The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein Read Online Free PDF

You are interested in the principles of life.”
    “I am interested in the springs of life,” I said. “That is true.”
    “Where it comes from?” Westbrook asked me.
    “Where it might come from. What else have you two been discussing? I cannot be a topic of absorbing interest.”
    “We have been discussing, Victor, the future of Daniel’s sister.”
    “Mr. Shelley has seen my father.”
    “Really? When did this occur?” The conversation in the tavern, when Bysshe pledged himself to educate Harriet Westbrook at his own expense, had taken place three days before.
    “I visited the Westbrook family yesterday morning,” Bysshe replied. “I believed that Sunday was, for Daniel’s father, the only day of consideration.”
    “Mr. Shelley—” Westbrook began.
    “Bysshe,” he said. “Merely Bysshe and Victor.”
    “Bysshe was remorseless. He remonstrated with my father for allowing Harriet to consort with loose females.”
    “I exaggerated. To make the point. Harriet had already left the room.”
    “He pleaded with him to allow her the study of improving authors.”
    “I know that she can read. She told me so.”
    “And then, in a final moment of passion, he offered my father money.”
    “That did it. I promised to pay to him the exact amount of Harriet’s earnings, with another guinea a week. These religious men love lucre. Stand by the fire, Victor, you are still trembling.”
    “My father,” Westbrook said, “is a poor man as well as a religious one.”
    “I am not blaming him for his poverty. I am blaming him for his neglect of Harriet.”
    “Where will you place her?” I asked Bysshe.
    “I do not intend to place her anywhere. No. That is not true. I will place her here.”
    “You mean—” I looked around at the mass of books and papers; his lodgings were in the same degree of confusion as his rooms in Oxford.
    “I intend to educate her myself. Daniel and I have been discussing the question of female education as the necessary preliminary to female suffrage. I will introduce Harriet to Plato, Voltaire, the divine Shakespeare.”
    “That is rich fare for a young girl.”
    “Daniel assures me that she is eager to learn on her own account. They began to read under the tutelage of their mother.”
    “She is dead now,” Westbrook said.
    “And Daniel passes books to her still which she reads on Sunday within the pages of her Bible.”
    “So she will come here?” I asked.
    “What of it?”
    “She has no female to accompany her?”
    “You are still the solid citizen of Geneva, Victor. There are no such conventions in London. In this part of London. And, if there were, I would be happy to break them!” He looked at Westbrook. “I have Harriet’s interests wholly at heart. I will read to her. Look.” He went over to a pile of books, half-fallen on the carpet, and picked up one of them. “Volney’s Ruin of Empires . You know it, Victor?” I nodded. “From this she will learn how unjust power is doomed and how all tyrants decay.”
    “I trust she enjoys it,” I said.
    “And what would you have me read to her? The novels of Fanny Burney? They are the fetters that bind young women in their servitude. I am lending this book to Daniel.” He returned to the pile, and held up Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman . “When he has thoroughly absorbed it, I will present it to his sister. Do you agree, Daniel?”
    “What was the phrase you used to me?” Westbrook asked. “‘We must break up the ground.’”
    “Precisely. We speak of radical reformation, but radical means root. Root and branch. We must take reform to all spheres of activity. Victor is interested in voltaic activity. I am interested in Harriet’s soul. They are precisely comparable.” He had excited himself in the course of this conversation, and opened the window to breathe in the cool damp air.
    “What a night,” he said. “On such a night as this I imagine stray watery phantoms in the