Victor here openly deprives the Creature of a human essence and thus of the requirements
of human sympathy. In other words, even as he upholds Justine's innocence against
a legal system that indicts her on circumstantial evidence, he himself embodies the
fundamental principles of a dehumanized injustice against which he will inveigh.

Although the discussion may seem to have moved far from the structural center of the
novel, the resonance of this phrase reminds us of the glorious ambitions driving both
Walton and Victor Frankenstein and of how Victor's aspiration that "many happy and
excellent natures would owe their being to" him (I:3:8) has been disastrously subverted
into a murder and miscarriage of justice implicating both his Creature and himself.

Mary Shelley's point seems to be that, whatever Victor's enthusiasm for the sciences,
at this point in his adolescent education he knows nothing of the modern state of
chemistry and has little motivation on his own to learn more.

Beaufort's introverted withdrawal is of a type similar to further and more conspicuous
examples we will encounter later in the text. It may well be that Victor Frankenstein
is himself too implicated in this sort of response to notice the parallels, but the
more objective reader is here being alerted to another of the thematic concerns the
novel will develop.

This diction, like the subtitle and the epigraph, is meant to drape Frankenstein with
a seriousness of purpose not customary among popular gothic novels. To students of
British Romanticism, it is language that is characteristic of Percy Bysshe Shelley's
own practices in the prefatory matter to his poems. He frequently accentuates his
attempt to transcend through imaginative means the normative, or "ordinary," thoughts
and passions of humanity. See, for example, the first paragraph of the Preface to
"Alastor" (published in March 1816) or his explanation of the use of dramatic imagery
in the Preface to The Cenci (1820). The reader will discover that the uses of the
imagination are likewise to become a recurring theme in the novel.

With an uncanny artistry that must be considered deliberate, in this and the next
paragraph Mary Shelley internalizes within her own writing the imaginative process
by which Victor Frankenstein is first swept along by his scientific advances ("my
imagination was too much exalted," I:3:7 and note), then becomes concerned by their
obsessiveness ("[it] had taken an irresistible hold of my imagination," I:3:11 and
note), and finally finds himself haunted by his own terrifying creation ("I imagined
that the monster seized me," I:4:15). Throughout the novel, although the power of
the human imagination is universally underscored, its uses or effects are as much
deeply questioned as they are celebrated.

In her introduction Mary Shelley appears to be purposefully collapsing the customary
distinction between the curiosity of the scientist and the creative afflatus of the
writer, a design we see carried out as well in the novel itself. Following these introductory
materials, we will turn immediately, as yet a third example of the same elemental
process, to the imaginative enthusiasm with which Robert Walton foresees his polar
explorations (I:L1:2).

Mary Shelley's language here is resonant with the terms by which she describes the
educational milieu within the Frankenstein circle. Thus, it cannot be accidental that
she draws an implicit comparison between her own youthful career as a writer and that
of her most imaginative character, Henry Clerval, who is described as smitten with
a world of romance in both the 1818 (I:1:11) and 1831 (I:2:2) editions of the novel.

As in I:4:15 and note, Victor's imagination produces not a visionary paradise, but
a mental inferno.

This reticence is exactly what friendship is intended to transcend, if we take Walton's
notion of its value as a benchmark. He looks to an ideal friend "to regulate [his]
mind" (I:L2:2). Even Victor, in the revised text, conceives the value of a friend
as being "to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures" (I:L4:23). Victor's reserve,
however, negates this function of friendship, suggesting a limit to how far it is
able to surmount the barriers of what a later time might call ego-defences.

For whatever reason of self-presentation or nostalgia, Mary Shelley here magnifies
her love of and accessibility to an untrammelled natural environment. Her Scottish
experiences occupied less than two years of her early adolescence. Prior to that time
she was brought up in Somers Town, in that day located on the edge of the London metropolis,
where she could divide her interests between the countryside to the north, upon which
her father's house looked out, and the attractions of the city. Godwin's house itself
was anything but rural, maintaining an intensely urban and intellectually sophisticated
ambience throughout Mary Shelley's youth. There, as a child, she came into contact
with dozens of the principal luminaries of British culture at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. One of these was Samuel Taylor, whom she heard recite "The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner," a poem of particular resonance for Frankenstein, where it
is quoted twice—(see I:L2:6 and I:4:7)—and frequently functions allusively.