great monarchies
Prussia and Austria would be the obvious surrounding context for
Switzerland, but two sentences later
the reader is given pre-revolutionary
France and England
as natural referents (and thus implicit allies), a sly
but penetrating political thrust on Mary Shelley's part. The defeat of
Napoleon at Waterloo had occured in
June 1815, a little over a
year before the novel was begun, and the "Holy Alliance" of autocracies
had through the Congress of Vienna reinstated itself in firm control of the
continent of Europe.
