self-educated
The terms of Walton's education are provided in Letter 2.1, where he laments his neglect
of systematic preparation in his youth. It will remain to be seen in the
course of the novel whether Victor Frankenstein's more formal education
served him better than did Walton's autodidacticism. The question of
self-education would have resonated strongly in the Shelley household.
Mary Shelley did not attend school
and was largely educated by her father, who in his early years had tried
to read everything that was written and therefore was presumably qualified
in the highest terms to direct his daughter's intellectual development.
Though her husband attended the finest of preparatory schools, Syon House
and Eton College, P. B. Shelley
was expelled from Oxford in his second
term at the university and thereafter amassed his considerable learning on
his own. Mary, it should be stressed, embarked on a similar reading
program as her husband and, if still only eighteen when she began
Frankenstein was, by the standards of woman's education in her day,
prodigiously learned.
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