The legendary "Peeping Tom" was struck blind as punishment for spying on the nude
Lady Godiva riding through the streets of Coventry.

In the first edition Mary Shelley laid great stress on a noncoercive educational program
practised in Alphonse Frankenstein's household (see I:1:12 and I:1:26), a tribute
to her own education under the guidance of her father William Godwin. As she rethinks
the structure of the novel, it seems apparent that she wishes to shift that emphasis
from Victor's family (whose educational program she deletes) to Waldman as the professor
who guides Victor's mature scientific studies from a similar pedagogical principle.

The Northwest Passage, and (to a lesser extent because less practicable) the Northeast
Passage, were major objects of exploration in the later eighteenth century, renewed
after peace returned to Europe in 1815 with the strong backing of the British government
as seemingly being crucial to Britain's domination of the seas and to the commerce
that held together the Empire. As with other scientific aspects of Mary Shelley's
novel, this ambition of Walton's has a large cultural and political resonance.

Before the creation of the Suez Canal (completed in 1869) and the Panama Canal (begun
1882, completed 1914), navigation between the hemispheres was a complicated process,
involving lengthy trips around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa or the Cape of
Horn in South America, both notoriously difficult to navigate. Explorers turned their
attention to the north, in the hopes of finding a means of sailing from the Atlantic
to the Pacific. Two major paths, a Northeast Passage and a Northwest Passage, were
sought for centuries, with minimal success. Northeast Passage The searches for a Northeast
Passage -- one from the north of Scandinavia, into the Arctic Basin, and along the
north coast of Asia -- began in the late sixteenth century. In 1596, fifteen Dutch
sailors, led by Jacob van Heemskerck and Willem Barents, tried to complete the Northeast
Passage, only to be trapped in June near the northcape of Novaya Zemlya. The sailors
were trapped there for months in an ad-hoc dwelling built from driftwood they called
Het Behouden Huys (the Saved House; the site was discovered in 1871). Their ordeal
was described in print by one of the sailors, Gerrit de Veer, in 1598.

Most of the searches for a Northeast Passage, though, were carried out by Russia,
which hoped to increase the profitability of its fur trade by finding a more direct
route from the Atlantic to the Pacific. By the end of the 16th century the Russians
had established a commercial route via the Arctic to the fur-trading centre of Mangazeya
on the Taz River in western Siberia. But a polar passage was still greatly desired.
Several archaelogical digs in Taymyr in the 1940s provide evidence of an unsuccessful
Russian mission to sail the Northeast Passage in or shortly after 1619.

By 1645, Russian trading vessels were routinely sailing between the Kolyma and Lena
Rivers along the Arctic coast. In 1648, Semyon Dezhnyov, a Cossack, was the first
European to sail what is now called the Bering Strait. He sailed east from the Kolyma
toward the Anadyr basin, believed to be rich in furs. Although several of his ships
were destroyed, Dezhnyov reached Cape Olyutorsky, from which he traveled overland
to the north to the Anadyr.

Dezhnyov's voyage aroused interest in exploration in Russia. In the 1720s, Peter the
Great authorized a number of voyages to the area he had first sailed. It was Vitus
Bering, an officer of Danish birth who served in the Russian navy, who made the most
important discoveries. In 1728 he discovered St. Lawrence Island and sailed through
the Bering Strait (named for him) and well into the Arctic Ocean, although, because
he did not see Alaska, he did not realize how far he had in fact sailed. Four years
later, two Russians, Ivan Fyodorov and Mikhail Gvozdev, were the first Europeans to
see Alaska.

The discovery of a passage to the Pacific led to the greatest operation in the history
of polar exploration, the Great Northern Expedition, which began in 1733 and continued
through 1743. Vitus Bering led the expeditions, carried out by nearly a thousand men,
many of whom died from cold, scurvy, or other accidents. Such setbacks caused the
Russian government to withdraw its support, but the mission was successful in producing
sixty-two maps of the Arctic coast from Archangelsk to Cape Bolshoy Baranov. The only
other Russian expedition in the next few decades was carried out by Nikita Shalaurov,
a trader without government support, whose party was killed by the cold in 1764.

After Captain James Cook sailed from the Pacific north through the Bering Strait as
far as Cape North (now Cape Shmidt), Catherine the Great renewed Russian interest
in polar expeditions. Catherine hired Joseph Billings, a member of Cook's crew, to
travel overland from St. Lawrence Bay to Nizhnekolymsk in the search for a gap between
Chaun Bay and the Bering Strait. The gap was not discovered, however, until 1823,
when Lieutenant Ferdinand Petrovich Wrangel successfully navigated and surveyed Kolyuchin
Bay. Northwest Passage Only five years after Columbus discovered the Americas, England's
Henry VII sent John Cabot in search of a northwest route from Europe to the Orient.
Jacques Cartier and Gaspar and Miguel Corte-Real similarly explored Canada in hopes
of discovering such a passage.

Navigators began searching in earnest for a water route from the Atlantic to the Pacific
in the sixteenth century with Sir Martin Frobisher (1535-1594); subsequent explorers
included John Davis, Henry Hudson (who in 1609 explored the New York river and Canadian
bay that now bear his name), and William Baffin. In 1768, Samuel Hearne set out on
a two-year walking expedition, which took him as far as the shore of the Arctic Ocean,
but he found no passage.

With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, England, in an attempt to secure its
naval superiority and the enormous commercial advantage that came with it, began what
eventually became a decades-long endeavor to discover the Northwest passage. The Passage
eluded explorers through Mary Shelley's lifetime; as late as 1845, Sir John Franklin
set out on an expedition that ended in the loss of the entire expedition of 129 men.
The Passage was discovered only in the 1850s by Sir Robert McClure, who led one of
the forty search parties that sought information on Franklin's expedition. McClure's
expedition was icebound for nearly two years, and was rescued by Captain Henry Kellett;
Kellett's ship was in turn icebound for another year.

The Passage itself runs through the Arctic Islands of Canada some 500 miles north
of the Arctic Circle, only 1,200 miles from the North Pole. The 900-mile east-west
water route runs from Baffin Island to the Beaufort Sea through a field of thousands
of icebergs, and thence into the Pacific through the Bering Strait, which separates
Siberia from Alaska.

Even after the Passage was discovered, it took another half century for a single ship
to sail through it: the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen made the passage between
1903 and 1906. Although the centuries-long search for the route was inspired by the
desire for a more efficient trading route, the first successful commercial navigation
came only in 1969, after the discovery of oil in Alaska.

Paracelsus, pseudonym of Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493-1541, physician,
alchemist, and mystic.

Little is known of Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who took the name Paracelsus
for himself. He was the son to a physician, and at the age of sixteen entered Basel
University where he studied alchemy. He later worked in the mines at Tirol, where
he gained first-hand knowledge of the properties of metals.

By his early thirties he had become famous as a physician in Basel, where he gave
lectures on medicine. His disputes with the authorities in 1528 were symptomatic of
his abrasive and arrogant disputing style, and led to his expulsion from Basel. In
the last year of his life he settled in Salzburg.

He argued that human life could be created through alchemy, and believed in the long-sought-after
elixir vitae as a means of infinitely prolonging life free from disease. His lasting
contribution to science is the rejection of Galen's humoral theory of illness.

Percy Bysshe Shelley listed Paracelsus (along with Agrippa) among his favorite writers
in a discussion with Godwin in 1812.

Health in this novel is something of a moral index. Victor's physical collapse results
from his obsessiveness and introversion. His father, who loads him with moral maxims
(I:3:10 ), in contrast, renews his vigor as Victor's is sapped.

Mary Shelley quotes from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III, stanza 62,
written the same summer, 1816, in which she began Frankenstein.

. . . Above me are the Alps,
The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls,
Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps,
And throned Eternity in icy halls
Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls
The avalanche—the thunderbolt of snow!
All that expands the spirit, yet appals,
Gather around these summits, as to show
How Earth may pierce to Heaven, yet leave vain man below.
-- III.590-98

The doppelgänger or double is a feature of gothic tales throughout the eighteenth
and nineteenth century. As a literary type, however, the double can have more than
sensational uses. Within a year of Frankenstein's publication, for instance, Percy
Bysshe Shelley incorporated the figure within the first act of Prometheus Unbound,
where the Earth tells Prometheus of a second realm of potentiality that shadows the
actual world:

     Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
-- I.191-95

Mary Shelley, too, is concerned with potentiality, both its development and its thwarting,
which she pursues on a number of different levels in this novel, projecting the doubling
on moral and psychological, but also on mythic and theological, grounds. Up to this
point in the novel the theme of doubling has been only hinted at in the intensities
of male friendship we have encountered. Here, in directly introducing doubling as
a psychological condition, her basic stress is on the self-division and resulting
self-destructiveness that, we may now begin to realize, is the driving force behind
the arctic pursuit that initiates Victor's narrative.

This is the exact denotation of the Greek roots that form the word "catastrophe,"
used by Victor to describe his initial reaction upon imparting life to the Creature
(I:4:2).

Doubtless, Alphonse Frankenstein is right. At the same time, the stern condescension
of this parting admonition is suggestive of the distance between father and son that
continually surfaces in the novel.

In the novel's structuring it is not coincidental that Walton is an orphan and, at
this point in his life, so is Victor Frankenstein. Victor's Creature, in a related
sense, will be a virtual orphan from the moment of his coming to life.