This addition to the 1831 text is prepared for by a similar ambition stressed in Henry's
youth (see 1831:I:2:2 and note) and may be generally accounted for by the importance
the intervening decade and a half had attached to the growing eastern empire of Great
Britain, not just in India but also in Afghanistan, on the edge of the Ottoman empire.
It would have not seemed questionable to the author or her readers in 1831 that Henry
Clerval would wish to distinguish himself as an imperialist. Mary Shelley would have
been well aware that one of her former husband's closest friends, Thomas Love Peacock,
though sharing Victor Frankenstein's privileging of the European classical tradition
over "oriental" literature, had carved out a career in the East Indian Office, the
bureaucracy that oversaw commerce with the imperial East.