Victor Frankenstein, the protagonist of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, studies natural philosophy and chemistry at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany. His education spans far more than a single subject, though. It begins with a childhood obsession with outdated alchemists, shifts to legitimate university science, and eventually veers into a private, obsessive study of human anatomy and the boundary between life and death.
Early Self-Education in Alchemy
Long before he sets foot in a university, young Victor discovers the works of Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, all medieval and Renaissance-era alchemists whose ideas had been discredited for centuries by the time the novel takes place. He throws himself into their writings, searching for the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. As he admits, his family “was not scientifical,” and he never attended lectures at the schools of Geneva, so no one corrected his course. His dreams, as he puts it, were “undisturbed by reality.”
A pivotal moment comes when he watches a bolt of lightning destroy a tree, sparking his curiosity about electricity and natural forces. That event begins pulling his interests away from alchemy and toward real science, though the old ambitions of conquering death never fully leave him.
University Studies at Ingolstadt
Victor arrives at the University of Ingolstadt at age 17, grieving his mother’s recent death. He is already well-read, having taught himself Latin, Greek, English, and German alongside years of self-directed study in natural science. But his first encounters with university professors are jarring.
He meets two key figures. The first, Professor Krempe, teaches natural philosophy and immediately dismisses Victor’s alchemical reading as a waste of time. Victor finds Krempe both intellectually and personally repulsive. The second, Professor Waldman, specializes in chemistry and proves far more influential. Waldman is kind and encouraging, and he delivers a lecture that reignites Victor’s passion for science. Waldman tells him that modern scientists “penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places,” that they have “discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe,” and that they “can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”
Victor is initially disappointed by modern chemistry’s modest goals compared to alchemy’s grand promises of immortality and limitless power. He laments being “required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.” But Waldman’s speech convinces him that modern science has its own form of power, and Victor dedicates himself to chemistry and natural philosophy with extraordinary intensity.
Anatomy, Decay, and the Secret of Life
Victor’s studies take a dark turn when he becomes consumed by a single question: what causes life? To answer it, he decides he must first understand death. He begins spending days and nights in vaults and charnel houses, places where corpses were stored, studying the process of human decomposition in painstaking detail.
In his own words: “My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.” This is not coursework assigned by his professors. It is private, obsessive research conducted in secret, driven by his conviction that understanding decay will reveal the mechanism of life itself.
Eventually, Victor claims to discover the principle of life, though Shelley never tells the reader exactly what that discovery is. Armed with this knowledge, he moves from studying dead bodies to assembling one, collecting parts from corpses and building a creature he intends to animate.
The Role of Electricity
Popular culture, especially the 1931 film, shows Frankenstein using dramatic bolts of electricity to bring his creature to life. The novel is far more vague. Shelley describes Victor collecting “the instruments of life” so he might “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet,” but she never specifies what those instruments are or names electricity outright as his method.
That said, the language of sparks and the novel’s subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus” (Prometheus stole fire from the gods), strongly echo the real-world experiments of Luigi Galvani, who had demonstrated in the 1790s that electrical current could make dead frog legs twitch. Shelley was aware of galvanism and referenced it in conversation, but within the text itself, Victor’s exact technique remains deliberately mysterious.
What Drove His Research
Victor frames his ambitions in noble terms early on, claiming his interest in natural science was driven by “the glory of banishing disease from the human frame, and even to render man invulnerable to death.” But the novel complicates this. His deeper motivation is personal glory. He wants to be remembered among the greats, “to become one among those whose names are recorded in glory.” Banishing disease is a goal only insofar as it would make him famous.
His mother’s death also shapes everything. He leaves for university while still in mourning, and his fixation on conquering death reads as both a scientific pursuit and a response to personal loss. The tragedy of the novel is that Victor’s fields of study, chemistry, anatomy, natural philosophy, were legitimate and respected. It was the scale of his ambition and his willingness to work in isolation, without ethical limits or anyone to check his judgment, that turned knowledge into catastrophe.