Shelley's Ghost

Another opening from the Geneva notebook, showing Frankenstein’s encounter on the Mer de Glace with the Creature, who approaches him over the crevices ‘with superhuman speed’. In Mary Shelley’s novel the Creature is highly articulate, and in the ensuing dialogue he berates his creator for rejecting him: ‘You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow-creatures, who owe me nothing? they spurn and hate me. The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge.’

The Alpine setting was inspired by Shelley’s and Mary’s visit to Chamonix and Mont Blanc in July 1816. Shelley, who has augmented Mary’s description of the Mer de Glace in the margin of the manuscript, gave a full account of it in a letter to Peacock, later published in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour :

… on all sides precipitous mountains the abodes of unrelenting frost surround this vale. Their sides are banked up with ice & snow broken & heaped up & exhibiting terrific chasms. The summits are sharp & naked pinnacles whose overhanging steepness will not even permit snow to rest there. They pierce the clouds like things not belonging to this earth. The vale itself is filled with a mass of undulating ice, & has an ascent sufficiently gradual even to the remotest abysses of these horrible deserts. It is only half a league (about two miles) in breadth, & seems much less. – It exhibits an appearance as if frost had suddenly bound up the waves & whir[l]pools of a mighty torrent. We walked to some distance upon its surface, –the waves are elevated about 12 or 15 feet from the surface of the mass which is intersected with long gaps of unfathomable depth, the ice of whose sides is more beautifully azure than the sky. In these regions every thing changes & is in motion. This vast mass of ice has one general progress which ceases neither day nor night. It breaks & rises forever; its undulations sink whilst others rise.