Frankenstein Chapter 2 Summary: The Dismissal That Changed Everything

Victor, Elizabeth, and Henry Clerval grow up within a year of one another, without dispute. Harmony is the soul of their companionship, and contrast keeps them close. Elizabeth follows the poets and the Swiss mountains. Clerval dreams of adventurous exploit, and she teaches him that doing good is the end of soaring ambition. Victor is more deeply smitten with the thirst for knowledge. He wants hidden causes, not the surfaces that content the others.

At thirteen, on a rainy day at an inn, he finds a volume of Cornelius Agrippa. He shows it to his father. Alphonse says, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash. He does not explain why. Victor reads Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus in secret and believes he holds treasures known to few. He wants the philosopher's stone and an elixir that would banish disease from the human frame.

When he is fifteen a thunderstorm bursts an old oak into ribbons before his eyes. A man of science names electricity and galvanism, and the alchemists collapse in an instant. Victor turns to mathematics with the same all-or-nothing will. The change feels like a guardian angel's last effort to avert a storm already hanging in the stars. It is ineffectual. Destiny, he says, was too potent.