From the French for "speed," and pronounced as if French: a public stagecoach. The
Swiss diligence would likely emanate from Zurich, passing through Munich on its way
to Ingolstadt.

Once again, as in the previous chapter (I:1:15), Victor suggests that the course of
his development is not of his own making, but was necessitated by his professional
commitment. His linking of his destiny to scientific knowledge has the effect of transferring
the systematic logic of the discipline to the random events of his life, an inductive
leap that, however much it may lack a rational base, will bear profound consequences.

If we revert to the actual chronology of Frankenstein, we realize that it was only
the day before that Victor had told Walton that his "fate [was] nearly fulfilled"
(I:L4:32 and note), but left the reasons for that assurance totally unarticulated.
In the present narration he will slowly begin to explore the range of determinants
of his "destiny," starting a few paragraphs earlier by acknowledging that it ought
to have been tied to his patriarchal inheritance as a set of understood family obligations
(I:1:1), a duty that is here to be set in opposition to a self-absorbed obsession
with scientific discovery, which is the evil "genius" he will now delineate.

The phrasing suggests not just a vile being, as "wretch" was used in I:4:3 and I:4:6,
but now also one who is corrupt, wicked. Victor, who has no discernible religious
belief or instruction, has wandered into a treacherous theological morass. The Judeo-Christian
God has created humanity, in Milton's words, "just and right,/ Sufficient to have
stood, though free to fall" (Paradise Lost, III.98-99). Victor, however, as God's
stand-in, has no assurance that his Creature is without flaw. Having constructed him
from whatever bodily parts he could lay his hands on (and without any particular nicety
that they even be human), Victor presumes a correlation between body and soul, both
being corrupt. In theological terms, however, such a vision of God as the creator
of evil is fundamentally heretical, for it would hold God directly responsible for
human depravity. Victor's chain of thoughts does not extend so far as openly to convict
himself of the responsibility for the evil he assigns his Creature. Yet, his sudden
sense here of their twin relationship does suggest the glimmer of that terrible truth
the novel will slowly unfold.

Johnson's 1755 Dictionary represents the verb to deprave with an uncharacteristic
lack of discrimination:

To vitiate; to corrupt; to contaminate.

The Oxford English Dictionary, on the other hand, registers historical and theological
shifts in usage:

depravity An extension of pravity (ad. L. pravitas) previously used in same sense,
after deprave and its derivatives. (No corresponding form in Latin or French.) The
quality or condition of being depraved or corrupt.

a. Perverted or corrupted quality. Obs.

b. Perversion of the moral faculties; corruption, viciousness, abandoned wickedness.

c. Theol. The innate corruption of human nature due to original sin. Often total depravity:
In common use from the time of Jonathan Edwards: the earlier terms were pravity and
depravation.

d. A depraved act or practice.

depraved

1. Rendered bad or worse; perverted, vitiated, debased, corrupt. Now chiefly of taste,
appetite, and the like.

2. spec. Rendered morally bad; corrupt; wicked.

The shift in pronouns here (from "its" to "he") is telling but hardly indicative of
a sudden sense of human identification between Victor and his Creature. Instead, to
denominate the Creature a man allows Victor immediately to fix moral blame upon him.

The monstrous is further mystified, not just as a zombie, who has come by black magic
into a false and unnatural vitality, but also as a demon, a supernatural embodiment
of evil. The progression is thus from the wretched (alienated) to wretch (marginally
human) to monster (inhuman) to demon (antihuman). And howsoever the Creature is named
or names himself, as he will richly illustrate in the second volume (especially II:5:17
and II:7:7), so he becomes.

The theme of dejection is a significant component of "dark" Romanticism. The most
influential exploration of it in the canon of British Romanticism is that found in
"Dejection: An Ode" by Coleridge, whose "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" has already
figured in the structure of the novel (I:L2:6). Of the major Romantic poets (besides
Percy Bysshe Shelley), Coleridge seems to have had the greatest impact on Mary Shelley's
writing in Frankenstein.

In her revisions Mary Shelley seems intent to plant certain elements crucial to the
plot very early in its exposition. In this case Victor Frankenstein's resuscitation
in the short term is balanced by an awareness of the underlying debility of his physique.
Later on, both in his autobiographical account and, afterwards, when Walton resumes
the narrative, he will manifest symptoms that a nineteenth-century reader would identify
with consumption—that is to say, tuberculosis.

Walton begins his journey to the pole almost at the dark of the year, an ominous sign.

Although there have been several deaths already confronted in the novel—those of Walton's
cousin (I:L1:4), of Caroline's father (I:1:5), and of Elizabeth's mother (I:1:7)—this
is the first that is not simply reported, but is enacted before the reader. That Caroline's
death is a consequence of selfless nurture suggests that this is an expectation of
women that is not without danger. Mary Shelley could not have failed to recognize
that, in focusing so sharply on the death of Caroline Frankenstein as being brought
on by her stepdaughter, she was in some sense rehearsing the death of her own mother
Mary Wollstonecraft following her birth. Critics have likewise traced the novel's
twin emphases on responsibility and guilt to this crucial biographical detail.