scope for his spirit of enterprise
This addition to the 1831 text is prepared for by a similar ambition
stressed in Henry's youth (see 1.1.5
and note) and may be generally
accounted for by the importance the intervening decade and a half had
attached to the growing eastern empire of Great Britain, not just in India but also in Afghanistan, on the edge of the Ottoman
empire. It would have not seemed questionable to the author or her readers
in 1831 that Henry Clerval would wish to distinguish himself as an
imperialist. Mary Shelley would have been well aware that one of her
former husband's closest friends, Thomas
Love Peacock, though sharing Victor Frankenstein's privileging of the
European classical tradition over "oriental" literature, had carved out a
career in the East Indian Office, the bureaucracy that oversaw commerce
with the imperial East.
