These leaves were originally part of a notebook Mary Shelley used to draft her first novel. In a passage which Mary Shelley did not include in the published version, Victor Frankenstein and his friend Clerval look round Oxford. They are charmed by the University and amused by its strange rules, ‘which although they might excite the laughter of a stranger were looked upon in the world of the university as matters of the utmost consequence’. Two students, they learn, are obstinately wearing ‘light coloured pantaloons when it was the rule of the colledge to wear dark’, and are in danger of being expelled for the offence. 

MS. Abinger c. 57, fols. 47v–48r