Why Wordsworth's Words?

Mary Shelley cites William Wordsworth’s “Tinturn Abbey” near the end Frankenstein’s eighth chapter, writing that “The sounding cataract / Haunted him like a passion: the tall rock, / The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, / Their colours and their forms, were then to him / An appetite; a feeling, and a love, / That had no need of a remoter charm. / By thought supplied, or any interest / Unborrow’d from the eye” (19-140).

Ironically, within the context of Wordsworth’s original work, this sample of the piece is used as a description of his former reflection upon a place that he’d been as a child—a sharp contrast to Clerval, who simply seems to find himself wrapped up in the beauty of the countryside, so new to his eyes. Even more interesting than the quote itself, I believe, is the part left out: “That time is past, / And all its aching joys are now no more, / And all its dizzying raptures” (84-86). These lines immediately follow the ones Shelley quoted and, I believe, extend a hand in explaining why she chose that specific quote. In the scene that Victor Frankenstein uses Wordsworth’s quote, he is describing his friend Henry Clerval not long before his death. “That time is past” (84). Is Victor Frankenstein not hinting at what is to come for his friend, whose life ends in a violent turn of events? So innocent and childlike, full of a writer’s passion and eye for detail, the young man is enthralled with the beauty of this waterfall (ironic because Henry was strangled and thrown into the waves to wash up on an Irish shore).

So, I suppose, it could be said that Mary Shelley uses “Tinturn Abbey” as a sort of warning or prophecy for the knowledgeable reader, a hint that Henry Clerval’s time of childlike innocence is soon to be gone—not just gone, in fact, but obliterated by the cruel hands of adulthood and rage.