This map plots the settings and references in Frankenstein
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Modern-day 'Switzerland' was preceded by a loose federation of more or less independent canton states – of which Geneva was one – formed in the late 13th-century by a mixture of German, French, and Italian alpine communities. The Swiss Alps themselves form the central section of the mountain range, providing the iconic glacial scenery Mary Shelley recorded, both in an account of her European travels and in Frankenstein (See bookmark to page 76).
Despite maintaining international neutrality throughout its history, the Confederacy was temporarily 'liberated' from independence in 1798 by the advancing French Revolutionary armies, which attempted to unite and control its numerous cantons as one nation. The newly-minted 'Helvetic Republic' was fraught with discord; a battleground for the ensuing wars between France (for whom the Swiss declined to fight) and her enemies, and beset by occasional rebellions against the new regime, it collapsed in 1803. Napoleon himself intervened to reinstate the federal system, and after his defeat in 1815 Switzerland became something like its old feudal self again, albeit with a new sense of the national unity it might, and ultimately would, possess.
Online edition of 'The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau', (first published 1782)
What was once the university of Ingolstadt's Anatomy Building - Credit:
Brian Clontarf
Established in 1472, the University of Ingolstadt made the Bavarian city an important counter-Reformation presence during the Renaissance, but it underwent a systematic secularization throughout the Enlightenment. By the late 18th century it had entirely shed its religious associations and, due to the extra-curricular activities of Professor Adam Weishaupt, had become famous instead as the birthplace of a radical pro-Enlightenment offshoot of the freemasons, an ostensibly "secret" society known as the 'Illuminati'.
Anticipating the modern multitude of hilarious conspiracy theories it has spawned, some contemporaries feared that this club of bored noblemen and self-professed 'free-thinkers' was in fact a sinister anti-theistic conspiracy, secretly advancing a worldwide revolutionary agenda. Although the group had dispersed by the end of the 18th century, and financial difficulties had required the university to relocate to Munich in 1800, its history ensures that Frankenstein's education is as laden with sinister implications as the experiments which result.
Online edition of Volume III of Augustin Barruel's 'Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism', (1799), which generously credits a group of masonic societies, including the 'Illuminati', with engineering the French Revolution – read by Mary Shelley
The Russian Empire, 1745 - Credit:
Russian Academy of Science
St Petersburg was the capital of the Russian Empire from the early 18th-century until the revolution of 1917; seat of Catherine the Great during her reign (1762-1796), which saw a great upsurge in Enlightened reform and artistic patronage until checked by the instructive examples of the American and French revolutions.
Walton's long journey along the post road to Arkhangelsk on the northern coast suggests its importance not only as Russia's main trading port, but as a gateway to the Arctic for expeditions seeking a Northeast Passage to the Pacific Ocean (See bookmark to page 6). Such attempts were frustrated by the shifting surface of the Arctic Ocean; the smallest of the world's oceans, for much of the year it is completely covered by a layer of ice, onto which Frankenstein recklessly pursues his creature.
Walton has progressed quite far on his voyage when he rescues Victor, most likely at a point north of the sparsely populated wastes of Siberia.
Continuously updated scenes of the Arctic are available from the North Pole Environmental Observatory's webcams
Incoming storm over Lake Geneva, (2010) - Credit:
Danimal1802
The book's preface, by Percy Shelley writing from Mary's perspective, originates the legendary 'ghost-story competition' account of Frankenstein's conception. In 1816 the couple had travelled to Switzerland to summer with celebrated philanderer and poet George Byron, along with and at the urging of Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont who was pregnant with his child. Byron rented one 'Villa Diodati' on the scenic shores of Lake Geneva, but worldwide atmospheric disturbance from the volcanic eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia caused an abnormally "cold and rainy" (p.4) season which forced the party to stay indoors and amuse themselves by composing ghoulish horror stories.
Although the preface describes Shelley's novel as the only completed product of the contest, a year later Byron's physician John William Polidori expanded his patron's fragment into a novella of his own - one of the first works to depict The Vampyre as a suave, myserious aristocrat.
A more elaborate account of the contest is given in Mary Shelley's 'Introduction' to the 1831 edition of 'Frankenstein'
Online edition of Lord Byron's 'Fragment of a Novel', (1816)
Online edition of John William Polidori's expansion of it 'The Vampyre', (1819)
The glacier Montanvert, where it fills a narrow valley on the northern slopes of Mont Blanc, is known as the 'Mer de Glace' and has been a popular tourist destination for centuries. It was one of the sights visited by the Shelleys during their European travels with Claire Clairmont, described in Letter IV of their joint journal.
Online edition of 'History of a Six Weeks' Tour', Mary and Percy Shelley, (1817)
The reformist rationalism of Enlightenment thinking provided the perfect motivation for Edinburgh to solve its problem of overcrowding by extending northwards into a 'New Town', constructed throughout the second half of the 18th-century. Based on a design by James Craig it was patterned on an even, regular grid, ultimately providing the city's wealthy with an escape from the disorganised squalor left to its less mobile citizens. For two long periods, in 1812 and 1813, Mary Shelley was sent to live with the Baxter family near Dundee; in the introduction to her 1831 edition of Frankenstein she attributed to this period her first attempts at writing, as well as "occasional visits to the more picturesque parts" of Scotland.
Orkney Islands, UK, (2006) - Credit:
Pixie
The Orkneys are a windswept archipelago of small islands off the north coast of Scotland – approximately 70 in all, of which 20-odd are currently inhabited.
The islands have a long history of habitation, holding the remains of Skara Brae, Europe's most completely preserved Neolithic village. Although Frankenstein describes his island as "barren", most of the Orkneys are highly fertile. As the most remote of the islands is more than fifty miles from mainland Scotland, we must either assume that Victor's "five miles distant" is a miscalculation, or that he is measuring from the largest of the Orkneys, which is colloquially named 'Mainland'.
Incredibly, Frankenstein's small skiff has drifted a distance of several hundred miles, from the Orkneys to the northern coast of Ireland, while he slept. By a coincidence which is never explained he lands at the same remote coastal village where Henry Clerval has been murdered by the creature. Victor's timely jaunt does provide him with an alibi for Clerval's murder, committed while he was still in the Orkneys, but the incident's usefulness as a plot device is surely outweighed by its sheer improbability.
This sense of unreality can be seen as the passage's goal, coming at a point when Frankenstein himself starts to question the coherence of his narrative: "my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality" (p.149).
From the Orkneys (top right)... to Ireland (bottom left):
Holyhead, on the Isle of Anglesea in northwest Wales, has long been the main departure point from southern Britain for Ireland. The sea-route remains in active use by a popular ferry service.
Évian-les-Bains is a town on the southern French shore of Lake Geneva (or 'Lac Léman'). It's reputation as a source of health-giving mineral water began in 1789 after a local nobelman, the Marquis of Lessert, proclaimed his kidney trouble had been cured by drinking from a local spring.
The vague proportions of Victor's travels in pursuit of the creature are given sudden clarity by his arrival at the Arctic Ocean, the great mass of shifting ice that surrounds the North Pole. The pair have travelled thousands of miles across the European and Asian continents, finally entering the uncharted region being explored by Walton and his crew (See note to page 6). Early cartographers were divided over whether to depict the area as land or sea, an ambivalence captured as the shipless Frankenstein continues his pursuit out onto the ocean's surface.
Continuously updated scenes of the Arctic are available from the North Pole Environmental Observatory's webcams
Black Sea near Balaklava, (2006) - Credit:
Argenberg
After an unsuccessful attempt to unseat King Artaxerxes II of Persia in 401 BC, an army of roughly ten thousand Greek mercenaries was forced to march across hundreds of miles of hostile terrain to get home. The journey was later recorded by one of their leaders, a scholar named Xenophon, who famously recounts their sighting of the Black Sea from a mountaintop – named 'Theches' in the text, it has been identified as modern-day Turkey's 'Deveboynu Tepe'.
Online edition of Xenophon's 'Anabasis' (4th-century BC)