the linkage between the scientific concerns of Victor Frankenstein
and Robert Walton
Walton's polar exploration, with its concern for the secret of magnetism
(Letter 2.2), and Victor's experiments
with electricity (1.1.9) as vital fluid
intersect with one of the most exciting scientific breakthroughs of the
later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although Erasmus Darwin's scientific take on the
linkage -- that it is somehow to be explained by basic chemistry rather
than the mechanics of physics -- is wrong, what impels it is not. Indeed,
though it is pedestrian in manner, the lengthy twelfth note to The Temple of Nature
is nothing short of visionary. There Darwin first extensively expounds the
dynamics of electricity, then turns to the similar processes of magnetism, bifurcated figuratively
between arctic and antarctic poles, and in the end links the two with a
rudimentary conception of atomic physics (only to be expounded by John Dalton in the decade after Darwin's
death), and with the third component of the Grand Unified Field Theory, gravitation. That Mary Shelley is
aware of this conjunction can be deduced from Walton's hope that his
discoveries will help astronomers "regulate a thousand celestial observations".
