Seasonal adjustments are very carefully marked in the novel, partly as a way of keeping
its several narratives joined in the reader's mind. In this case, we will recall Victor's
phrasing when we revert to the same moment in time at a later point (II:4:19) in the
novel.

Mary Shelley, her half-sister Claire Clairmont, and Percy had arrived in Sécheron
by night on 3 May 1816 and took up lodgings at the Hotel d'Angleterre where they remained
for more than a month before moving to the opposite side of the Lake at Cologny. She
noted in a letter of 1 June (published in The History of a Six Weeks' Tour as Letter
II) that Geneva "is surrounded by a wall, the three gates of which are shut exactly
at ten o'clock, when no bribery (as in France) can open them."

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).

This language resonates beyond the fictional world of this novel and links in complex
ways with the concerns of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who likewise focuses on this theme
in "Alastor" (lines 20-23, 75-82, and 116-28), where both the narrator and the Poet
whose story he tells are obsessed with uncovering secret lore; in the "Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty," stanza 5, where Shelley recounts his own youthful investment in the supernatural;
and in "Mont Blanc," esp. ll. 139-41, where the mountain itself is represented as
holding secrets the poet would penetrate. "Alastor" was published in March of 1816,
and the other two poems were written that summer. In addition, the theme is continually
sounded in The Revolt of Islam, the long narrative poem he composed while Mary Shelley
was simultaneously writing Frankenstein: (see esp. Canto II, sts. 11-12, 20; Canto
IV, sts. 3, 6-8, 12). There Shelley gives a strong political tilt to the notion of
suppressed knowledge.

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.

Justine is orphaned pointedly about the same time (the previous November) that Victor
Frankenstein gives life to his Creature, who is, like Justine, an unwanted dependant.
Unlike every other character in the novel, however, the Creature is cut adrift from
family protection not by death, but by a lack of human responsibility for his nurture.
Born in abnormal circumstances, he is without family, wholly unaccommodated in an
alien world. Where Alphonse Frankenstein virtually adopts Justine, his son rejects
the Creature he has fashioned.