the latter days of
The text printed in 1818 has "latter days of December," which is clearly a
compositor's error unnoticed in the Shelleys' proofreading of the text for
the first edition. The mistake, once in print, went unnoticed in all
later editions of the novel. In Mary
Shelley's draft, however, the word is
unmistakably "September." She would have had every reason to adhere to
this timeline since, just a few weeks earlier than her fictional schedule,
in 1814, it took the Shelley
party nine days to cover the distance between Basel and Rotterdam (30 August-7 September)
travelling exactly as do Victor Frankenstein and Henry Clerval and, even
when adverse conditions delayed their departure from Holland, a three
days' crossing brought them to London on 13 September (see Six Weeks'
Tour for Switzerland and Holland). The attenuated journey
of the 1818 text is whittled to three months in the shifting of the
original departure date in 1831, which, as indicated earlier, may have been done to accommodate the
timespan after Victor's return from Mont
Blanc rather than his arrival
date in England. In the next
chapter, as recorded in both the 1818 and
1831 texts, the chronology reverts to a normative calendar and Victor
observes that he and Clerval "had arrived in England at the beginning of
October" (3.2.2).
