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.

At 15,781 feet, Mont Blanc is the highest mountain peak in Europe: its top remains
perpetually snow-covered, white ("Blanc"), thus "bright." Walking southwest toward
Geneva, Victor would have Mt. Blanc firmly in his sights.

The difference in the Genesis account of human creation could not be more pronounced:

1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them
have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the
cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the
earth.

1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male
and female created he them.

1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and
replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and
over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Victor's adjective "breathless" may be intended by Mary Shelley to resonate ironically
against the moment in Genesis in which Adam is actually brought to life: 2:7 And the
LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the
breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Even more directly than in I:4:5, Victor casts himself in the guise of Satan, whose
hell is a mental before it is a physical state: cf. Paradise Lost, IV. 75ff.

Walton's continuing preoccupation with the bravery of his crew (I:L2:1, I:L2:3) and
assurance to himself of their sense of purpose indicates a level of worry that will
return as a stark reality in the late pages of the novel. There he will confront what
is close to mutiny (III:WC:15).