Chapter 1 — Geneva, the family, Elizabeth

Victor begins his narration. He was born to a Genevan family of long standing — counsellors, magistrates, men of public service. His father Alphonse married late in life, a young woman named Caroline whose own father had died in poverty. They were a devoted couple. Victor describes a happy childhood: travel in Italy and Germany during his early years, a household full of books, parents who were patient and warm.

On a journey through Italy his parents stopped in a peasant cottage on Lake Como and found a child of unusual beauty being raised by the cottagers — Elizabeth Lavenza, the orphaned daughter of a Milanese nobleman who had been jailed for political activity. Caroline took the child home as her own. From the moment of her arrival in Geneva, Elizabeth was intended as Victor's future wife; the Frankensteins make this explicit, gently, through her childhood.

A second son, Ernest, is born. Many years later a third — William, the youngest, the family pet. Victor's closest friend from outside the family is Henry Clerval, a Genevan merchant's son, who shares his love of literature and science. The household, as Victor describes it, is something like ideal. He is presenting it carefully because he wants Walton — and the reader — to feel the weight of what he is about to lose. The chapter ends with Victor entering his teens, beginning to read the alchemists, and feeling the first stirrings of the obsession that will consume him.