As noted before (I:1:15, and note), natural philosophy, Professor Krempe's purview,
is science considered from a general perspective, whereas his colleague Waldman teaches
the more restrictive discipline of chemistry. Paradoxically, it is Waldman who appears
to have the larger humanistic grasp of the physical sciences.

Here is yet another sign of the "unnatural" nature of Victor's obsession, in which
he is closing off the world of life in order to animate the dead. At this point it
has become clear that Victor is isolated from all the those to whom he is related,
either by blood or by intellectual affinity, whether they be family members, friends,
or teachers. The true object of his affinity, and passionate aversion, psychologically
speaking, has already been set. This will be the Creature whom he creates in the next
chapter.

A share of the worth of a ship and its cargo taken in war.

This may be the single case in the novel where one can sense Mary Shelley reacting
to a reaction to her novel. She could not have revised this passage, adding such inflated
self-deprecation by Victor, without being conscious of the title of the first dramatic
redaction of her novel, Richard Brinsley Peake's Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein,
which she saw with her father upon her return to London in 1823. The word is never
uttered in the play, but the title clearly established a context in which Victor Frankenstein's
researches were from then on to be conceived; and Mary Shelley herself responds by
subsuming it within the third edition.

That is, Saturday, August 5: Victor came aboard ship on Tuesday morning, August 1.

Victor's holding us in suspense constitutes more than a novelist's manipulation of
her readers. Frankenstein, unlike much of the gothic fiction of the previous half
century, is a novel without much interest in the sensational per se, rigorously subsuming
its dynamic effects to a larger narrative logic. Such a train of logical premises
is here invoked by Victor, as Mary Shelley emphasizes that a major structural division
in the narrative is about to occur.

On 14 May 1817 Mary Shelley notes in her Journal that she wrote a preface to Frankenstein
and finished work on the novel. Over the next several months the fair-copy was read
by Godwin and several publishers; then in late August terms were struck for a contract
with Lackington, Allen & Co. At that point a new preface of just four paragraphs in
length was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, as if in Mary's hand. In the end, this
was the Preface that appeared with the novel. Mary Shelley's original remarks from
May 1817 have apparently not survived.

The historic main road between Petrograd and Archangelsk runs east to Vologda, then
turns directly north to Archangelsk.

How well Victor Frankenstein fulfills what he considers his obligation by Elizabeth
will unfold in the sequel. To some extent Mary Shelley is playing to a sentimental
conception of elective affinity in this portrayal, and certainly she is attempting
from the start to strengthen the romantic attachment Victor feels for Elizabeth. At
the same time, the extreme possessiveness of Victor's attitude is a characteristic
from which, in her personal life, she would have recoiled; and it is therefore no
unusual stretching of the rhetoric that would lead a reader to see in Victor's sense
of duty an implicitly demeaning condescension that reinforces an inherently masculinist
notion of power.

The description here and later in the chapter makes it sound as if Mary Shelley is
modelling the University of Ingolstadt on the college houses of Oxford, which Percy
Bysshe Shelley attended for less than a year and where a porter would lock the gates
during the night, barring access to the college until morning. Ingolstadt seems not
to have had such elaborately protective accommodations for its students.