In the 1831 edition Elizabeth Lavenza's consanguinity with Victor Frankenstein has
been removed: she is no longer his cousin. She is also no longer compared by simile
to an insect, a bird, and a pet animal. Yet, Mary Shelley does retain the curiously
dehumanizing figuration of the first edition by having Victor now compare her to a
chamois.

No critic has ever traced a protoype of the Lavenza surname, which is, in any event,
a highly uncommon one. More immediately problematic to the reader, however, is the
figurative imagery elaborated in this paragraph, which in its comparisons to an insect,
a bird, and a pet animal, implicitly dehumanizes Elizabeth. It is possible, though
the textual support is equivocal, that Mary Shelley intends this diction to be less
laudatory of Elizabeth than self-referential, in terms of his facile sexism, of Victor's
character.

Mary Shelley underscores the perfect irony of Victor's growing increasingly death-like
as he attempts to impart life to a new being. Similarly, in his attempt to liberate
that being from death into the freedom of life, he voluntarily commits himself to
a prison of his own making.

If we revert to the actual chronology of Frankenstein, we realize that it was only
the day before that Victor had told Walton that his "fate [was] nearly fulfilled"
(I:L4:32 and note), but left the reasons for that assurance totally unarticulated.
In the present narration he will slowly begin to explore the range of determinants
of his "destiny," starting a few paragraphs earlier by acknowledging that it ought
to have been tied to his patriarchal inheritance as a set of understood family obligations
(I:1:1), a duty that is here to be set in opposition to a self-absorbed obsession
with scientific discovery, which is the evil "genius" he will now delineate.

Once again, as in the previous chapter (I:1:15), Victor suggests that the course of
his development is not of his own making, but was necessitated by his professional
commitment. His linking of his destiny to scientific knowledge has the effect of transferring
the systematic logic of the discipline to the random events of his life, an inductive
leap that, however much it may lack a rational base, will bear profound consequences.

From the French for "speed," and pronounced as if French: a public stagecoach. The
Swiss diligence would likely emanate from Zurich, passing through Munich on its way
to Ingolstadt.

In her revision Mary Shelley seems conscious of the uncanny freight this word carries
from beyond the novel. It is, we recall, the first noun we encounter in the fiction,
a word uttered by Margaret Saville before Walton's departure from London and repeated
by him in writing her (I:L1:1)

The first such disciple of Albertus Magnus was his student Thomas Aquinas, who was
the greatest medieval systematizer of knowledge in the Aristotelian mode of division
and subdivision and by no means a proselytizer for alchemy. Albertus Magnus, it should
be noted, was for a time the bishop of Regensburg, the nearest principal medieval
city on the Danube to the north of Ingolstadt, the university city to which Victor
travels in the next chapter (I:2:8). Though he attributes the choice of university
to his parents (I:2:1), perhaps Victor's sense of discipleship to the bishop contributed
to his acquiescence.

Here Victor is explicit about his dependence on the anatomical theater of the University
of Ingolstadt. Although nowhere in Mary Shelley's writings does she refer to her knowledge
of the actual university facilities in Ingolstadt, which in the eighteenth century
included a state-of-the art anatomy theater and dissecting table, this detail does
appear to indicate an awareness of the exact particulars of the institution.

Frankenstein's inclusion of distillation among the "processes of which my favourite
authors were utterly ignorant" is surprising, for distillation was central to many
alchemical processes. The eighteenth century did, however, see a number of important
scientific developments involving both distillation and the use of steam, culminating
in Watt's steam engine.