the events
That Mary Sheley principally wrote Frankenstein, and certainly its
third volume, while living in Marlow, near Windsor and not far from
Oxford, might logically have suggested to her the value of inserting its
local scenery and history into her novel. More pointedly, her own tribute
to her father, in dedicating her novel to Godwin, would have been
underscored by her including scenes associated with his most recent novel
Mandeville, centered on the English civil war in the
mid-seventeenth century. For this politically-minded group of writers
(Godwin, Mary Shelley, P. B. Shelley), the civil war had been, first and
foremost, a conflict of ideologies pitting aristocratic against republican
values. Although a century and a half past, its political resonanace was
far from muted in a reactionary political climate like England's during
the Regency. Thus, the political undertones of this choice of scenery on
Mary Shelley's part are unlikely to have been in any sense innocent.
That said, there is another salient reason for the British setting of the
earlier chapters of Volume 3, which is the simple fact that the novel is
designed for an English-reading audience rather unaccustomed during the
years of the Napoleonic Wars either themselves to travel abroad or to
respond with much interest to a continental setting as sweeping as that
embraced by the first two volumes. In its final volume
Frankenstein goes rather out of its way, as if designed according
to formula, to embrace all three parts of the United Kingdom.
