Far more than printed books, attendance at lectures on natural philosophy instructed thousands of eighteenth-century students of the sciences. Mary Shelley indirectly refers the reader to the vastly popular London lectures on the sciences to which audiences had been flocking since Humphry Davy's inaugural lecture in 1802. Anne Mellor has persuasively argued that Davy was a partial model for the character of Victor in this novel. [Anne Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (Routledge, 1989) pp. 91-103)]

The special role of chemistry in Victor's apprenticeship to medicine links premodern sciences like alchemy to modern empirical science. Humphry Davy (1778-1829)was the contemporary British chemist who argued the chemistry was the key to all other sciences and useful arts of the time.