Johnson in his 1755 Dictionary defines a charnel house as "The place under churches
where the bones of the dead are reposited" and a vault as simply "a repository for
the dead." By the latter Victor Frankenstein probably means to distinguish a mausoleum.
Body-snatching or grave-robbing, a means of supplying cadavers for medical experiments
and instruction, was a source of great anxiety in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
It was, of course, a criminal activity.

This constitutes something of a misreading of the kinds of experiments Erasmus Darwin
recounts in the first of his Additional Notes—"Spontaneous Vitality of Microscopic
Animals"—appended to The Temple of Nature. Probably Mary Shelley is taking figuratively,
as a kind of macaroni, the literal meaning of "vermicelli," tiny worms—what Darwin
calls "microscopic animalcules." Still, although she humorously exaggerates the kind
of spontaneous generation that drew scientific speculation in the early years of the
nineteenth century, it is important to recognize how seriously such experiments were
taken. Here, for instance, is the initial sentence of Darwin's "Conclusion":

{8} There is therefore no absurdity in believing that the most simple animals and
vegetables may be produced by the congress of the parts of decomposing organic matter,
without what can properly be termed generation, as the genus did not previously exist;
which accounts for the endless varieties, as well as for the immense numbers of microscopic
animals.

Percy Bysshe Shelley also cites Erasmus Darwin in the first sentence of his Preface
(I:Pref:1) to the 1818 edition.

Wooden-hulled ships before the age of steam were vulnerable to innumerable hazards
in the arctic and, given the length of such expeditions, required ample storage space
for provisions.

From Chapter 20 of Oliver Goldsmith's novel (1766), where Parson Primrose's son George
recounts his misadventures across the continent of Europe.

Walton's science here is demonstrably false, particularly in respect to the time in
which he writes his letter (mid-December), when at this latitude the sun is visible
for only seven hours of the day. At midsummer, of course, the phenomenon over which
he enthuses is true.

Or is he? As in the early chapters of Mary Shelley's careful revisions for the 1831
edition where we find her intent on accentuating the link between Victor's statements
and the exhausted, fanatic sufferer rescued by Walton's crew, this proviso may be
inserted to suggest the opposite of its import, that the man who utters it is, or
has been, mad. At the very least the statement raises the question of wherein the
truth lies, in scientific evidence or in psychological experience.

Although the emphasis here is on a Godwinian model of education, the implicit equality
and shared sense of responsibility carry political connotations as well. This is particularly
so within the democratic environment provided by Switzerland.

Accounts of explorers were frequently bound together and sold as sets. From Hakluyt's
Voyages (1589) until well into the nineteenth century these were a common genre of
publishing.

The "wondrous power" is magnetism. Mary Shelley, working within the accepted scientific
discourse of her time, in this second paragraph of her novel, is carefully establishing
a conceptual—the term in her time would have been "philosophical"—base for it in physics.
The key is provided by Percy Bysshe Shelley's citation, in the opening sentence of
the Preface (I:Pref:1), of Erasmus Darwin, to whom the reader may turn for further
elucidation of the scientific grounding of the novel.

This phrase recurs with frequency in the critical literature about the novel, partly
because it stands in such contrast to the almost divine attributes with which Victor
has up to now been honoring himself and his discovery. In the phrase there is not
only a sense of the irreducibly brute physical reality of what would have actually
constituted a butcher-shop but as well a decided undertone of self-loathing.