Mister_Sosotris t1_j7udtne wrote on February 9, 2023 at 2:03 PM

Jane Eyre does that, too. It was a stylistic choice to make it look like certain places and people are “redacted” from the record as if they were real letters and documents to protect people’s privacy

PangeanPrawn OP t1_j7ukibb wrote on February 9, 2023 at 2:52 PM

So its versimilitude? Frankenstein is framed as a series of letters so I guess that kinda makes sense, it just seems like the choice is so arbitrary, because its not like any character names, or even other place names are redacted.

BadAtNamesWasTaken t1_j7waksl wrote on February 9, 2023 at 9:22 PM

I think character names weren't redacted because it was (& is) pretty difficult to identify somebody with just their name. You need a location to go along with it, at the very least, unless we are speaking of the royalty I suppose

I haven't read Frankenstein in a long time, so I don't know if it's the same there, but in Austen's novels I feel place names are "redacted" when they're associated with negative things and left in place when they're associated with positive things. Kinda like how our newspapers would go "Florida Man threw an alligator at his girlfriend" vs "Steve Irwin, the famous Australian wildlife educator, and his wife Terri spent their honeymoon trapping crocodiles in the wild".

So in Pride and Prejudice, we know Mr. Darcy is from Pemberly, Derbyshire and Pemberly is near the town of Lambton. That's basically pin pointing his identity - but that's okay because he has nothing to be ashamed of/to hide so his identity need not be protected. On the other hand, Wickham's regiment is always _Shire - because he is is a scoundrel and thus his identity needs to be protected/censored.

Mister_Sosotris t1_j7uqnqb wrote on February 9, 2023 at 3:34 PM

Yeah, it’s to make them seem realistic. It’s kind of a weird choice. I don’t think a book like Dracula, which is all letters and articles, uses this technique at all.

steampunkunicorn01 t1_j7ur8u5 wrote on February 9, 2023 at 3:38 PM

No, by the time Dracula was written (about 70-80 years after Frankenstein) it had gone out of fashion in both novels and letter writing. I'm not 100% sure when it faded out of style, but it was a common trend that lasted at least until mid-way through the 1800's (for example, it was also done in the American book Uncle Tom's Cabin)