Letter 1
Walton in St. Petersburg
December, St. Petersburg. Robert Walton, a young Englishman with a private fortune, writes to his married sister Margaret in London. He has come to Russia to outfit an expedition to the North Pole, where he hopes to find either a passage through the polar ice to the warm sea he believes lies beyond, or the source of the magnetic field. He writes with the breathless self-importance of someone who has read too much Coleridge. Margaret has tried to talk him out of the voyage. He politely will not be talked out of it. Mary Shelley puts the novel's first voice in his mouth before any of the more famous voices arrive.
Letter 2
Walton at Archangel
Archangel, March. Walton has hired a ship and most of a crew and is waiting for the ice to thaw. The letter is shorter and sharper than the first. Walton writes about how alone he feels — there is no one on his ship with whom he can share his thoughts; the captain is competent but not a friend; the lieutenant is duty itself but unimaginative. Walton longs for an intellectual companion. The line will be remembered later.
Letter 3
Under sail
A very short letter, dated July. The ice has broken; the expedition is at last under sail. Walton writes a few lines of cheerful confidence — the wind is fair, the men are in good spirits, no accidents — and signs off. The pacing of the novel is using these short letters to move quickly toward the encounter that the rest of the book will turn on.
Letter 4
The stranger on the ice
August. The ship is locked in the ice. One morning the lookout sees, across the plain of ice, a sled drawn by dogs being driven north by a figure of "gigantic stature." It disappears. Two days later, another sled — the dogs all dead but one — drifts past the ship. The figure on it is barely alive. He is European. The crew brings him aboard. He recovers slowly. He has, he says, been pursuing a man across the ice for many months. When Walton tries to comfort him, the stranger asks who he is and what his ambition is. Walton tells him. The stranger looks at him for a long moment and says: I will tell you my story, so that you can learn from my example. Sit, and listen.
Chapter 1
Geneva, the family
Victor begins. He was born to a happy and prosperous Genevan family; his father Alphonse, a magistrate, married late in life to a young woman named Caroline. The family travels through Italy. In a peasant cottage on Lake Como they find a beautiful child, Elizabeth Lavenza, the orphan daughter of a Milanese nobleman, being raised by poor cottagers. Caroline takes the child home as her own. She is intended, from the moment of adoption, as Victor's future wife. A second son, Ernest, is born; later, William, the youngest. Henry Clerval, Victor's closest friend, joins the household as a frequent visitor. Victor is sixteen.
Chapter 2
Early studies
At thirteen Victor finds, by chance, a volume of Cornelius Agrippa, a sixteenth-century alchemist. His father dismisses it ("trash"); the dismissal pushes Victor further toward Agrippa, then toward Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. He spends his teenage years devouring the alchemists' search for the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life. A thunderstorm at fifteen — a tree near the family house struck and shattered — turns him for a time toward modern electricity. But the older books have shaped him. He is fixed on the question of how life can be created and how death can be defeated.
Chapter 3
Ingolstadt
Victor arrives at Ingolstadt grieving for his mother and embarrassed about his alchemical studies. His first encounter is with Professor Krempe, who scoffs at the alchemists. The second is with Professor Waldman, who lectures on the chemistry of life with reverence — and concedes that the alchemists, though wrong about specifics, asked the right questions. Waldman becomes Victor's mentor. Within months Victor has thrown himself into his studies with an intensity that frightens his teachers. He is searching, although he has not yet said so out loud, for the principle of life itself.
Chapter 4
The work
Two years pass. Victor works alone, day and night, on the principle of animation. He robs charnel houses for materials. He stops writing home; his father's letters arrive and go unanswered. He neglects to eat. He has, by his own account, become almost ghostly. The work, he is convinced, is on the verge of producing a discovery that will overturn natural philosophy. The chapter is the novel's only sustained look at Victor in his obsession; the next chapter will be the result.
Chapter 5
The creation
On a dreary night in November, Victor finishes. The Creature opens his eyes. Victor is overwhelmed by revulsion at the being he has created — limbs in proportion, hair lustrous, features chosen for beauty, but the skin "scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath," the eyes "watery," the lips a "straight black line." He flees the room. He sleeps fitfully. He has nightmares of his dead mother. When he returns at dawn, the Creature is gone. Victor wanders Ingolstadt in a fugue. By chance he meets Henry Clerval, who has just arrived from Geneva to study with him. Victor collapses; Henry nurses him through several months of brain fever.
Chapter 6
Elizabeth's letter
Victor recovers slowly. Henry, careful, brings him news from home. A letter from Elizabeth. She writes warmly, plainly — about the family, about Justine Moritz the servant who has joined the household, about little William who is growing into a sweet boy, about her hope that Victor is well and will come home soon. The letter is the novel's representation of the world Victor has been ignoring. He reads it and weeps. He does not, however, write back.
Chapter 7
The news from Geneva
A letter from Victor's father. William has been found strangled in a wood near the family estate. Justine Moritz is suspected — a locket of Caroline's that William had been wearing was found in her pocket. Victor sets out for Geneva immediately. The journey is days. On the night he arrives, a thunderstorm breaks over the lake. From a slope above the city Victor sees, in a flash of lightning, an enormous figure climbing the mountain. He recognizes him. He understands, in that instant, that his Creature has done this. He knows he should tell what he knows. He cannot bring himself to say it.
Chapter 8
Justine's trial
The trial. The locket of Caroline's, taken from William, was found on Justine's person; she has no plausible explanation. She is convicted on circumstantial evidence. Victor, sitting in the courtroom, knows the truth. He cannot bring himself to give it. Elizabeth speaks at the trial in Justine's defense. The defence is moving but fails. Justine, in private to Elizabeth and Victor afterwards, falsely confesses to the murder under pressure from her confessor. She is executed the next morning. The chapter is the novel's first statement of the moral cost of Victor's silence.
Chapter 9
Chamonix
Victor goes alone into the mountains. He walks the valleys and glaciers around Chamonix for weeks. He hopes the immensity of the landscape will make his guilt smaller. It does not. One morning he climbs the glacier of Montanvert and sits on a rock above the ice, weeping. He sees, far off, a figure approaching across the ice with extraordinary speed. The figure is the Creature. The Creature has been waiting for this conversation.
Chapter 10
The meeting on the ice
The Creature speaks. He is articulate — startlingly so. He has, he says, been observing humans for nearly two years and has learned their language by listening. He is not asking Victor for forgiveness; he is asking to be heard. "Remember that I am thy creature," he says. "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed." If Victor will listen to his story, the Creature will then make a request, and Victor will decide whether to grant it. Victor agrees. They walk to a hut on the slope above. The Creature begins to tell the story of his short life.
Chapter 11
The Creature's awakening
The Creature's narration begins. He remembers, dimly, the first sensations after his eyes opened — light, cold, hunger, the confusion of multiple senses. He remembers fleeing Victor's rooms and wandering into the forest outside Ingolstadt. He learned to feed himself on berries and water from streams. He found a fire some travelers had abandoned and burned his hand on it before he understood it. He saw, in the dark, his own reflection in a pool and was terrified by what he saw. He was, at this stage, entirely innocent.
Chapter 12
The De Laceys
The Creature comes upon a small cottage with a hovel attached. The hovel is empty; he takes shelter in it. From a chink in the wall he can observe the cottage's inhabitants — a blind old man named De Lacey, his son Felix, his daughter Agatha. They are poor. They love each other. The Creature, watching them, learns about family; he learns also about kindness in poverty (Felix sometimes goes without food so the others can eat). He begins to learn their language by overhearing them. He starts, at night, to do them small services — bringing firewood, clearing snow from the path.
Chapter 13
Safie arrives
One day a young woman on horseback arrives at the cottage. She is Safie, an Arabian merchant's daughter; her father had been imprisoned in France and rescued by Felix. The De Laceys had once been wealthy; Felix's rescue of Safie's father cost the family everything; they fled to this cottage. Safie has now come back to find Felix, alone, having traveled across Europe. Felix begins teaching her French, with a primer; the Creature, listening, learns at the same pace. He learns to read. He becomes, by his own account, a different being.
Chapter 14
The De Laceys' history
An interpolated chapter. The Creature recounts the De Laceys' full backstory, which he has pieced together from overheard conversations. The family was once wealthy in Paris. Felix, on a state errand, witnessed Safie's father condemned to death by a French court on a fabricated charge. Outraged, Felix planned and executed the prisoner's escape. The escape was discovered; the De Laceys were stripped of property, exiled, and forced to flee to Germany and then Switzerland. Safie, separated from Felix by her father's death, has now found her way to him.
Chapter 15
The rejection
The Creature has been planning, for months, how to reveal himself. He picks the day Felix and Agatha are away. He approaches the cottage; the blind old De Lacey is alone; the Creature speaks gently. The conversation goes well. The blind man, who cannot see what the Creature looks like, is moved by his story and offers him the family's help. Then Felix and Agatha return. They see what is sitting at their father's feet. Agatha faints. Safie flees the cottage. Felix beats the Creature with a stick until he is driven from the cottage. The Creature flees back into the forest. The break is total.
Chapter 16
Geneva and William
The Creature travels to Geneva, the city Victor's journal had named as home. On the way he saves a young girl from drowning and is shot by her father, who mistakes him for a kidnapper. The injury embitters him further. In Geneva, in the woods at Plainpalais, he comes upon a small boy — beautiful, bright, alone. He approaches the child, intending to befriend him. The boy screams and calls Victor by name (he is Victor's brother). The Creature, in a rage, strangles him. He finds a gold locket on the body, with Caroline's portrait inside. He carries it to a sleeping woman in a barn — Justine — and slips it into her pocket. He frames her on purpose. The chapter ends with the Creature having committed his first deliberate human acts of cruelty.
Chapter 17
The demand
The Creature finishes his narration. He has one request to make of Victor. Make me a companion — a female of my own kind, as ugly and as solitary as I am. We will leave Europe together; we will live in the wilderness of South America; you will never hear of us again. If you make her, the Creature swears, his violence will end. If you refuse, his violence will not end. Victor, after long argument, agrees. The chapter ends with the agreement and Victor's descent from the mountain, sick at heart but committed.
Chapter 18
The journey to England
Victor returns from the mountains and announces, ambiguously, that he must travel to England before he marries Elizabeth. His father, hoping the journey will restore his spirits, agrees and asks Henry to accompany him. The two friends travel through Germany and the Low Countries to England, then north into Scotland. Henry is delighted by everything. Victor is preoccupied with the work he has agreed to undertake. They arrive in Edinburgh; Victor leaves Henry visiting friends and travels alone to a lonely island in the Orkneys.
Chapter 19
The second laboratory
Victor settles into the hut on the Orkney island. He sets up his second laboratory. The work is more disgusting to him this time — he is older, more aware of what he is doing, more conscious of the moral weight of the act. He works fitfully, hating it. One afternoon he looks up from his bench and sees, through the window, the Creature watching him from a distance, smiling. The smile decides him. He cannot do this.
Chapter 20
The destruction
Victor, decided, tears the half-finished female to pieces in front of the Creature's eyes. The Creature howls in despair. The howl is the loudest moment in the novel. The Creature confronts Victor: you were going to give me a companion, you have torn her apart in front of me, you have chosen this. Then the threat — "It is well. I go; but remember, I shall be with you on your wedding-night." The Creature vanishes. Victor disposes of the female's remains in a basket weighted with stones and dropped from a boat into the sea. On his return to shore he is arrested for a murder he did not commit.
Chapter 21
Henry dead
Victor recovers in jail. The body is Henry's — strangled, marks at the throat consistent with the marks on William, marks that Victor recognizes immediately. Victor falls into months of brain fever in the cell. His father, alerted by the consul, travels to Ireland to be with him. By the time the trial finally takes place, the alibi (Victor was on his island the night of the murder) is corroborated and he is acquitted. Father and son sail home. Victor cannot tell his father what he knows, nor what he is now expecting.
Chapter 22
The wedding
Victor and his father return to Geneva. Elizabeth is waiting, gentle and concerned. She has half-guessed that something private is destroying him. She tells him, in private, that if he is bound by a previous vow she will not hold him to the marriage. He swears he is bound only to her. They marry. Victor spends the day in a state of dread; he is convinced the Creature will come for him that night. He arms himself. He insists that Elizabeth retire to a separate room while he keeps watch. He does not warn her. He has misread the threat.
Chapter 23
The pursuit begins
Victor brings the news to Alphonse. The old man dies within days, of grief that nothing can offer him relief from — Caroline, William, Justine, Henry, Elizabeth, all gone, his eldest son's mind almost gone with them. Victor, with no household left to defend, finally tells the magistrate of Geneva the whole truth. The magistrate, kindly, is unable to believe it. Victor leaves Geneva to hunt the Creature himself. The pursuit will take him across Russia and into the Arctic.
Chapter 24
The end on the ice
The pursuit reaches the Arctic. Victor, frozen, dying, is picked up by Walton on the ice — which is the moment of the novel's frame opening. Victor finishes his narration. Within days he dies in Walton's cabin. That night, in the dark, Walton hears a voice from the cabin where Victor's body lies. He goes in. The Creature is standing over the body, weeping. He gives Walton his last speech — he is the only living thing of his kind; he has killed every person he was capable of being known by; he is going north, alone, to build his own pyre and die. He climbs out the porthole onto the ice and is gone. Walton turns the ship for home.