The reference seems to be to a theatrical representation in which time is telescoped
or to a painting representing different time frames simultaneously. The iconic overlap
of nativity scenes in Christian art would be a common instance of the latter effect.

The vast power of a sublime nature returns to the text, preparing us for the reintroduction
of the being animated by and associated with the "vital fluid" of electricity. However,
as with the previous eruption of lightning within the text (I:1:22), what is implicitly
emphasized is not its creative power, but its capacity for destruction.

Victor has fainted. The word "lifeless" had a broader range of signification in Mary
Shelley's day than it does now. Johnson's 1755 Dictionary offers three meanings for
the adjective, only the first, which is the modern definition, being inappropriate
to Victor's state.

1. Dead; deprived of life.
2. Unanimated; void of life.
3. Without power, force, or spirit.

Letter IV actually contains the entirety of the subsequent action of the novel, which
returns to an openly epistolary form near its end (III:WC:1).

Victor had in retrospect characterized the nature of his cloistered and obsessive
study at Ingolstadt "unlawful," which he then defined as "not befitting the human
mind," in I:3:12. Here, one senses that the emphasis is less on social or antisocial
behavior than on what an individual human being has the right to do: "devices" implies
a means by which actions are performed.

Lausanne, on the northern shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, is the capital of the
Vaud canton and an ancient cultural center to rival Geneva, located some fifty miles
away. Built on the Jorat hills, the city offers a prospect of the entire Lake, as
well as of the Alps to the south beyond it.

It was conquered by the Protestant Reformers the Bernese in the sixteenth century.
In 1798, however, Lausanne fell to Napoleon, who made the city the capital of the
Vaud canton of the new Helvetic Republic in 1803. Its pre-Napoleonic political structure
is described in the 4th edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1797). For a time
in the eighteenth century, Lausanne was home to Voltaire, Rousseau, and Edward Gibbon
(who wrote most of his Decline and Fall there).

Percy Bysshe Shelley recounts the associations of Lausanne with Gibbon in the third
letter of A History of a Six Weeks' Tour.

In other words, Victor rejects the possibility of creating unlimited gold in the interest
of discovering the root laws of life. As the complicated mix of his character begins
to take shape, Mary Shelley stresses from the outset that Victor Frankenstein is motivated
not by greed but by a pure impulse of scientific discovery.

These languages are considerable accomplishments for an adolescent, though both Percy
Bysshe Shelley and William Godwin could assert similar claims. More important, with
the exception of German, by this time in her life so could Mary Shelley. Within the
fictional ambience itself, the reader can imagine how rekindled, in listening to this
account, would have been Walton's retrospective guilt over his undereducated, undirected
adolescence (I:L2:2).

From this diction it appears that Elizabeth is included among the "we" of this circle
who are instructed in both a useful and a learned language. Most women of her time
were denied such access to Latin. We recall that French is the operating language
of the Frankenstein household (as it is of Geneva). Obviously, English is here singled
out in order to justify Victor's narration as being conducted wholly in English. At
what point the German in which he is taught at Ingolstadt enters his educational program
is left unmentioned, but by the age of seventeen he will be fluent in it (I:1:26).
No note is made of whether Elizabeth retained a residual Italian from having spent
her early years in that environment.

The perilous isolation of Victor Frankenstein's situation bears symbolic overtones
that, being introduced here, will return near the close of his narrative in Volume
3.