Physiognomy is a pseudoscientific discipline that purports to find correspondences
between psychological attributes and physical features of the head, face, and body.
Victor has every reason to use the term, since his medieval mentor Albertus Magnus
wrote extensively about physiognomy and the mixture of humors in the body and mind.
As Mary Shelley would have been well aware, this discipline was resurrected in the
later eighteenth century by a countryman of Victor Frankenstein's, Johann Kaspar Lavater
(11 November 1741 - 2 January 1801), a resident of Zurich. His Essays on Physiognomy
(1775-1778; translated into English in 1789-1798) made him world-famous, inspiring
many a quack psychologist of his day, and many further days across the ensuing century.
More seriously relevant for the context of Frankenstein might be the title of an earlier
work of Lavater's, Geheimes Tagebuch von einem Beobachter seiner selbst (1772-73),
which was translated into English in 1795 under the title Secret Journal of a Self-Observer.

Compare I:2:12 and note and I:6:41 and note.

The vagueness of this reference, in contrast to the pointed citation of Erasmus Darwin,
perhaps suggests that Percy Bysshe Shelley, who at this point had only rudimentary
German, is operating here from report rather than personal experience.

The chief figure among relevant German scientists would appear to be Johann Wilhelm
Ritter (1776-1810), who conducted extensive experiments in galvanism. Other commentators
have at various times suggested J. F. Blumenbach, Friedrich Tiedemann, Goethe, Schelling,
and Lorenz Oken.

Elizabeth's conformity to her female lot, staying in Geneva rather than traveling
to Ingolstadt to care for Victor, spreading contentment around her, being content
herself with "trifling occupations," has been a source of irritation to many critics
who, from this and similar evidence, see the novel as enforcing a mindless domesticity
as the only alternative to the overreaching of the male protagonists. Yet, to take
this passage at face value as the expression not of Elizabeth but of Mary Shelley,
is not really defensible as a critical reading. Elizabeth's blandness is an aspect
of her character. Her satisfaction with, broadly speaking, the beautiful is certainly
an aspect of the female role in this period, but in no way does her author resemble
her in this narrow predeliction. Nor does the novel unquestionably reinforce it. After
all, the first direct view we as readers have had of this serene landscape was as
a violent thunderstorm burst from over the Jura mountains (I:1:22). When in the second
volume Victor enters into, instead of gazing upon, this world of "snow-clad mountains,"
it will be to confront the sublime directly.

Plain, in contrast to fancy, work consisted of hemming and other essential tasks of
household sewing. Mary Wollstonecraft discusses the place of plain-work in girls'
education in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 12.24.

Plainpalais is a promenade to the south of the city of Geneva.

A statue of Rousseau stands in the square. During the Geneva Revolution of 1792-1795,
Geneva's syndics were killed in an uprising in Plainpalais. Mary Shelley recounts
this incident in A History of a Six Weeks' Tour, Letter II:

To the south of the town is the promenade of the Genevese, a grassy plain planted
with a few trees, and called Plainpalais. Here a small obelisk is erected to the glory
of Rousseau, and here (such is the mutability of human life) the magistrates, the
successors of those who exiled him from his native country, were shot by the populace
during that revolution, which his writings mainly contributed to mature, and which,
notwithstanding the temporary bloodshed and injustice with which it was polluted,
has produced enduring benefits to mankind, which all the chicanery of statesmen, nor
even the great conspiracy of kings, can entirely render vain. From respect to the
memory of their predecessors, none of the present magistrates ever walk in Plainpalais.

Caroline wove strands of straw together to be used in basket-weaving and in the manufacture
of articles of clothing like hats or such accessories as purses.

Caius Plinius Secundus, CE 23-79, Roman naturalist.

Pliny the Elder was the author of Historia naturalis, the principal compendium of
scientific knowledge for the original Augustan age, a work to which Percy Bysshe Shelley
was introduced at Eton. He claimed there to have, for the most part, translated the
encyclopedic work on metallurgy, pharmacology, zoology, anthropology, and psychology
into English.

The Natural History is the only one of Pliny's seven writings to survive antiquity
entire. That work in thirty-seven books was an attempt to survey all natural knowledge
systematically in an unadorned style, and his methodical approach and careful regard
for citation make it a model of ancient scientific research, in spite of Pliny's superstitious
beliefs in magic. Book 1 is an introduction to the entire work. Book 2 addresses cosmology
and astronomy; books 3 through 6 are on geography. The next thirteen books treat biology:
zoology in books 7 through 11, botany in books 12 through 19. Books 20 through 22
address medicine; books 23 through 37 are concerned with metals, minerals, and precious
stones.

Pliny's authority was comparable to Aristotle's throughout the Middle Ages; only in
1492 did he come under attack in Niccolò Leoniceno's catalogue of his errors. From
then on its influence waned by degrees, and few regarded it seriously as science after
the end of the seventeenth century.

Pliny died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in CE 79, famously described in letters
by his nephew.

Mary Shelley deliberately joins the obsessiveness of artistic creation to that of
scientific pursuit. Although some commentators have assumed an implicit critique of
Percy Bysshe Shelley, he follows a similar path in "Alastor" (published in 1816).
Compare—

The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to
           heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

(Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, V.i.7-22)

John William Polidori (7 September 1795-24 August 1821) was the son of Gaetano Polidori,
a Tuscan man of letters and at one point secretary to the dramatist Vittorio Alfieri,
who had emigrated to England where he married a Miss Pierce and settled in London
as a teacher of Italian. John was educated at Ampleforth, Yorkshire -- a Roman Catholic
school -- and subsequently matriculated at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied
medicine, writing a dissertation -- Dissertatio medica inauguralis, quaedam de morbo,
oneirodynia dicto, complectens ...  -- on the highly romantic subject of sleep-walking
and receiving his medical degree at the remarkably young age of 19. The next year,
still not yet legally an adult, he accompanied Lord Byron on his excursion to Geneva.
That Byron quickly tired of his protege's immaturity is well known, but Polidori was,
indeed, quite young and inexperienced to be in such company.

Polidori left Switzerland for Italy in September 1816, where he traveled for nearly
a year, returning to England the following spring, at which point he sought to practice
medicine in Norwich. But he was unhappy in his profession and thought, instead, of
turning to law. In the meantime, perhaps as his own response to the heady literary
summer he had passed on the continent, he began a short, but productive literary career.
His first work was an extension of his interest in psychology, An essay on the source
of positive pleasure (1818). The following year came a volume of poems -- Ximenes,
the wreath: and other poems -- the novel Ernestus Berchtold, and the short story,
"The Vampyre," which, unfortunately, was passed off as the production of Lord Byron
when it was published in the New Monthly Magazine. When he found the work being published
under a separate imprint, Polidori went to some lengths to claim the work as his own,
but the scandal of imposture dogged him thereafter. His final work, Sketches Illustrative
of the Manners and Costumes of France, Switzerland, and Italy, was published in 1821
under the pseudonym of Richard Bridgens. That August, purportedly as the result of
contracting a gambling debt he could not honor, he committed suicide by drinking prussic
acid. He was 25 years old.

This is the exact denotation of the Greek roots that form the word "catastrophe,"
used by Victor to describe his initial reaction upon imparting life to the Creature
(I:4:2).