This additional blindness removes all doubt that Victor himself, at the very least,
sees a moral flaw in his having spurned his family. In essence, to ignore one's loved
ones is to break one's basic ties with the natural.

Although it dates from June 1818, and thus postdates the publication of the first
edition of Frankenstein by several months, Percy Bysshe Shelley's fragment of an essay
"On Life" has a passage that may shed light on Mary Shelley's own attitude to her
adolescent student's disenchantment with a philosophical discipline that deconstructs
rather than creates:

Philosophy, impatient as it may be to build, has much work yet remaining as pioneer*
for the overgrowth of ages. It makes one step towards this object; it destroys error,
and the roots of error. It leaves, what is too often the duty of the reformer in political
and ethical questions to leave, a vacancy.# It reduces the mind to that freedom in
which it would have acted, but for the misuse of words and signs, the instruments
of its own creation. —By signs, I would be understood in a wide sense, including what
is properly meant by that term, and what I peculiarly mean. In this latter sense almost
all familiar objects are signs, standing not for themselves but for others, in their
capacity of suggesting one thought, which shall lead to a train of thoughts. —Our
whole life is thus an education of error. (Reiman-Powers, eds., Shelley's Poetry and
Prose, p. 477)

*advance guard.

#see I:1:10, and note.

Justine in her honesty unwittingly testifies against herself. Yet such a detail, so
indicative of her candor, could have easily weighed in her favor in a less hostile
courtroom environment.

Mary Shelley here suggestively reveals that Victor's self-education involves no sense
of social responsibility for the knowledge he might attain. Victor's withdrawal from
Elizabeth and barring of Clerval from his confidence also initiates a pattern of being
secretive about that knowledge, whether it is in the construction of the Creature
(I:3:10) or the withholding of evidence from a court examining a murder (I:7:1). That
he has conducted his entire life without candor will increasingly be seen to have
implications for the veracity of the narrative, since, after such a pattern of evasion
becomes clear, the reader might well begin to wonder why we should credit what he
says in the present instance as the unvarnished truth.

In contrast to the shared grief and affection of Elizabeth and Justine, Victor has
immured himself in a barricaded isolation, unable to attract sympathy and, through
his lack of candor, unable also truly to offer it.

The details of this paragraph are all intended to be ugly and repulsive to the reader,
but this quick reference has a particular force to it, reminding us that the Shelley
household was vegetarian. The torturing of animals in medical experimentation would
have been felt by Mary Shelley to be thoughtless cruelty. It is ironic, and clearly
not intentional on Victor Frankenstein's part, that his Creature turns out also to
be a vegetarian.

Victor's egocentric concentration on his own reaction is more than simply ungenerous:
it reveals a sense of class and gender superiority that is deeply troubling.

This unattractive portrait of Henry Clerval's father relies on common prejudices of
British society in the early nineteenth century. Trade was looked down upon as narrowing
the mind and depraving the soul. One can sense the disparagement as Johnson offers
two definitions for "trader" in his 1755 Dictionary:

1.One engaged in merchandise or commerce.
2.One long used in the methods of money getting; a practitioner.

The same tone insinuates itself into cognate definitions: Trade

1.Traffick; commerce; exchange of goods for other goods, or for money.
2.Occupation; particular employment whether manual or mercantile, distinguished from
the liberal arts or learned professions.
3. Instruments of any occupation.
4. Any employment not manual; habitual exercise.

To trade

1. To traffick; to deal; to hold commerce.
2. To act merely for money.
3. Having a trade wind.

It is easy to pass over this diction as simply an exaggeration brought on by the emotional
duress of this meeting. But if we take the language at its face value, it asserts
an uncanny oneness between Creator and Creature that will continue to reassert itself
through the subsequent course of the novel.

This seems to allude to Lord Byron (who is the unidentified figure in the following
parenthesis) and Percy Bysshe Shelley. John William Polidori, Byron's physician, also
wrote a tale, "The Vampyre," which he managed to have published under Byron's name
in the New Monthly Magazine of April 1819. His strained relations with Byron were
broken by this act.