"Your affectionate and afflicted father,
Alphonse Frankenstein
Geneva, May 12th, 17--"
- p. 47
It rather annoys me to think that anyone would deliberately place such massive quantities of alliteration/assonance/consonance/what-have-you in a letter closing. Just... who... does that? Yes, yes, very impressive, Mr. Frankenstein. I'm sure your son is very impressed with your skills.
I assume that his purpose was not to annoy me, and I think that's a pretty safe assumption, as he is fictional, and also he is the brainchild of a lady who lived a long time ago who never had any reason to suspect I would exist. In poetry, I suppose it sounds nice, but in a letter closing, it just makes my reading brain-voice feel scared and confused, like my reading voice-voice would have stumbled there, and my brain-voice lucked out.
"People reading tongue twisters silently actually take longer to read tongue twisters than non-tongue-twisting sentences." - Hank Green
So was Shelley just trying to make me take my time? I doubt that she put that much thought into it, really. She was busy coming up with "a" and "f" sounds to put really close together.
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