A reference to Charles Lamb's haunting personal poem about nostalgia for an unreachable
past and the harsh costs of experience, "The Old Familiar Faces" (1798). Lamb was
a close friend and coadjutor of Mary Shelley's father William Godwin: the details
of his poem recall his mother's murder and Lamb's sense of distance from various friends,
probably Charles Lloyd in the first reference and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the second.

Where are they gone, the old familiar faces?

I had a mother, but she died, and left me,
Died prematurely in a day of horrors—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I loved a Love once, fairest among women.
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man:
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.

Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood.
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces—

How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

Ortelius' map of the world in 1570 marked a clear passage from west to east across
the top of Siberia. Although the northern bourdaries of Siberia have been mapped with
certainty, a perpetual icefield blocks the northeast passage to the Bering Sea. On
this map the White Sea and its port Archangelsk are located at the far left.

Victor here unconsciously slides between the terms "subject" and "object," that is,
between what would possess a substantive being and what is merely a thing upon which
an action is committed. The odd inversion of the question, with its verb placed at
the end, likewise contributes to an effect of syntactical estrangement. This brief
moment of panic is thus highly illuminating, employing a linguistic shorthand to reveal
how Victor's thought processes characteristically distance and demonize his Creature.

Nursing in this novel defines a character's capacity for sympathy and selfless affection:
Victor's mother Caroline has come to her death from the act of nursing Elizabeth (I:2:2),
and Victor himself has already been the subject of Walton's concerned ministrations
after being brought aboard ship and, as here, fainting (I:L4:9).

The stress on forgiveness in this paragraph will stand ironically against the adversarial
bond developed between Victor and his Creature.

Walton credits Victor with retaining some of the power of sympathy that, in the early
chapters of his narration, Victor will portray himself as having felt in his youth.

Victor does jump to the right conclusion, yet without any discernible grounds for
it. He thus encapsulates the false justice within social institutions that will proceed
in the next chapter to claim an innocent victim.

Neither the Creature nor members of the De Lacey family hunt for food (II:4:5). Similarly,
for the most part, the Shelley household existed on a vegetarian regimen. It is unlikely
that such a pronounced abstinence from a meat diet can be discerned in any other major
novel in English.

In 1812, three years before the summer in which Frankenstein was conceived, Percy
Bysshe Shelley published the first of this couple's reinterpretations of the Prometheus
myth, suggesting that the significance of the titan's carrying fire to earth was as
a means of introducing flesh-eating to humanity. From that point on the pristine human
civilization was ravaged by disease. This seventeenth of the sometimes very long endnotes
to his "philosophical poem" Queen Mab (a note to VIII.211) was republished as a pamphlet
called A Vindication of Natural Diet in 1813.