To you first entering on life
In regard to this curious reminder of the present tense in which Victor
narrates the story of his life, it is important to recall that, far from
being Victor's junior, Walton is 28 years old at this point in the
account, one year older than Victor. A useful point of comparison is the exchange between the simple
Chamois Hunter and Manfred in the second act of Byron's Manfred,
the dramatic poem he began in the summer of 1816 and set in the same
Alpine wilderness as the second volume of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
