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.

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.