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.

Another example of an unexpectedly dark context in which to encounter a word so generally
privileged in English Romanticism: see I:3:7 and I:3:11. Victor's imagination appears
to lack restraint, common morality, and the instinct for self-preservation. It even
subverts the essential principles of his education, substituting fantasy for reason.

The caveat about Walton's boasting of his courage in the opening letter (I:L1:6),
and at the beginning of the second (I:L2:1) his insisting on the same attribute in
his crew, must extend here as well. Although certainly it is hard to see in this tribute
to his lieutenant any trace of diabolic lineaments, still, the combination of terms
driving him are inherently those of Milton's Satan.

This, the second death in as many paragraphs, almost slips by without notice. But
surely Walton might have been left a patrimony by his father and thus need not have
been granted freedom from financial constraints by the death of a youth whom we may
assume was of an age comparable to his. This unexpected source of his independence,
means sufficiently ample to allow him to hire a crew and outfit an ocean-going vessel
for a lengthy voyage, testifies to the instability of fortune, the constant threat
of mortality, and even to how important are extended families in this narration. It
also rather foreshadows later events in the novel, since Victor Frankenstein's cousin
Elizabeth will also bear the cost of his success.

Many other elements that Victor does not mention might restrain such inquiry, from
fear of divine retribution to worry over the possible ethical consequences of scientific
intervention. Upon a closer look, the reader may wish to recognize an abiding egotism
underlying Victor's exclusive concentration on the efficacy of an individual scientist's
endeavor, without regard for its extrinsic contexts or its social impact.

The undertone of narcissism here has less motivated critical attention than has Victor's
anticipation of reproducing himself in an issue without female intervention.

Elizabeth is represented here as having a strong sensibility and an artistic temperament,
conventional attributes of early nineteenth-century notions of femininity. However,
the emphasis on her "mind" in the previous paragraph (of 1818, excised in 1831) may
suggest the tempering influence of Mary Wollstonecraft.