Frankenstein's creature does not begin with a theory of good and evil. He first learns warmth, hunger, sound, and light. He then learns kindness by watching the De Lacey family, and finally finds names for virtue, injustice, love, government, and rebellion in books. Mary Shelley therefore gives him a moral education before society gives him a place in which to practise it. The tragedy is not that reading civilises a monster. It is that reading equips a rejected being to measure the human world against its own stated values.
The library entry for Frankenstein foregrounds the creature as a sympathetic victim. His education is what lets him name that victimhood as an ethical failure.
01
The creature learns care before he learns its name
The creature's education begins with observation. Hidden beside the De Lacey cottage, he notices that taking the family's food worsens their hunger. He stops stealing and gathers firewood for them at night. This decision occurs before he can converse with anyone. Sympathy is therefore not implanted by a teacher or commanded by law. It develops as he connects his own need with the visible needs of others.
Language enlarges that connection. Listening to Felix teach Safie, the creature discovers that spoken signs can produce pleasure, grief, and understanding. He calls language a godlike science because it makes inward states shareable. The phrase matters: speech is not merely camouflage that will help him pass as human. It is a medium through which another person's suffering can become intelligible and morally demanding.
The De Laceys also model mutual obligation. Their poverty does not prevent Felix and Agatha from caring for their father, nor does exile erase their tenderness toward Safie. The creature watches a small society whose members sacrifice for one another. Before he reads political history or sacred epic, he has already inferred a rule: vulnerability ought to call forth assistance rather than contempt. His later accusations against Victor depend on that rule.
02
Three books turn feeling into judgement
The books found in the abandoned portmanteau do different kinds of moral work. Plutarch's Lives supplies public examples of lawmakers and founders, directing the creature's admiration toward peaceful government. Goethe's Sorrows of Werter gives him a language for private feeling and social exclusion. Paradise Lost offers the largest available story of creation, obedience, companionship, and revolt. Together they join political, emotional, and theological vocabularies.
Shelley is careful about the emotional cost of this education. The creature says the books generate new images and feelings, often lowering him into dejection. Reading does not simply improve him. It gives form to comparisons he could not previously make. He can place the De Laceys' companionship beside his solitude, benevolent rulers beside arbitrary power, and Adam's protected creation beside Victor's flight from the being he made.
The result is ethical literacy without social recognition. He knows the concepts through which a community might judge conduct, yet no community accepts him as a participant. When he asks whether he is Adam or the fallen angel, he is not confusing fiction with fact so much as using narrative roles to test his relation to his creator. The books let him formulate an accusation that sensation alone could never express.
03
Human beings teach the counter-curriculum
The creature's encounters with people repeatedly contradict the values he has learned. Villagers attack him on sight. Felix strikes him when he approaches the blind De Lacey, although the conversation had been peaceful before sight intervened. After the creature saves a girl from drowning, her companion shoots him. These episodes do more than injure him. They demonstrate that appearance can override gratitude, evidence, and the presumption of good intent.
That contradiction helps explain the precision of his grievance. He does not tell Victor only that he is lonely. He argues that a creator has duties toward a dependent being and that misery has altered a disposition once inclined toward benevolence. The claim may be self-serving, especially after violence begins, but it is recognisably moral reasoning. He presents cause, responsibility, proportionality, and a proposed remedy in the demand for a companion.
Cambridge's teaching material notes that the creature develops moral judgement and can assess Victor's duties. The novel pushes the point further by making human conduct the practical test of the creature's book learning. He does not discover that books lied about virtue. He discovers that readers and citizens can praise benevolence in the abstract while withholding it from the body before them.
04
Education increases responsibility on both sides
The creature's education cannot absolve his murders. Once he can reason about justice and suffering, he can also understand the suffering he inflicts. His literacy makes him more accountable. Yet it also makes Victor's abandonment harder to defend. Victor has created a mind capable of reflection and obligation, then refuses the sustained relationship through which those capacities might have been guided.
This is why the novel's educational sequence matters more than the familiar surprise that the creature speaks beautifully. Eloquence is the visible result. The deeper transformation is his acquisition of standards by which both he and humanity can fail. He becomes dangerous after rejection, but he becomes capable of naming rejection as injustice before that danger fully emerges.
Shelley leaves no clean opposition between cultivated human and natural monster. A being assembled by experiment learns fellow feeling from domestic observation and ethical categories from canonical books. The recognised members of society, meanwhile, repeatedly respond through reflex and appearance. The creature's library does not make him human by supplying a cultural password. It reveals that humanity's own moral language can travel farther than its willingness to act.
Sources
- primaryFrankenstein; or, the Modern PrometheusMary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1818 text hosted by Project Gutenberg.
- criticismA “Godlike Science”Rachel Roberts, in Ontologies of English, Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Questions about Frankenstein
Which books does the creature read in Frankenstein?
He reads Goethe's The Sorrows of Werter, a volume of Plutarch's Lives, and Milton's Paradise Lost, as well as papers from Victor's laboratory journal.
Does the De Lacey family teach the creature directly?
Not at first. He secretly observes the family and learns alongside Safie by listening to Felix. The blind father later speaks with him briefly before the others return.
Do books cause the creature to become violent?
The novel presents reading as a source of sympathy, comparison, and moral judgement. His turn toward violence follows repeated rejection, though education also makes him responsible for understanding the harm he chooses.
Is the creature born evil?
Shelley does not present him that way. His earliest conduct includes restraint, secret assistance, and a desire for companionship; the novel traces how abandonment and rejection reshape those tendencies.