https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Schrodinger%27s%20douchebag

In the 1818 edition, Victor is chastized by a prison guard for having a guilty conscience, despite his exoneration for Clerval's murder. In the 1831 version, this exchange is replaced by Victor's weakening physical and mental state as he travels home to Geneva with his father.

In this addition to the 1831 edition, Walton turns the focus of this passage about the ship’s master onto himself and how his older sister fostered him somewhat like a mother and helped build his character. Where 1818 says little about Mrs. Saville’s character, Walton now likens her to Elizabeth, who will also act as a mother figure to Victor Frankenstein after his own mother’s death. The 1831 edition more strongly accentuates the domestic world throughout the new version.

Roncesvalles, a small village in Northern Spain, was the site of the Battle of Roncevaux Pass (1798), in which the rear guard of Charlemagne's army was defeated by Basque Tribes.

There is no reference to India in the 1818 edition. But in this 1831addition, Victor refers to Clerval's ambitions to travel to India in "progress of European colonisation and trade." Though the British had pursued various ventures in the subcontinent since the seventeenth century, the East India Company Act of 1813 expanded British Rule in India, culminating in the enactment of the Government of India Act 1833, which disbanded the monopoly of the East India Company. Clerval's ambitions suggest the weakening of the monopoly and the emergence of new commercial opportunities for those wishing to make their fortunes in India.

As Mary comments in her 1831 account of the novel's composition, Percy Shelley wrote (anonymously) this 1818 preface to the novel's first edition.

In the 1831 edition, since Victor now travels alone rather than with his family, his perceptions seem to be more emotionally turbulent than when he shares the trip with Elizabeth and his father in the 1818 version.

In the 1818 edition the Creature says he had tried and failed to elicit Victor's compassion. In this 1831 revision, he is more direct and demanding.

In earlier editions, Victor leaves Switzerland in late August. The 1831 edition changes the timeline to late September.

This revision to 1831 emphasizes Elizabeth's "sensibility" and "intellect" as a full grown woman and her "slight and graceful" figure.

In this revision, the 1831 edition makes Victor far more explicit about the parallels between his own quest for knowledge as power and Walton's expedition. Victor also attributes this insight to the sublime context of their Arctic location. The 1818 edition only suggests Walton will learn from Victor's story.

In this revision to the 1831 edition, VIctor's confusion at this report of the murderer almost exposes his knowledge of the true perpetrator.

In the 1831 edition, nature is personified in greater detail. Victor continues up the Arveiron with his mule and the mountains, the "mighty friends," his only companions.

In 1831 Shelley makes one of the most controversial revisions of the 1818 edition. In the 1818, Elizabeth is a blood relation--Victor's first cousin--since she is the daughter of his father's brother. In the 1831 edition, Elizabeth is instead "discovered" by Caroline. Caroline notices a comely blonde girl "of a different stock" among the dark-eyed, Italian "vagrants." When Caroline learns that Elizabeth is the daughter of a Milanese nobleman and a German woman she decides that Elizabeth and Victor should someday marry. Thus the potential implication of incest in 1818, when Victor eventually weds his cousin, is erased in 1831.

See, for instance:

Ketterer, David "Thematic Anatomy: Intrinsic Structures" in Frankenstein: Bloom's Major Literary Characters, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004), 33-54; Richardson, Alan "Rethinking Romantic Incest: Human Universals, Literary Representation, and the Biology of Mind." New Literary History 31, no.3 (2000): 553-572; Twitchell, James B. Forbidden Partners: The Incest Taboo in Modern Culture (New York: Columbia UP, 1987).

This epigram to the frontispiece of the 1831 edition quotes from Book I, chapter 4, p. 43 of the original print edition, the scene in which the Creature comes alive in Victor's laboratory. The frontispiece depicts the Creature's birth and was engraved for the 1831 edition by William Chevalier, adapting a painted illustration by Theodor von Holst. This picture appears on our interface.

In this 1831 revision, Shelley emphasizes the physiognomy of Elizabeth's melancholy, witness by Victor in her somber countenance, absent in previous editions.

In this 1831 revision, Walton no longer refers to the Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca, telling his sister he will "die with a good heart." Instead he regrets that this own "mad schemes" have resulted in a threat to the lives of many others.

This appears as footnote, w/ asterisk at the bottom of page in 1818--so, presumably this formatting is carried over in 1831 here?

https://www.themorgan.org/collection/frankenstein/60

IS THIS IN THE ORIGINAL TEXT? WHY DOES IT APPEAR THIS WAY? OR DID IT APPEAR AS A FOOTNOTE TO THE 1831 PAGE, WHICH MAKES SENSE. BUT WE NEED TO CHECK ORIGINAL PRINT TEXT, OR ASK ELISA

In this revision to 1831 edition, Shelley elaborates on Clerval's "Indian enterprise," mentioned earlier in the previous chapter. Clerval wishes Victor to return to Perth to spend time together before the former's voyage to India. In the 1818 edition, Clerval notes they had been traveling in Britain for a year, and should take the next year of their voyage to return to Switzerland, via France.

Mary Shelley understates the weather emergency in 1816, which was often called "the year without a summer." Following the eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia, Europe's weather turned cold and wet enough to destroy crops and induce famine among populations across the continent. For a vivid account, see Gillen D'Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World (Princeton University Press, 2014).

The change from Victor’s countenance as seeming “very eager” (1818) to “a new spirit of life animated the decaying frame...” (1831) prefigures the same "animation" of the Creature later in Volume 1. FIX TYPO in TEXT--DELETE "THE" "time the a new"

While the 1818 version was published anonymously, its author unknown to the public, the 1831 title page identifies Mary Shelley as now a famed novelist, citing the science-fiction novel The Last Man (1826) and the historical novel The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830).

In this lengthy addition to the 1831 edition, Walton's brazen willingness to sacrifice the life of a human being to realize his own ambition for knowledge more strongly motivates Victor to "reveal my tale" as a powerful lesson to teach Walton's naive hopes for glory. The passage underscores the symbiotic "madness" that the mariner and the scientist share.

In the 1831 version Victor still refers to Elizabeth as his cousin, but in an affectionate, rather than familial, sense.

In this 1831 addition, Justine's testimony mentions the sound of "some steps" disturbing her as she waited out the night in the barn. This may be another reference to the creature, as with Victor's near slip with Ernest.

Shelley refers to Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), the polymath poet, inventor, and scientist who controversially speculated on the materialist idea of life's origins in matter.

In this 1831 revision, Shelley suggest that Victor's facial expression and agitation betrays his fear to Elizabeth.

In this change to the 1831 edition, "Elizabeth" appears instead of "niece." Elizabeth had been the father's brother's daughter (or Victor's actual cousin) in the 1818 edition, but this is no longer true in 1831.

In all editions before 1831, Victor's father asks his son whether he is "mad." Shelley's change of this word is peculiar, since Victor's response--"I am not mad"--seems more natural to the father's original question than it does to the 1831 question about his "infatuation."

In this 1831 addition, Victor rationalizes his decision to withhold his knowledge of the creature in relation to Justine's trial by reflecting that no one would believe him, or more likely, would think him mad.

This 1831 addition further emphasizes Walton’s bravado, pride, and ethos as an Arctic explorer. The dichotomy of rational man and untamed nature extends throughout the text. The change makes Walton further resemble Victor, who also acts on a “determined heart and resolved will” despite the consequences.

The 1831 edition adds references to "exploded systems" and "contradictory theories" that underscore Victor's engagement with kinds of science animated by imagination and wonder rather than critical restraint or careful study.

In the tale of the blasted stump that follows this passage, as with his discovery of the copy of Agrippa, once again Victor's fate is presented as the result of a confluence of his childlike enthusiasm and cosmic accident.

This substantial revision in 1831 seems to place greater blame on Beaufort for his condition as a matter of "false pride", implying that Beaufort's sins have betrayed the affection that once united thim with Victor's father. In the 1818 version, his father's primary concern is for the loss of Beaufort's company and his contributions to Genevese society.

Scotland's longest river, the River Tay extended from western Scotland to the town of Dundee on the east coast.

In the 1818 edition Shelley attributed this passage in a footnote to Leigh Hunt's poem "Rimini" (1816), but she no longer cites the poem's title or author in 1831.

In this 1831 revision, M. Waldman's influence depends less on his personality or charisma and more on his capabilities as a teacher.

Mary Shelley believed she did not substantially alter the story but only improved its concision and style. Modern critics, as our later annotations to 1831 will show, have strongly differed with her on this point, arguing that her revisions substantively changed the political tenor of the story, its gender and familial relationships, and its moral implications. For one influential example of this argument, see Marilyn Butler's introduction to the 2009 Oxford World's Classics edition of the 1818 text,

The 1818 edition cites popular romance heroes admired by the young Henry Clerval, but the 1831 text replaces these with a religious reference to the holy wars of the Crusades, which took place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The "chivalrous train" refers to the Christian knights of Europe who sought to regain control over the Holy Lands of the Levant. This passage is one of many places where Mary's 1831 revision becomes more explicitly religious than was the novel's original text.

The term tempest in 1831 replaces storm in 1818.

In the first edition, Victor fears the Creature will survive to "make another such a wretch as [he] is," tormenting him out of loneliness and hopelessness. In the 1831 edition, however, Victor asks Walton to end the Creature's life, so that the Creature might not "survive to add to the list of his dark crimes."

In this revision for the 1831 edition, Shelley emphasizes the effect Victor has on Walton and stresses Victor's weakened state.

In the 1831 edition, the portrayal of Professor M.Krempe becomes even more unflattering than it was in the 1818 version, showing him to be "uncouth" and Victor's evil "Angel of Destruction."

In all editions but the 1831, Victor says he wished to avoid London because he "dreaded to see again those places in which [he] had enjoyed a few moments of tranquility with [his] beloved Clerval." The 1831 edition makes no mention of Clerval; now Victor's father entreats his son to seek solace in the company of society, which Victor refuses, out of guilt and his guilt at unleashing "an enemy among them." Also eliminated in 1813 are references to stopping at the ports of Holyhead and Portsmouth on their way to Paris.

In this lengthy addition to 1831, Victor experiences an early flash of ruinous ambition during the chemistry lecture by M. Waldman. The new picture of Waldman as an evil force belongs to a pattern of provoking suspicion about scientific education in the 1831 edition that did not appear in the 1818.

Unlike the three-volume 1818 edition, the 1831 revision was published in a single volume (with chapter renumbering and extensive revision) in Colburn and Bentley's "Standard Novels" series. Outside London, the novel was published as a standalone volume--not a part of the London-based "Standard Novels" series--in Edinburgh and Dublin.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was a natural philosopher and is widely considered one of the most prominent figures of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution.

Luigi Galvani (1737-1798) was an Italian scientist who is generally credited with making pioneering discoveries in the study of bio-electricity, most famously passing electric current through a pair of frog’s legs to stimulate a muscular response.

By the early 19th century Galvani’s ideas had gained currency in England. In one infamous 1818 experiment, the corpse of a deceased criminal named Matthew Clydesdale was revivified briefly with the use of electric current. High profile scientific events such as this might explain the insertion of the otherwise anachronistic reference to “galvanism” in 1831.

In 1831, the opening to Elizabeth's letter is significantly re-written. Here she seems more desperate to see Victor and vouchsafe for his health. Her discussion of Ernest also changes: Shelley leaves out her lengthy excursus on the virtues of farming, as opposed to practicing law. Instead, Ernest is described as patriotic and considering a military career.

In 1818 a more perfunctory passage appears at the beginning of this chapter stating simply that the party "...visited the source of the Arveiron, and rode about the valley until evening."

In 1831, Shelley replaces this brief remark with a much more vividly detailed description elaborating upon the topography of Victor's journey through the Arveiron and the "sublime and magnificent scenes" in which he finds consolation.

When Victor calls Elizabeth "cousin" in the 1831 edition, the word is a term of endearment but not a term to take literally, since they have no blood relation. The term likely carries over, but with an entirely changed meaning, from the 1818 edition where Elizabeth actually is Victor's cousin (the daughter of his father's brother).

It is true, however, that incest was of significant fascination to Shelley. Her novella Mathilda, published posthumously in 1954, concerns the relationship of a woman with her father. After sending the manuscript of Mathilda to William Godwin, he told Shelley he found the depiction of incest "disgusting and detestable," and refused to return the manuscript to his daughter.

See Janet Todd's edition of Mary's novel:Shelley, Mary. Matilda; with Mary and Maria, by Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Janet Todd. London: Penguin, 1992, p. xvii.

Shelley adds this 1831 passage in which she traces Victor's fascination with alchemy and outmoded scientific ideas to an impetuous childhood, while the 1818 edition shows Victor reading the ancient sciences as an adult.

In the 1818 edition Victor says that he was "by birth a Genevese," his only reference to his own birth. The implication there is that he was born in Geneva, but the 1831 edition instead places his birth in Naples. Soon afterward we learn that when his family discovered Elizabeth, her mother is Italian.

This epigram appears underneath an illustration on the novel's first 1831 title page, facing the frontispiece; it was also engraved by William Chevalier after a painting by Theodor von Holst, Colburn and Bentley's illustrators for the Standard Novel Series. The epigram refers readers to chapter 3, page 31, in which Victor first departs the family home to attend the University of Ingolstadt--and to study there the sciences that will motivate him to create the Creature. The illustration shows Elizabeth Lavenza standing in the doorway of their home, smiling, as Victor steps into the street.

Byron's narrative poem Mazeppa would be published in 1819.

Shelley added this clarifying passage to the 1831 edition. By rephrasing “glory” as “advancement in his profession,” Shelley adopts a new expression, not usually found before 1810, indicating a more precise path to famed achievement. It was often used to mean advancement in Her Majesty’s Navy, thus it is especially apt for the lieutenant of Walton’s ship.

In earlier editions, a house is purchased for Victor and Elizabeth, presumably by Victor's father. However, in the 1831 edition, Victor's father petitions the Austrian Government for return of Elizabeth's inheritance. The change appears to be in error, since Shelley explains that Villa Lavenza sits on the shores of Lake Como, though the borders of Austrian Empire (1804-1867) did not extend as far as Lake Como.

"The springing of a leak" in the 1831 version replaces "the breaking of the mast" in the 1818 edition. Shelley had begun revising this phrase in the Thomas copy by pencilling in "carrying away of the mast," but she discards any reference to the mast in 1831.

In this addition to the 1831 edition, Shelley emphasizes the Creature's loneliness and the desire that drives him.

In this addition to the 1831 edition, Victor resists the judgment that he is "mad" by explaining his hesitance to reveal the truth about the Creature to anyone else.

In earlier editions, Victor's father calms him by pointing to the approach of their next port at Holyhead, a Welsh port in the Irish Sea. This reference, along with a reference to stopping in Portsmouth, England, disappears in this 1831 revision, replaced by Victor's shuddering at the "disastrous future" looming before him. The journey toward Paris now appears to have no stopping points in the United Kingdom.

In this 1831 revision, Elizabeth's letter is slightly more urgent for some communication from Victor.

This addition to the 1831 emphasizes Victor's sense of his culpability for the Creature's actions.

In this addition to 1831, Shelley emphasizes the importance of Ingolstadt as Victor's university-town environment during his medical training.

In this 1831 revision, Shelley reverses Elizabeth's bout of scarlet fever from "not severe" to "severe" so that it represents the "greatest danger" to her health.

In the 1818 edition, Elizabeth is the indirect cause of both her biological mother and stepmother's death. Her mother dies in childbirth, while Victor's mother falls fatally ill after caring for Elizabeth during her bout of scarlet fever.

The 1818 edition of Frankenstein was published anonymously, and early readers and reviewers often attributed it to Percy Shelley, not Mary. According to Mary in 1831 (and subsequent scholarship), Percy did largely write the 1818 "Preface," and it is now estimated by Charles Robinson that Percy contributed between 4000 and 5000 words to Mary's 72,000 word manuscript. See Robinson, ed., The Original Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley) [New York: VIntage Classics, 2009].

In 1831, the foundling Elizabeth's nobility appears to be recognizable in her physiognomy. Her features are described in terms that might be read as typical markers of whiteness: “thin of frame, fair of skin, and possessed of golden hair and blue eyes.”

During the early 19th century the field of “race science” was already established and growing. For instance, Linnaeus’ Systema naturae (1758) infamously contains a hierarchy of homo sapiens based on skin color.

In discussions of these contextual sources in the “race science,” scholars have often focused on the Creature as a symbol of the racialized other. This alteration to Elizabeth’s description in 1831 lends further credence to these readings by positioning Elizabeth, the spiritually and racially pure female, as has his ultimate victim.

See, for instance: Mellor, Anne K. “Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril” in Frankenstein Norton Critical Edition, 2nd Edition, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), 481-489.

Mary Shelley made a number of changes to this passage across editions. In the manuscript, 1818, and 1823 editions, Victor's father tries "to reason" with and console his son. In the 1831 edition the appeal to reason has disappeared. Instead Victor's father makes a Romantic injunction, proceeding from a "serene conscience and guiltless life," which he hopes will "inspire [Victor] with fortitude" and awaken in him "the courage to dispel the dark clouds" brooding over him. Since Shelley also toyed with this passage in the Thomas Copy, it was clearly an unsettled moment in the novel in her mind.

The 1831 edition records the place as "Havre-de-Grace," which appears simply as "Havre" in earlier editions. Havre is in the Normandy region of northwestern France. It is situated on the right bank of the river Seine, on the Channel southwest of the Pays de Caux. It was known for its maritime traditions.

In earlier versions, Victor and Elizabeth travel to Evian, a resort on Lake Geneva near Lausanne, for the evening before returning to Cologny the next morning. In the 1831 edition, the couple spend the night in Evian before traveling to Villa Lavenza on Lake Como the following day, but there is no mention of their return to Cologny.

in this revision to 1831 Victor's physical deterioration, as a result of his obsessive work and research, is more clearly linked to a deteriorating mental state as well.

In all earlier editions, Victor's begins to cry on thinking that he must to return to his father alone, without Elizabeth. In the 1831 edition, Victor joins a group of women and "join[s] his sad tears to theirs."

In this 1831 revision, Victor's expression "former studies" is generalized from the specific "more rational theory of chemistry" that appears in the 1818 edition. However, it is unclear what "former studies" Shelley is intimating here, as the scene with the copy of Agrippa is presented as the fateful moment of genesis for Victor's interest in science.

Thus, in the 1818 edition his father's gruff dismissal is presented as the foreclosure of a hypothetical redirection of Victor's curiosity towards "modern discoveries" of chemistry as an uncharted course of future study, rather than as a rebuke which threw him off the established track of his "former studies."

The Drance river near Evian extends about 30 miles through Switzerland and converges with the Rhone River.

In this 1831 revision, Walton more explicitly attributes exceptional emotional and intellectual powers to Victor than his letters in the 1818 edition make apparent.

In the 1831 revision, Henry Clerval is a more pitiable figure., acutely feeling the loss of his chance to pursue his passions in university studies.

As in the preceding sentence, Shelley elaborates on Victor's fragile mental state. The involuntary voicings of guilt evoke Iago's betrayal of Cassio to Othello: "There are a kind of men / So loose of soul that in their sleeps will / mutter." (Othello, 3.3.425-27).

The capital of Scotland and home to Edinburgh Castle. The Great North Road was the main mail and passenger routes. from London to York to Edinburgh.

Victor's imagination is treated as an element of his personality motivated by its own success.

Audiences and reviewers first took the novel to be written by Percy Shelley. According to Mary Shelley in her 1831 edition of the novel, Percy wrote the entirety of this 1818 Preface, which would reappear in all future editions. We now know that he also revised passages from Mary's manuscript before printing in 1818. For details of his revisions, see Charles Robinson, ed., The Original Frankenstein (New York: Vintage Classics, 2009): 44-252.

Shelley probably means the great fifth-century Greek tragedies, such as Sophocles' Antigone, Oedipus the King and others.

Like Elizabeth, Henry is made part of the family and shares what Mary Shelley often call its "domestic affections" that Victor's later actions imperil.

The relationships between Victor and his teachers appear to drive the interdisciplinary curiosity that leads to his later discoveries. For example, M. Waldman, who loves chemistry, notes that "I have not neglected the other branches of science," and neither does Victor.

The Cumberland lakes are part of the Lake District, a mountainous region on the border of Scotland and England.

Even by 1818, the novel was still a genre not recognized as worthy of being called a"literature." This may be partly why Shelley suggests novel should bear comparison with, and aspire to the stature of, poetry and drama: Miltonic, Shakespearean, and Greek.

"Manes," in this context, are ghosts or spirits of the deceased.

Like Robert Walton's love for poetry, Henry Clerval's love for books of chivalry and romance makes him sociable and open to domestic affections, unlike Victor. Victor will later regret that he did not have Henry's or Victor's orientation to languages and poetry at the most critical moments of his life.

One of the northernmost cities in Russia, St. Petersburgh, along with the city Archangel mentioned below, has a name that suggests a journey with theological overtones as Robert Walton moves ever closer on his expedition to his aim of discovering the principle of life, magnetism, and thus symbolically the seat of God.

Like the air-pump, recent experiments with electricity also fascinate Victor even while he reaches for a non-modern "system" that would be antithetical to empirical scientific reason. See Iwan Morus, Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early Nineteenth Century London (Princeton UP, 1998).

As Victor's cousin, Elizabeth will also play other family roles as "sister," substitute "mother," and finally "wife." In 1831 Mary Shelley changed Elizabeth's role into that of a foundling, unrelated to Victor by blood. Some modern critics believe this 1831 change avoids the possibility of incest in the 1818 novel and makes the later novel more conservative in implication. For the first arguments of this kind, see Ellen Moers, "Female Gothic: The Monster's Mother," The New York Review of Books, 21, no. 4 (March 21, 1974) and "Female Gothic: Monsters, Goblins, and Freaks," The New York Review of Books, 21, no. 5 (April 4, 1974).

Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in the Swiss Alps, the highest in Europe west of Russia's Caucasus peaks, at about 15,000 feet. It is situated between the regions of Aosta Valley, Italy, and Haute-Savoie, France. It gave Percy Shelley the title of one of his most powerful poems.

Havre is in the Normandy region of northwestern France. It is situated on the right bank of the river Seine, on the Channel southwest of the Pays de Caux. It was known for its maritime traditions.

Robert Walton's letters to his sister, Mrs. Saville, suggest he, like Victor later in the novel, has ambitious aims that will conflict with his family members' sense of well being. She never appears as a character in the novel, however.

The repeated references to "countenance" reminds us of the practice of the pseudo-scientific physiognomy prevailing in Victor's time. The writings of Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801), for instance, argued that thought that a person's character could be discerned from his physical appearance.

Robert imagines the cold North Pole as a sunny garden, suggesting a kind of Paradise as the destination toward which his scientific quest is moving. This is one of many affinities to Victor, whose fall into the profane knowledge of modern science also links him to Adam's expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

In the 1831 edition, the next eight paragraphs were to be heavily revised and important family relationships altered.

Of the books the Creature learns in the forest, Volney's The Ruins of Empires was most closely associated with Europe's radical Enlightenment. While the Creature learns a powerful critique of power, imperialism, and exploitation from hearing Volney read aloud, he also absorbs some of the Enlightenment's prejudices and ethnic stereotypes ("slothful Asiatics"). However, the effect on the Creature is to give him a sense of the structural and not merely a personal framework for understanding virtue and suffering. See Ian Balfour, "Allegories of Origins: Frankenstein after the Enlightenment," SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 56.4 (2016): 777-98.

Victors isolation from social ties or any scientific community makes it possible for him to conduct his grisly experiments in the first place. At the same time, Victor's choice points toward the later fate of the creature as a vagrant, not capable of socializing because he has been born outside of society. Ultimately, both Victor and the creature are left with no pathways back to social life and its affections.

The Andes are the highest peaks in the western hemisphere.

Mary Shelley seems to confuse "Turk" with "Arab" here, and more generally her picture of Safie's father as both suffering Christian religious prejudices (against Muslims) and acting as a wily, untrustworthy figure.

Pentland is a range of hills to the south-west of Edinburgh.

The Shelleys visited Mont Blanc, located in the Swiss Alps, the site of Percy Shelley's great poem "Mont Blanc; Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni" (1816). Compare the following lines from the poem: "Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there, The still and solemn power of many sights, And many sounds, and much of life and death. In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, In the lone glare of day, the snows descend Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there, Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, Or the star-beams dart through them."

Theseus was the mythical king and founder-hero of Athens. Plutarch's Life of Theseus makes use of varying accounts of the death of the Minotaur, Theseus' escape, and the love of Ariadne for Theseus.

It is unclear who this English philosopher might have been, though it might be a reference to Erasmus Darwin, who Percy Shelley cites in the novel's introduction.

Victor refers to the Creature as his vampire--a reanimated corpse. The vampire was a notorious figure in British lore in the period, which later be immortalized in John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) a friend of the Shelleys and their guest at Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816, when Mary first drafted the novel.

In the late eighteenth century, a "wallet" was a bag used by beggars.

Arveiron is a glacial tributary of Mont Blanc. It is referred to twice by Mary in Six Weeks' Tour. For example, this entry on July 24: "Yesterday morning we went the source of the Arveiron. It is about a league from this village ; the river rolls forth impetuously from an arch of ice, and spreads itself in many streams over a vast space of the valley, ravaged and laid bare by its inundations. The glacier by which its waters are nourished, overhangs this cavern and the plain, and the forests of pine which surround it, with terrible precipices of solid ice.". See Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland: With Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni. T. Hookham, jun. Old Bond Street; and C. and J. Ollier, Welbeck street, 1817, p. 156.

William Godwin was Mary Godwin's father, the leading radical political philosopher of the Romantic period. A prolific writer, Godwin was known primarily for his political works, most notably Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793), but also for the novel Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) and the biography of his late wife Mary Wollstonecraft, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), an early example of biography.

The Creature's story emphasizes the complex question of knowledge--how "strange" and contradictory it is to have, how "sorrow only increased with knowledge"--in ways that suggest it is drastically reductive to see in this novel only a warning against science.

This word is an archaic term for Muslim, derived from Mahomet, a version of "Muhummad."

Solon (c.  638 – c.  558 BC) was an Athenian poet, statesman, and lawmaker. In Plutarch's telling, he is particularly notable for his efforts to legislate against political, economic, and moral decline in pre-Socratic Athens.

Tartary was a vast, cold country in the northern parts of Asia, bounded by Siberia on the north and west. A vast tract of land in northern and central Asia, it stretched from the Caspian Sea and the Ural Mountains to the west, all the way to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It was inhabited mostly by Mongol peoples.

Retributive justice holds that the correct punishment for a crime balances the wrong, and that punishing wrongdoers deters others from committing similar crimes in the future. Note, however, that Justine is wrongfully executed for the death of William. Shelley thus seems to imply that hasty prosecution, especially for the sake of revenge, might hurt the innocent, thereby creating new injustices.

At the time of its writing, there was already a concerted reformist effort to do away with the death penalty. For example, as early as 1762, Jean-Jaques Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract that "There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example if he can be left to live without danger to society."

Not called "science" until the mid-nineteenth century, "natural philosophy" was science in the tradition of England's Royal Society (begun 1660), with its emphasis on Baconian induction, careful experiment, and refusal of any older science that could not be proven and demonstrated in a laboratory.

Perth is an ancient town on the River Tay in Scotland, about 44 miles north of Edinburgh.

The region south of Mayence might be more picturesque because of the Kühkopf-Knoblochsaue, now a well-known nature preserve.

The early modern English physician William Harvey (1578-1627) made several valuable contributions to the medical sciences, including the circulation of blood in the human body. In De Motu Cordis (1628), Harvey sets down his landmark experiments; in these, Harvey used ligatures to stem blood flow to better understand how the heart works to pump blood throughout the human body. This knowledge will be critical for Victor's creation of the Creature.

At the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816, Lord Byron (1788-1824) and John Polidori (1795-1821) joined Mary and Percy Shelley in their competition to write ghost stories on the model of German Gothic narratives.

The capacity for friendship is closely linked in the novel to the virtues of sympathy and high regard for domestic affections; Walton and Victor both yearn for a friend.

We now know that the magnetic charge of the North Pole causes the needle of a compass to point north. However, until William Gilbert (1540-1603) discovered the magnetism of the earth's poles, it was a common conception that the needle on the compass moved by force of magic. In Shelley's time, the source of the earth's magnetism was a mystery and adventurers like Robert Walton set out to the North and South Poles seeking scientific answers and public glory.

In French the phrase maladie du pays literally means "disease of the country," the common expression for "homesickness".

Victor recognizes that grave robbing and animal torture are "loathsome activities," but imagining the "great object" of their results overpowers his conscious. Here, Shelley seems to explore the relation between imagination, morality, and convention, and to what extent feelings express what ought to be done morally.

St. Bernard's Well, a circular Roman-style structure, was built in 1789 to a design by celebrated Edinburgh landscape painter Alexander Nasymth drawing inspiration from the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli in Italy. It is on the Water of Leith in Dean Private Gardens.

Pandaemonium ("All demons" in Latin), was the capital of Hell in Milton's Paradise Lost (II.119-69).

With Victor's mother's death, her wish for Elizabeth to assume her motherly role begins a series of symbolic family roles that Elizabeth will occupy: mother to the children, "my more than sister" to Victor, and eventually wife to Victor.

Robert will return to England by way of the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa) or the Cape Horn (South America).

The novel’s subtitle invokes the trickster hero of Greek mythology, Prometheus, who defies the Gods by stealing fire (a symbol of knowledge) and giving it to humanity. Akin to Victor Frankenstein, Prometheus is also credited with the creation of man, which he fashions out of clay. As punishment for the disobedience, Zeus condemns Prometheus to eternal torment: he is chained to a rock for eternity while an eagle feeds on his liver. Shelley’s husband Percy would later take up the Prometheus myth in the closet drama Prometheus Unbound, published in 1819. Reading the novel against the myth, we can understand Prometheus’s punishment for the Gods akin to Victor’s psychological torment for defying nature.

The Creature identifies himself with the hero of Johann Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Werther (1774), but unlike his reputation among European readers, Werther is not a glamorous figure for Shelley but an emblem of the Creature's isolation and despair. On the relation of these novels, see Roswitha Burwick, "Goethe's Werther and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," Wordsworth Circle 24.1 (1993): 47-52.

Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) was also the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas. He is often praised for his rejection of dogmatic philosophy and his stress on experimentation. Many books, including the Little Book on Alchemy, were falsely attributed to Magnus but likely written by Paracelsus.

The Iliad is an epic poem attributed to Homer; its action is set earlier than the plot of Homer's The Odyssey and takes place in the last year of the Trojan War.

Situated near the peaks of the Aiguilles Rouges, Chamounix faces the north side of the summit of Mont Blanc. Picturesque, Chamounix was the host of the first Winter

A diligence is a type of public carriage.

Along with reference to Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Manner," Victor's hopeless plight reminds us somewhat of William Cowper's (1731-1800) "The Castaway" (1799). Victor, however, does not perish "each alone," but instead in the company of his new friend Walton. The Creature, by contrast, will choose to perish alone.

Victor expresses guilt over his failure to make the existence of the creature known to the public, especially at the trial of Justine. In Volume 3, Chapter 5, Victor claims that it is well for "the unfortunate to be resigned," since "for the guilty there is no peace."

There were a number of different denominations of Orthodox Christianity prevailing in Turkey at the time, which was predominantly Muslim under the Ottoman Empire.

A syndic was the mayor or head of administration of a commune or canton. In Geneva, they were part of a council appointed by the legislature to govern the republic.

Strasburgh, or more commonly Strasbourg, is the capital of the Grand Est region of France, the official seat of the European Parliament. It is located close to the border with Germany in the historic region of Alsace. In Shelley's day, Strasburgh was a well-known center of humanism, at the crossroads of French and German intellectual traditions.

The Salève is a mountain of the French Prealps. It is also called the "Balcony of Geneva."

The maintenance of "domestic affection" is one of the most important virtues for Mary Shelley, one that is repeatedly violated by Victor Frankenstein's disregard of family responsibility, including the care of his own creation, the Creature.

Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount of Falkland (c. 1610-1643), fought on the Royalist side during the Civil War and was killed in action at the First Battle of Newbury.

Numa Pompilius (753–673 BC; reigned 715–673 BC) was the legendary second king of Rome, succeeding Romulus.

When Mary wrote Frankenstein slavery was still pervasive in Europe and the Americas, and slavery persisted in England until the 1834 Slavery Abolition Act. Mary's father, William Godwin, wrote against slavery in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793).

A tincture of opium, laudanum was popular among some English writers of the Romantic period including, most notably, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey, whose Confessions of an English Opium Eater specifically related his experiences with and addiction to the drug.

Victor seems to regard himself as godlike in his research. Subsequently, he advances a personal ethics of creation about the specific "raw material" he uses for his experiments, and to the source of the raw material.

In his review, "On Frankenstein," published in The Athenaeum in 1831, Percy states that "The scene between the Being and the blind De Lacey in the cottage is one of the most profound and extraordinary instances of pathos that we ever recollect. It is impossible to read this dialogue--and indeed many other situations of a somewhat similar character--without feeling the heart suspend its pulsations with wonder, and 'the tears stream down the cheeks!'" (Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "On Frankenstein." The Athenaeum: Journal of English and Foreign Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, Saturday, November 10, 1832, p. 730).

The philosophers stone was also called the elixir of life, or thought to create it, and to be useful for rejuvenation and for achieving immortality; for many centuries, the stone and the elixir were the most sought goal in alchemy.

The Creature's awakening to consciousness alludes to accounts of consciousness and maturation by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Locke gives an account of how the mind of a child slowly learns to distinguish the various senses before it can apprehend the world in totu, in Ch. 7 of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Rousseau's Emile, which Mary recorded having read in 1815, also offers an account contrasting the senses of an adult to the senses of a child.

Mary may be borrowing from her father's work in her account of Victor's childhood. Regarding children, William Godwin's Political Justice recommends that we: "Refer them to reading, to conversation ... but teach them neither creeds nor catechisms, either moral or political ... Speak the language of truth and reason to your child, and be under no apprehension for the result. Show him that what you recommend is valuable and desirable, and fear not but he will desire it. Convince his understanding, and you enlist all his powers animal and intellectual in your service" [Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (London, 1798) I: 43].

The Jura Mountains are a sub-alpine mountain range to the north of the Western Alps, along the border of Switzerland and France.

Victor implies that life can be renewed from death, a theme present in biblical scripture. See Gen. 3:19, 18:27; Job 30:19; Eccl. 3:20) and in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (Burial Rite 1:485, 2:501).

Rising in the northern side of the Mont Blanc in the Alps, the river Arve receives water from the many glaciers of the Chamounix valley. The river is known for its frigid waters.

"Guided by a slight clue," Victor tracks the monster from Geneva along the windings of the Rhone southward to the Mediterranean. He spots the monster hiding in a ship and follows him to the Black Sea, through the wilds of Tartary and Russia. Ultimately, he travels northward into the ice.

the Pelissier structure is a scenic bridge over the Arve river, featuring stunning view of Mont Blanc to the north.

Victor is referring to Chalgrove Field in Oxfordshire, where the revolutionary leader John Hampden was fatally wounded in a battle with Royalist leader Prince Rupert.

Born in Geneva, Switzerland, Victor is a potential hero insofar as he embodies the "republican" virtues of Europe's only country, much admired by the Shelleys, which did not have a hereditary monarchy. By making Geneva so central to the novel's cultural geography, Mary Shelley also designates the relation between Victor's ambition and Jean Jacques Rousseau's world-making ambition in Discourse on Inequality (1754) among other works.

Romulus (c. 750 BC) was believed to have founded the city of Rome, its institutions, government, military and religious traditions. He reigned for many years as its first king. He is thought to have killed his twin brother, Remus.

La Valais is an extremely mountainous region that includes the highest mountains in Switzerland. The highest mountain ranges are the Pennine Alps, the Bernese Alps, and the Mont Blanc. The Pays de Vaud, on the other hand, is partly mountainous, though visually arresting, having summits of about 3,000 meters.

Cadavers for anatomical training in this period were scarce, and thus a medical education meant to study and extend life also fostered serial killers who committed murders for the sake of selling fresh corpses. Such killing sprees were ended by the Anatomical Act of 1832 in England, which made corpses legally available for medical research.

Walton's imagined "paradise" of his own making suggests the power of imagination, yet also the possibility of creating a Hell of one's own. It is also one of the novel's many allusions to John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Matlock is a county town in Derbyshire, just to the north of Matlock Bath, a former spa town.

Cato the Younger (95-46 BCE) was a Roman statesman and Stoic.

Derby, England is a city lying on the banks of the River Derwent, Derbyshire.

Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC – AD 65) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, moralist, and dramatist. He was forced to commit suicide by Nero after allegedly plotting the Emperor's death.

Victor followed the Rhone as it winded its way south, toward the Mediterranean.

Arthur's Seat is a main peak of a group of hills in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Aiguilles is French for "pinnacle of rock."

The Aztec empire, located in Mexico, was conquered by the Spanish in 1521, and the Peruvian Inca empire was conquered in 1532. Both were "destroyed" by the disease, famine, and violence the Europeans brought with them.

In July 1794, Plainpalais, a neighborhood in Geneva, was the site where a group of Swiss revolted against the Genovese government with the help of the French revolutionary Robespierre, establishing a tribunal and putting on trial several high-ranking Genovese officials. Critics suggest Shelley's use of Plainpalais is an attempt to explicitly link the revolutionary events of Plainpalais with the Creature's monstrosity. See Fred V. Randel, "The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," ELH Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer, 2003): 465-491.

St. Andrews is a town on the east coast of Fife in Scotland, 30 miles northeast of Edinburgh. It is home to the University of St Andrews, the third oldest university in the English-speaking world.

Mainz (French: Mayence) is the capital and largest city of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. The city is located on the Rhine river at its confluence with the Main river, opposite Wiesbaden on the border with Hesse.

Elizabeth was also the name of Percy Shelley's mother.

Known for its number and length of bridges, Lucerne had a population of about 100,000 in the 1797 census. Almost exclusively Catholic, it was situated in the German-speaking region of Switzerland. It remains highly scenic, framed by mountains and lakes.

The Creature inverts the master-slave relationship, which may explain why apartheid South Africa banned the novel. Throughout the passage, the Creature seems to adopt the voice of Satan's language in Paradise Lost.

The Orkney Islands lie along the north-east coast of Scotland.

By 1818 physiology had become a controversial branch of medicine at the center of the dispute between vitalism, the idea that a divine spark energized animal life, and materialism, the argument that chemical processes alone give rise to life. Mary Shelley was well aware of the dispute since the Shelleys' family doctor, William Lawrence, was vigorously taking up the materialist argument in works like An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology (1816). For a full view of this controversy as it relates to the novel, see Marilyn Butler, "Frankenstein and Radical Science" [1993] reprinted in J. Paul Hunter, Frankenstein, Norton Critical Edition, second ed. (New York: Norton, 2012): 404-416.

That is, they spoke German, rather than the French of De Lacey and his family.

Charnel houses were vaults where human skeletal remains were stored. Often they were built near churches for depositing bones unearthed while digging fresh graves. They were a major resource for Victor's experiments.

Walton's exploratory ambitions parallel Victor's scientific ambitions, one of many affinities they recognize in each other.

Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans is also called Parallel Lives or Plutarch's Lives. A series of biographies of famous leaders from ancient Greece and Rome, they are arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings across the two civilizations and were likely written at the beginning of the second century AD. The Lives seem to give the Creature a stirring ideal of the human life that is unlike his own experience of existence.

Victor means Edinburgh Castle, a historic fortress presiding over the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, and built as early as the 12th Century.

Angelica is the heroine of Orlando Furioso by Lodovico Ariosto (1532).

This passage comes from Oliver Goldsmith's (1730-1774) novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and seems to ask whether education ought to be directed squarely towards vocational training (as clear from Clerval's father's opinion), or whether learning the classical languages or literature (or "the Greeks") is valuable in itself.

"Creation" points toward popular literary themes, and to the Bible. It also calls into question property rights. John Locke (1632-1704) argued in Two Treatises of Government that applying one's labor to nature made that creation one's property. Shelley seems to call into question the relation of scientific research to the idea of ownership.

Montanvert, also known as Mer de Glace (French for 'sea of ice"), is one of the three major glaciers on Mont Blanc.

Isis is the former name for the section of the Thames that flows from Gloustershire to Dorchester-on-Thames.

Victor's understanding of biological systems as machines was typical of nineteenth-century biology and physiology, and the debates between mechanists and vitalists, which still partially embraced the mechanistic perspective of human life advanced by Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and others.

In his book De Occulta Philosophia Agrippa suggested that God placed magic in the world to make man capable of transcending the natural sphere and able to influence the superior realms.

Appearing at the very end of the chapter, Alphonse Frankenstein's words do little to reassure his son (or the reader), of the administration of justice at court. See: Patrick Vincent, "'This Wretched Mockery of Justice': Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Geneva," European Romantic Review, 18.5 (2007): 645-661.

The landscape in southern Holland is mainly flat and strewn with lakes and canals. Since most of the Netherlands is low-lying, with nearly half of the land at or below sea level, it was commonly referred to at the time as "the plains of Holland."

In 1642, the absolutist monarch Charles I of England (1600-1649) gathered forces loyal to him, and used Oxford as a home base to combat the rebelling Parliamentarian Forces led by the Earl of Essex, Thomas Fairfax, and Oliver Cromwell. The conflict culminated in the execution of the monarch for treason in 1649. See Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War 2nd ed (New York: Palgrave Macmillon, 1998).

Victor's admiration for John Hampden (1595-1643)--a leading English dissident opposing Charles I in the early years of the English Revolution--sits uneasily with his earlier nostalgia for the days of Charles I. Where the Creature had shown a consistent and clear sympathy with the radical Enlightenment, Victor seems as confused about the reactionary and progressive elements of the English past as he had about the modern and premodern versions of "natural philosophy" in the history of science. See also Iain Crawford, "Wading Through Slaughter: John Hampden, Thomas Gray, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," Studies in the Novel, 20.3 (1988): 249-61.

The death of Victor's mother, caused by her catching Elizabeth's scarlet fever, would lead in Victor's mind to a morbid association between the two women. It appears more vividly in Victor's nightmare in Volume 1, Chapter 4, associated there with his first horror at beholding his creature.

From Milton's poem the Creature imagines himself as an Adam created by an all-powerful god (Victor). Later in the paragraph, the Creature considers if a more apt comparison for his condition might be to Satan, cast out from his companions and protector.

In this Thomas Copy interpolation, Shelley gives Victor a torrent of mixed feelings, from love to grief, before he speaks to Elizabeth

In this Thomas Copy addition, Victor guides Elizabeth to safety amid imagined threats from the Creature that exist, of course, only in his own haunted mind.

This addition to the Thomas copy associates the creature with the "un-human," an early indication of revisions in 1831 that will make the Creature more monstrous and less compellingly human than he had been in the 1818 original.

This addition in the Thomas Copy is one of several indications that Mary is rethinking Victor's extreme emotional states as a form of madness, despite his denial to his father that "I am not mad." By distinguishing a madness "of the heart" rather than the mind, Victor confides in the reader a belief that he is verging on madness that will be more elaborate in the 1831 revision and does not appear so pronounced in the 1818 version. This addition in the Thomas Copy does not specifically carry over to 1831 but it does seem to suggest she was already thinking of him in terms of madness by 1823.

This revision in the Thomas Copy adds a vivid account of Victor's symptoms as they seem to drain him of masculinity and make him quiver "as a love-sick girl." In 1831 Shelley rewrote this passage again without the gendered simile.

This brief addition in the Thomas Copy emphasizes the extent to which Victor's interest in human physiology carries away his imagination until he is "exalted to a kind of transport."

FIX

The 1823 edition's title page differs almost entirely from the 1818 original title page. The title is the same, but for the first time the 1823 edition lists Mary Shelley as the novel's author. (Though it does not list Wiliam Godwin, her father, as the editor responsible for the minor revisions in this edition.) The page also shows that the 1823 edition appears in two volumes, not three as in 1818. The new publisher for the novel is G. and W.B. Whittaker.