Clerval, who has already exhibited an instantaneous fellow-feeling for Victor where
others might be oblivious to his pain (see I:5:18), functions in the novel as a paragon
of sympathy.

This seems an innocent-sounding phrase, but if read carefully, it manifests what the
final chapter of Volume 1 will likewise suggest, that this novel resolutely refuses
to invoke a supernatural or transcendental framework for support. As human beings
can create other beings, they also mentally create a divinity to structure their universe:
the same human fallibility can attend both operations with tragic consequences.

Although it is not said explicitly, this is a poetry defined by conventional feminine
concerns. Thus, Clerval's interest in it may implicitly suggest that realms exist
that allow a man to identify himself without simultaneously excluding the feminine.
In Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Asia is an archetypal feminine figure
of emotion and intuition in contrast to Prometheus, the male avatar of the analytical
European intellect.

Even more than the previous sentence the phraseology seems deliberately erotic. Since
the issue of this labor will be a being created by a man without female participation,
the autoerotic emphasis of the diction, though perhaps surprising for the age in which
it is written, is exactly appropriate to the situation.

Victor, it must be remembered, has no proof whatsoever, only the momentary intuition
the night before that his Creature was the murderer (see I:6:22). His having overnight
extended that supposition to the point of conviction once again ironically reproduces
the mental process by which Justine's guilt has been assumed before her trial begins.

In a patrilineal society Victor would be the principal heir of his father, anticipating
his succession to the principal share of the family estate. An English readership
would be well schooled in the legal circumstances involved, and, indeed, such exigencies
are at the core of many an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novel. Victor,
however, seems to think of this inheritance not just as a financial expectation, but
as a moral and civic obligation as well. We will soon come to realize, however, how
deeply he has failed to live up to the expectations of his father and of his earlier
self in this regard.

Condemned by society and forsaken by the Church, Justine is left by herself in a condition
that is the opposite of a state of grace, caught in a lie made and reinforced by social
institutions. Not only do these institutions not practice the candor they may preach,
but they deny its possibility on an essential level.

This description of the Frankenstein household's educational routine appears to reflect
the principles of instruction practised by William Godwin in overseeing Mary's education,
which amounted to a rigorous education conducted totally at home. At this time there
could have been only a handful of British girls who received an education comparable
to hers.

This careful specifying of Victor's intellectual passions and gaps is added to the
1831 text to prepare us for the kind of obsessiveness Victor develops when, in the
ensuing chapter, he arrives at the University of Ingolstadt. Yet, intentionally or
not, the emendation also introduces a remarkable contrast in character development
between Victor and his Creature. In contrast to Victor's nostalgic memory of an indulged
childhood, the Creature experiences no parental kindness whatsoever and must begin
life from an existential nadir. In doing so, he is forced to educate himself exactly
in the elements of knowledge for which Victor has no interest: language, law, and
politics. See II:4:9, II:5:10 and II:5:14.

In the opening decade of the eighteenth century Czar Peter the Great decided to build
a new capital city for imperial Russia and picked for his site the swampy estuary
of the Neva River where it flowed into the Baltic Sea. There he built the city named
after his patron saint, officially establishing it as his capital in 1712. The extraordinary
dimensions of this achievement were still retailed with awe by the end of the century
when the 4th edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1797) dwelt at length on the
founding of St. Petersburg. Only in the second half of the century, however, did it
achieve the grandiose dimensions we now associate with the city. The major impetus
to its development was the building of the Winter Palace, the official home of the
Czars of Russia, begun by Peter III in 1754. In a palace coup that seems to have been
universally praised, the Czar's wife Catherine seized power from Peter III in 1762,
inaugurating the development of Russia into a modern and formidable nation. German
by birth, Catherine aspired to make her country not just a major European political
power but, more, one of its principal cultural centers. In her thirty-four years on
the imperial throne she amassed an extraordinary collection of art to supplement and
eventually supplant the Dutch-Flemish collection of Peter the Great: beginning in
1764. She had the fancifully named but grandly outfitted Hermitage built to house
these treasures. Likewise, she gathered a major library of over 30,000 books, whose
crowning glory was the acquisition of the entire library of Voltaire after his death
in 1778. In his later years he had been a frequent correspondent with Catherine, as
was Denis Diderot, the leading figure in creating for the French Enlightenment a compendium
of all that was known, the Encyclopédie. Diderot became her chief advisor on the acquisition
of art and in 1774 was himself persuaded to remove to St. Petersburg where he had
the singular duty of providing Catherine with an hour of learned conversation every
afternoon. Autocrat that she was, by the end of her life in 1796 Catherine had repented
of her patronage of the leading philosophical forces that had spawned the French Revolution.

That the novel is first set in St. Petersburg may be, then, not a mere curiosity,
but a careful signal of its intellectual and cultural dimensions. Through it the reader
of Mary Shelley's novel is to understand that it begins intellectually where it stands
geographically, in the shadow of Catherine's enlightenment vision of a modernized
culture. Robert Walton's thrilling sense of scientific discovery, detailed throughout
this first letter, and Victor Frankenstein's endeavor to create a new being both share
that ambience. The open question subtly articulated by this initial postmark is whether
the dream of the new city or of the new human can alter the conditions that have determined
the old. Will the novel, like Catherine, repudiate the world it brings forth?