Frankenstein

Victor Frankenstein is a Genevese, and the lake is the fixed centre of the book: his family's house in the city, the campagne at Belrive, and Plainpalais across the water, where the creature kills his brother William. From there the story climbs to the Mer de Glace above Chamonix, the real glacier where Victor meets the creature face to face. The making of the creature at Ingolstadt, the destroyed mate in the Orkneys, and the final chase across the Arctic ice all lie far outside this frame, and are flagged as excursions.

Victor Frankenstein

Ingolstadt: the making

Ingolstadt, a night in November · 20% through the novel

It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

In his lodgings at the university of Ingolstadt, on a dreary night of November, Victor infuses the spark of life and recoils from what he has made. Everything that follows across Europe and the Arctic begins in this room. The town is a real one on the Danube; the laboratory is Shelley's invention.

inferred Ingolstadt, the Bavarian university town where Victor studies, is real and named repeatedly, but Shelley never fixes the house or garret in which he assembles the creature. The pin marks the town, some 400 km northeast of Geneva, and is flagged as an excursion beyond the book's setting.

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