Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds (The MIT Press)

by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

the dæmon,

I begin to love him as a brother;

his constant and deep grief

My affection for my guest increases every day.

He excites at once my admiration and my pity

He is so gentle, yet so wise; his mind is so cultivated; and when he speaks, although his words are culled with the choicest art, yet they flow with rapidity and unparalleled eloquence.

Simile - conventional

I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures,

he will be like a celestial spirit, that has a halo around him,

this divine wanderer?

You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did;

a serpent to sting you,

a view of nature, which may enlarge your faculties and understanding.

Beaufort,

Lucerne,

the Reuss.

Caroline Beaufort

leaving her an orphan and a beggar.

decide whether you would prefer educating your niece yourself to her being brought up by a stepmother.”

Haha the wicked stepmother trope

Elizabeth Lavenza

Victor’s cousin

Simile - interesting and surprising

constraint and caprice.

Question - opposites?

imagination was luxuriant,

appli...

Smile - shocking, in the circumstances. Question

although there was a great dissimilitude in our characters, there was an harmony in that very dissimilitude.

application

I delighted in investigating the facts relative to the actual world; she busied herself in following the ...

The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.

Nice. Metaphor simile

Henry Clerval

Two masterpieces of Italian Renaissance poetry, the Orlando Innamorato and Orlando Furioso (by Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto respectively), are even further detached from history than the earlier Chansons.

Italian (from French history), English, Spanish, Greek

No youth could have passed more happily than mine. My parents were indulgent, and my companions amiable. Our studies were never forced;

Question

application.

application,

Haha

Henry Clerval;

misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self.

Profound recovery insight here.

a party of pleasure to the baths

Thonon:

Cornelius Agrippa.

“Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash.”

What an idiot. And supercilious know-it-all. Why not ask dad a simple question? Fatal flaw.

Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus.

our family was not scientifical,

I had not attended any of the lectures given at the schools of Geneva.

My dreams were therefore undisturbed by reality;

Haha

discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame,

Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors, the fulfilment of which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake, than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors.