Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley began the Standard Novels series as a way to restore
to the public popular works of fiction that were either out of print or only available
in expensive multi-volume formats. A crucial aspect of their editorial procedure was,
where possible, to have the author revise the novel sufficiently so that a fresh copyright
could be drawn upon the new publication. Given the opportunity, Mary Shelley was happy
to have the chance to polish and, in some cases, expand upon her earlier production.
Unwittingly, however, in assigning the copyright of her work to the Standard Novels
series, she forestalled the novel's reappearance for a generation, with the consequence
that Frankenstein was not republished in England until the 1860s.

Victor unwittingly emphasizes the strong social conscience and sense of duty of his
father and other members of his family. Within a few chapters, in contrast, we will
witness his own abnegation of both qualities as he is seized by an obsession with
scientific pursuits that impels a withdrawal from all his social obligations.

Prometheus, in one strand of the myth, created human beings from clay, animating them
with fire stolen from Zeus. In another strand he stole fire in order to free humanity
from dependence upon the gods and was punished by Zeus by being chained to a peak
in the Caucasus mountains; there as an emblem of human frustration an eagle daily
tore at his liver, which was restored by night. Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin,
to whom she dedicated her first novel, stressed the second of these strands in the
section on Prometheus he wrote for his children's book, The Pantheon, or, Ancient
History of the Gods of Greece and Rome, which he published under the pseudonymn Edward
Baldwin in 1806. Mary Shelley's novel unifies all strands of the myth in a complex,
multifaceted form. Its "modernity" for the second decade of the nineteenth century
may apply broadly to revolutionary developments in political and scientific arenas
over the previous generation that transformed the intellectual landscape of Europe.
Although in the years intervening since the initial publication of Frankenstein, those
terms may be thought to have changed radically, the novel's modernity seems to have
remained curiously unaffected by such shifts in its local application.

Mary Shelley's husband Percy Bysshe Shelley began his own modernization of the Prometheus
legend barely nine months after the publication of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.
His Prometheus Unbound was published in 1820.

As noted before (I:1:15, and note), natural philosophy, Professor Krempe's purview,
is science considered from a general perspective, whereas his colleague Waldman teaches
the more restrictive discipline of chemistry. Paradoxically, it is Waldman who appears
to have the larger humanistic grasp of the physical sciences.

Here is yet another sign of the "unnatural" nature of Victor's obsession, in which
he is closing off the world of life in order to animate the dead. At this point it
has become clear that Victor is isolated from all the those to whom he is related,
either by blood or by intellectual affinity, whether they be family members, friends,
or teachers. The true object of his affinity, and passionate aversion, psychologically
speaking, has already been set. This will be the Creature whom he creates in the next
chapter.

A share of the worth of a ship and its cargo taken in war.

This may be the single case in the novel where one can sense Mary Shelley reacting
to a reaction to her novel. She could not have revised this passage, adding such inflated
self-deprecation by Victor, without being conscious of the title of the first dramatic
redaction of her novel, Richard Brinsley Peake's Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein,
which she saw with her father upon her return to London in 1823. The word is never
uttered in the play, but the title clearly established a context in which Victor Frankenstein's
researches were from then on to be conceived; and Mary Shelley herself responds by
subsuming it within the third edition.

That is, Saturday, August 5: Victor came aboard ship on Tuesday morning, August 1.

Victor's holding us in suspense constitutes more than a novelist's manipulation of
her readers. Frankenstein, unlike much of the gothic fiction of the previous half
century, is a novel without much interest in the sensational per se, rigorously subsuming
its dynamic effects to a larger narrative logic. Such a train of logical premises
is here invoked by Victor, as Mary Shelley emphasizes that a major structural division
in the narrative is about to occur.

On 14 May 1817 Mary Shelley notes in her Journal that she wrote a preface to Frankenstein
and finished work on the novel. Over the next several months the fair-copy was read
by Godwin and several publishers; then in late August terms were struck for a contract
with Lackington, Allen & Co. At that point a new preface of just four paragraphs in
length was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, as if in Mary's hand. In the end, this
was the Preface that appeared with the novel. Mary Shelley's original remarks from
May 1817 have apparently not survived.