A city of about thirty thousand at the time of the novel, Geneva had long held an
importance in central Europe incommensurate with its relatively modest size. John
Calvin, arriving in this quiet city in 1536, transformed it into a center of the Reformation.
In 1559, Calvin and Théodore de Bèze founded the University of Geneva to function
as a center of Protestant intellectual inquiry. This orientation made a natural linkage
between the University of Geneva and Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England
that thrived throughout the later Renaissance.

That early sense of kinship the English felt for the Swiss was reinforced during Mary
Shelley's age by two factors. One was the invasion of this neutral, unoffending country
by the French in 1798, which became a major focus of government propaganda in England
and effectively ended all sympathy for the course of the French Revolution by its
intellectual elite. The second, and for Mary Shelley a more immediate factor, was
the inveterate hostility to Napoleon practiced by the leading citizen of Geneva's
small suburb of Coppet, Germaine de Staël, who there surrounded herself with a significant
circle of independent and generally democratic thinkers like A. W. Schlegel and J.
C. L. Simonde de Sismondi. The daughter of one of the few untouchable supporters of
the early revolution, Jacques Necker, who kept France financially afloat during its
turbulent transition from monarchy to jacobin directory, Germaine de Staël was banned
from France by Napoleon and through her travels enjoyed a pan-European renown. Byron
met her in London in 1813, a year before his publisher John Murray brought out her
important work On Germany.

The circle surrounding Madame de Staël could be construed as an extension of the earlier
source of independent intellectual energy provided by Geneva's most famous citizen
in the eightenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. During the 1816 summer, Byron and
Shelley undertook a boat tour of the northern shore of Lake Geneva with the particular
aim of visiting locations associated with Rousseau and his writings. Although Mary
remained behind, she would have shared their enthusiasm for this last great figure
of the French Enlightenment. It could not have been absent from her mind that to begin
a first-person narrative account, "I am by birth a Genevese" (I:1:1) would automatically
remind readers of Rousseau's Confessions, the fourth paragraph of which begins in
a similar manner. Rousseau's spirit, indeed, might be said to hover over the entire
novel, from its emphasis on a new "noble savage" to its concern with education, particularly
in the formation of the Creature, to its antiestablishment political undertones.

With such pronounced associations of relevance in both its past and recent history,
Geneva stands as a perfect match for the other great center of the Enlightenment,
St. Petersburg. As Chapter 1 issues, so to speak, from the voice of Victor Frankenstein
identifying himself with the Swiss city, Letter 1 (I:L1:1) is dated by Robert Walton
from the Russian capital. Together these figures and these cities represent the values
of the Enlightenment that will be interrogated over and over in the subsequent pages
of Mary Shelley's novel.

Trials were a form of spectator sport in the later eighteenth century, with criminals
commonly being assaulted and otherwise abused in being transferred from a prison or
jail to the courts of law. Mary Shelley endeavors here to intensify the isolation
of Justine Moritz, whom public opinion has convicted of child murder before her trial
commences.

This is a characteristic of the city of which Mary Shelley was well aware, commenting
on it in a letter she included in A History of a Six Weeks' Tour and dated 1 June
1816.

Galvanism is named after the inventor of the electric cell, Luigi Galvani, professor
of medicine at the University of Bologna. It specifically refers to the application
of an electrical charge to dead tissue, which was usually demonstrated by making the
legs of dead frogs move as if with life. Galvani's nephew, Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834),
conducted experiments in London recounted in John Aldini, An Account of the Late Improvements
in Galvanism, with a series of curious and interesting experiments . . . [and an]
Appendix, containing the author's Experiments on the body of a Malefactor executed
at Newgate (London: Cuthell & Martin and John Murray, 1803). In the first canto of
Don Juan, written later in the year in which Frankenstein was published (1818), Byron
remarks that "This is the age of oddities let loose" (line 1021), and comments on
various scientific advances:

Bread has been made (indifferent) from potatoes;
  And galvanism has set some corpses grinning. . . .
(I.1033-4)

For a more serious contemporary estimate, written by a major figure engaged in research
on this phenomenon who possesses an acute sense of its implications for radical developments
in chemistry and physics, consult William Nicholson's account in The British Encyclopedia
(1809).

In this context Victor means a long passage-way, which was a feature of many older
European residences. Such a gallery allowed the inhabitants a place in inclement weather
to exercise themselves by walking: in major houses the gallery would often contain
the family picture collection. In this instance, its purposes are directly contrary
and antisocial, providing Victor a protective distance for his furtive experiments.

This sudden elevation of language should not be merely dismissed as a facile rhetorical
heightening for effect. What Mary Shelley seems deliberately to be doing here is evoking
a succession of elements and emotional states associated with the Sublime in eighteenth-century
aesthetic theory. As the Creature in his coming to life is associated with the Sublime,
so he is its avatar wherever he appears in the novel, either living within a sublime
landscape (e.g. Mont Blanc or northern Siberia) or terrifying the human beings whom
he encounters by his extra-human size and countenance.

The novel reverts once more to the importance of male bonding, already developed in
Victor's narrative in the warm relationship between Alphonse Frankenstein and his
wife's father, M. Beaufort, represented in its second paragraph (I:1:2 and note),
and before that in the intimacy struck between Walton and Victor aboard ship (I:L4:24).

The first embarkation on a major and, to some critics, puzzling feature of this novel,
its all but exclusive emphasis on male bonding.

If we consider novels that are contemporary with Frankenstein and have been accorded
a similar canonical reputation, we might expect a woman novelist to emphasize the
richness of female relationships (for instance, the sisters of Austen's Sense and
Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice) and a man (the classic example might be Walter
Scott in Ivanhoe) to concentrate on the representation of male competition and loyalties.

Perhaps, however, we are overly conditioned by stereotypes. On the one hand, there
is the fact that Frankenstein was published anonymously and was taken by at least
one critic, Walter Scott himself, to be the work of a male author (see his review
in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine). From this it could be argued that Mary Shelley
might have wished to escape the preoccupation with female experience in contemporary
"lady novelists." And on the other hand, from a feminist perspective it could likewise
be argued that a women might have a very different take on that male competition and
loyalty than a man. Inasmuch as masculine terms might be said to define the boundaries
of a woman's existence, Mary Shelley might have thought an exclusionary male experience
to be a province to which she had every right to demand access. This would have been
particularly the case in 1816, after nearly a quarter century of almost continuous
warfare in Europe.

Elizabeth's candor is exemplary of her virtue and stands in marked contrast to Victor's
resolve of silence.