The monstrous is further mystified, not just as a zombie, who has come by black magic
into a false and unnatural vitality, but also as a demon, a supernatural embodiment
of evil. The progression is thus from the wretched (alienated) to wretch (marginally
human) to monster (inhuman) to demon (antihuman). And howsoever the Creature is named
or names himself, as he will richly illustrate in the second volume (especially II:5:17
and II:7:7), so he becomes.

The shift in pronouns here (from "its" to "he") is telling but hardly indicative of
a sudden sense of human identification between Victor and his Creature. Instead, to
denominate the Creature a man allows Victor immediately to fix moral blame upon him.

The phrasing suggests not just a vile being, as "wretch" was used in I:4:3 and I:4:6,
but now also one who is corrupt, wicked. Victor, who has no discernible religious
belief or instruction, has wandered into a treacherous theological morass. The Judeo-Christian
God has created humanity, in Milton's words, "just and right,/ Sufficient to have
stood, though free to fall" (Paradise Lost, III.98-99). Victor, however, as God's
stand-in, has no assurance that his Creature is without flaw. Having constructed him
from whatever bodily parts he could lay his hands on (and without any particular nicety
that they even be human), Victor presumes a correlation between body and soul, both
being corrupt. In theological terms, however, such a vision of God as the creator
of evil is fundamentally heretical, for it would hold God directly responsible for
human depravity. Victor's chain of thoughts does not extend so far as openly to convict
himself of the responsibility for the evil he assigns his Creature. Yet, his sudden
sense here of their twin relationship does suggest the glimmer of that terrible truth
the novel will slowly unfold.

Johnson's 1755 Dictionary represents the verb to deprave with an uncharacteristic
lack of discrimination:

To vitiate; to corrupt; to contaminate.

The Oxford English Dictionary, on the other hand, registers historical and theological
shifts in usage:

depravity An extension of pravity (ad. L. pravitas) previously used in same sense,
after deprave and its derivatives. (No corresponding form in Latin or French.) The
quality or condition of being depraved or corrupt.

a. Perverted or corrupted quality. Obs.

b. Perversion of the moral faculties; corruption, viciousness, abandoned wickedness.

c. Theol. The innate corruption of human nature due to original sin. Often total depravity:
In common use from the time of Jonathan Edwards: the earlier terms were pravity and
depravation.

d. A depraved act or practice.

depraved

1. Rendered bad or worse; perverted, vitiated, debased, corrupt. Now chiefly of taste,
appetite, and the like.

2. spec. Rendered morally bad; corrupt; wicked.

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.