1174

  • ignorant This is a word with considerable resonance by this point in the novel. Victor has
    carefully kept Walton ignorant of the process by which he created life, and, moreover,
    excoriates him when he suspects Walton of wanting to penetrate his secret (III:Walton:3).
    He dies clearly wishing that he had himself remained in a state of innocent ignorance.
    Although it is likely that, upon reflection, Walton will broaden the range under which
    he construes knowledge to embrace a moral education, here he limits its conception
    wholly to scientific discovery. In his dejection he seems to have gone out of his
    way to miss the point of Victor Frankenstein's narration, which is itself truly a
    mark of his ignorance.

    • 1178

  • my imagination was vivid Victor's remembrance alters the emphasis of his earlier account, which contrasted
    his own interest in facticity with Elizabeth's (and Henry Clerval's) delight in the
    imagination (I:1:9). However much he may be inflating the record here, the reader
    cannot but be aware of the ambivalence about the nature of the imagination expressed
    in these lines. That Victor once "trod heaven in [his] thoughts" cannot mitigate the
    hellish misery to which he has now sunk, nor even at that earlier point in his remembrance
    could it guarantee that the outcome of such an introverted elation would have an essential
    value. The imagination, in this analysis, might be necessary for great achievement,
    but by itself it is by no means sufficient, being merely an instrument, and, as such,
    easily capable of indulging a self-absorbed solipsism.

    • 1179

  • immersed in a solitude This statement makes very clear that, for Victor, solitude carries psychological
    consequences of considerable and dangerous weight. From this point on for many months,
    with only the briefest exceptions, Victor will be trapped in a kind of solitary confinement.
    What begins as a figurative condition, indeed, will become an actual physical fact.

    • 1177

  • the strangest tale that ever imagination formed There may be an element of self-puffery by Mary Shelley in this statement, yet it
    is surprisingly prescient in its sense of the cultural impact her novel was to have.
    Moreover, it is entirely consistent with the way both she and her husband represented
    the work to its public. Percy Bysshe Shelley, writing the Preface to the original
    edition of Frankenstein, distanced this novel from any attempt at "merely weaving
    a series of supernatural terrors," insisting on its adherence to the higher aims of
    the "imagination." Similarly, Mary Shelley, in writing the Introduction to the third
    edition, stresses how in its initial conception her "imagination, unbidden, possessed
    and guided" her. That all these statements are congruent with one another and with
    an exalted notion of the Romantic imagination, however, cannot alter the ironic context
    in which this particular phrase is uttered. In the previous paragraph we have been
    observing Victor Frankenstein, who was once swept along by his imagination to create
    a deformed and alienated being, revising with soberly rational care his account of
    that act and its consequences. The actual context for this phrase in the novel would
    thus appear to offset its perhaps expected paean to the imagination.

    • 1176

  • imagination was dreadful

    This is a further example of the dark tones in which the Romantic imagination is painted
    in this novel, resembling earlier cases where an isolated mind is confronted with
    a radical uncertainty. For earlier instances pertaining to Victor, see I:4:18 and
    note; II:1:8 and note; for a similar construction on the part of the Creature, see
    II:4:17 and note.

    • 1175

  • I had been conversing with several persons in the island The episode remembered by Victor is not noted in the previous chapter. There, the
    events of the night before Victor departed "[b]etween two and three in the morning"
    (III:3:24) are wholly unremarked. Clerval's body was discovered approximately four
    hours earlier, some time after 10 o'clock.

    • 1152

  • Havre Le Havre is a principal seaport of Normandy: Mary, Shelley, and Claire Clairmont
    embarked for England from Le Havre when they returned from Geneva in September 1816
    . The town would have held more than a tourist's interest for Mary. Her mother Mary
    Wollstonecraft had moved to Le Havre to escape the Terror of 1794: there she wrote
    her Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution
    and gave birth to her daughter Fanny Imlay, Mary's half-sister, in May of that year.

    In the 1831 revision Mary Shelley has Victor and his father sail directly from Dublin
    to Le Havre, avoiding the lengthy coach journey across England in the 1818 novel.
    This, perhaps, reflects a more sophisticated sense of the historical geography of
    the British Isles gained after her return to England in 1823. Over many centuries
    Ireland had maintained a commercial and cultural exchange with France that flourished
    independently from the frames of reference in which the British viewed the power that
    was increasingly its major antagonist. Napoleon's attempt to capitalize on the Wolfe
    Tone rebellion of 1798 underscored the dangers implicit in Ireland's independent foreign
    relations, leading directly to the Act of Union of 1801 in which Ireland was assimilated
    to the British crown.

    • 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.

    • 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.
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