11

  • These reflections have dispelled the agitation

    We are thus invited to return at this point to the beginning of Walton's letter (and
    the novel), perhaps to reflect on the fact that the first noun we encounter in the
    novel is "disaster" (I:L1:1). Clearly, however he may publicly suppress their effects,
    Walton, to some extent at least, shares the "evil forebodings" of his sister he recalls
    in that initial sentence.

  • 12

  • agony

    Several critics have noted the extent to which Mary Shelley goes out of her way, as
    Victor brings his creation to life, to transpose the physical pains of childbirth
    into an equivalent psychological state.

  • 13

  • Cornelius Agrippa

    Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, 1486-1535, German mystic and alchemist.

    Agrippa of Nettesheim was born of a once-noble family near Cologne, and studied both
    medicine and law there, apparently without taking a degree. In 1503, he assumed the
    name Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, adopting the von to suggest a noble background;
    three years later, he established a secret society in Paris devoted to astrology,
    magic, and Kabbalah.

    His career is diverse: secret agent, soldier, physician, orator, and law professor,
    in Cologne, Paris, Dôle, London, Italy, Pavia, and Metz. In 1509, he set up a laboratory
    in Dôle in the hopes of synthesizing gold, and for the next decade or so traveled
    Europe, making a living as an alchemist, and conversing with such important early
    humanist scholars as Colet and Reuchlin. In 1520, he set up a medical practice in
    Geneva, and in 1524 became personal physician to the queen mother at the court of
    King Francis I in Lyons. When the queen mother abandoned him, he began practicing
    medicine in Antwerp, but was later banned for practicing without a license, and became
    historiographer at the court of Charles V. After several stays in prison, variously
    for debt and criminal offenses, he died in 1535.

    Agrippa's wrote on a great many topics, including marriage and military engineering,
    but his most important work is the three-volume De occulta philosophiae (written c.
    1510, published 1531), a defense of "hidden philosophy" or magic, which draws on diverse
    mystical traditions -- alchemy, astrology, Kabbalah. A later work, De incertitudine
    et vanitate scientiarum (Of the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences), attacks contemporary
    scientific theory and practice.

    Many of his opinions were controversial. His early lectures on theology angered the
    Church, and his defense of a woman accused of witchcraft in 1520 led to his being
    hounded out of Cologne Cologne by the Inquisition. In his own day, Agrippa was widely
    attacked as a charlatan. After his death, legends about him were plentiful. Some believed
    him to be not only an alchemist but a demonic magician, even a vampire. In one account,
    he traveled to the New World.

    In 1799, Robert Southey published an amusing ballad on this man, suggestive of his
    later reputation as a master of black magic, as well as of his susceptibility to gothic
    trappings. Percy Bysshe Shelley listed Agrippa and Paracelsus among his favorite writers
    in a discussion with Godwin in 1812.

  • 14

  • experiments on an air-pump

    The air-pump—what a later age would call a vacuum-chamber—was an important part of
    any eighteenth-century chemical laboratory. Darwin, for instance, notes an experiment
    with an air-pump in the fifth of the Additional Notes to his Temple of Nature.

  • 15

  • Albertus Magnus

    Albertus Magnus (1193 or 1206-1280), German monk and alchemist, known as "Doctor Universalis."

    Born to a noble family in Bavaria, Albertus (Albert von Bollstüdt) became an adherent
    to the newly formed Dominican Order while he was a student at Padua in 1223. After
    being ordained in Germany, he traveled to Paris and in 1245 became master of theology
    at the University there. His most famous student was Thomas Aquinas. Albertus had
    a lifelong interest in the natural sciences (at a time when alchemy had not yet been
    sharply distinguished from more legitimate sciences such as chemistry), and was an
    important scholar of Aristotle, whose influence pervaded both his scientific and his
    religious writings.

    From 1260 to 1262, Albertus was the bishop of Regensburg, the nearest principal medieval
    city on the Danube to the north of Ingolstadt. He died in Cologne in 1280. Not long
    after his death, a number of writings on magic circulated under his name, although
    the validity of these attributions is questionable.

    Albertus was beatified in 1622. In 1931, Pope Pius XI declared him a saint and a Doctor
    of the Church; in 1941, Pope Pius XII named him the patron saint of those who study
    the natural sciences.

  • 16

  • a league

    This is how the Oxford English Dictionary represents this obsolete measure:

    LEAGUE

    league lig, sb.1 Forms: 4-5 leghe, 4-6 lege, leuge, (4 lewge, 5 lewke, leuke, leeke),
    5-6 leege, 6 legge, le(a)que, Sc. lig, 6-7 leag(e, 6- league. Late ME. leuge, lege,
    leghe, etc., ad. late L. leuga, leuca (= late Gr. leu'gh, leu'kh), according to Hesychius
    and Jordanes a Gaulish word; hence OFr. liue, liwe (mod.Fr. lieue), Pr. lega, legua,
    Cat. llegua, Sp. legua, Pg. legoa, Ital. lega.

    An itinerary measure of distance, varying in different countries, but usually estimated
    roughly at about 3 miles; app. never in regular use in England, but often occurring
    in poetical or rhetorical statements of distance.

    Thus, a league outside Geneva. would be, perhaps, an hour's easy walk from the town.

  • 17

  • the creature . . . might still be there, alive

    It is clear, to invoke the customary alternatives, that to Victor at this point "dead"
    would be far preferable to "alive." The ugliness of the morality behind his ruminations
    here seems not to occur to him.

  • 18

  • all at once become so extremely wicked

    The doltishness with which Ernest speaks cannot obscure the moral question implicit
    here. The reliance on simplistic moral absolutes will extend outward from Ernest to
    involve his father (I:6:37), who has been established from the beginnings of Victor's
    narrative as a citizen of consequence, and he will then in the next chapter be joined
    by other men of consequence in Geneva, from the Church to the magistracy, in a miscarriage
    of justice. Victor's intuition of the murderer, as well as his own intellectual research
    beyond conventional limitations, isolates him from the other male upholders of establishment
    values. This does give Victor a certain moral authority not apparent before, but it
    is heavily shadowed by his silence as the travesty of Justine's trial unfolds. Only
    Elizabeth, like Justine a woman and without effectual power, is able through sheer
    human sympathy to "judge" aright in this case.

  • 19

  • all judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer, than that one guilty should
    escape

    Victor's bitterness over the law may reflect Godwin's teachings about its arbitrary
    nature and conformist tendencies, as well as Percy Bysshe Shelley's own legal problems
    with his father during Mary's first years living with him. We see similar sentiments
    in Elizabeth's aversion to the law as a profession for Ernest, which is expressed
    in a passage in the first edition (I:5:2 and note).

  • 20

  • with all my ardour

    This word, which as a noun entered the novel with Walton rhapsodizing over his passion
    for discovery (I:L4:20), is now picked up by Victor as if deliberately to echo and
    admonish the mariner. It will toll repetitively—and resonantly—through the remainder
    of this chapter. It seems clear that Mary Shelley, capitalizing on her strategy in
    1818, is here emphasizing the word in all its ambiguity. The complex of associations
    in its definition can be tracked here.