their idle curiosity
Walton's highly refined sense of good manners here keeps him from inquiring
about what had brought Victor to this desolate northern wilderness. His
crew is much more natural in its reaction. One may sense a certain class
snobbery in Walton's tone here, as there was in his earlier description of
the sailors with whom he had to consort (Letter 2.3, 2.4). Of course, it might be argued that
the class system that so rigidly divided a ship's officers and its crew
resulted in just such a dichotomy: it is not to the crew that Victor
will retail his painful autobiography, but rather to a person of social
breeding and intellectual ambition, if not education, comparable to his
own. On the other hand, it could be maintained that the tone here is wholly
unintentional, an unwitting reflection of the residual bourgeois tonality
that Mary Shelley occasionally betrays in her contemporary publication,
A History of a Six Weeks' Tour, when confronted with what she considers
vulgar behavior.
