This edition was first designed and marked up in XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS by Joseph Byrne at the University of Maryland. Additional markup assistance was contributed by Lisa Marie Rhody, David Rettenmaier, and Mike Quilligan. Finally, in 2009, David, Mike, and Laura Mandell TEI-encoded the edition for the sake of preserving it and making it accessible through NINES. The present design features a detail from Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani (1747) by Bernhard Siegfried Albinus and engraved by Jan Wandelaar.
1410
a similar "nervous fever" that, after the creation of his being, confined him for
months (see I:4:17 and note). Mary Shelley emphasizes how severely debilitated his
physical state has become as a result of the acute psychological stress under which
he has been laboring and from which no amount of diversion can seem to liberate him.
1412
of his case, both for the magistrate and for Mary Shelley's readers. We cannot help
recognizing here that the end of a novel is to make fiction appear like truth. That
Victor in the end does not gain the credence of his judge does, of course, vindicate
his earlier reticence; but it also in some sense impinges on his reliability as a
witness. Does it also have a destabilizing effect on the larger narrative of which
it is a microcosm?
1415
white wines of Germany frequently designated as "Rhine wines." Mary Godwin, Claire
Clairmont, and Percy Bysshe Shelley descended the Rhine at this same time of year
in 1814, and this description is colored by the experiences Mary recorded in A History
of a Six Weeks' Tour.
1414
replicates the gesture in which he first appeared before Victor's eyes, in his bedroom
in Ingolstadt (I:4:3). The reaction of Walton to his monstrous presence is in stark
contrast to that evinced on that previous occasion by his creator.
1413
(I:7:30), Victor's innate sense of decency is evoked to complicate our recognitions:
in this particular case, that his own medical carelessness was implicit in his creation
of a being with monstrous features who could not function within a conventional social
format (I:3:7) and that his uncaring brutality has been recently marked in the wanton
destruction of the second creature on whom he had been working in the preceding chapter
(III:3:4).
1411
at this point in the discourse, as a justification for the blindness with which he
worried so exclusively about himself, leaving Elizabeth unprotected. But it falls
in line as well with his reiterated invocation of destiny during this narration to
Walton, a rhetorical ploy by which, whether or not it is his explicit intention, he
exonerates himself of acknowledged responsiblity for the events his actions produce.
1419
1416
life after the execution of Justine Moritz (II:1:1).
1420
journey had begun from Geneva, a period the 1831 text identifies as "the latter end
of September." (There is a month's disparity between the two texts on this point—see
III:1 in 1818 and 1831). In her revision of the novel Mary Shelley, desiring to underpin
the professional engagement of Henry Clerval, quietly presses home the irony that
he, who once indolently indulged himself in imitating eastern poetry (see I:6:14)
now has, in contrast to Victor, a firm sense of personal mission and a commitment
to the future. Of course, in Ingolstadt at one point Victor was himself posssessed
of both traits.