1301

  • I had had now neglected my promise for some time Since Victor and Clerval had not left London until the end of March, and as they
    had "passed a considerable period at Oxford" and "two months in Cumberland and Westmoreland,"
    not to mention the time spent in this lengthy journey northward, it should now be
    early in July, which is to say, almost a year after Victor's promise to his Creature.
    His pattern of attenuated delays throughout the novel is particularized in an earlier
    note.

    • 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.

    • 1296

  • my power is complete This curious phrase recalls us to the last colloquy between Victor and his Creature
    after the destruction of Victor's second being. There, asserting his mastery over
    Victor, the Creature claims that he will attain this "power" (III:3:11), which is
    that of reducing Victor to the state of utter wretchedness he has now reached.

    • 1262

  • my wretchedness Once again, the Creature reverses Victor's assignment of "wretchedness," affirming
    that it is the state he is forced to inhabit, not the condition he wishes to perpetrate
    on human society.

    • 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.

    • 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).

    • 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.

    • 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.
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