Ingolstadt, Germany, lies on the Danube and Schutter Rivers, 45 miles north of Munich
and 30 miles south of Regensburg.

Records of this cultural and commercial center of Bavaria go back to the beginning
of the 9th century C.E. The city is surrounded by fourteenth-century walls, and is
distinguished by a ducal castle (1420), the Cathedral of Our Lady (1425-1500), the
Church of Maria de Victoria (1732-36). For centuries it was the seat of the Dukes
of Bavaria, who transferred to Munich only in 1800, leaving Ingolstadt a relatively
small provincial city (current population c. 90,000). The brief account in the 4th
edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1797), written before this event and roughly
contemporary with the timeframe of the novel, gives no hint of the town's impending
displacement.

A university was founded there in 1472, although it was moved to Landshut in 1800
and then to Munich in 1826. At the height of its importance in the Renaissance the
city and the university were a stronghold of Counter-Reformation orthodoxy.

In the eighteenth century an intellectual fervor of an opposite sort was centered
there, when a secret society, an offspin of the Masons self-styled the Illuminati,
was formed in Ingolstadt to consider the means to a revolutionary reconstruction of
European society. Although their actual effect was small, they constituted an easy
target for reactionary agitators who traced the debacle of the French Revolution to
this improbable source. The main purveyors of this reactionary propaganda were John
Playfair's Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe
(1797) and the Abbé Augustin Barruel's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du Jacobinisme
(1797). The latter volume was read by both Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814-1815.

These and other similar works were the basis for a novel, with a long episode set
in Bavaria and drawing upon the secret society of Illuminati, written by Thomas Jefferson
Hogg, Shelley's roommate at Oxford, Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff (1813). Shelley
wrote the notice of the novel that appeared in the Critical Review in December 1814.
It is thus impossible for Mary not to have been well aware of the political contexts
in which she inserts her youthful protagonist.

To disobey such an injunction, with its almost institutionalized cultural sanction,
is to commit a transgression of substance, preparing us for other instances of conflicting
goals between son and father—Victor and Alphonse Frankenstein, Felix De Lacey and
his blind father—on other narrative levels of the novel, as well as other, much greater
transgressions for the sake of knowledge. The fact that Walton is orphaned at a young
age introduces yet another common theme of the novel.

What Wordsworth calls the "correspondent breeze" (The Prelude, I.35), the dynamic
response of the human imagination to natural or divine inspiration, is a frequent
theme among the first generation of English Romantic poets (particularly Coleridge
and Wordsworth) and has been much discussed by critics (see, for example, M. H. Abrams,
"The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor"). Closer to home, the same correspondence
will become the motivating force in Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"
in 1819.

This phrase is inserted in so unobtrusive a manner as to pass almost without a reader's
comprehension of its drift. The unmistakeable suggestion, however, is that the course
of Victor's and his family's lives might have been altered if he and Clerval had been
candid about the depth and cause of his illness. Yet, Clerval is at no fault, since
he, too, is kept in the dark. Only Victor at this point could alter the narrative
logic he has set in motion: among its other aspects, his illness constitutes a deep
refuge from both reality and his responsibility for its nature.

As with many of her interpolations in 1831, Mary Shelley here seems intent on an early
establishment of a pattern that will reappear and become more intense in its significance
as the novel progresses. Such psychological turmoil will produce a state of nightmare
and half-sleep on the night after the Creature is created (I:5:3) and will reveal
itself in Volumes 2 and 3 by a chronic and, in the end, debilitating fever.

This is the second close male friendship in as many lines (see the note to "friend").
Since friendships reflect character in this novel, the intimacy Alphonse Frankenstein
feels for Beaufort (I:1:2) and the elder Clerval (I:2:5), both of whom share a sternness
of resolve and a narrow preoccupation with business success, may suggest a comparable
rigidity, or at least a stiffness and lack of flexibility, in Victor's father. Victor
will himself shortly note these traits in respect to how his father oversees his development
(I:1:16).

Beginning here, Victor portrays himself as having an instinctive interest in science
that will drive his entire existence, particularly once he arrives within a university
setting and can devote himself to scientific investigation (I:3:1).

Frankenstein refers gnomically to Henry Clerval, whom he will introduce, in this 1831
edition, at the beginning of the second chapter of his narrative (I:2:2).

Throughout the novel, with the exception of Victor's interview with his Creature in
Volume 2 (II:2:6), only the blind (II:7:16) or one who dissembles their condition
(III:WC:35) can remain unperturbed in the presence of the Creature.

Seemingly a proverbial expression, this phrase bears a strong resemblance to the Archangel
Raphael's injunction to Adam at the conclusion of his survey of God's newly created
universe:

Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid;
Leave them to God above; him serve, and fear!
Of other creatures, as him pleases best,
Wherever placed, let him dispose; joy thou
In what he gives to thee, this Paradise
And thy fair Eve; Heaven is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowly wise:
Think only what concerns thee, and thy being;
Dream not of other worlds, what creatures there
Live, in what state, condition, or degree;
Contented that thus far hath been revealed
Not of Earth only, but of highest Heaven.
-- Paradise Lost, VIII.167-178