No other account of the writing contest verifies this bizarre project as Mary Shelley
outlines it. Polidori himself, in the introduction to his realistic novel Ernestus
Berchtold; or, the Modern Oedipus 1819), identified that work as the one he began
as the response to the challenge given by Lord Byron. He did, however, also produce
a horror-story of his own in direct competition with Byron's unfinished fragment,
which he published in 1819 as The Vampyre; a Tale.

Although the term sounds innocent at first reading, we may be reminded here of the
"secret stores of knowledge" ("secrets of nature" in 1831) Victor found in Cornelius
Agrippa (I:1:15) and perhaps also, as a point of contrast, of the emphasis shared
by all modern scientific discourse on open inquiry and testing results of experimentation
in a court of learned opinion.

Fanciful representations of the North Pole as an edenic clime, however nonsensical
they might appear in the light of modern science, are fairly common in early mythology.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, writing contemporaneously with Frankenstein, stages part of
the first canto of The Revolt of Islam in such a polar paradise derived from Indian
sources. The oxymoronic combination of fire and ice is a conspicuous feature of the
edenic paradise of Xanadu in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," published in 1816 and read
that summer in the Geneva circle as Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein. A strongly
ironic version of this coexistence of opposites informs the Creature's plans for his
self-destruction in the penultimate paragraph of the novel (III:WC:47).

The physical implications of Victor's "unremitting ardour" (I:3:9 and note) are here
made explicitly clear.

The saccharine evocation of Caroline Frankenstein may be meant to offset the radical
import of this phrase: there is no mention at all of heaven here.

To facilitate his creation Victor has recourse to animal parts and tissues from the
abattoir. What Victor thus rightly distinguishes in the previous paragraph as his
"new species" would seem to be an amalgam of several orders of sentient life. The
Creature's mixed status perhaps explains his superhuman strength, also the curious
fact that—like the herbivore cattle and horses to whom he may be physically indebted—he
is a vegetarian.

That is, of a less highly developed genus. The language reflects the late-eighteenth
century fascination with hierarchical taxonomies in all the sciences (see also I:2:16
and note).

In the early nineteenth century Turkey was the center of the far-flung Ottoman Empire,
which was to an English readership noteworthy for its autocracy and corruption. Perhaps
more to the point in 1831, that Empire abutted the growing British presence in India
and Afghanistan, making it a natural object of suspicion and prejudice. Whether Mary
Shelley thought twice about the terms of her analogy here one cannot know, but it
is a fact that Turks do not fare well in this novel. In its second volume (II:6:12)
Safie's father acts an ungenerous and even treacherous role.

Mary Shelley's brief addition in 1831 emphasizes the extremity of psychological state
that lies behind Victor's critical physical debility. He is at once paranoid, profoundly
introverted, and vaguely guilt-stricken. In modern parlance his condition would be
described as psychotic.

This length would have been commensurate with the suggestive but unfinished "Fragment"
that Byron contributed to the writing contest, or with the longer piece, essentially
a short story, that John Polidori entitled The Vampyre; a Tale.