acquirement of the knowledge which I sought
By the time Mary Shelley made
these revisions, Goethe's Faust,
Part
I, had become a European classic. She knew the work well, not only because
Percy Bysshe Shelley had
translated parts of it during his last months,
but because she had twice prepared the text of these -- a partial version
the first time, in The Liberal, the shortlived periodical the
Shelleys, Byron, and Leigh
Hunt had projected -- and then in full in her 1824 publication of Posthumous
Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Faustian desire for knowledge, of
course, was also deeply implicated in the 1818 edition. Mary Shelley was
introduced to it shortly after she began work on her novel when Matthew
("Monk") Lewis, visiting Byron during the 1816 summer at Geneva, translated
parts of it to the assembled company. Faust also had a profound
effect on Byron's dramatic poem Manfred, begun shortly thereafter.
The extent to which Walton here throws all caution to the winds will be
balanced late in the novel by Victor Frankenstein's adoption of the same
kind of rhetoric in appealing to the sailors on Walton's vessel to risk
everything for the mission's success
(Walton 7). It is at that point
that Walton's prudence and essential humanity return, perhaps as a
secondary effect of his having, in the meantime, by this outburst
elicited Victor's sobering account of the cost to him and to
those he loved of his passion for knowledge.
