What the De Lacey Family Teaches the Creature in Frankenstein

Before the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can ask anyone for kindness, he learns to recognize it through a crack in a wall. From a shelter adjoining the De Lacey cottage, he watches a family share what little food they have. He stops taking from their stores and begins gathering firewood for them. The family never sees who leaves it.

That quiet exchange helps explain why the De Lacey episode matters. The family teaches the creature language and gives him a model of how people care for one another. By the time he knocks on their door, he has spent months imagining what it would be like to be welcomed inside.

How the creature learns to speak

The creature’s education begins with Felix, Agatha and their blind father. He watches their daily routines and gradually learns to connect familiar sounds with people, objects and actions. When Safie arrives, Felix begins teaching her French. The creature follows the lessons from hiding and learns alongside her.

Safie’s arrival also gives him a glimpse of what being expected and welcomed looks like. He can follow the same lessons she does, but he has nobody to answer his questions or tell him what he has understood correctly. That difference becomes painfully clear when he tries to turn everything he has learned about the family into a conversation.

What the De Laceys teach him about injustice

Felix uses Volney’s Ruins of Empires in his lessons with Safie. As the creature listens, he learns about wealth, rank and the ways societies divide people. Those ideas have a counterpart in the family’s own history. Felix helped Safie’s father escape prison, and the authorities punished the De Laceys. The family once lived comfortably in Paris. By the time the creature finds them, they are living in exile and struggling to feed themselves.

The creature also starts asking where he fits in the society he is learning about. Other people can name their families and describe where they come from. He has no family name or childhood memories to draw on. Learning to speak gives him a way to ask who he is, and the answers he finds make him feel more alone.

Why he approaches the blind De Lacey first

The creature waits until the old man is alone. He hopes De Lacey will hear what he has to say before anyone reacts to his appearance. For a moment, the plan works. The old man listens and offers to help. Then Felix, Agatha and Safie return. Felix pulls the creature away from his father, strikes him with a stick and drives him out.

From the creature’s side of the wall, the De Laceys have become the people he knows best. From Felix’s side of the door, a stranger is clinging to his father’s knees. The gap between those perspectives is what makes the encounter so painful. All those months of watching have given the creature a history with the family that he has only a few moments to explain.

Why Shelley lets the creature tell this part

We first see the creature through Victor’s eyes, in the shock of the laboratory scene. At the cottage, we hear what the creature remembers and what he wants Victor to understand. He chooses to tell Victor about the food he stopped taking, the wood he gathered and the conversation he almost managed to have. Hearing those details changes how we read Victor’s decision to flee the moment his creation comes to life.

The creature’s later violence still belongs to him. What the cottage chapters add is a record of choices he made before revenge took over. On a reread, watch for the firewood. It is the clearest sign that he has already learned to care for people who have no idea he exists.

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If you want to read the cottage chapters in Shelley’s original published version, find the Penguin Classics paperback of Frankenstein: The 1818 on Amazon,

Read next
Books of Brilliance’s Frankenstein review · What Mary Shelley changed between 1818 and 1831

Primary text
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at Project Gutenberg. The cottage episode spans Chapters 11–16 in this edition.

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