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.

This was the work on which Byron was working during the summer of 1816. It was carried
to his publisher John Murray by Percy Bysshe Shelley when the group returned to England
in the late summer. Mary Shelley directly quotes from this canto early in the novel
(see I:6:16 and note), and its landscapes frequently color her own natural descriptions.

Although the extent of Victor's losses must await his own narration, his despairing
language here calls attention to itself and introduces several themes that will be
developed in the course of the novel. One is psychic death: a person who cannot renew
life is, in some profound sense, not truly alive, a condition made famous by Coleridge
in the idea of "Life-in-Death" advanced in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," line
193. Philosophically speaking, Victor's language reflects a deterministic viewpoint.
Readers will observe how often he invokes destiny or a like sense of fatality driving
the course of his existence.

A cabriolet is a two-wheeled carriage, rather in the manner of a chariot, drawn by
a single horse, a small vehicle for a trip of 500 miles. Since Victor mentions "horses"
in the plural, perhaps Mary Shelley intended to allow him a larger vehicle for his
journey than the type she names. In circumstances like this, the traveller would ride
post, which is to say, would change horses at stages along the road.

Although debilitated by care and exhaustion, Victor Frankenstein is actually of an
age when one would expect a normal adult vigor. A year younger than Robert Walton,
he is 27 years old as he begins this narrative.

Although debilitated by care and exhaustion, Victor Frankenstein is actually of an
age when one would expect a normal adult vigor. A year younger than Robert Walton,
he is 27 years old as he begins this narrative.

Having twice in his letters to his sister (I:L2:5 and I:L3:3) assured her of his prudence,
Walton here becomes carried away by his enthusiasm. In terming what impels him a "burning
ardour," he utters what is almost a code word in the novel, designating a feature
shared by the male protagonists whose value, like the other shared attribute of curiosity,
is complexly ambiguous. He has already declared himself overly ardent (I:L1:2). Soon,
we will observe the same problem in Victor (I:4:2).

Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, 1707-1788, French naturalist.

Buffon spelled out his views in his monumental Natural History (Histoire naturelle,
générale et particulière), an attempt to present systematically all the known facts
of natural science, of which the first volumes appeared in 1749 and the final volumes
in 1804.

Buffon rejected Linnaeus's method of classifying species, insisting instead on smooth
gradations between not only species but individual organisms. Although he was willing
to use anatomical structures to make working distinctions between species, he believed
any division into orders, classes, genera, and species misrepresented the variety
of nature.

His own experiments, however, caused him to think seriously about the idea of the
species. Buffon discovered that animals of different species could be crossbred, but
the offspring were infertile: he therefore defined a species as a group of animals
that could produce fertile offspring.

Buffon did believe in the idea of the mutation of species, and was the first to suggest
the possibility that all animals might have descended or evolved ultimately from a
single breeding pair. He rejected the notion of evolution, however, favoring instead
a devolutionary theory: animals over time fell off by degrees from their originally
perfect state. The broad range of his scientific interest includes subjects of direct
import for Frankenstein: comparative geography, the diversification of types within
a species, the sexual origin of species, and monsters.

Buffon's most important work in physical anthropology appeared in The Varieties of
the Human Species (1749), in which he described the physical and cultural differences
between groups of humans. He attributed these differences to the races' accommodation
to different environmental conditions.

This well-known theory is alluded to in a letter that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote his
long-time friend Thomas Love Peacock during the Geneva summer of 1816. That citation,
in turn, was included in the last letter appended to Mary Shelley's History of a Six
Weeks' Tour.

Walton is referring obliquely to the wide-spread practice of flogging to keep discipline
aboard ship. It had been a serious issue in Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars,
a spur to the mutinies that took place in the British navy at Spithead and the Nore
in the spring of 1797. The Shelleys' friend Leigh Hunt wrote several attacks on the
practice in his weekly newspaper The Examiner. The ship's master would have the responsibility
for maintaining order, and what most attracts Walton to this veteran mariner is his
capacity to do so without violence.

Victor is sixteen years older than his brother William, who is of the age of 7 when
he is murdered by the Creature. He is just six years older than his shadowy second
brother Ernest, who, left an orphan at the age of 20, is the only member of the Frankenstein
family to survive the novel.