This description of the Frankenstein household's educational routine appears to reflect
the principles of instruction practised by William Godwin in overseeing Mary's education,
which amounted to a rigorous education conducted totally at home. At this time there
could have been only a handful of British girls who received an education comparable
to hers.

This careful specifying of Victor's intellectual passions and gaps is added to the
1831 text to prepare us for the kind of obsessiveness Victor develops when, in the
ensuing chapter, he arrives at the University of Ingolstadt. Yet, intentionally or
not, the emendation also introduces a remarkable contrast in character development
between Victor and his Creature. In contrast to Victor's nostalgic memory of an indulged
childhood, the Creature experiences no parental kindness whatsoever and must begin
life from an existential nadir. In doing so, he is forced to educate himself exactly
in the elements of knowledge for which Victor has no interest: language, law, and
politics. See II:4:9, II:5:10 and II:5:14.

In the opening decade of the eighteenth century Czar Peter the Great decided to build
a new capital city for imperial Russia and picked for his site the swampy estuary
of the Neva River where it flowed into the Baltic Sea. There he built the city named
after his patron saint, officially establishing it as his capital in 1712. The extraordinary
dimensions of this achievement were still retailed with awe by the end of the century
when the 4th edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1797) dwelt at length on the
founding of St. Petersburg. Only in the second half of the century, however, did it
achieve the grandiose dimensions we now associate with the city. The major impetus
to its development was the building of the Winter Palace, the official home of the
Czars of Russia, begun by Peter III in 1754. In a palace coup that seems to have been
universally praised, the Czar's wife Catherine seized power from Peter III in 1762,
inaugurating the development of Russia into a modern and formidable nation. German
by birth, Catherine aspired to make her country not just a major European political
power but, more, one of its principal cultural centers. In her thirty-four years on
the imperial throne she amassed an extraordinary collection of art to supplement and
eventually supplant the Dutch-Flemish collection of Peter the Great: beginning in
1764. She had the fancifully named but grandly outfitted Hermitage built to house
these treasures. Likewise, she gathered a major library of over 30,000 books, whose
crowning glory was the acquisition of the entire library of Voltaire after his death
in 1778. In his later years he had been a frequent correspondent with Catherine, as
was Denis Diderot, the leading figure in creating for the French Enlightenment a compendium
of all that was known, the Encyclopédie. Diderot became her chief advisor on the acquisition
of art and in 1774 was himself persuaded to remove to St. Petersburg where he had
the singular duty of providing Catherine with an hour of learned conversation every
afternoon. Autocrat that she was, by the end of her life in 1796 Catherine had repented
of her patronage of the leading philosophical forces that had spawned the French Revolution.

That the novel is first set in St. Petersburg may be, then, not a mere curiosity,
but a careful signal of its intellectual and cultural dimensions. Through it the reader
of Mary Shelley's novel is to understand that it begins intellectually where it stands
geographically, in the shadow of Catherine's enlightenment vision of a modernized
culture. Robert Walton's thrilling sense of scientific discovery, detailed throughout
this first letter, and Victor Frankenstein's endeavor to create a new being both share
that ambience. The open question subtly articulated by this initial postmark is whether
the dream of the new city or of the new human can alter the conditions that have determined
the old. Will the novel, like Catherine, repudiate the world it brings forth?

Mary Shelley comments at length on the "terrific" storms she witnessed in the environs
of Geneva, including one that so illuminated the lake, in her letter of 1 June 1816.
Byron likewise includes a description of such a night-time storm in Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage, Canto 3, stanzas 92-95.

The Greek philosopher Zeno founded the school of Stoics, which, as the reference to
Cato indicates, lasted well into Roman times.

Novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth century reveal many instances of the antipathy
of a second wife to the children of an earlier marriage: it is the impulse behind
the Cinderella story. More to the point is the fact that Mary Shelley was brought
up by a stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin, for whom she felt little affection.

For the second time (see I:2:8 and note), Mary Shelley intrudes a white steeple into
a town without one, now adding a clock for good measure. However laudable the narrative
consistency, there is no such building in Ingolstadt.

Although the description here is intended to be amusing and to reflect an adolescent
student's viewpoint of his elder, behind it lie serious and even, perhaps, irresolvable
issues for the novel: particularly, the extent to which our perspectives are implicitly
molded by aesthetic criteria. By this standard the Creature whom Victor will create
in his laboratory becomes a proof text for every figure who depends upon sight for
knowledge. Even if familiarity, in the case of Victor Frankenstein, allows him in
time to overlook the ugliness of Professor Krempe or of the Creature while in the
process of his construction, it is clear from the repetitive emphasis on Krempe's
size that Victor has an aversion to littleness. In contradistinction to Krempe, his
Creature will be eight feet tall (I:3:7).

Loathe to leave the tight family circle to which he is accustomed (I:2:7), Victor,
in a sign that is a portent of the future, turns in on himself. His defensive condescension
excludes much more than Professor Krempe from his perspective.

This is a curious statement for Victor to make, perhaps indicative of how tenuous
a hold he has on reality at this point. Earlier, he had prided himself on his freedom
from this kind of childish fear: "I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale
of superstition, or to have feared the apparition of a spirit" (I:3:3).