Letter IV actually contains the entirety of the subsequent action of the novel, which
returns to an openly epistolary form near its end (III:WC:1).

Victor had in retrospect characterized the nature of his cloistered and obsessive
study at Ingolstadt "unlawful," which he then defined as "not befitting the human
mind," in I:3:12. Here, one senses that the emphasis is less on social or antisocial
behavior than on what an individual human being has the right to do: "devices" implies
a means by which actions are performed.

Lausanne, on the northern shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, is the capital of the
Vaud canton and an ancient cultural center to rival Geneva, located some fifty miles
away. Built on the Jorat hills, the city offers a prospect of the entire Lake, as
well as of the Alps to the south beyond it.

It was conquered by the Protestant Reformers the Bernese in the sixteenth century.
In 1798, however, Lausanne fell to Napoleon, who made the city the capital of the
Vaud canton of the new Helvetic Republic in 1803. Its pre-Napoleonic political structure
is described in the 4th edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1797). For a time
in the eighteenth century, Lausanne was home to Voltaire, Rousseau, and Edward Gibbon
(who wrote most of his Decline and Fall there).

Percy Bysshe Shelley recounts the associations of Lausanne with Gibbon in the third
letter of A History of a Six Weeks' Tour.

In other words, Victor rejects the possibility of creating unlimited gold in the interest
of discovering the root laws of life. As the complicated mix of his character begins
to take shape, Mary Shelley stresses from the outset that Victor Frankenstein is motivated
not by greed but by a pure impulse of scientific discovery.

These languages are considerable accomplishments for an adolescent, though both Percy
Bysshe Shelley and William Godwin could assert similar claims. More important, with
the exception of German, by this time in her life so could Mary Shelley. Within the
fictional ambience itself, the reader can imagine how rekindled, in listening to this
account, would have been Walton's retrospective guilt over his undereducated, undirected
adolescence (I:L2:2).

From this diction it appears that Elizabeth is included among the "we" of this circle
who are instructed in both a useful and a learned language. Most women of her time
were denied such access to Latin. We recall that French is the operating language
of the Frankenstein household (as it is of Geneva). Obviously, English is here singled
out in order to justify Victor's narration as being conducted wholly in English. At
what point the German in which he is taught at Ingolstadt enters his educational program
is left unmentioned, but by the age of seventeen he will be fluent in it (I:1:26).
No note is made of whether Elizabeth retained a residual Italian from having spent
her early years in that environment.

The perilous isolation of Victor Frankenstein's situation bears symbolic overtones
that, being introduced here, will return near the close of his narrative in Volume
3.

As she does with chemistry, Mary Shelley focuses on an arena of major intellectual
development in her age. At the time she was writing, the rudiments of linguistic understanding
of what we call the Indo-European language group were coming into place but had yet
not been fully recognized and proclaimed as such. Thus, in his area of interest Henry,
the poet, should be recognized to be as intellectually ambitious as Victor, the scientist.

Walton's inability to speak other languages would presumably magnify his sense of
isolation after almost four months in Russia. Generally speaking, in this pan-European
novel Mary Shelley conveniently allows her characters, wherever they come from or
are educated, to communicate freely across national borders. The exception is the
Arab Safie, who must be taught by the De Laceys to speak their language. Since the
book chosen for that end is Volney's Les Ruines, ou meditations sur les revolutions
des empires (II:5:14), she and the Creature who secretly participates in her lessons
are educated in French. French is likewise the language of the Frankenstein household,
but Victor, in I:1:12, recounts his education in Latin, Greek, English and German:
he receives his scientific education in German, in the heart of Bavaria at Ingolstadt,
and is adept enough in English to negotiate his way around Scotland and the Orkney
Islands. While in prison there his delirious ravings revert to French, which only
Mr. Kirwin the magistrate is able to understand (III:4:11). When he hails Walton,
the mariner will tell his sister in I:L4:7, Victor does so in English "although with
a foreign accent." By the time the Creature and Walton meet one another, however,
Mary Shelley finesses her otherwise careful observation of linguistic difference in
favor of an unimpeded confrontation; yet Victor's concern that his narration be faithfully
recorded (III:WC:4) and his warning that the Creature's eloquence should be distrusted
(III:7:25) emphasize radical instability and the problematic of translation as inherent
in language.

Today, Switzerland and Italy share access to Lake Como as they do to the larger Lago
Maggiore somewhat to its west. The Shelleys and Claire Clairmont stopped at Lake Como
in the spring of 1818 and, they claimed, would have settled there had they been able
to find suitable lodgings. In the event, their fortunes led them further south, and
Mary Shelley herself was not to return to the fabled beauty of these surroundings
until well after the revised edition of Frankenstein was published. She obviously
returned there frequently in her imagination. It is on Lake Como that the small remnant
of survivors for a time is able to reestablish a human community in The Last Man,
her novel of 1826. Years later, her lengthy sojourn in the vicinity of Lake Como during
the summer of 1840 is lovingly recorded in her Rambles in Germany and Italy published
in 1844.