twenty-eight
This is the first indication of the age of a character in the novel, but a
careful tracing of its chronology would prove that Mary Shelley maintains
a shrewd sense of the relative ages of all of them. The emaciated figure
of Victor Frankenstein who will appear before Walton four months after
this letter ("I never saw a man in so wretched a condition" -- Letter 4.3) is actually Walton's junior
by a year.
