1381

  • the devil Curiously, with so many references to the Creature as diabolical, only once earlier
    has Victor used this flat substantive, when he glimpsed the Creature on the Plainpalais
    outside Geneva after uttering a similar imprecation to the heavens.

    • 1380

  • that class This would appear to be another point where one senses in the conceptions of the
    novel the effects of Mary Shelley's experiences of giving birth.

    • 1379

  • the banks of the Thames

    London is situated far up the Thames from the entrance to the river on the Kent coast.
    Victor notes the principal landmarks the travelers pass enroute.

    • 1378

  • title here

    Main text here.

    • 1377

  • tears . . . streamed from my eyes Even as Victor thinks of himself as reacting with compassion to the assumed plight
    of Elizabeth, it is clear to any reader that he is actually weeping for himself. His
    giving in at last to his feelings is thus ironized, for rather than opening him to
    a renewal of his emotional life, his convulsive weeping results from a maudlin theatrical
    representation of his own death that wholly mistakes the threat to his future wife.

    • 1376

  • tears gushed from my eyes Victor's emotional instability is underscored by this sudden excess of sensibility.
    That his rekindled joy will soon be transformed into the despair his isolation in
    the boat had prefigured is indicative of the irony in which, from the point in which
    he spurned his Creature's desire for sympathetic rapport, he finds himself invested.
    Later, hope will come to him in a "burning gush" of ironically inverted expectation
    (III:7:22).

    • 1375

  • the sympathy of a stranger In accentuating his own lack of any ties but the common ones of humanity, Mr. Kirwin
    quietly establishes his link with Walton, who in the immediate context of the narrative
    recital has likewise altruistically attended to Victor's well-being without any sense
    of obligation or self-congratulation.

    • 1374

  • sympathies Although Victor dehumanizes the creature, it is interesting to recognize that, even
    so, he is unable to deny the being's fundamental claim to a primary human attribute.

    • 1373

  • swear That Victor has no right to implicate Walton in his vendetta goes without saying.
    But the legalistic, contractual mode in which he assaults Walton testifies strongly
    to the closed tyranny of mind in which he has been laboring now for many months.

    • 1372

  • the sun shone upon me The context seems to take the reader back to the May afternoon two and a half years
    earlier when Victor and Henry Clerval returned from their happy perambulations in
    the region of Ingolstadt to find Alphonse Frankenstein's letter describing William's
    death. Such innocent pleasure in natural renewal, Victor asserts, is no longer possible
    for him (see I:5:17).
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