1360

  • the numerous steeples of London

    Coming up the Thames, these late eighteenth-century travellers remark the objects
    that rise above the cityscape, which in general would have otherwise been limited
    to perhaps five or six storeys in height. In these circumstances the steeples of the
    London churches would have called attention to themselves, as they include many architectural
    masterpieces.

    • 1359

  • St. Andrew's

    A coastal city in Fife, St. Andrew's is the site of the oldest university in Scotland,
    founded in 1411. However impatient Victor represents himself, he and Henry Clerval
    go well out of their way to visit medieval sites on their way to Perth.

    • 1358

  • as I spoke my native language Although he has spent a full year negotiating his way in English, when Victor is
    reduced to an irrational state he naturally falls back on his native French. There
    is an undercurrent of class revealed in the indication that only Mr. Kirwin among
    the Irish attendants or villagers is sufficiently educated to understand French.

    • 1357

  • The spirits of the departed seemed to flit around As the chapter continues the tentative "seems" of the shadow cast by the dead is
    sharpened by Victor into a certainty. The dead become the enablers of his action and
    he sees himself increasingly as acting upon their behalf. Again, Mary Shelley's psychological
    portrait here is subtly telling: a person who has given up all sense of individual
    will has surrendered the central principal of vitality and may, indeed, be considered
    to have become an agent of death.

    • 1356

  • this glorious spirit This is the second time that Walton has referred to Victor Frankenstein as "glorious."
    Although less obviously allusive to Milton's characterization of Satan in Paradise
    Lost than the earlier reference (III:Walton:6 and note; see also I:L4:22), the verbal
    repetition serves to underscore with some finality the parallel with the fallen archangel.

    • 1355

  • the spirits that I had invoked to aid me This observation strengthens Victor's faith in an unworldly sanction for his mission
    of destruction. Yet, the forceful egotism by which Victor empowers himself, justifying
    his actions as divinely decreed, also suggests what today we would call a megalomania.

    • 1354

  • The spirits that guarded me Two paragraphs before Victor hypothesized the active intervention of the spirit world
    on his behalf. By this point he has convinced himself that he is under their protection.
    This is a further example of how in the last pages of his narration Victor moves further
    and further beyond the boundaries of a normative rationality.

    • 1353

  • a spirit of good The context strongly suggests that it is the ever-watchful Creature who is sustaining
    Victor's life throughout his long voyage, not the heaven-directed spirits that Victor
    imagines. Thus, this phrase is heavily weighted with irony. The irony is in fact attenuated,
    for Mary Shelley could not have written this phrase without consciousness of P.B.
    Shelley's title, "Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude," the poem he published in 1816,
    three months before the excursion to Lake Geneva. An alastor in Greek is an evil spirit.

    • 1352

  • the spirits of the dead The character of the "guiding spirit" (III:7:17) is darkened even more by this representation
    of the walking dead hovering around Victor and encouraging his desperate venture into
    a world of death. Although such macaberie is conventional to the gothic mode, its
    psychological impress here is new and startling.

    • 1351

  • so unfeeling a speech Victor's reflection on the nurse's lack of charity and sympathy is surely justified,
    but it has a double edge, reminding the reader of a similar abstracted indifference
    with which he has treated a being with far more substantial claims on his interest
    and attention.
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