To disobey such an injunction, with its almost institutionalized cultural sanction,
is to commit a transgression of substance, preparing us for other instances of conflicting
goals between son and father—Victor and Alphonse Frankenstein, Felix De Lacey and
his blind father—on other narrative levels of the novel, as well as other, much greater
transgressions for the sake of knowledge. The fact that Walton is orphaned at a young
age introduces yet another common theme of the novel.

Ingolstadt, Germany, lies on the Danube and Schutter Rivers, 45 miles north of Munich
and 30 miles south of Regensburg.

Records of this cultural and commercial center of Bavaria go back to the beginning
of the 9th century C.E. The city is surrounded by fourteenth-century walls, and is
distinguished by a ducal castle (1420), the Cathedral of Our Lady (1425-1500), the
Church of Maria de Victoria (1732-36). For centuries it was the seat of the Dukes
of Bavaria, who transferred to Munich only in 1800, leaving Ingolstadt a relatively
small provincial city (current population c. 90,000). The brief account in the 4th
edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1797), written before this event and roughly
contemporary with the timeframe of the novel, gives no hint of the town's impending
displacement.

A university was founded there in 1472, although it was moved to Landshut in 1800
and then to Munich in 1826. At the height of its importance in the Renaissance the
city and the university were a stronghold of Counter-Reformation orthodoxy.

In the eighteenth century an intellectual fervor of an opposite sort was centered
there, when a secret society, an offspin of the Masons self-styled the Illuminati,
was formed in Ingolstadt to consider the means to a revolutionary reconstruction of
European society. Although their actual effect was small, they constituted an easy
target for reactionary agitators who traced the debacle of the French Revolution to
this improbable source. The main purveyors of this reactionary propaganda were John
Playfair's Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe
(1797) and the Abbé Augustin Barruel's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du Jacobinisme
(1797). The latter volume was read by both Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814-1815.

These and other similar works were the basis for a novel, with a long episode set
in Bavaria and drawing upon the secret society of Illuminati, written by Thomas Jefferson
Hogg, Shelley's roommate at Oxford, Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff (1813). Shelley
wrote the notice of the novel that appeared in the Critical Review in December 1814.
It is thus impossible for Mary not to have been well aware of the political contexts
in which she inserts her youthful protagonist.

As at other key points in the revision of the novel, Victor's inflation of rhetoric
as he invokes fate calls attention at once to his self-pity and his sense that he
lacked any options that could have altered his destiny. As we turn to the second of
the three parts of Frankenstein, that conclusion will be seriously interrogated.

Victor here openly deprives the Creature of a human essence and thus of the requirements
of human sympathy. In other words, even as he upholds Justine's innocence against
a legal system that indicts her on circumstantial evidence, he himself embodies the
fundamental principles of a dehumanized injustice against which he will inveigh.

Although the discussion may seem to have moved far from the structural center of the
novel, the resonance of this phrase reminds us of the glorious ambitions driving both
Walton and Victor Frankenstein and of how Victor's aspiration that "many happy and
excellent natures would owe their being to" him (I:3:8) has been disastrously subverted
into a murder and miscarriage of justice implicating both his Creature and himself.

Mary Shelley's point seems to be that, whatever Victor's enthusiasm for the sciences,
at this point in his adolescent education he knows nothing of the modern state of
chemistry and has little motivation on his own to learn more.

Beaufort's introverted withdrawal is of a type similar to further and more conspicuous
examples we will encounter later in the text. It may well be that Victor Frankenstein
is himself too implicated in this sort of response to notice the parallels, but the
more objective reader is here being alerted to another of the thematic concerns the
novel will develop.

This diction, like the subtitle and the epigraph, is meant to drape Frankenstein with
a seriousness of purpose not customary among popular gothic novels. To students of
British Romanticism, it is language that is characteristic of Percy Bysshe Shelley's
own practices in the prefatory matter to his poems. He frequently accentuates his
attempt to transcend through imaginative means the normative, or "ordinary," thoughts
and passions of humanity. See, for example, the first paragraph of the Preface to
"Alastor" (published in March 1816) or his explanation of the use of dramatic imagery
in the Preface to The Cenci (1820). The reader will discover that the uses of the
imagination are likewise to become a recurring theme in the novel.

With an uncanny artistry that must be considered deliberate, in this and the next
paragraph Mary Shelley internalizes within her own writing the imaginative process
by which Victor Frankenstein is first swept along by his scientific advances ("my
imagination was too much exalted," I:3:7 and note), then becomes concerned by their
obsessiveness ("[it] had taken an irresistible hold of my imagination," I:3:11 and
note), and finally finds himself haunted by his own terrifying creation ("I imagined
that the monster seized me," I:4:15). Throughout the novel, although the power of
the human imagination is universally underscored, its uses or effects are as much
deeply questioned as they are celebrated.

In her introduction Mary Shelley appears to be purposefully collapsing the customary
distinction between the curiosity of the scientist and the creative afflatus of the
writer, a design we see carried out as well in the novel itself. Following these introductory
materials, we will turn immediately, as yet a third example of the same elemental
process, to the imaginative enthusiasm with which Robert Walton foresees his polar
explorations (I:L1:2).

Mary Shelley's language here is resonant with the terms by which she describes the
educational milieu within the Frankenstein circle. Thus, it cannot be accidental that
she draws an implicit comparison between her own youthful career as a writer and that
of her most imaginative character, Henry Clerval, who is described as smitten with
a world of romance in both the 1818 (I:1:11) and 1831 (I:2:2) editions of the novel.