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).

    • 1290

  • Perth

    An ancient city of Scotland, Perth was the Scottish capital until the mid-fifteenth
    century, when Edinburgh succeeded it: the old parlimentary building was not, in fact,
    razed until the year of Frankenstein's publication. The city is located on the river
    Tay some twenty miles southwest of Dundee, where Mary Shelley spent nearly two years
    -- from June 1812 to March 1814 -- at the home of the Baxter family.

    • 1289

  • a person A subtle irony attends this instinctive assignment of humanity where the status of
    "personhood" is what is most at issue.
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