b. In invidious use: A schemer; one who lives by his wits; a promoter of bubble companies;
a speculator, a cheat.

Samuel Johnson is, if anything, less evenhanded in the double definition of "projector"
contained in his 1755 Dictionary: 1. One who forms schemes or designs.

2. One who forms wild impracticable schemes.

Perhaps the most famous literary account of projectors is that offered by Jonathan
Swift in Gulliver's tour through the Grand Academy of Lagado (Gulliver's Travels,
III.5), a think-tank populated by inventors of perfectly useless or insane conceptions
and contraptions.

Victor Frankenstein's desire to separate himself from madmen and hacks is thus easily
justifiable, whether we construe it in accord with his ambition or his achievement.
Yet, the tone of condescension in his phrasing is expressive of an arrogance and self-approbation
that verges on universal contempt. Its natural complement in a social dimension would
be a hierarchical rigidity denominated according to class, and in a psychological
field the prejudice we customarily comprehend under the rubric of racism. In other
words, there is an easy shift from this self-esteem to the denigration of the Other
expressed by Victor's continual demonization of his Creature.

Portsmouth was at this time the principal commercial port of the south of England,
maintaining a constant traffic between it and France. For a Londoner the normal crossing
would have been via Kent, from Dover to Calais; but embarkation from Portsmouth would
have been preferable for voyagers coming, like Alphonse and Victor, from the west
of England.

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.

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.

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.