Why Mary Shelley should begin the chapter by deliberately obliterating all suspense
is a good question not easily answered. Certainly, Victor's remark asks us to scrutinize
how this court conducts itself as a social institution and as a microcosm of the polity
of Geneva. Since Geneva's republican government (I:1:1 and note) and its softening
of class hierarchies (I:5:3 and note) have already been admiringly stressed, we might
expect from Mary Shelley's political allegiances to witness a trial conducted in ideal
circumstances. But that is far from being the case. Instead of a jury of peers, a
panel of male magistrates decides Justine's lot, and to exonerate a verdict reached
by only circumstantial evidence they employ the coercive power of the church to extort
a false confession. Victor's private denunciation of these proceedings does not indict
his own society or consider the extent to which his own family, that long line of
syndics, is complicit in an injustice that is all but institutionalized. It will be
left for his Creature, who is likewise victimized, to articulate the more radical
implications of such a society (see II:5:15).

Having quoted from Byron 's writings of the summer of 1816, here Mary Shelley seems
also to allude to the poem that same summer's experiences prompted from Percy Bysshe
Shelley, "Mont Blanc," 76-83.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," line 134, repeated in
lines 378 and 403 (1798: lines 383, 408). In the 1818 edition, the allusion is noted
only through quotation marks, allowing the knowing reader to make the connection between
Coleridge's sublime tale of moral transgression and the events to unfold in the novel.
No effort is made to affect the time frame of the novel. In the 1831 text (I:L2:6),
on the other hand, Walton self-consciously attributes his own thirst for adventure
partly to the influence of this poem, presumably encountered among the volumes of
poetry he read after exhausting Uncle Thomas's library of discovery. This forces an
impossible chronology on the novel, since Coleridge's poem was published, as Walton
dates his letters, only fifteen months before the 17--s became the 18--s.

That the forward-looking and sunny Elizabeth harbors such gloom within her reinvokes
the dark tones that have been insistently arising in what has seemed at times a text
promoting the happiness of domestic enclosure. Mary Shelley brings the first volume,
the first third, of her novel to a close with her central characters in something
approaching complete despair over the efficacy of political and social systems.

Invented by Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) in 1674 and continually refined thereafter.
By the end of the eighteenth century this instrument had assumed the shape familiar
to modern science.

These are the twin aims of alchemy, already discriminated by Victor in his youth (I:1:15,
and note).

The addition of such powerfully honorific diction is clearly meant to strengthen the
reader's impression of Victor Frankenstein leading into his assumption of the novel's
narrative. In 1818 the effect of Walton's enthusiasm was to make him appear rather
credulous, easily taken in by Victor's cultivated manner. The reader, of course, whatever
the inflations of vocabulary in which Walton indulges, may yet think the same of him
in the 1831 version.

The repetition of a note of disparagement ("merely weaving," "a mere tale") in this
and the succeeding sentence indicate that Shelley is seeking from the first to distance
Frankenstein from the tradition of popular gothic fiction to which, in his own adolescence,
he had contributed two outlandish examples, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, both published
in 1810.

This turnabout is as improbable as it is unexpected, since Clerval's father's incomprehension
of a world beyond his account books was stressed in I:2:5, where Henry "bitterly lamented"
being excluded from the kind of opportunity afforded Victor.

The public realm of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is so insistently masculine that the
reader must construe this as a deliberate aspect of the novel's construction. The
wholly male crew of the ship will, later in the first volume, be replicated in the
exclusively male ambience of the University of Ingolstadt and the more narrow and
even sinister magistracy of Geneva. By the second volume the novel's main characters
have committed themselves and the novel to a homosocial bonding of enormous force.