the living monument of presumption
This may be the single case in the novel where one can sense Mary Shelley
reacting to a reaction to her novel. She could not have revised this
passage, adding such inflated self-deprecation by Victor, without being
conscious of the title of the first dramatic redaction of her novel,
Richard Brinsley Peake's Presumption; or, the Fate of
Frankenstein, which she saw with her father upon her return to
London in 1823. The word is
never uttered in the play, but the title clearly established a context in
which Victor Frankenstein's researches were from then on to be conceived;
and Mary Shelley herself responds by subsuming it within the third edition.
