That is, of a less highly developed genus. The language reflects the late-eighteenth
century fascination with hierarchical taxonomies in all the sciences (see also I:2:16
and note).

In the early nineteenth century Turkey was the center of the far-flung Ottoman Empire,
which was to an English readership noteworthy for its autocracy and corruption. Perhaps
more to the point in 1831, that Empire abutted the growing British presence in India
and Afghanistan, making it a natural object of suspicion and prejudice. Whether Mary
Shelley thought twice about the terms of her analogy here one cannot know, but it
is a fact that Turks do not fare well in this novel. In its second volume (II:6:12)
Safie's father acts an ungenerous and even treacherous role.

Mary Shelley's brief addition in 1831 emphasizes the extremity of psychological state
that lies behind Victor's critical physical debility. He is at once paranoid, profoundly
introverted, and vaguely guilt-stricken. In modern parlance his condition would be
described as psychotic.

This length would have been commensurate with the suggestive but unfinished "Fragment"
that Byron contributed to the writing contest, or with the longer piece, essentially
a short story, that John Polidori entitled The Vampyre; a Tale.

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.