Later Walton calls Frankenstein's eloquence "forcible and touching" (III:WC:6) and
just three weeks after the present letter the crew will witness its effect (III:WC:17).
But on that occasion the crew will not be swayed by Victor; and even Victor himself,
somewhat earlier, evinced himself as distrustful of mere eloquence, warning Walton
against the power of the Creature's speech and suggesting that it might mislead him
(III:7:26).

Eloquence as a concept implicitly assumes multiple perspectives and an underlying
uncertainty as to where truth resides. It is thus focussed as a highly vexed issue
in the novel, which reveals itself to be at once selfconscious in its employment of
manipulative rhetoric and suspicious of the effects.

The University of Ingolstadt was opened on 26 July 1472 under the patronage of the
Duke of Bavaria, Ludwig the Wealthy. For centuries its various faculties—humanistic,
scientific, theology, law, and medicine—were contained in the Hoheschule (High School).
By the end of the seventeenth century plans were elaborated for new university buildings,
but these were never realized. Nonetheless, during the ensuing century the University
was forced to expand. In 1760 George Ludwig Claudius Rousseau was appointed demonstrator
of Chemistry, and in 1778 a separate laboratory was constructed for him near the Hoheschule.
Given the time scheme of Frankenstein, it seems likely that Victor would have pursued
his studies in that location.

But Ingolstadt was also very well equipped to support Victor's more elaborate scientific
ambitions. From the first, the University possessed a medical school of stature. In
1722 its faculty acquired a site for a projected school that would incorporate an
anatomy theater, botanical garden, and chemistry laboratory, and construction was
begun early in 1723 though, for want of money, it was not wholly finished until 1736.
A major botanical garden was attached to the school to support its experiments and
treatments. By 1755 the demonstration hall in the central atrium had been converted
into a two-story anatomical theater, with a dissecting table on the ground floor,
a gallery for student observers above, and a glass ceiling allowing overhead illumination.
In the later eighteenth century it was considered to be one of the finest such theaters
in Europe. Obviously, such a theater would have had ample provision for the specimens
required for teaching purposes—or for clandestine experimentation.

In the third volume Alphonse Frankenstein will have to undertake a much longer and
more perilous journey to save his son after a similar illness. See III:4:28.

A half-year earlier Clerval had begun this same discourse with Victor, only to have
it interrupted by his friend's physical collapse (I:4:15). At that point the previous
November Victor had been out of communication with his family for something like two
years.

Although Clerval seems lighthearted in his exaggeration, his phrasing resonates with
startling irony. Not only does it play against Victor's obsession with acquiring knowledge
at any cost, only just now having attained its fateful consequence, but the diction,
so like the language of Walton's first letter (I:L1:2), reminds us that Walton himself
would not be an auditor of Victor Frankenstein's life story had not both of them been
in peril of their lives in the Arctic wilderness.

Surely, Victor, like any human being, has a right to pursue happiness. But it is the
case, that, beginning here, on every occasion when he anticipates a return to normal
human pleasures he experiences instead a disastrous reversal of expectations. From
this moment on his joy will never again be "unbridled," but rather, at best, what
Thomas Gray, in his "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," called "fearful."

Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of their little reign,
And unknown regions dare descry:
Still as they run they look behind,
And hear a voice in every wind,
And snatch a fearful joy. (lines 35-40)

This double emphasis on his impotence calls into play both the heavy irony of Victor's
having given birth by himself and his habitual manner of ducking responsibility for
his actions.

This is the first indication of the age of a character in the novel, but a careful
tracing of its chronology would prove that Mary Shelley maintains a shrewd sense of
the relative ages of all of them. The emaciated figure of Victor Frankenstein who
will appear before Walton four months after this letter ("I never saw a man in so
wretched a condition"— I:L4:9) is actually Walton's junior by a year.

Alphonse Frankenstein's delay in proposing marriage is motivated by a sense of decorum
and of tact. He neither intrudes on Caroline's grief nor openly plants a sense of
obligation in her mind.

This seems to allude to Lord Byron (who is the unidentified figure in the following
parenthesis) and Percy Bysshe Shelley. John William Polidori, Byron's physician, also
wrote a tale, "The Vampyre," which he managed to have published under Byron's name
in the New Monthly Magazine of April 1819. His strained relations with Byron were
broken by this act.