1298

  • in a prison As the initial consequence of Victor's abandoning his Creature led to his brother's
    death and Justine's being cast into the Swiss prison where he visited her, the second
    wave of dark events is starkly complementary. Now his best friend has been murdered
    and he has himself experienced the alienating effects of imprisonment.

    • 1297

  • One paternal kind precaution

    Bearing in mind the previous paragraph's emphasis on Alphonse's fears for his son's
    mental stability, we may see this careful planning between father and fiancée as reflecting
    a shared concern that Victor not be left alone to indulge what they see as a tendency
    toward melancholy, or, in his own characterization, "lonely, maddening reflection."
    Even his seemingly innocent adjective here ("maddening") takes on added weight in
    the depiction of Clerval as a kind of chaperon to ensure the preservation of Victor's
    mental balance.

    • 1258

  • My letter was calm and affectionate A less calming letter could scarcely have been written to a fiancée who had not heard
    from her lover for the better part of two years. Perhaps, Mary Shelley writes with
    her tongue in her cheek, wishing to stress the strange air of unreality that has become
    habitual by now with Victor. His idea of "perfect confidence," after all, is to let
    on that he has a "dreadful" secret and then to require that Elizabeth not ask him
    a word about it. The irony is lost on him, though one assumes not on the reader. Unfortunately
    for Elizabeth, she, indeed, never questions him about his odd revelation.

    • 1263

  • Nature This is the only point in the 1818 edition where Nature is capitalized to give it
    a quasi-transcendental significance. By the 1831 edition this practice is extended
    (see I:2:10 or II:10:1 in that text).

    • 1266

  • new and dear objects of care will be born This statement carries a subtle resonance, reminding us that this was exactly the
    fear Victor entertained of his Creature if he were allowed a mate, except that his
    perspective on those "dear objects of care" was of "a race of devils [being] propagated
    upon the earth" (III:3:2 and note). Immersed as he is in irony, Victor does not notice
    the similarity between his state and that of his Creature.

    • 1265

  • its deadly weight yet hanging around my neck

    Although this language may sound proverbial, we are actually witness here to the actual
    occurrence of a cultural transformation into proverbial status. The reference is,
    once again, specifically to Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," where the dead
    albatross is hung around the Mariner's neck in the last stanza of Part 2, not to be
    removed until the end of Part 4. Although the overtone of Victor's comment is light,
    it does return us to the isolation of the far northern seas where this story is being
    told and where earlier Coleridge's poem was invoked for analogy by Walton (I:L2:6).
    It may also remind us of the morning after the Creature's endowment with life (I:4:7)
    when Victor's sense of being haunted first descends on him.

    • 1264

  • nearly a year had elapsed

    This would suggest that the date is in early August, since it was "in the latter end
    of August that [Victor] departed" (III:1:15) from Geneva.

    • 1269

  • O Night, and by the spirits that preside over thee In all conventional mythologies Night is a figure of discord and threat. As she appears
    in Book I of Spenser's Faerie Queene, she is represented as "griesly Night, with visage
    deadly sad" (I.5.172), testifying that "I the mother bee/ Of falshood" (I.5.240-41).
    The eldest of divinities, she has unimpeded access to the depths of Hell. In Paradise
    Lost Night dwells with Chaos in the "dark/ Illimitable ocean without bound" (II.891-92)
    from which God creates Hell. Whatever Victor thinks he is doing by solemnly invoking
    Night to aid him in his revenge, it is clear, by all traditional associations, that
    no good will come of it.

    The observant reader may recall that the Creature invoked figures associated with
    the daytime in swearing before Victor that, if he were given a partner, he would never
    trouble his maker again (see II:9:17).

    • 1267

  • the new town The area to the north of the old town, between the Castle and the Firth of Forth,
    was developed during the eighteenth century and rapidly became the center of the vital
    cultural and intellectual life of the "Scottish Enlightenment." When Percy Bysshe
    Shelley and his first wife Harriet eloped to Edinburgh at the end of August 1811,
    they took lodgings in George Street in New Town.

    • 1268

  • nicer eye Nice here bears the significance of sense 12a of the Oxford English Dictionary: "Entering
    minutely into details; attentive, close." Elizabeth's frankness and perspicuity are
    testified to earlier by Victor upon his return to Geneva after William's murder (see
    I:6:41).
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