In revising her novel Mary Shelley totally changed Ernest's state of health but added
nothing that would give him a reason for existing in the novel except to carry on
the family name in obscurity. In both texts, however, Ernest serves as a foil to the
overly abstract and abstracted mind of his brother Victor. As a farmer (1818) or a
mercenary keeper of the peace (1831), Ernest's concern would be with the given order
of things rather than with what underlies it conceptually. In both texts (but paradoxically
more pronounced in the third edition, many years after Byron provided an immediate
context for her writing), Ernest bears a striking similarity to the Chamois Hunter
of Manfred, which Byron began after the Shelleys' departure in 1816 and is also set
in Switzerland. See Act I, scene ii, and Act II, scene i.