The methods of research are

Captain Walton's conclusion

At the end of Victor's narrative, Captain Walton resumes telling the story. A few days after the Creature vanishes, the ship becomes trapped in pack ice, and several crewmen die in the cold before the rest of Walton's crew insists on returning south once it is freed. Upon hearing the crew's demands, Victor is angered and, despite his condition, gives a powerful speech to them. He reminds them of why they chose to join the expedition and that it is hardship and danger, not comfort, that defines a glorious undertaking such as theirs. He urges them to be men, not cowards. However, although the speech makes an impression on the crew, it is not enough to change their minds and when the ship is freed, Walton regretfully decides to return South. Victor, even though he is in a very weak condition, states that he will go on by himself. He is adamant that the Creature must die.
Victor dies shortly thereafter, telling Walton, in his last words, to seek "happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition." Walton discovers the Creature on his ship, mourning over Victor's body. The Creature tells Walton that Victor's death has not brought him peace; rather, his crimes have made him even more miserable than Victor ever was. The Creature vows to kill himself so that no one else will ever know of his existence and Walton watches as the Creature drifts away on an ice raft, never to be seen again.
Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell (1840–41)
Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died from infection shortly after giving birth to her. Shelley grew close to her father, William Godwin, having never known her mother. Godwin hired a nurse, who briefly cared for her and her half sister, before marrying second wife Mary Jane Clairmont, who did not like the close bond between Shelley and her father. The resulting friction caused Godwin to favour his other children.
Shelley's father was a famous author of the time, and her education was of great importance to him, although it was not formal. Shelley grew up surrounded by her father's friends, writers, and persons of political importance, who often gathered at the family home. This inspired her authorship at an early age. Mary met Percy Bysshe Shelley, who later became her husband, at the age of sixteen while he was visiting her father. Godwin did not approve of the relationship between his daughter and an older, married man, so they fled to France along with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. It was during their trip to France that Percy very likely had an affair with Mary's stepsister, Claire. On 22 February 1815, Shelley gave birth prematurely to her first child, Clara who then died two weeks later. Over eight years, she endured a similar pattern of pregnancy and loss, one hemorrhage occurring until Percy placed her upon ice to cease the bleeding. ³
In the summer of 1816, Mary, Percy, and Claire took a trip to visit Claire's lover, Lord Byron, in Geneva. During the visit, Byron suggested that he, Mary, Percy, and Byron's physician, John Polidori, have a competition to write the best ghost story to pass time stuck indoors. Historians suggest that an affair occurred too, even that the father of one of Shelley's children may have been Byron. Mary was just eighteen years old when she won the contest with her creation of Frankenstein
Shelley was heavily influenced by both of her parents' works. Her father was famous for Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and her mother famous for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her father's novels also influenced her writing of Frankenstein. These novels included Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, St. Leon, and Fleetwood. All of these books were set in Switzerland, similar to the setting in Frankenstein. Some major themes of social affections and the renewal of life that appear in Shelley's novel stem from these works she had in her possession. Other literary influences that appear in Frankenstein are Pygmalion et Galatée by Mme de Genlis, and Ovid, with the use of individuals identifying the problems with society. Ovid also inspires the use of Prometheus in Shelley's title.
The influence of John Milton's Paradise Lost and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are clearly evident in the novel. In The Frankenstein of the French Revolution, author Julia Douthwaite posits that Shelley likely acquired some ideas for Frankenstein's character from Humphry Davy's book Elements of Chemical Philosophy, in which he had written that "science has ... bestowed upon man powers which may be called creative; which have enabled him to change and modify the beings around him ...". References to the French Revolution run through the novel; a possible source may lie in François-Félix Nogaret [fr]'s Le Miroir des événemens actuels, ou la Belle au plus offrant (1790), a political parable about scientific progress featuring an inventor named Frankésteïn, who creates a life-sized automaton.
Both Frankenstein and the monster quote passages from Percy Shelley's 1816 poem, "Mutability", and its theme of the role of the subconscious is discussed in prose. Percy Shelley's name never appeared as the author of the poem, although the novel credits other quoted poets by name. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798) is associated with the theme of guilt and William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798) with that of innocence.
Many writers and historians have attempted to associate several then popular natural philosophers (now called physical scientists) with Shelley's work because of several notable similarities. Two of the most noted natural philosophers among Shelley's contemporaries were Giovanni Aldini, who made many public attempts at human reanimation through bio-electric Galvanism in London and Johann Konrad Dippel, who was supposed to have developed chemical means to extend the life span of humans. While Shelley was aware of both of these men and their activities, she makes no mention of or reference to them or their experiments in any of her published or released notes.
Ideas about life and death discussed by Percy and Byron were of great interest to scientists of that time. They discussed ideas from Erasmus Darwin and the experiments of Luigi Galvani as well as James Lind. Mary joined these conversations and the ideas of Darwin, Galvani and perhaps Lind were present in her novel.
Shelley's personal experiences also influenced the themes within Frankenstein. The themes of loss, guilt, and the consequences of defying nature present in the novel all developed from Mary Shelley's own life. The loss of her mother, the relationship with her father, and the death of her first child are thought to have inspired the monster and his separation from parental guidance. In a 1965 issue of The Journal of Religion and Health a psychologist proposed that the theme of guilt stemmed from her not feeling good enough for Percy because of the loss of their child.⁴

An English editorial cartoonist conceives the Irish Fenian movement as akin to Frankenstein's creature, in the wake of the Phoenix Park murders in an 1882 issue of Punch.

Although the Creature was described in later works as a composite of whole body parts grafted together from cadavers and reanimated by the use of electricity, this description is not consistent with Shelley's work; both the use of electricity and the cobbled-together image of Frankenstein's monster were more the result of James Whale's popular 1931 film adaptation of the story and other early motion-picture works based on the creature. In Shelley's original work, Victor Frankenstein discovers a previously unknown but elemental principle of life, and that insight allows him to develop a method to imbue vitality into inanimate matter, though the exact nature of the process is left largely ambiguous. After a great deal of hesitation in exercising this power, Frankenstein spends two years painstakingly constructing the Creature's body (one anatomical feature at a time, from raw materials supplied by "the dissecting room and the slaughter-house"), which he then brings to life using his unspecified process.
Part of Frankenstein's rejection of his creation is the fact that he does not give him a name. Instead, Frankenstein's creation is referred to by words such as "wretch", "monster", "creature", "demon", "devil", "fiend", and "it". When Frankenstein converses with the creature, he addresses him as "vile insect", "abhorred monster", "fiend", "wretched devil", and "abhorred devil". John C. Engleworth, a Victorian literature professor at Cornell University,[36] posits that the creature was inspired by a man Shelly met in her time in Geneva with Lord Byron. The man was a beggar and geometer by the name of Noah Burdick, who Shelley described in her travel diary as "sickly, gaunt, abysmally tall and lacking any human emotion, morality, or sensibilities. Jackson Blackwell, a literary historian, corroborates this viewpoint.
In the novel, the creature is compared to Adam, the first man in the Garden of Eden. The monster also compares himself with the "fallen" angel. Speaking to Frankenstein, the monster says "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel". That angel would be Lucifer (meaning "light-bringer") in Milton's Paradise Lost, which the monster has read. Adam is also referred to in the epigraph of the 1818 edition:
The Creature has often been mistakenly called Frankenstein. In 1908, one author said "It is strange to note how well-nigh universally the term "Frankenstein" is misused, even by intelligent people, as describing some hideous monster. Edith Wharton's The Reef (1916) describes an unruly child as an "infant Frankenstein. David Lindsay's "The Bridal Ornament", published in The Rover, 12 June 1844, mentioned "the maker of poor Frankenstein". After the release of Whale's cinematic Frankenstein, the public at large began speaking of the Creature itself as "Frankenstein". This misnomer continued with the successful sequel Bride of Frankenstein(1935), as well as in film titles such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Illustration