For the second time (see I:2:8 and note), Mary Shelley intrudes a white steeple into
a town without one, now adding a clock for good measure. However laudable the narrative
consistency, there is no such building in Ingolstadt.

Novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth century reveal many instances of the antipathy
of a second wife to the children of an earlier marriage: it is the impulse behind
the Cinderella story. More to the point is the fact that Mary Shelley was brought
up by a stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin, for whom she felt little affection.

The Greek philosopher Zeno founded the school of Stoics, which, as the reference to
Cato indicates, lasted well into Roman times.

Mary Shelley comments at length on the "terrific" storms she witnessed in the environs
of Geneva, including one that so illuminated the lake, in her letter of 1 June 1816.
Byron likewise includes a description of such a night-time storm in Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage, Canto 3, stanzas 92-95.

In the opening decade of the eighteenth century Czar Peter the Great decided to build
a new capital city for imperial Russia and picked for his site the swampy estuary
of the Neva River where it flowed into the Baltic Sea. There he built the city named
after his patron saint, officially establishing it as his capital in 1712. The extraordinary
dimensions of this achievement were still retailed with awe by the end of the century
when the 4th edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1797) dwelt at length on the
founding of St. Petersburg. Only in the second half of the century, however, did it
achieve the grandiose dimensions we now associate with the city. The major impetus
to its development was the building of the Winter Palace, the official home of the
Czars of Russia, begun by Peter III in 1754. In a palace coup that seems to have been
universally praised, the Czar's wife Catherine seized power from Peter III in 1762,
inaugurating the development of Russia into a modern and formidable nation. German
by birth, Catherine aspired to make her country not just a major European political
power but, more, one of its principal cultural centers. In her thirty-four years on
the imperial throne she amassed an extraordinary collection of art to supplement and
eventually supplant the Dutch-Flemish collection of Peter the Great: beginning in
1764. She had the fancifully named but grandly outfitted Hermitage built to house
these treasures. Likewise, she gathered a major library of over 30,000 books, whose
crowning glory was the acquisition of the entire library of Voltaire after his death
in 1778. In his later years he had been a frequent correspondent with Catherine, as
was Denis Diderot, the leading figure in creating for the French Enlightenment a compendium
of all that was known, the Encyclopédie. Diderot became her chief advisor on the acquisition
of art and in 1774 was himself persuaded to remove to St. Petersburg where he had
the singular duty of providing Catherine with an hour of learned conversation every
afternoon. Autocrat that she was, by the end of her life in 1796 Catherine had repented
of her patronage of the leading philosophical forces that had spawned the French Revolution.

That the novel is first set in St. Petersburg may be, then, not a mere curiosity,
but a careful signal of its intellectual and cultural dimensions. Through it the reader
of Mary Shelley's novel is to understand that it begins intellectually where it stands
geographically, in the shadow of Catherine's enlightenment vision of a modernized
culture. Robert Walton's thrilling sense of scientific discovery, detailed throughout
this first letter, and Victor Frankenstein's endeavor to create a new being both share
that ambience. The open question subtly articulated by this initial postmark is whether
the dream of the new city or of the new human can alter the conditions that have determined
the old. Will the novel, like Catherine, repudiate the world it brings forth?

Dignity in this case signifies rank. But it is uncertain exactly how to construe what
this rank might be. It could be that Walton was offered the position of second mate.
But, depending on the size of the ship, it could have been an even more imposing rank
than that. In the terms Walton will employ about his own command in the ensuing letter,
the second dignity would be, after the captain's lieutenant, the master of the ship
(I:L2:3).

The terms of Walton's education are provided in I:L2:2, where he laments his neglect
of systematic preparation in his youth. It will remain to be seen in the course of
the novel whether Victor Frankenstein's more formal education served him better than
did Walton's autodidacticism.

The question of self-education would have resonated strongly in the Shelley household.
Mary Shelley did not attend school and was largely educated by her father, who in
his early years had tried to read everything that was written and therefore was presumably
qualified in the highest terms to direct his daughter's intellectual development.
Though her husband attended the finest of preparatory schools, Syon House and Eton
College, P. B. Shelley was expelled from Oxford in his second term at the university
and thereafter amassed his considerable learning on his own. Mary, it should be stressed,
embarked on a similar reading program as her husband and, if still only eighteen when
she began Frankenstein was, by the standards of woman's education in her day, prodigiously
learned.

The description of Elizabeth, needless to say, is taken from stock; but it is likewise
defining of her later personality. For the many critics troubled by the way women
are portrayed in this novel, her stereotypical femininity, composed of a sweet temper
and refined imaginativeness, gives her no role to play in a male-dominated culture
but that of a potential victim of its dynamics.

Victor's faith rests on nothing more than intuition. Indeed, he actually has fewer
facts to go on than the circumstantial evidence that indicts Justine.

As with other additions made by Mary Shelley in the early pages of her novel, this
renders more explicit the extent to which Victor Frankenstein and Robert Walton share
much the same passion for knowledge. Their seeming differences are really superficial,
accounted for by the terrible cost experience has wrought on Victor and the sheltered
innocence in which Walton has been protected. Mary Shelley here likewise strengthens
her plot line, giving Victor Frankenstein a strong reason for bestowing the terrible
moral of his autobiography upon the enthusiastic explorer, allowing him, too, to be
the first to indicate that he might be mad. By questioning Walton's sanity as well,
he opens up large problems of reliability that the subsequent narrative will exploit.