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London is situated far up the Thames from the entrance to the river on the Kent coast.
Victor notes the principal landmarks the travelers pass enroute.
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Main text here.
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of Elizabeth, it is clear to any reader that he is actually weeping for himself. His
giving in at last to his feelings is thus ironized, for rather than opening him to
a renewal of his emotional life, his convulsive weeping results from a maudlin theatrical
representation of his own death that wholly mistakes the threat to his future wife.
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That his rekindled joy will soon be transformed into the despair his isolation in
the boat had prefigured is indicative of the irony in which, from the point in which
he spurned his Creature's desire for sympathetic rapport, he finds himself invested.
Later, hope will come to him in a "burning gush" of ironically inverted expectation
(III:7:22).
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By the eighteenth century the Tower of London had been reduced to a tourist attraction,
housing the crown jewels, the royal armor modelled by full-size wooden figures, and
a menagerie dominated by the great cats.
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himself. At the age of twenty-two she should not be so beyond her prime. Clearly,
worry over the last two years has taken its toll. Although Mary Shelley maintains
her undeviating focus on Victor, this momentary description illuminates the cost of
his obsession and detachment from Elizabeth on her state of mind and body. This is
as close to an inner life as Elizabeth ever manifests.
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chances" to seem beyond the ordinary expectations of causality, whether in a human
or a novelistic sphere. Such uncanny events are, however, a customary feature of the
gothic novel, and it is at points like this that one feels that the author fully recognizes
the heritage she is exploiting.
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The idea here is that Victor would travel northeast to Basel on the confines of Switzerland,
thence follow the Rhine to Strasbourg, where he would be met by Clerval who, suspending
his course of studies at the University of Ingolstadt, would have travelled west across
Germany to join him. The two would then proceed north by boat through Germany into
Holland where the Rhine empties into the North Sea just beyond Rotterdam. This is
essentially the return route followed by Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley in their 1814
excursion memorialized in A History of a Six Weeks' Tour.
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In the eighteenth century the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, after St. Peter's in Rome
the largest structure in the world, dominated the London cityscape.
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over the conflicting claims of domestic retreat and aspiring self-assertion, which
are in turn poles that themselves comprise a dialectical field over which Romanticism
continually expresses much ambivalence. The particular terms of Victor's last utterance
have a somewhat chilling effect: at what, a reader may well wonder, does Victor contemplate
another's success? If in the realm in which he has failed, assuming the role of God,
we may envision from Victor's experience a greater, even a catastrophic, failure.
Even as he moves linguistically to open up possibility, the lingering effects of his
example resist his optimism.