemporaries (London, 1876), pp. 289-90), she, too, possessed a "capacious forehead."