Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, 1486-1535, German mystic and alchemist.

Agrippa of Nettesheim was born of a once-noble family near Cologne, and studied both
medicine and law there, apparently without taking a degree. In 1503, he assumed the
name Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, adopting the von to suggest a noble background;
three years later, he established a secret society in Paris devoted to astrology,
magic, and Kabbalah.

His career is diverse: secret agent, soldier, physician, orator, and law professor,
in Cologne, Paris, Dôle, London, Italy, Pavia, and Metz. In 1509, he set up a laboratory
in Dôle in the hopes of synthesizing gold, and for the next decade or so traveled
Europe, making a living as an alchemist, and conversing with such important early
humanist scholars as Colet and Reuchlin. In 1520, he set up a medical practice in
Geneva, and in 1524 became personal physician to the queen mother at the court of
King Francis I in Lyons. When the queen mother abandoned him, he began practicing
medicine in Antwerp, but was later banned for practicing without a license, and became
historiographer at the court of Charles V. After several stays in prison, variously
for debt and criminal offenses, he died in 1535.

Agrippa's wrote on a great many topics, including marriage and military engineering,
but his most important work is the three-volume De occulta philosophiae (written c.
1510, published 1531), a defense of "hidden philosophy" or magic, which draws on diverse
mystical traditions -- alchemy, astrology, Kabbalah. A later work, De incertitudine
et vanitate scientiarum (Of the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences), attacks contemporary
scientific theory and practice.

Many of his opinions were controversial. His early lectures on theology angered the
Church, and his defense of a woman accused of witchcraft in 1520 led to his being
hounded out of Cologne Cologne by the Inquisition. In his own day, Agrippa was widely
attacked as a charlatan. After his death, legends about him were plentiful. Some believed
him to be not only an alchemist but a demonic magician, even a vampire. In one account,
he traveled to the New World.

In 1799, Robert Southey published an amusing ballad on this man, suggestive of his
later reputation as a master of black magic, as well as of his susceptibility to gothic
trappings. Percy Bysshe Shelley listed Agrippa and Paracelsus among his favorite writers
in a discussion with Godwin in 1812.

Several critics have noted the extent to which Mary Shelley goes out of her way, as
Victor brings his creation to life, to transpose the physical pains of childbirth
into an equivalent psychological state.

We are thus invited to return at this point to the beginning of Walton's letter (and
the novel), perhaps to reflect on the fact that the first noun we encounter in the
novel is "disaster" (I:L1:1). Clearly, however he may publicly suppress their effects,
Walton, to some extent at least, shares the "evil forebodings" of his sister he recalls
in that initial sentence.

Only in retrospect will the conclusion of this letter take on additional meaning from
the remarkably heightened rhetoric indulged in by Walton here at its end. For Walton
so to "testify" is to "bear witness" before the world to a dependence upon and need
for his sister. In a narrative in which solitude and obsessiveness will come to seem
a threat to all normative human relationships, this prior assertion of the primacy
of human affection bears an ideological import. Students of English Romantic poetry
may even be reminded of the highly emotional faith with which Wordsworth turns to
his sister Dorothy in "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey", a poem that
will be quoted by Victor Frankenstein in an encomium to his friend Henry Clerval at
a point of structural balance with this passage, at the beginning of Volume 3 of the
novel (III:1:21).

Slowly, if we compare this statement with the initial voicing of this theme in I:L2:2,
it begins to take on secondary associations. Here, the primary value of friendship
is to provide sympathy, which is here glossed not as mere compassion or genial fellow-feeling,
but as a mirror for the self that will be conducive to personal growth.

The supposition is that Walton has met with a ship above Finland at the end of the
common sea-route out of the Russian port of Archangelsk. Here, at the top of Scandinavia,
as Walton continues his northern voyage, the other ship prepares to curve in a southerly
direction toward England. With its departure Walton loses his last contact with his
domestic circle: from now on he must prepare himself to be in isolation.

This, the first substantive change in the 1831 edition, speaks volumes on the shifts
in consciousness that have taken place during the thirteen years separating the two
editions. A separate middle-class identity and sense of upward mobility have become
endemic in British cultural attitudes, bringing heroic concepts like glory firmly
to earth.

The first-time reader of this sentence would see no reason to pause and ponder its
import, but for one returning to the text and tracing its linguistic and thematic
linkages, it would hard to understand how Victor could speak in such bland terms about
circumstances his mother could not foresee but through which he has suffered inordinately.
Moreover, not only does he have strong personal reason to repent this "design," but
its fulfillment, as he bitterly knows, will result directly in the death of his father
(III:6:16).

By the time Mary Shelley made these revisions, Goethe's Faust, Part I, had become
a European classic. She knew the work well, not only because Percy Bysshe Shelley
had translated parts of it during his last months, but because she had twice prepared
the text of these—a partial version the first time, in The Liberal, the shortlived
periodical the Shelleys, Byron, and Leigh Hunt had projected—and then in full in her
1824 publication of Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Faustian desire
for knowledge, of course, was also deeply implicated in the 1818 edition. Mary Shelley
was introduced to it shortly after she began work on her novel when Matthew (Monk)
Lewis, visiting Byron during the 1816 summer at Geneva, translated parts of it to
the assembled company. Faust also had a profound effect on Byron's dramatic poem Manfred,
begun shortly thereafter.

The extent to which Walton here throws all caution to the winds will be balanced late
in the novel by Victor Frankenstein's adoption of the same kind of rhetoric in appealing
to the sailors on Walton's vessel to risk everything for the mission's success (See
III:WC:14). It is at that point that Walton's prudence and essential humanity return,
perhaps as a secondary effect of his having, in the meantime, by this outburst elicited
Victor's sobering account of the cost to him and to those he loved of his passion
for knowledge.

Victor's native tongue is French, which, the reader will recall, is a language Walton
cannot speak (I:L2:02 and note).