A share of the worth of a ship and its cargo taken in war.

This may be the single case in the novel where one can sense Mary Shelley reacting
to a reaction to her novel. She could not have revised this passage, adding such inflated
self-deprecation by Victor, without being conscious of the title of the first dramatic
redaction of her novel, Richard Brinsley Peake's Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein,
which she saw with her father upon her return to London in 1823. The word is never
uttered in the play, but the title clearly established a context in which Victor Frankenstein's
researches were from then on to be conceived; and Mary Shelley herself responds by
subsuming it within the third edition.

That is, Saturday, August 5: Victor came aboard ship on Tuesday morning, August 1.

Victor's holding us in suspense constitutes more than a novelist's manipulation of
her readers. Frankenstein, unlike much of the gothic fiction of the previous half
century, is a novel without much interest in the sensational per se, rigorously subsuming
its dynamic effects to a larger narrative logic. Such a train of logical premises
is here invoked by Victor, as Mary Shelley emphasizes that a major structural division
in the narrative is about to occur.

On 14 May 1817 Mary Shelley notes in her Journal that she wrote a preface to Frankenstein
and finished work on the novel. Over the next several months the fair-copy was read
by Godwin and several publishers; then in late August terms were struck for a contract
with Lackington, Allen & Co. At that point a new preface of just four paragraphs in
length was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, as if in Mary's hand. In the end, this
was the Preface that appeared with the novel. Mary Shelley's original remarks from
May 1817 have apparently not survived.

The historic main road between Petrograd and Archangelsk runs east to Vologda, then
turns directly north to Archangelsk.

How well Victor Frankenstein fulfills what he considers his obligation by Elizabeth
will unfold in the sequel. To some extent Mary Shelley is playing to a sentimental
conception of elective affinity in this portrayal, and certainly she is attempting
from the start to strengthen the romantic attachment Victor feels for Elizabeth. At
the same time, the extreme possessiveness of Victor's attitude is a characteristic
from which, in her personal life, she would have recoiled; and it is therefore no
unusual stretching of the rhetoric that would lead a reader to see in Victor's sense
of duty an implicitly demeaning condescension that reinforces an inherently masculinist
notion of power.

The description here and later in the chapter makes it sound as if Mary Shelley is
modelling the University of Ingolstadt on the college houses of Oxford, which Percy
Bysshe Shelley attended for less than a year and where a porter would lock the gates
during the night, barring access to the college until morning. Ingolstadt seems not
to have had such elaborately protective accommodations for its students.

John William Polidori (7 September 1795-24 August 1821) was the son of Gaetano Polidori,
a Tuscan man of letters and at one point secretary to the dramatist Vittorio Alfieri,
who had emigrated to England where he married a Miss Pierce and settled in London
as a teacher of Italian. John was educated at Ampleforth, Yorkshire -- a Roman Catholic
school -- and subsequently matriculated at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied
medicine, writing a dissertation -- Dissertatio medica inauguralis, quaedam de morbo,
oneirodynia dicto, complectens ...  -- on the highly romantic subject of sleep-walking
and receiving his medical degree at the remarkably young age of 19. The next year,
still not yet legally an adult, he accompanied Lord Byron on his excursion to Geneva.
That Byron quickly tired of his protege's immaturity is well known, but Polidori was,
indeed, quite young and inexperienced to be in such company.

Polidori left Switzerland for Italy in September 1816, where he traveled for nearly
a year, returning to England the following spring, at which point he sought to practice
medicine in Norwich. But he was unhappy in his profession and thought, instead, of
turning to law. In the meantime, perhaps as his own response to the heady literary
summer he had passed on the continent, he began a short, but productive literary career.
His first work was an extension of his interest in psychology, An essay on the source
of positive pleasure (1818). The following year came a volume of poems -- Ximenes,
the wreath: and other poems -- the novel Ernestus Berchtold, and the short story,
"The Vampyre," which, unfortunately, was passed off as the production of Lord Byron
when it was published in the New Monthly Magazine. When he found the work being published
under a separate imprint, Polidori went to some lengths to claim the work as his own,
but the scandal of imposture dogged him thereafter. His final work, Sketches Illustrative
of the Manners and Costumes of France, Switzerland, and Italy, was published in 1821
under the pseudonym of Richard Bridgens. That August, purportedly as the result of
contracting a gambling debt he could not honor, he committed suicide by drinking prussic
acid. He was 25 years old.

Mary Shelley deliberately joins the obsessiveness of artistic creation to that of
scientific pursuit. Although some commentators have assumed an implicit critique of
Percy Bysshe Shelley, he follows a similar path in "Alastor" (published in 1816).
Compare—

The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to
           heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

(Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, V.i.7-22)