In the early months after Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley returned to England
they were both afflicted with the deaths of women with whom their lives were closely
interknit. On 9 October 1816 Fanny Godwin, Mary's half-sister, committed suicide.
A month later Harriet Shelley, P. B. Shelley's legal wife, drowned herself in the
Serpentine River in Hyde Park. Those experiences would appear to be registered in
this elegiac paragraph.

In a novel so concerned with education this emphasis on Justine's advancement testifies
to Mary Shelley's belief in its universal value. This is of a piece with the arguments
of her father William Godwin in Political Justice (1793) and reflects as well the
strong democratic sentiments that Mary Shelley shared with her husband. It is important
to remember that, under her father's tutelege, Mary Godwin enjoyed an education that
in her day was equalled by only a handful of young women in England.

As in the account she gave Victor in the letter of March of the previous spring (I:5:5),
Elizabeth accentuates Justine's ministrations.

Justine is orphaned pointedly about the same time (the previous November) that Victor
Frankenstein gives life to his Creature, who is, like Justine, an unwanted dependant.
Unlike every other character in the novel, however, the Creature is cut adrift from
family protection not by death, but by a lack of human responsibility for his nurture.
Born in abnormal circumstances, he is without family, wholly unaccommodated in an
alien world. Where Alphonse Frankenstein virtually adopts Justine, his son rejects
the Creature he has fashioned.

As with other additions made by Mary Shelley in the early pages of her novel, this
renders more explicit the extent to which Victor Frankenstein and Robert Walton share
much the same passion for knowledge. Their seeming differences are really superficial,
accounted for by the terrible cost experience has wrought on Victor and the sheltered
innocence in which Walton has been protected. Mary Shelley here likewise strengthens
her plot line, giving Victor Frankenstein a strong reason for bestowing the terrible
moral of his autobiography upon the enthusiastic explorer, allowing him, too, to be
the first to indicate that he might be mad. By questioning Walton's sanity as well,
he opens up large problems of reliability that the subsequent narrative will exploit.

Victor's faith rests on nothing more than intuition. Indeed, he actually has fewer
facts to go on than the circumstantial evidence that indicts Justine.

The description of Elizabeth, needless to say, is taken from stock; but it is likewise
defining of her later personality. For the many critics troubled by the way women
are portrayed in this novel, her stereotypical femininity, composed of a sweet temper
and refined imaginativeness, gives her no role to play in a male-dominated culture
but that of a potential victim of its dynamics.

The terms of Walton's education are provided in I:L2:2, where he laments his neglect
of systematic preparation in his youth. It will remain to be seen in the course of
the novel whether Victor Frankenstein's more formal education served him better than
did Walton's autodidacticism.

The question of self-education would have resonated strongly in the Shelley household.
Mary Shelley did not attend school and was largely educated by her father, who in
his early years had tried to read everything that was written and therefore was presumably
qualified in the highest terms to direct his daughter's intellectual development.
Though her husband attended the finest of preparatory schools, Syon House and Eton
College, P. B. Shelley was expelled from Oxford in his second term at the university
and thereafter amassed his considerable learning on his own. Mary, it should be stressed,
embarked on a similar reading program as her husband and, if still only eighteen when
she began Frankenstein was, by the standards of woman's education in her day, prodigiously
learned.

This language resonates beyond the fictional world of this novel and links in complex
ways with the concerns of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who likewise focuses on this theme
in "Alastor" (lines 20-23, 75-82, and 116-28), where both the narrator and the Poet
whose story he tells are obsessed with uncovering secret lore; in the "Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty," stanza 5, where Shelley recounts his own youthful investment in the supernatural;
and in "Mont Blanc," esp. ll. 139-41, where the mountain itself is represented as
holding secrets the poet would penetrate. "Alastor" was published in March of 1816,
and the other two poems were written that summer. In addition, the theme is continually
sounded in The Revolt of Islam, the long narrative poem he composed while Mary Shelley
was simultaneously writing Frankenstein: (see esp. Canto II, sts. 11-12, 20; Canto
IV, sts. 3, 6-8, 12). There Shelley gives a strong political tilt to the notion of
suppressed knowledge.

Dignity in this case signifies rank. But it is uncertain exactly how to construe what
this rank might be. It could be that Walton was offered the position of second mate.
But, depending on the size of the ship, it could have been an even more imposing rank
than that. In the terms Walton will employ about his own command in the ensuing letter,
the second dignity would be, after the captain's lieutenant, the master of the ship
(I:L2:3).