19th-century novel: Frankenstein — AQA GCSE English Literature Revision Notes

What you'll learn

• How Shelley's frame narrative works and why the Creature's story sits at the centre of it
• Victor's ambition, his abandonment of responsibility, and how the novel judges him
• Why the Creature is the most sympathetic character despite what he does
• The contexts that produced the book — Romanticism, galvanism, Shelley's parents and the Villa Diodati
• The novel's central questions about creation, education and exclusion
• How to approach the AQA Paper 1 19th-century novel question, which is extract-based

Key terms and definitions

Frame narrative — a story enclosed within another story. Walton's letters enclose Victor's account, which encloses the Creature's.

Epistolary — told through letters. The novel opens and closes in Walton's correspondence with his sister.

Gothic — a genre of horror, transgression, doubled identity and oppressive settings.

Romanticism — an early nineteenth-century movement valuing feeling, imagination, the sublime in nature and the individual against institutions.

The sublime — an experience of nature so vast or terrible that it overwhelms, producing awe rather than pleasure. The Alps and the Arctic serve this function.

Hubris — overreaching pride, especially the ambition to exceed proper human limits.

Prometheus — the Titan who stole fire for humanity and was punished eternally. Shelley's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, invites the comparison.

Galvanism — the use of electricity to produce movement in dead tissue, a subject of public fascination and experiment in Shelley's lifetime.

Doppelgänger — a double. Victor and the Creature are repeatedly presented as two halves of one situation.

Core concepts

The frame narrative and why it matters

The novel is built in three layers, and the ordering controls the reader's sympathy.

Walton writes to his sister from a ship pushing towards the North Pole. He is ambitious, isolated, and explicitly hungry for glory — a man on the same path Victor has already walked. Placing him first means the reader meets Victor's ambition in a milder form before seeing where it leads.

Victor tells his story to Walton, and it occupies most of the book. Because he is speaking to a man he is trying to warn, his account is shaped as a cautionary tale, which makes it self-justifying as well as confessional. He is not lying, but he is selecting.

The Creature tells his own story at the exact centre of the novel, to Victor, in the Alps. Shelley places it there deliberately: the reader has spent a hundred pages hearing him described as a monster and now hears him speak for himself, articulate and grieving. It is the most important structural decision in the book.

The layers then unwind — back out to Victor, back out to Walton, and finally to the Creature standing over Victor's body, given the last word.

Victor Frankenstein

Victor is not a mad scientist. He is a gifted, ambitious young man from a loving family who pursues a genuine intellectual question past the point where he should have stopped.

His ambition is initially admirable and becomes obsessive. He works in secret, neglects his family, makes himself ill, and treats the creation of life as a problem to be solved rather than a responsibility to be assumed. Shelley is precise about the moment of failure: it is not the making of the Creature but what happens immediately afterwards, when Victor sees what he has made and runs away. Every subsequent death follows from that abandonment.

He is also a serial evader. He conceals what he knows when Justine is tried for a murder he could explain, he destroys the Creature's mate rather than face the consequences of a decision, and he continues to describe himself as the victim. The novel allows him self-knowledge only at the very end, and even then his final advice to Walton is ambiguous.

The Creature

The Creature is the novel's moral centre, and Shelley makes his development the book's strongest argument.

He begins with nothing — no language, no name, no guidance — and teaches himself by observing a family through a gap in a wall. He learns to speak, to read, and to reason, and he does so while performing secret kindnesses for people who would be terrified of him. He is, for a considerable stretch of the novel, the most humane character in it.

His turn to violence is caused by rejection, and Shelley stages it in stages so the reader can see the causation: the villagers who drive him out, the family who flee, the man who shoots him after he saves a drowning child, and finally his creator's refusal. Only after the last of these does he kill.

That said, the novel does not excuse him. He murders a child, frames an innocent woman, and kills Elizabeth on her wedding night — the cruellest act in the book, aimed at Victor through someone else. Shelley's achievement is that he remains sympathetic and culpable at once, and answers that hold both will outscore answers that pick one.

Victor and the Creature as doubles

The two are constructed as a pair. Both are isolated, both are obsessive, both narrate their own suffering at length, and both end alone in the Arctic. Each pursues the other for the second half of the book, and neither can be released except by the other's death.

Shelley reinforces this with language: Victor repeatedly describes the Creature in terms that apply equally to himself, and the Creature accuses Victor of being the real monster. The pursuit across the ice reverses their positions so completely that it becomes impossible to say who is hunting whom.

Themes

Creation and responsibility is the novel's central concern. The book is far less interested in whether Victor could make life than in what he owed the thing he made. The Creature's demand is not for freedom or power but for acknowledgement and a companion.

Ambition and its limits connects Victor to Walton and to the Prometheus subtitle. Walton's turning back at the end — persuaded by his crew rather than by Victor — is the novel's only successful act of restraint.

Isolation afflicts everyone. Victor isolates himself by choice, the Creature by his appearance, Walton by his ambition. The novel repeatedly suggests that company and domestic affection are what keep people whole.

Prejudice and appearance drive the plot. Every character who meets the Creature judges him instantly on how he looks, including the blind man's family the moment they can see him. The one person who treats him kindly is the one who cannot see.

Nature and the sublime gives the novel its settings. Victor recovers among mountains and glaciers, and Shelley uses Alpine and Arctic landscapes to dwarf human ambition.

Education and nurture run underneath the Creature's story. He becomes what his treatment makes him, which is a direct engagement with contemporary arguments about upbringing and society.

Context

Mary Shelley was nineteen when she began the novel, at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, where a group including Byron and Percy Shelley agreed to write ghost stories. That summer was unusually cold and dark following a volcanic eruption, which shows in the book's weather.

Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and died days after her birth; her father, William Godwin, was a radical philosopher who argued that people are formed by their circumstances. Both influences are visible — the latter in the Creature's development, the former in the novel's treatment of women who are consistently passive and consistently destroyed.

Galvanism — experiments passing electricity through dead tissue to produce movement — was widely discussed and publicly demonstrated in the period. Shelley keeps the science vague, but the cultural anxiety about reanimation is entirely of its moment.

Romanticism shapes the novel's landscapes and its interest in the individual, while also being examined: Victor is a Romantic overreacher, and the book is not sure he should be admired.

The Industrial Revolution provides a background of rapid technological change with unexamined consequences, which the novel's central situation reflects.

Worked examples

Example 1: Extract-based character question

Starting with this extract, how does Shelley present the Creature as a sympathetic character?

Work close in the extract first — the vocabulary of feeling, any first-person appeal, the way he describes being treated. Then widen across the novel: his self-education, the wood he gathers for the cottagers, his rescue of the drowning child, and the reward he receives for it. Bring in the blind man to sharpen the argument about appearance. A strong conclusion acknowledges the murders and argues that Shelley makes him sympathetic and culpable rather than choosing between them.

Example 2: Theme question

Starting with this extract, how does Shelley explore ideas about responsibility?

Locate Victor's failure precisely — not the creation but the abandonment — and build outward from there. Trace the consequences through William's death, Justine's execution, the destroyed mate and Elizabeth's murder. Then use Walton as the counterweight: he is offered the same ambition and turns back. Close on the frame, noting that Victor tells the story as a warning yet never quite accepts the charge.

Example 3: Handling the extract

Spend roughly the first third of the answer inside the extract, analysing individual words rather than listing devices, then signal the move outward and follow the same idea through the novel. Because the frame narrative means passages come from different speakers, always establish who is narrating the extract — a paragraph in the Creature's voice does very different work from the same events in Victor's. Noticing that is one of the easiest ways to show real command of this text.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

Calling the Creature "Frankenstein". Frankenstein is Victor. The Creature has no name, and saying so is itself a point about how he is denied identity.

Treating Victor as a mad scientist. He is a sympathetic, gifted man who fails at the point of responsibility. Flattening him loses the novel's argument.

Ignoring the frame. Walton exists for a reason and the Creature's central narration is a deliberate structural choice. Answers that never mention either are missing the novel's design.

Excusing the Creature completely. He kills a child and an innocent woman. The interesting reading holds sympathy and culpability together.

Context as biography. Shelley's mother matters if you connect her to the novel's treatment of women or to ideas about upbringing — not as a standalone fact.

Overlooking the women. Elizabeth, Justine and Caroline are passive and all suffer. In a novel written by Wollstonecraft's daughter, that pattern is worth commenting on.

Exam technique for "19th-century novel: Frankenstein"

On AQA Paper 1 this question is worth 30 marks and you should spend about 50 minutes on it. There are no AO4 marks here, so put your effort into analysis rather than polish.

Read the question and underline its focus before reading the extract.

Plan briefly: three or four points anchored to specific moments, ordered so the argument develops rather than repeats.

Learn short quotations grouped by character and theme — a few from the Creature's self-account, one or two from Victor at the moment of creation, something from Walton's letters, and something on the Alpine or Arctic landscape will cover most questions.

Always identify the narrator of the extract. It is a distinctive feature of this novel and examiners notice when students use it.

Write about Shelley constructing an effect: "Shelley places the Creature's narrative at the centre of the novel so that" is analysis; "the Creature tells his story" is content.

Quick revision summary

• Three-layer frame: Walton's letters enclose Victor's account, which encloses the Creature's — the Creature speaks at the exact centre
• Victor's failure is abandonment, not creation; every death follows from him running away
• The Creature educates himself, performs kindnesses, and turns violent only after repeated rejection — sympathetic and culpable
• Victor and the Creature are doubles: both obsessive, both isolated, both end in the Arctic
• Walton is the control case — offered the same ambition, he turns back
• Themes: responsibility, ambition, isolation, prejudice by appearance, nurture, the sublime
• Context: Villa Diodati 1816, galvanism, Godwin on circumstance, Wollstonecraft and the novel's passive women, Romanticism
• The Creature has no name — Frankenstein is Victor
• Paper 1, roughly 50 minutes, 30 marks, extract-based — always say who is narrating