Victor's characteristic passive verb construction reasserts itself here, in circumstances
where, since he has been out of the country for so long, he is the only member of
his family without an understood obligation to the court. The passive mood does suggest
his sense that he is trapped without a means of exonerating a person he is certain
is innocent. At the same time, in being attached to his own withdrawal from family
obligations, it may also indicate a more complicated pattern of causality than Victor
might like to believe in, one in which from the first he bears responsibility.

It has been suggested that Mary Shelley models Waldman on Percy Bysshe Shelley's instructor
in science at Eton, James Lind, who was also physician to George III at Windsor Castle.
He is portrayed by Shelley as Laon's protector and teacher in the contemporary Revolt
of Islam, Canto III.

Pronounced Valt-mahn.

Accounts of explorers were frequently bound together and sold as sets. From Hakluyt's
Voyages (1589) until well into the nineteenth century these were a common genre of
publishing.

Although the emphasis here is on a Godwinian model of education, the implicit equality
and shared sense of responsibility carry political connotations as well. This is particularly
so within the democratic environment provided by Switzerland.

Or is he? As in the early chapters of Mary Shelley's careful revisions for the 1831
edition where we find her intent on accentuating the link between Victor's statements
and the exhausted, fanatic sufferer rescued by Walton's crew, this proviso may be
inserted to suggest the opposite of its import, that the man who utters it is, or
has been, mad. At the very least the statement raises the question of wherein the
truth lies, in scientific evidence or in psychological experience.

Walton's science here is demonstrably false, particularly in respect to the time in
which he writes his letter (mid-December), when at this latitude the sun is visible
for only seven hours of the day. At midsummer, of course, the phenomenon over which
he enthuses is true.

From Chapter 20 of Oliver Goldsmith's novel (1766), where Parson Primrose's son George
recounts his misadventures across the continent of Europe.

Wooden-hulled ships before the age of steam were vulnerable to innumerable hazards
in the arctic and, given the length of such expeditions, required ample storage space
for provisions.

This constitutes something of a misreading of the kinds of experiments Erasmus Darwin
recounts in the first of his Additional Notes—"Spontaneous Vitality of Microscopic
Animals"—appended to The Temple of Nature. Probably Mary Shelley is taking figuratively,
as a kind of macaroni, the literal meaning of "vermicelli," tiny worms—what Darwin
calls "microscopic animalcules." Still, although she humorously exaggerates the kind
of spontaneous generation that drew scientific speculation in the early years of the
nineteenth century, it is important to recognize how seriously such experiments were
taken. Here, for instance, is the initial sentence of Darwin's "Conclusion":

{8} There is therefore no absurdity in believing that the most simple animals and
vegetables may be produced by the congress of the parts of decomposing organic matter,
without what can properly be termed generation, as the genus did not previously exist;
which accounts for the endless varieties, as well as for the immense numbers of microscopic
animals.

Percy Bysshe Shelley also cites Erasmus Darwin in the first sentence of his Preface
(I:Pref:1) to the 1818 edition.