Frankenstein is a novel haunted by the spectre of death. Not yet a quarter of the
way through the novel, the reader will encounter in Justine the fifth orphan (after
Walton and his sister, Caroline, and Elizabeth). Beyond this repeated pattern, death
has touched each chapter of the novel, first as Walton recounts how he inherited a
fortune upon the death of an unnamed cousin (I:L1:4and note), the decline of Alphonse
Frankenstein's friend Beaufort (I:1:2), the sudden demise of Caroline Frankenstein
(I:2:2), Victor's nocturnal visits to vaults and charnel houses (I:3:3), his association
of his Creature with mummies and ghouls (I:4:4), and the death of Justine's three
siblings and mother in this paragraph. The actual context for this narrative should,
of course, not be forgotten, an unexplored reach of the Arctic wilderness where the
sight of another human being (I:L4:4) provokes "unqualified wonder."

Although there are occasional instances in the literature of Romanticism where the
world of childhood is privileged—Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" is
a prime example—still the timbres here are unmistakeably Victorian, another sign of
the major shift in British culture during the 1820s. The nostalgic sentimentality,
however, rather veils the way in which Victor displaces upon his parents the mode
of his future conduct in life. His tacit abdication of responsibility will be repeated
in a more overt manner further on in his account.

Written in 1816, this is exactly appropriate for the circumstances of the day. England
was at this point in the forefront of research and the development of systematic knowledge
in chemistry.

During the latter part of the eighteenth-century the life sciences were undergoing
a radical transformation of their conduct, substituting scrupulous taxonomic categorization
and rigorous inductive experimentation for the slippery conceptual ordering and deductive
animism inherited from medieval and Renaissance paradigms. The exacting science of
chemistry influenced these developments and, in turn, was given impetus by the responsiveness
of the life sciences to their renewed systemization. When Victor speaks of a "rational
theory," he means, at least in part, such a logical ordering of constituent knowledge
within the discipline. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, particularly
in Great Britain under the guidance of figures like John Dalton and Humphrey Davy,
chemistry made enormous advances in basic knowledge, winning for the discipline something
of a cachet among educated people.

Victor's blasé consent is in sharp contrast with his sense of follow-through, and
his truancy from school is indicative of an increasing drift from his father's influence.
Perhaps it is meant as well to be ominous, a sign of future laxness in seeing his
scientific work through to a successful conclusion.

This poses a contrast worth contemplating: on the one hand, as earlier in the chapter
(I:3:8 and note), enthusiasm here literally suggests the presence of an indwelling
deity, or at least Victor's aspiration to play God; on the other hand, anxiety indicates
a counterforce within his mind, disrupting his self-assurance, even prompting self-alienation.
Since in Milton's myth Satan is created as a counterforce at the precise moment that
God announces his plan to create a new race, these contrary poles are essential to
the basic creation myth in terms of which Mary Shelley plots her novel.

See also the angel Raphael's account of the beginning of the new universe in Paradise
Lost (V.579-617).

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.