Frankenstein — who's who

An ambitious young Englishman with a private fortune leading an expedition to the North Pole. The novel opens and closes with his letters home to his sister Margaret in London. Picks up Victor Frankenstein from the ice in Letter 4 and listens to the entire story Victor tells him. The novel's argument is that Walton listens hard enough to take Victor's warning — and turns the ship around at the end. The reader is meant to be in Walton's position.

Walton's married sister, the addressee of the framing letters. Never speaks; only mentioned. Some readers note that her initials — M.W.S. — are the initials of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author. The dedication is felt rather than stated.

A young Genevan of good family. Studies natural philosophy first under his old tutors, then at the University of Ingolstadt, where over two years of solitary obsessive work he builds the Creature and brings it to life. Spends the rest of the novel running from what he has made. Refuses to confess his role even when an innocent woman is hanged for a murder he knows the Creature committed. Watches everyone he loves die at the Creature's hands and pursues the Creature into the Arctic, where he dies in Walton's cabin.

Adopted by Victor's parents as a small child. Raised in the Frankenstein household; intended from childhood as Victor's wife. Bright, gentle, attentive — the novel's clearest portrait of the human world Victor is sacrificing for his ambition. Marries Victor in Chapter 23 and is murdered by the Creature on the wedding night, in a scene Mary Shelley stages with deliberate care.

Victor's much-younger brother, about seven when he is murdered. The Creature, who has come to Geneva looking for Victor, encounters William in a wood near the family estate and strangles him after the boy refuses to be friends with him. William is the Creature's first victim and the moral break-point of the novel — the moment the Creature commits an act he cannot retract.

Victor's father, a steady, decent magistrate of Geneva. Watches his sons and his daughter-in-law and finally his foster-daughter die. Dies of grief in Chapter 23, shortly after Elizabeth's murder. The novel uses him to show the cost of Victor's silence: a man who could have helped is never told what is happening.

Victor's mother, who dies of scarlet fever in Chapter 3 after nursing Elizabeth back to health. Her death is the trigger for Victor's withdrawal into his obsessive studies; he spends the next months thinking about how to defeat death.

Victor's middle brother — older than William, younger than Victor. The least developed of the Frankensteins; he survives the novel mostly by being absent from the action. Mentioned in Letters and Geneva scenes.

A young servant of the Frankenstein family, raised almost as a daughter by Caroline. Accused, falsely, of William's murder — the Creature has planted the locket on her while she slept — and convicted on circumstantial evidence. Victor knows she is innocent and refuses to speak up; she is hanged in Chapter 8. Justine's death is the novel's first, sharpest demonstration of what Victor's silence costs.

Victor's childhood friend from Geneva, the novel's representation of a humane and balanced young man. Joins Victor at Ingolstadt, nurses him through his post-creation breakdown, accompanies him through England and Scotland, and is murdered by the Creature on the coast of Ireland in Chapter 21 — a death Victor will be temporarily charged with himself.

The being Victor creates. Eight feet tall, with hair of lustrous black and teeth of pearly whiteness — but skin barely covering the working of muscles and arteries beneath, watery yellow eyes, lips a straight black line. Articulate, capable of acquiring a humanist education by overhearing it through a chink in a wall. Begins gentle; is rejected, again and again; eventually murders Victor's family in a deliberate, retributive sequence. Disappears into the polar ice at the end to die alone. The novel never gives him a name.

A French family living in poverty in a Swiss cottage. The blind father De Lacey, his son Felix, his daughter Agatha, and the Arabian woman Safie whom Felix loves. The Creature watches them for months from a hovel attached to their cottage, learns French and reading by overhearing them, falls in love with their domestic life, and is brutally rejected when he finally reveals himself. He burns their cottage down. The De Lacey episode in Volume II is the moral center of the Creature's narration.

An Arabian woman whose father, a Turkish merchant, was helped to escape from a French prison by Felix De Lacey. Safie travels alone across Europe to find Felix and joins the De Laceys in their cottage. Her arrival is what makes the Creature's education possible — Felix teaches her French, with a primer, and the Creature, eavesdropping, learns at the same pace.