Chapter 4 — the work

Two years pass. Victor describes them with a candor that is half-confession, half-warning. He has been working alone in his university apartments, with materials gathered from charnel-houses, dissecting-rooms, and graveyards. He has barely left the laboratory. He has stopped writing home. His father's letters, full of family news and increasing concern, arrive and are not answered. Henry Clerval, who has been writing weekly, is also forgotten. Victor has become almost a ghost in his own life — pale, thin, sleepless, indifferent to everything but the work.

The work itself is described in deliberately incomplete terms. Victor will not tell Walton — or the reader — exactly how he has done what he is about to do. He says only that the principle of life can be discovered by careful study, and that he has, after months of false starts, succeeded in identifying it. Mary Shelley keeps the science vague on purpose; the novel is not interested in the technology, only in what it produces. Victor decides to use the discovery to build a being from human and animal parts — not, as he might have, to study the principle in simpler organisms first. He gives himself an entirely human-shaped problem and proceeds.

He builds the body in his laboratory. He works on it through a winter, a spring, a summer. He chooses a being of larger than normal stature — eight feet tall, by his own description, because the scale is easier to work with. He selects features he intends to be beautiful: black hair, white teeth, well-proportioned limbs. He animates it on a wet November night, alone in his apartments, having lit a single candle that has nearly burned out. What happens in the next sentence is the most famous moment in the novel and also the one Mary Shelley refuses to describe in detail. The Creature opens his eyes. Victor looks at him.