Frankenstein
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley

Victor Frankenstein Timeline and Summary

  • Victor is born in Geneva to parents Alphonse and Caroline Frankenstein.
  • His parents adopt Elizabeth with the intention that when the kids are older, they will marry.
  • He reads the work of alchemists and forms his view of the world and of science.
  • His mother dies of scarlet fever only a few weeks before he is to go away to college. On her deathbed, she again says how much she wants Victor to marry Elizabeth.
  • Victor attends the university of Ingolstadt, where he studies chemistry and natural philosophy.
  • He becomes a star pupil at the university, learning all his professors can teach him in a few short years.
  • After that, he has to take his studies further on his own. It is then that he decides to create the spark of life in an inanimate thing.
  • He creates a monster and runs away from it.
  • He has a nightmare about Elizabeth and his mother’s corpse.
  • He runs into Henry Clerval and falls ill.
  • Henry nurses him back to health over a period of months.
  • They study "Oriental" languages together at Ingolstadt.
  • Victor and Henry return home because Victor’s brother, William, has been murdered.
  • Victor sees the monster in the woods on the way home when he is locked out of the gates of Geneva for the night; he realizes the monster killed William.
  • He is too afraid to tell anyone his secret, and partly because of his silence, an innocent, Frankenstein family servant, Justine Moritz, is executed.
  • Victor feels remorse and goes off into the mountains. He runs into the monster there.
  • The monster asks him to listen to his story, and Victor consents, going to an ice cave with him.
  • The monster asks Victor to make him a companion, and Victor reluctantly consents.
  • He goes back to Geneva and delays making the companion for the monster.
  • His father thinks Victor doesn’t want to marry Elizabeth. But he does. Really.
  • He says he needs to go on a journey first.
  • Henry accompanies him to England, but Victor can’t work with him around.
  • He sends Henry to stay with his friends in Scotland.
  • The monster watches Victor closely, and he sees the monster looking through the window one day while he is working on the she-monster on the desolate island of Orkney.
  • Victor realizes what he might release upon humanity if he creates a second monster, so he destroys it and dumps its body parts into the lake that night.
  • The winds prevent him from returning to shore.
  • He thinks about drowning himself.
  • Instead, he sails up to a nearby town, where the people accuse him of murder.
  • The magistrate takes him to view the body. It is Henry.
  • Victor falls ill for two months.
  • He is in jail.
  • When he recovers, his father visits him and he gets letters from Elizabeth asking him if he loves another woman.
  • The town magistrate takes pity on him. He is acquitted of the charges.
  • He rests in Paris and returns to Geneva.
  • He is fearful of the monster, who vowed to be with him on his wedding night, but he goes ahead with wedding plans, not realizing the monster’s true intent.
  • He marries Elizabeth.
  • On their wedding night, while Victor is preparing to fight the monster, the monster kills Elizabeth instead of him.
  • Victor returns to Geneva. His father dies of grief to hear the news of Elizabeth’s death.
  • He swears revenge on the monster, and starts out chasing him. He ends up with a dog sled in the Arctic Ocean. Well, not literally in the ocean, but pretty close. On, perhaps.
  • Near death, he boards Captain Walton’s ship, and resting, he tells Walton his story.
  • He urges the ship not to give up if it ever gets unstuck from the ice.
  • He dies.

Next Page: The monster Timeline