The New Annotated Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley

  20. It is possible that Elizabeth already spoke Italian, learning it as an infant, and certainly Victor and Elizabeth would also have been fluent in German, the predominant language of Switzerland; both Italian and German were commonly spoken in Geneva, in addition to the principal language of French. Victor only mentions English and Latin because they were uncommon languages to learn, at least for daily use. Victor undoubtedly made extensive use of his Latin in connection with his studies: Much of the work of the alchemists that he read was published in Latin, and much of his course instruction at Ingolstadt University would have been in Latin. See note 17, Volume I, Chapter II, below.

  21. The phrase following was added by Percy Shelley and seems to reflect his approbation of Godwin’s methods.

  22. The Thomas Text indicates that Mary Shelley determined to strike this entire paragraph and replace it with a less concrete passage: “With what delight do I even now remember the details of our domestic circle, and the happy years of my childhood. Joy attended on my steps—and the ardent affection that attached me to my excellent parents, my beloved Elizabeth, and Henry, the brother of my soul, has given almost a religious and sacred feeling to the recollection of a period passed beneath their eyes, and in their society.”

  23. The phrase is “exquisite pleasure” in the 1831 edition.

  24. The word “But” is changed to “Besides” in the 1831 edition.

  25. The phrase “must not admit to” is replaced by “also” in the 1831 edition.

  26. Thonon-les-Bains is a town in the Rhône Alps, about twenty miles from Geneva; its population in 1838 was 3,740.

  27. Murray reports that in 1838 the inn was called Les Balances and that it had been “improved of late.”

  28. Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), German magician-alchemist and philosopher, best known for his book on ritual magic De Occulta Philosophia libri III (Three Books of Occult Philosophy), written in 1509 or 1510 and published in 1533. An incantation recorded in the book, said to invoke demonic beings, figures prominently in H. P. Lovecraft’s Case of Charles Dexter Ward, first published in 1941.

  29. This sentence does not appear in the 1831 edition.

  30. This didactic comment is stricken in the Thomas Text.

  31. This is the first mention of the narrator’s first name. Curiously, it was a name frequently adopted by Percy Shelley as a pseudonym.

  32. The balance of the sentence is revised in the 1831 edition: “have contented my imagination, warmed as it was, by returning with greater ardour to my former studies.”

  33. This sentence, the first equivocation by Victor about his measure of blame, was added by Percy Shelley. Psychoanalytic critics of Frankenstein point to this passage as a pretext (one of many such), a cover-up for Victor’s oedipal hostility toward his father and of course a vast overreaction to a father’s poor choice of tone of voice at a random moment. See, for example, Morton Kaplan and Robert Kloss’s “Fantasy of Paternity and the Doppelgänger: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” from their book The Unspoken Motive: A Guide to Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (New York: Free Press, 1973).

  34. Paracelsus, whose real name was Phillip von Hohenheim (1493–1541), was a German-Swiss alchemist and philosopher. He adopted the name Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim and, later, the title Paracelsus: “equal to or greater than Celsus.” (Celsus was a Roman doctor, philosopher, and encyclopedist.) Although most of Paracelsus’s ideas and theories have in fact been “overthrown,” he stands out in the history of medicine for his rejection of the ancient scholarship and his insistence on building anew on the basis of observation. Paracelsus is also credited with first suggesting that diseases might have a mental cause.

  35. Albertus Magnus (ca. 1193–1280), also known as Albert the Great and Albert of Cologne, was a German Dominican friar and a Catholic bishop (and later, saint—today he is the patron saint of natural scientists) whose encyclopedic scholarship won him widespread fame. Among his students was St. Thomas Aquinas. Although alchemy and astrology were two of the subjects that interested him, many works on those topics have been falsely attributed to him, to the detriment of his modern reputation. Although some of his theories, like those of Paracelsus, have been discarded, again like Paracelsus, he is honored today for his stress on experimentation and observation and his rejection of dogmatic acceptance of the classic scholars.

  36. The balance of this paragraph and the next are substantially revised in the 1831 edition to read as follows:

  besides myself. I have described myself as always having been imbued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature. In spite of the intense labour and wonderful discoveries of modern philosophers, I always came from my studies discontented and unsatisfied. Sir Isaac Newton is said to have avowed that he felt like a child picking up shells beside the great and unexplored ocean of truth. Those of his successors in each branch of natural philosophy with whom I was acquainted appeared even to my boy’s apprehensions as tyros engaged in the same pursuit.

  The untaught peasant beheld the elements around him and was acquainted with their practical uses. The most learned philosopher knew little more. He had partially unveiled the face of Nature, but her immortal lineaments were still a wonder and a mystery. He might dissect, anatomise, and give names; but, not to speak of a final cause, causes in their secondary and tertiary grades were utterly unknown to him. I had gazed upon the fortifications and impediments that seemed to keep human beings from entering the citadel of nature, and rashly and ignorantly I had repined.

  But here were books, and here were men who had penetrated deeper and knew more. I took their word for all that they averred, and I became their disciple. It may appear strange that such should arise in the eighteenth century; but while I followed the routine of education in the schools of Geneva, I was, to a great degree, self-taught with regard to my favourite studies. My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child’s blindness, added to a student’s thirst for knowledge. Under the guidance of my new preceptors I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher’s stone [see note 38, below] and the elixir of life; but the latter soon obtained my most undivided attention. Wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!

  There is little new here; the changes are primarily stylistic, expanding on Victor’s seduction by the alchemists.

  37. The word is “definite” in the Draft, as seems more apt.

  38. The philosopher’s stone, the quest for which was termed the “Great Work” of alchemy, was thought to be a substance that had various characteristics, depending on the alchemist: Paracelsus, for example, termed it “alkahest,” the universal solvent, with the ability to dissolve anything or to change any substance into another (such as lead to gold). The seventeenth-century alchemist Eirenæus Philalethes, in The Secret of the Immortal Liquor Called Alkahest, or Ignis-aqua (1683), wrote: “It is a Catholic and Universal Menstruum, and, in a word, may be called (Ignis-Aqua) a Fiery Water, an uncompounded and immortal ens, which is penetrative, resolving all things into their first Liquid Matter, nor can anything resist its power, for it acteth without any reaction from the patient, nor doth it suffer from anything but its equal, by which it is brought into subjection; but after it hath dissolved all other things, it remaineth entire in its former nature, and is of the same virtue after a thousand operations as at the first.” As late as 1797, it was noted in the Encyclopædia Britannica (3rd ed.) that “[t]he third method [of making gold] is by transmutation, or by turning all metals readily into pure gold, by melting them in the fire, and calling a little quantity of a certain preparation into the fused matter; upon which the feces [sediment] retire, are volatilized and burnt, and carried off, and the rest of the mass is turned into pure gold. That which works this change in the metals is called the philosopher’s stone. … Whether this third method be poss
ible or not, it is difficult to say. We have so many testimonies of it from persons who on all other occasions speak truth that it is hard to say they are guilty of direct falsehood, even when they say that they have been masters of the secret” (Vol. 14, 572).

  39. The elixir of life, sometimes actually identified with the philosopher’s stone, was said to grant eternal life or eternal youth. Accounts of the search for the elixir—known by hundreds of different names—can be found in ancient Chinese and Indian texts as well as European alchemical works. It was said to be possessed by the Comte de Saint-Germain, an eighteenth-century figure who claimed to be several hundred years old (not to be confused with the four-thousand-year-old vampire whose adventures have been recorded by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro), and Nicholas Flamel, a French scribe who lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (Legend has it that Flamel was an alchemist of great skill, and that he is immortal; Michael Scott’s fine Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series sets him in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

  Contrary to its attitude toward the philosopher’s stone, the 1797 Encyclopædia Britannica called the “panacea,” the universal medicine, nostrum, or remedy for all diseases, “a thing impossible to be obtained” (Vol. 13, 686).

  40. Including Cornelius Agrippa—see note 28, above. The Illuminati, or “the Enlightened” (see note 1, Volume I, Chapter II, below), also searched for a means whereby the initiated could achieve communication with the dead.

  41. This passage was substantially expanded in the 1816 manuscript by Percy Shelley to refer to “favourite authors” and “fidelity” to their writings.

  42. Distillation—separation of the components of a liquid by vaporization of the liquid and condensation of the vapor—was not new in the eighteenth century. The process was well known to the ancient Greeks; to the Chinese, who are said to have distilled beverages from rice by 800 BCE; and to Arab alchemists of the eighth and ninth centuries, among other cultures. In 1500, German alchemist Hieronymus Braunschwig published Liber de arte distillandi (The Book of the Art of Distillation), originally written in German but graced with a Latin title, as pointed out by Alasdair A. MacDonald and Michael W. Twomey, the editors of Schooling and Society: The Ordering and Reordering of Knowledge in the Western Middle Ages (Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2004), 65, note 15. Braunschwig’s work was translated into English in 1527. The first major work on technique and practice composed in English, probably based heavily on the Braunschwig, appeared in 1651 (The Art of Distillation, by the British physician John French [London: Printed by Richard Cotes], http://goo.gl/WdBZvK). “I rejoice as at the break of day after a long a tedious night,” French wrote, “to see how this solary art of alchemy begins to shine forth out of the clouds of reproach which it has for a long time laid under.” He was writing at a time when the use of spagyrical, or alchemical, preparations was being positively reconsidered.

  Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Liber de arte Distillandi de Compositis (Strassburg, 1512).

  43. It is unclear whether Victor here refers to steam distillation (see note 42, above) or the newly invented steam engine. The use of steam to produce mechanical motion probably dates from prehistoric times. The first patent for a steam engine was granted in 1606, to the Spanish mining administrator Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont, whose invention represented a partial solution to flooded silver mines in Seville. (An entrepreneur, Ayanz also created one of the earliest air conditioners; ovens for domestic and industrial use, including in the metal industry; silver-extraction devices; and nautical pumps.) Nearly a decade later, the Englishman Thomas Savery, adapting the principle of the common pressure cooker (invented by French-British physicist Denis Papin, who was eventually to improve upon Savery’s work by substituting a piston for the former’s vacuum chamber, to provide better suction), patented the use of steam boilers to devise a continuously operating pump that removed water from mines. Savery’s invention worked only in shallow mines, and there were frequent explosions caused by buildup of steam pressure (important to the running of Savery’s system), and it was left to the Englishman Thomas Newcomen to create, in 1710, the “atmospheric engine,” which used a piston, and whose steam-pressure level nearly matched atmospheric pressure. In 1781, probably around the time of Victor’s early schooling (we extrapolate that Victor was born in 1772—see Appendix 2, below), the instrument maker James Watt patented a rotary engine powered by steam that improved still further on Newcomen’s invention. Watt fashioned a discrete condenser to cut down on the huge amount of steam used in the process, thus obviating the need for constant cooling and reheating of the steam cylinder. Eventually teaming up with the visionary and manufacturer (and his backer) Matthew Bouton, Watt coupled the condenser with a double-acting rotary steam engine. Thus the power of the steam cylinder was doubled. Numerous other improvements, including engine speed control and “sun and planet” gears, which made rotary motion out of linear motion, created a machine that was practical, cost effective, and efficient, and which quickly became the engine that literally drove the Industrial Revolution that was to sweep Europe.

  44. The English chemist Robert Boyle did extensive work in the seventeenth century with the air pump (manufactured for him by the unsung genius Robert Hooke—for more on both men, see note 30, Volume I, Chapter II, below). New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air, and Its Effects, an account of Boyle’s explorations, was published in 1660. The book had its origins in a letter, composed in 1659, to the Right Honorable Charles Lord Viscount of Dungarvan, later a Fellow of the Royal Society (more formally, the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, established in 1660—not to be confused with the Royal Institution of Great Britain: see note 54, below). In the book Boyle gives full (and rare, in scientific history) credit to the twenty-three-year-old Hooke, and likewise credits the clockmaker’s apprentice and instrument maker Ralph Greatorex (spelled variously as Greatrex, Gratorix, etc.), who had attempted to help him develop a prototype; and Otto von Guericke, whose own pneumatic pump had been described in 1657 by the Jesuit scholar and scientist Kaspar Schottus (also known as Gaspar Schott, Gaspare Schotto, etc.), in Mechanicahydraulica-pneumatica (Mechanics of Gas Hydraulics). The Otto von Geuricke University in Magdeburg, founded in 1993, is named for Guericke, a lawyer, mathematician, and engineer who served as mayor of the city and is perhaps most famous for having paved the way for vacuum technology, in particular for having proven that even two teams of horses could not (“or only with great difficulty”) pull apart two vacuum-sealed bronze hemispheres, or spherical shells.

  Perhaps Victor simply was privy to a demonstration of the properties of air that Boyle had so thoroughly laid out in his writing. In any event, we can see no connection between his interest in distillation, steam, and air pumps and his later obsession with the study of biology.

  45. This paragraph and the following paragraph are replaced in the 1831 edition with the following: “And thus for a time I was occupied by exploded systems, mingling, like an unadept, a thousand contradictory theories and floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge, guided by an ardent imagination and childish reasoning, till an accident again changed the current of my ideas.”

  The “visiting gentleman” is discarded and replaced in a subsequent paragraph by a “man of great research,” and Victor’s conversion is explained in more detail, although changed from an “accident” to a “caprice” caused by the “guardian angel” in his life.

  46. “Belle-rive,” as it is more commonly spelled, “beautiful view,” is a suburb on the western end of Lake Geneva, northeast of the city, only a few miles from the Villa Diodati (see Foreword, note 52, above).

  47. The chain of mountains forming the northwest boundary of Switzerland. The Jurassic geologic period, the age of dinosaurs, is named after the mountain range, where strata of limestone indicative of the period were first found.

  48. The word has been modernized to “ribbons” in the 1831 edition.

 
49. The balance of Chapter I has been replaced in the 1831 edition by the following:

  Before this I was not unacquainted with the more obvious laws of electricity. On this occasion a man of great research in natural philosophy was with us, and excited by this catastrophe, he entered on the explanation of a theory which he had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism, which was at once new and astonishing to me. All that he said threw greatly into the shade Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination; but by some fatality the overthrow of these men disinclined me to pursue my accustomed studies. It seemed to me as if nothing would or could ever be known. All that had so long engaged my attention suddenly grew despicable. By one of those caprices of the mind which we are perhaps most subject to in early youth, I at once gave up my former occupations, set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation, and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-be science which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge. In this mood of mind I betook myself to the mathematics [see note 60, below] and the branches of study appertaining to that science as being built upon secure foundations, and so worthy of my consideration.

  Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by such slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity or ruin. When I look back, it seems to me as if this almost miraculous change of inclination and will was the immediate suggestion of the guardian angel of my life—the last effort made by the spirit of preservation to avert the storm that was even then hanging in the stars and ready to envelop me. Her victory was announced by an unusual tranquillity and gladness of soul which followed the relinquishing of my ancient and latterly tormenting studies. It was thus that I was to be taught to associate evil with their prosecution, happiness with their disregard.