1298

  • in a prison As the initial consequence of Victor's abandoning his Creature led to his brother's
    death and Justine's being cast into the Swiss prison where he visited her, the second
    wave of dark events is starkly complementary. Now his best friend has been murdered
    and he has himself experienced the alienating effects of imprisonment.

    • 1297

  • One paternal kind precaution

    Bearing in mind the previous paragraph's emphasis on Alphonse's fears for his son's
    mental stability, we may see this careful planning between father and fiancée as reflecting
    a shared concern that Victor not be left alone to indulge what they see as a tendency
    toward melancholy, or, in his own characterization, "lonely, maddening reflection."
    Even his seemingly innocent adjective here ("maddening") takes on added weight in
    the depiction of Clerval as a kind of chaperon to ensure the preservation of Victor's
    mental balance.

    • 1296

  • my power is complete This curious phrase recalls us to the last colloquy between Victor and his Creature
    after the destruction of Victor's second being. There, asserting his mastery over
    Victor, the Creature claims that he will attain this "power" (III:3:11), which is
    that of reducing Victor to the state of utter wretchedness he has now reached.

    • 1295

  • to post To post means going overland in vehicles drawn by horses. Mary Shelley copies the
    experience recorded in her History of a Six Weeks' Tour, where the party left the
    Rhine after Cologne and proceeded on the final leg of their continental excursion
    by stagecoach.

    • 1294

  • Portsmouth

    Portsmouth was at this time the principal commercial port of the south of England,
    maintaining a constant traffic between it and France. For a Londoner the normal crossing
    would have been via Kent, from Dover to Calais; but embarkation from Portsmouth would
    have been preferable for voyagers coming, like Alphonse and Victor, from the west
    of England.

    • 1293

  • my heart was poisoned with remorse This may seem a strange usage, but it accords with the primary meaning of "remorse"
    in Mary Shelley's day. Johnson's Dictionary (1755) lists the following two definitions:
    • Pain of guilt
    • Tenderness; pity; sympathetick sorrow

    In both cases, but particularly in the first, remorse involves a passionate suffering
    that could be likened to the action of poison.

    • 1292

  • plans of my father Alphonse, we realize, controls the purse-strings, and Victor and Elizabeth are conspicuously
    dependent upon his largess for their future welfare.

    • 1291

  • a considerable change in the physiognomy After the various kinds of mental deterioration Victor has suffered in the later
    chapters, it may come as something of a relief to acknowledge that he is still as
    scientifically alert to the representations of physiognomy as he was shen he dismissed
    Dr. Krempe's credentials on that basis (see I:2:12).
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