All right, so we've broken through the crunchy, frozen outer shell of the framing device and into the smooth, chocolately Swiss backstory of young Victor. This is actually where an interesting change was put in when Shelley edited the story for the 1831 edition. In the original version we're reading, Elisabeth is Victor's cousin, taken in by Victor's father when his sister (Victor's aunt) dies, and Elizabeth's father decides she'd apparently be better with her uncle than with a stepmother. Reading too much Grimm, perhaps.Spoilers, but Elizabeth and Victor become sweethearts, which was not an uncommon thing back then. Charles Darwin, for instance, married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839.
The 1831 edition, in contrast, not only beefs up how much Victor's parents doted on him, but changes Elizabeth into the daughter of an Italian nobleman who, upon his wife's death, left her with a foster family to raise. When the foster father disappeared at war, the family fell into poverty. Victor's parents, traveling through Italy and being of a charitable mindset, frequented the houses of the poor and came across this foster family. They noticed that one of the children "appeared of a different stock. The four others were dark-eyed, hardy little vagrants; this child was thin, and very fair." Obviously, they decided to take this child (and only this child) out of poverty. The family loved her, but wanted the best for her, and so let them take her. Elizabeth was then subsequently given to Victor as a present. Jokingly, but the five-year-old took it seriously.
Personally, I find this 1831 version much creepier and more problematic than the kissing cousins.
Anyway, notes after then jump:
1:31 - Victor says that for many years his ancestors had been "counsellors and syndics," meaning that they'd been government officials of some sort or another.
2:55 - "the Reuss," as can probably be gathered from context, is a river that runs through Lucerne.
8:41 - Henry and Victor used to act out plays based on tales of chivalry and romance, based on "Orlando, Robin Hood, Amadis, and St. George." Robin Hood presumably needs no introduction, but for the others: Orlando was, in reality, Roland, one of Charlemagne's military governors. His death at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass eventually morphed into a legend immortalized in song and poetry throughout medieval and Renaissance times, most famously in the 11th-century The Song of Roland, the oldest existing major work of French literature. Italian works turned Roland into Orlando in works like Orlando in Love and The Frenzy of Orlando. He is not connected in any way with Orlando, Florida.
Amadis is the hero of Amadis de Gaula, a Spanish chivalric romance published in four volumes in 1508 by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, though the first three volumes were actually written by an unknown author sometime in the 1300s. De Montalvo edited these three volumes and wrote a fourth, boring volume, and later published a fifth. Throughout the rest of the 1500s, various other authors wrote around twenty more direct continuations of Amadis along with a host of imitators, stories of knights-errant, princesses, wizards, and monsters. Modern audiences are probably most familiar with these stories and characters now due to the now-even-more-legendary satire of them, Don Quixote, written by Miguel de Cervantes in the early 1600s and in which stories of Amadis are mentioned frequently.
Saint George is still pretty well-known, mostly due to still being one of the more venerated saints in the Catholic church. He was originally a Roman soldier in the late 200s to early 300s. He was sainted when an edict came down for all Christian soldiers to be arrested. George, though, was the son of a major official, and was given the option to convert (and they even tried bribing him with land and stuff). George refused and publicly denounced the emperor and declared his faith, and was thus tortured and decapitated. To death.
"But Rob!" I hear you cry, "What about the dragon? There's supposed to be a dragon!" Well, the dragon seems to have been introduced to the legend sometime in the 11th century, in a story where a dragon (or a crocodile) has perched itself near a town's spring, and if they need to get water they have to distract it by giving it a tasty sheep or (if a sheep isn't available) a tasty maiden, drawn by lots. The latest lot went to a princess, natch, but George (later to be sued by Perseus for plagiarism) was riding by and killed the dragon, saving the princess. Oh, and the dragon is also Satan.
11:01 - The Frankensteins travel to Thonon, a French town known for its thermal baths and spas. This is where, at 11:10, Victor discovers Cornelius Agrippa, leading later at 12:42 to Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. As can be gleaned from the text, these were all noted alchemists (from the Renaissance for the first two and the 1200s for Al). As M. Waldman later notes in the story, the failure of alchemy doesn't mean they didn't make important contributions to science. Paracelsus, for instance, is noted as a major figure in medicine, being one of the first to insist on learning from observing nature and, you know, the human body to learn medicine rather than relying on ancient texts, and is generally considered to be the father of toxicology. (Incidentally, I am somewhat disappointed that Shelley makes no mention of every Harry Potter fan's favorite alchemist, Nicholas Flamel, who was indeed a real person.)
15:53 - Victor's father's kite demonstration of electricity is of course a version of Ben Franklin's famous experiment, first proposed in 1750. It's interesting, despite popular culture, it's not actually certain whether Franklin himself ever performed the experiment, though others certainly did. Also contrary to pop culture, but in line with Shelley's description, the idea was not for the kite to be struck by lightning (though that was a very real danger), but for it to collect ambient electricity from the clouds, thus proving that lightning was, in fact, electricity writ large. The famous key attached to the kite was a convenient place for the electricity to gather (after being conducted down the wet kite string), demonstrated by making a spark jump from it.
16:46 - The natural philosophers that Victor enjoys, despite his confusion at coming into the lectures too late, are Pliny and Buffon. This refers to Gaius Plinius Secundus, aka Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist who is possibly most famous for his death while on board a ship observing the 79 AD eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that consumed Pompeii. Since none of his companions died, it was probably not toxic fumes (as they believed) but most likely natural causes. Buffon was Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, a French naturalist from the 18th century who, like Erasmus Darwin, was one of the first to raise ideas that led to the theory of evolution (though he himself was apparently a strict creationist who believed in the "degeneration of races."
18:30 -Victor goes to Germany to attend the University of Ingolstadt, a Bavarian university that was founded in 1472 and is where the for real Illuminati was founded in 1776. The university closed in 1800, shortly after the events of the novel, presumably due to its students tampering in God's domain.
Oh hey, we've reached one of the two illustrations from the 1831 edition:
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| 22:40 - The day of my departure at length arrived. |
This illustration and the one other from this edition were done by Theodor von Holst, an illustrator known primarily for works with supernatural, demonic, or erotic elements, such as those by Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, and especially the German Romantics, like Goethe. I must say, though, that considering he only picked TWO things to illustrate from Frankenstein, Victor tearfully going away to college is an interesting choice, especially for the frontispiece.
23:38 - Last, here Victor takes his leave via chaise, yet another method of conveyance to be noted (I really should make a reference page just about this.) The chaise is a light two- or four-wheeled carriage drawn by one or two horses, intended for one or two people. They often had a folding hood rather than be enclosed. We touched on a related type of carriage back in Sense and Sensibility, the post-chaise, which usually has four wheels and two to four horses with a closed body, intended for two to four people.
Okay, wow, those ended up being rather extensive notes for things that, on the whole, won't really have much of an effect on the actual story. Thanks for making it all the way through, anyway! At least I find it interesting.
If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!
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