Glossary
Twenty terms, three worlds: the Vizlings persona, Shelley's novel, and the real history behind both. Each entry is tagged so you always know which world you're in.
Tags: [persona] = Vizlings character canon · [novel] = Shelley’s 1818 book · [history] = real world.
Adam
[novel] The Creature compares himself to Adam — “I ought to be thy Adam” — the first man, created innocent and then cast out. See lines.
Aldini, Giovanni
[history] Italian physicist (1762–1834), nephew of Galvani, who staged public demonstrations of galvanism on the corpses of executed criminals, including in London in 1803. See science.
The Creature
[novel] What Shelley’s novel calls its unnamed creation: also “wretch,” “dæmon,” and “monster.” Never given a personal name in the text.
Dæmon
[novel] Shelley’s spelling (with the æ ligature) for the Creature — from the Greek daimon, a spirit, not necessarily evil.
De Lacey
[novel] The blind old cottager whose family the Creature secretly befriends and learns language from; the one human who treats him kindly because he cannot see him.
frankestein
[persona] The Vizlings character — spelled as in the app. A gentle-giant Monsterling inspired by Shelley’s Creature but with his own invented canon. Not the novel’s figure.
Frankenstein, Victor
[novel] The Genevan student of natural philosophy at Ingolstadt who creates and then abandons the Creature. “Frankenstein” is his surname — not the Creature’s name.
Galvanism
[history] The 18th-century science of muscular contraction by electricity, after Luigi Galvani’s frog experiments. The word Shelley would have known. See science.
Geneva
[novel] [history] Victor Frankenstein’s home city — and the city near which Mary Shelley, at the Villa Diodati in 1816, conceived the novel.
Graymoor
[persona] The fictional village below frankestein’s laboratory in persona canon.
Ingolstadt
[novel] [history] The real Bavarian university town where Victor Frankenstein studies and builds the Creature.
Leyden jar
[history] An early capacitor — a glass jar storing static charge — the kind of apparatus that fills frankestein’s spark room. See science.
The Modern Prometheus
[novel] [history] The novel’s subtitle. Prometheus stole fire from the gods for humanity and was punished; Victor steals the “spark of life.” See themes.
Monsterlings
[persona] frankestein’s category in the Vizlings app — the monster family of characters.
Paradise Lost
[novel] [history] Milton’s epic (1667), which the Creature reads in the novel and which supplies the book’s epigraph. frankestein keeps it by his fireside in persona canon too.
The Sanctuary
[persona] What frankestein calls the old laboratory now — a refuge for strays, storms, and travelers.
Spark of life
[novel] [history] Shelley’s phrase for the animating principle — deliberately vague in the novel; rooted in real galvanic experiments. See science.
Voltaic pile
[history] Alessandro Volta’s 1800 battery of stacked metal discs — the first true electric battery, and the pride of frankestein’s spark room.
The Village
[persona] Graymoor’s people, who once came with torches and now leave casseroles at the laboratory door.
Year Without a Summer
[history] 1816 — the cold, stormy year of Tambora’s eruption, when the Diodati ghost-story contest produced Frankenstein. See mythology.