self-educated
Mary Shelley is so insistent on this point that she has Walton repeat it
to Victor Frankenstein (Letter 4.6),
whose formal education, by contrast, is extensive. It could be that she
is trying to make a point about the primacy of moral education or the
essential importance, in a novelistic tradition one associates with Henry
Fielding, of a good heart. But it is more likely that she is establishing
a perspective by which to engage larger questions concerning the means and
ends of education. Victor Frankenstein's Creature is also self-educated
and likewise has his identity strongly molded by what he happens to read.
