Although Victor's jumping to conclusions about the guilt of his Creature indicates
how widespread is the temptation to judge without evidence, the fact that Justine
has been convicted in the popular mind before her trial even starts introduces a sinister
element to the social dimensions of the novel. The class issues that will arise in
the trial are highly complicated. The small detail of how the Frankenstein family
was circumvented by its own servants, who were the ones to appeal to the magistrates
(see I:6:34), is telling in its representation of how widespread has been the process
of scapegoating that has eventuated in Justine's arrest. This detail may also suggest
that the Frankenstein family has itself attempted to keep faith with Justine and thus,
in some sense, may serve to mitigate the reader's own temptation to rush to judgment
over the family's complicity in an exercise of injustice.

This is a curious imposition on Mary Shelley's novel and one that has raised eyebrows
among critics with a biographical orientation, both because of the death of her mother
Mary Wollstonecraft after giving birth and because of her adversion to her step-mother
Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin.

Mary Shelley has already used the word "hideous" four times in the Introduction to
refer to both the being who was endowed with life in the novel and her own conception,
"so very hideous an idea" (I:Intro:1). Here they are explicitly conflated. As this
novel of horror is revised, so the Creature that inhabits and terrorizes it is reanimated.

However much Mary Shelley may have known about Ingolstadt, she never visited the town
and thus probably surmised from her general travels in Switzerland and Germany (or
perhaps from her travels down the Rhine two years before in 1814) that it would have
had such a steeple. The various towered constructions of Ingolstadt, however, are
all built in brick. There is a wooden steeple-like construction atop the Hoheschule
(University), but it would not have been visible from afar as a landmark.

Unlike the public and the judges, Justine quietly assumes that only a man could have
committed the murder of a child.

Here, the invocation of imagination seems shadowed by no darker intimations, as it
had been earlier (see I:3:7 and note; I:4:18 and note). But, in fact, the shadow has
simply been postponed to the next chapter, where it looms with devastating effect,
dispelling all this happiness as being as insubstantial as dreams.

The pronoun is pointed, an attempt to shield Mary Shelley from an attack on her as
a female novelist. Attenuating this strategy, Percy Bysshe Shelley himself undertook
all negotiations for the publication of the novel. The subterfuge worked at least
to some extent. Walter Scott, reviewing the novel in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
identified Shelley as the author. Closer to the local scene, the Quarterly, inimical
to Godwin, savaged the novel as the production of his daughter. Perhaps, this was
exactly why the subterfuge was undertaken in the first place.

The sense of divergent perspectives between Victor and Alphonse Frankenstein encountered
in the first chapter (I:1:15-I:1:16) here is extended to a neighboring father's shortsighted
thwarting of all his son's ambitions. Given Victor's portrayal of Clerval as a poet,
it is impossible not to feel the impress of Percy Bysshe Shelley's strained relations
with his father in this account.

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