During the latter part of the eighteenth-century the life sciences were undergoing
a radical transformation of their conduct, substituting scrupulous taxonomic categorization
and rigorous inductive experimentation for the slippery conceptual ordering and deductive
animism inherited from medieval and Renaissance paradigms. The exacting science of
chemistry influenced these developments and, in turn, was given impetus by the responsiveness
of the life sciences to their renewed systemization. When Victor speaks of a "rational
theory," he means, at least in part, such a logical ordering of constituent knowledge
within the discipline. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, particularly
in Great Britain under the guidance of figures like John Dalton and Humphrey Davy,
chemistry made enormous advances in basic knowledge, winning for the discipline something
of a cachet among educated people.

Victor's blasé consent is in sharp contrast with his sense of follow-through, and
his truancy from school is indicative of an increasing drift from his father's influence.
Perhaps it is meant as well to be ominous, a sign of future laxness in seeing his
scientific work through to a successful conclusion.

This poses a contrast worth contemplating: on the one hand, as earlier in the chapter
(I:3:8 and note), enthusiasm here literally suggests the presence of an indwelling
deity, or at least Victor's aspiration to play God; on the other hand, anxiety indicates
a counterforce within his mind, disrupting his self-assurance, even prompting self-alienation.
Since in Milton's myth Satan is created as a counterforce at the precise moment that
God announces his plan to create a new race, these contrary poles are essential to
the basic creation myth in terms of which Mary Shelley plots her novel.

See also the angel Raphael's account of the beginning of the new universe in Paradise
Lost (V.579-617).

Most modern commentators would dispute this statement strongly, taking exception both
stylistically and substantively, and tending to see the 1831 edition as truly a reconception
of the 1818 edition rather than the tidying-up suggested here. But it is not entirely
easy to focus categorically on the differences between the texts. Some political innuendos
of moment in 1818, for instance, were no longer relevant to the changed climate in
the year before the Great Reform Bill, but that does not mean that others—for instance,
the curious intrusion of imperialism into the plot (see I:6:14 and note)—have not
taken their place. Mary Shelley did greatly rewrite the first chapter of 1818 breaking
it into two separate chapters in 1831. She similarly reworked the opening chapter
of Volume 2. Throughout her revision she endeavors to flesh out her characters rather
than merely to add descriptive elements to the novel. In this regard, her most extensive
elaboration is in making Victor's account of his life from the very beginning subtly
reflect the paranoid mental condition to which experience has reduced him.

This suggests that Walton implicitly recognizes the third element, after electricity
and magnetism, in what would in the twentieth century be called a "grand unified field
theory," gravitation.

That a unified field theorem is a still unrealized ideal of experimental physics,
one that has excited the ambitions of major scientific minds in all quarters of the
world, may indicate the seriousness of the scientific issues and passions underlying
Mary Shelley's novel. Without denigrating those ambitions here, she characteristically
reminds us of human limitations in Walton's inability to recognize that in a land
of eternal light, as he imagines the pole might be, celestial observations would be
impossible.

Marcus Porcius Cato (95-46 B.C.), known as Cato the Younger. Clerval appears at some
point to have read Plutarch's account of Cato's life and death, as some nine months
before this the Creature did as well (II:7:6).

Mary Shelley's general dismissal of Roman Catholicism in this novel should be placed
within the context of centuries of British abuse of the religion from which Henry
VIII severed his country's ties. Although such official disfavor would change markedly
during the nineteenth century, it is well to understand that Catholic Emancipation
was still a decade away at the time Frankenstein was published.

The powerful wrench to the language here replicates the effect of Victor's awaking
from his dreams into a new and alien perspective on his obsession. There is a faint
resonance of the "disaster" that Margaret Saville is recorded in the novel's first
sentence (I:L1:1) as foreseeing for Walton's expedition. The stark word would have
borne another kind of resonance in Mary Shelley's culture: Buffon'sNatural History
gave wide currency to a catastrophic theory of creation, and Victor's adolescent delight
in that account (at least as it is recounted in the first edition of the novel—see
I:1:25) would thus seem to have left an indelible, ironic imprint on him.

The tomb in which Juliet feigns death only to awake and discover that Romeo has killed
himself for love of her, at which point she, too, commits suicide. The phrase is proverbial,
meaning that something is forever lost or forgotten.

A curious phrase, with such a stress on "outward," as if for the past six months (and
perhaps long before that) Victor has only been able to look within. The emphasis clearly
invokes the idea of nature in its broad range of signification.