Chapter 18 — the journey to England

Victor returns from Chamonix shaken but committed. He announces, vaguely, that before he marries Elizabeth he must travel to England — there are scientific reasons; he gives no details. His father, who hopes the journey will lift his spirits, agrees and arranges for Henry Clerval to accompany him. Henry has been wanting to make a similar trip on his own and is delighted.

The two friends travel through France, the Low Countries, the Rhine valley, to England. Henry, of cheerful disposition and broad education, is enchanted by everything — the towns, the rivers, the libraries, the company. The chapter is one of the gentler in the novel, partly because Mary Shelley wants the reader to see, by contrast, what Victor is sacrificing by what he is about to do. Victor moves through the same landscape preoccupied. He is calculating. He is planning where, exactly, to do the work he has agreed to undertake.

In London they spend the winter; in the spring they travel north into Scotland. Henry has friends near Perth and stops with them. Victor uses the visit as an excuse to leave alone. He has decided to do the work in extreme isolation — a fishing hut on one of the remote islands of the Orkneys, off the north coast of Scotland. He says goodbye to Henry, promises to rejoin him in two months, and travels alone to the island. The chapter ends with him taking up residence in a stone hut on a wind-scoured shore, with the materials he has carried with him, and beginning the second creation.