That the inveterate Roman collector of superstitious lore could be thought by Victor
to be as useful for the modern student as the man who, perhaps more than any other,
stood as the foremost elaborator of Enlightenment natural science suggests that the
level of this youth's scientific conceptions has yet to mature. In the next chapter
he will embark upon his advanced education as an enthusiastic greenhorn.

Frankenstein is written in the mode of the epistolary novel, a form popularized in
the eighteenth century by Samuel Richardson in his novels Pamela (1741) and Clarissa
(1748) and expanded across class and social demarcations by Tobias Smollett in The
Expedition of Humphrey Clinker. By the nineteenth century the epistolary form was
something of an antique, its dynamics having largely been subsumed by other first-person
narrative modes that allowed their authors greater flexibility. Mary Shelley's novel,
which overtly advertises its modernity in a subtitle, is curiously, then, the last
major example of the form in English fiction. The epistolary mode inherently stresses
communication and process, major thematic concerns of the novel, and it accentuates
a reliance on a variety of self-conscious narrators who are not easily subject to
interrogation by one another nor the reader. Mary Shelley's stress on individual perspective
and on its resulting narrative indeterminacy are conspicuous features of her novel.

It is interesting to contemplate the fact that a principal account of William Parry's
Arctic expedition of 1819, Letters Written during the Late Voyage of Discovery in
the Western Arctic Sea (1821), is also couched in an epistolary form. This might indicate
some of the same thematic associations, structurally speaking, that the form held
for Mary Shelley, or, more immediately, it could reveal her sudden and striking influence
on subsequent travel narratives into inaccessible reaches of the globe.

Walton's "romantic" instincts, he realizes, are affecting his judgment. His language
recalls his earlier self-analysis (I:L2:2), suggesting that what he would need in
a friend like Victor Frankenstein is exactly the ability to curb such flights of fancy.
In the next paragraph Victor will decide to perform that function, starting in on
the narration of his career as a corrective and an admonition.

As in Walton's first letter (I:L1:3) enthusiasm is a charged word. In this period
it was as often a pejorative as an honorific word: fanatics of whatever stripe were
said to be enthusiastic. This was particularly true of religious fanatics and self-proclaimed
prophets. Such figures claimed to be directly inspired by God, to feel the presence
of God within (which is the root meaning of the word in Greek). In an ironic twist
on this meaning Mary Shelley presents Victor as a self-styled Ezekiel, wrought up
not by a storm sent by God but in a mental hurricane of his own making as he endeavors
to usurp the function of the deity.

Johnson's 1755 Dictionary is highly suggestive in its implicit aversion to the idea
of enthusiasm, defining it thus:

1. A vain belief of private revelation; a vain confidence of divine favour or communication.
2. Heat of imagination; violence of passion; confidence of opinion.
3. Elevation of fancy; exaltation of ideas.

If anything, Johnson is even more severe on the practitioner than on the concept,
defining an enthuasist as:

1. One who vainly imagines a private revelation; one who has a vain confidence of
his intercourse with God.
2. One of a hot imagination, or violent passions.
3. One of elevated fancy, or exalted ideas.

In, as it were, burying his third definition beneath the others, Johnson implies that
such exaltation is spurious, ungrounded in reality. His dismissive "hot imagination"
might similarly be taken as a synonymn for the "ardour" so conspicuously shared and
honored by the protagonists of the novel. Quite clearly, the repeated use of "vain"
and "vainly" is intended by Johnson to remind us of their substantive, which is "vanity."

Like "ardent curiosity" in the previous paragraph (I:L1:2), "enthusiasm" bears a double
sense, both good and bad, throughout the novel. It will be taken over by Victor Frankenstein,
who is gripped as a student by what he calls "an almost supernatural enthusiasm" (I:3:3),
which he likens to the force of a hurricane (I:3:8). In the retrospect of years and
their incumbent disasters he terms it first an enthusiastic frenzy (III:2:21) and,
more starkly in the last moments of his existence, an enthusiastic madness (III:WC:28).

The coupling of "enthusiasm" and "ardent" in this paragraph seems to indicate an intention
on Mary Shelley's part to underscore how associated are the two and how problematic
they may be in that association. The two notions have already been mentioned in proximity
in the previous letter (I:L1:2) and (I:L1:3). They will once again be linked in contiguous
paragraphs by Victor Frankenstein, when he recounts the frenzied rush of discovery
that accompanied his search for the secret of life (I:3:6 and I:3:8).

The seemingly admirable discipline by which Walton defers fulfillment and prepares
himself for the challenge of his expedition may take on less favorable connotations
once the reader has witnessed the introversion and compulsive self-denial into which
Victor Frankenstein throws himself as he pursues his own ambitious project. Furthermore,
the phrase itself, though seemingly innocent of allusive force, in the context provided
by the diction of the ensuing paragraph takes on a mythological resonance. In the
first book of Paradise Lost Satan, upon discovering himself on the floor of hell,
discerns next to him Beelzebub, his associate in what he terms the "glorious enterprise"
of the revolt against God:

     he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope
And hazard in the glorious enterprise
Joined with me once, now misery hath joined
In equal ruin.
-- I.87-91

This is the first of the many such deliberate and, in the aggregate, complexly interwoven
echoes of Paradise Lost in Frankenstein.

This addition to the 1831 text is prepared for by a similar ambition stressed in Henry's
youth (see 1831:I:2:2 and note) and may be generally accounted for by the importance
the intervening decade and a half had attached to the growing eastern empire of Great
Britain, not just in India but also in Afghanistan, on the edge of the Ottoman empire.
It would have not seemed questionable to the author or her readers in 1831 that Henry
Clerval would wish to distinguish himself as an imperialist. Mary Shelley would have
been well aware that one of her former husband's closest friends, Thomas Love Peacock,
though sharing Victor Frankenstein's privileging of the European classical tradition
over "oriental" literature, had carved out a career in the East Indian Office, the
bureaucracy that oversaw commerce with the imperial East.

There is no explanation for why Mary Shelley remakes Henry Clerval in so robust an
athletic mode, replacing the dreamy, poetical (and Shelleyan) figure of the first
edition. Perhaps it is Victor who renders the substitution, mindful of Walton's commitment
to "enterprise," a word that, starting with the first sentence of the novel (1831:I:L1:1),
he uses six times in his initial letters to his sister (see also 1831:I:L1:5, 1831:I:L2:1,
1831:I:L2:3 twice, and 1831:I:L4:20). (A context in Milton's Paradise Lost is noted
in the latter.) Admittedly, it requires some stretching of the imagination and the
text to force a Satanic context upon Henry Clerval: it may well be that by 1831 the
original contextual referents for Mary Shelley have diminished or have been replaced
by new emphases, in this case that of masculine heroism—the ardour so repetitiously
invoked by her male protagonists.

As in Walton's first letter (I:L1:5 and note) this may seem an innocent enough term,
but accentuated through repetition here as the last word of Walton's paragraph and
set within the context of the other substantives in this sentence, the echo of Satan's
first speech in Paradise Lost is unmistakeable.