1151

  • a soul more in harmony with man This is very much in the spirit with which Byron represents the Rhine in Childe Harold's
    Pilgrimage, Canto 3, stanza 45ff.: see particularly his summary in stanzas 59-61.
    Clerval prefers the beautiful, with its humanistic overtones, to the sublime with
    its otherworldly and supernatural associations. It is indicative that he centers his
    descriptions of the landscape upon human images—the priest and his mistress, grape-pickers
    among the vines—who give historical or local significance to its details.

    • 1147

  • the great road The road between London and Edinburgh had in the eighteenth century been improved
    to the equivalent of a modern superhighway, allowing a speedy transit to both mail
    and passengers and the commercial consolidation of the "United Kingdom."

    • 1157

  • A high destiny This final sentence of Victor's retrospective memoir ends in a tone of great pathos
    stemming from the most innocuous of verbs: "seemed." Reversing the assurance with
    which the paragraph began, here Victor comes close to acknowledging that all his talk
    of and even reliance on a sense of special destiny is empty of signification. If there
    is no actual destiny, then there is also no particular meaning to what he has done
    that can exonerate his actions or the path of destruction left in their wake.

    • 1156

  • what remains of my hideous narration The sharp suspension of narrative line here coincides with a self-regarding emphasis
    on story-telling of a sort that we have witnessed earlier (I:L4:30, I:3:13). Such
    a mirroring of the function of narrative will become a dominant motif in the late
    pages of the novel. This act of doubling seems to entail another, identifying the
    creation that is Victor's tale with his earlier creation, the being who five paragraphs
    earlier had presented to his sight "a figure the most hideous and deformed" (III:6:10).

    • 1153

  • my heart . . . escape By this time in his experience Victor might have learned to distrust such a state
    of self-induced euphoria. It is literally the case that every time he indulges himself
    in such a light-headed sense that he has escaped his "destiny," he is suddenly caught
    up short by a new misfortune. (See I:5:17 and II:2:1).

    • 1159

  • a hired nurse Up to this point in the novel nursing has been the domain of friends and family,
    and the willingness to engage in it has been the mark of selfless affection and respect.
    We recall that Victor's mother Caroline dies from the effects of nursing Elizabeth
    Lavenza through an adolescent attack of scarlet fever (I:2:2) and that Justine Moritz,
    in her turn, contracts the disease from attending on Caroline Frankenstein and herself
    falls "very ill" (I:5:5) as a result. Although not vulnerable to consequences so life-threatening,
    Henry Clerval acts as Victor's "only nurse" during the months-long nervous fever that
    incapacitates him after the Creature is brought to life (I:4:17).

    • 1160

  • Holyhead

    Holyhead, on the island of Angelsey, which lies off the northwest coast of Wales,
    in the eighteenth century had developed into the major port linking Ireland and the
    British Isles. It was the closest landing place to Dublin, with some 100 kilometers
    of the Irish Sea intervening. Since, however, Anglesey was an island, passengers still
    had to negotiate the treacherous Menai Strait linking it to the mainland. In 1810
    Thomas Telford was commissioned at this site to build the first suspension bridge
    in the world as part of a modernization of the coach road to Holyhead.

    Mary Shelley never traced this itinerary, but Percy did, both going to and returning
    from his Dublin adventure via Holyhead in 1812. Mary Wollstonecraft had also taken
    this route when she took up her post as governess in the Irish seat of Lord and Lady
    Kingsborough in 1786.

    • 1158

  • line of high land The north coast of Ireland near Scotland is among the most formidable in the British
    Isles, with high cliffs and a treacherous series of great rocks called the Giant's
    Causeway upthrust from the sea. At this time, as Mary Shelley's exposition indicates,
    the basic livelihood for the inhabitants was earned from these dangerous waters.

    • 1155

  • the cursed and hellish monster The rhetorical overload here may be considered an appropriate expression of what
    has become as well for Victor a totalized psychological overload. The "rage" that
    immediately chokes off his speech is its manifestation.

    • 1154

  • my heart bounded within me Here the conventional associations of erotic passion intrude upon the diction, as
    the closing of Creator and Creature appears to near its consummation.
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