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.

Ortelius' map of the world in 1570 marked a clear passage from west to east across
the top of Siberia. Although the northern bourdaries of Siberia have been mapped with
certainty, a perpetual icefield blocks the northeast passage to the Bering Sea. On
this map the White Sea and its port Archangelsk are located at the far left.

A reference to Charles Lamb's haunting personal poem about nostalgia for an unreachable
past and the harsh costs of experience, "The Old Familiar Faces" (1798). Lamb was
a close friend and coadjutor of Mary Shelley's father William Godwin: the details
of his poem recall his mother's murder and Lamb's sense of distance from various friends,
probably Charles Lloyd in the first reference and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the second.

Where are they gone, the old familiar faces?

I had a mother, but she died, and left me,
Died prematurely in a day of horrors—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I loved a Love once, fairest among women.
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man:
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.

Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood.
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces—

How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

Walton refers to his second letter, specifically I:L2:4.

The hero of Ariosto's Renaissance epic-romance, Orlando Furioso (1516-32). Dramatic
adaptations from this work were common in the Renaissance: Robert Greene's was revived
on a number of occasions. By Mary Shelley's time the work had become a classic, and,
as translated by John Hoole in 1783, was frequently republished in a full English
version.

In the novel's structuring it is not coincidental that Walton is an orphan and, at
this point in his life, so is Victor Frankenstein. Victor's Creature, in a related
sense, will be a virtual orphan from the moment of his coming to life.

Doubtless, Alphonse Frankenstein is right. At the same time, the stern condescension
of this parting admonition is suggestive of the distance between father and son that
continually surfaces in the novel.

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).

The doppelgänger or double is a feature of gothic tales throughout the eighteenth
and nineteenth century. As a literary type, however, the double can have more than
sensational uses. Within a year of Frankenstein's publication, for instance, Percy
Bysshe Shelley incorporated the figure within the first act of Prometheus Unbound,
where the Earth tells Prometheus of a second realm of potentiality that shadows the
actual world:

     Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
-- I.191-95

Mary Shelley, too, is concerned with potentiality, both its development and its thwarting,
which she pursues on a number of different levels in this novel, projecting the doubling
on moral and psychological, but also on mythic and theological, grounds. Up to this
point in the novel the theme of doubling has been only hinted at in the intensities
of male friendship we have encountered. Here, in directly introducing doubling as
a psychological condition, her basic stress is on the self-division and resulting
self-destructiveness that, we may now begin to realize, is the driving force behind
the arctic pursuit that initiates Victor's narrative.

Mary Shelley quotes from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III, stanza 62,
written the same summer, 1816, in which she began Frankenstein.

. . . Above me are the Alps,
The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls,
Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps,
And throned Eternity in icy halls
Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls
The avalanche—the thunderbolt of snow!
All that expands the spirit, yet appals,
Gather around these summits, as to show
How Earth may pierce to Heaven, yet leave vain man below.
-- III.590-98