These were, as Victor Frankenstein had been reminded the evening before (I:6:20 and
note), shut at 10 o'clock every night.

Victor is implicitly drawing a contrast between the educational program he was provided
by his father and the lack of such a discipline in Walton's formative years lamented
by the mariner in his conversation with Victor some ten days earlier ( I:L4:25 and
note). The recurrence of this theme is manifestly deliberate on Mary Shelley's part.
What the reader is to derive from it, however, is not so certain, since there are
clearly ways in which, whatever his deficiencies in languages or in systematic application,
Walton's moral education will serve him better in the course of this novel than does
Victor's.

Here the succession of names brings Victor at last to the ultimate moral distancing,
positioning his creature as an avatar of Satan and thus grounding the extensive analogy
with Milton's Paradise Lost that is a marked feature of the novel.

Here, in a sudden reversal, Victor indicts himself, recognizing his responsibility
for the consequences of a scientific experiment over which he exerted no intellectual
or moral control. And yet, since he has neither evidence to offer nor can even place
himself within Switzerland when the crime was committed, he is effectually without
any responsibility in the eyes of society. Also, of course, he does not truly know
that the Creature was William's murderer and thus has, in any objective sense, nothing
to offer but supposition that would be inadmissible in a judicial proceeding.

Byron recorded an equally powerful Alpine storm issuing from the Jura in Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage, Canto III, stanzas 92-96, during the summer of 1816.

Main text here.

Civil magistrates; government functionaries. The word does not appear in Johnson's
1755 Dictionary, but he does include the cognate verb, to syndicate:

To judge; to pass judgment on, to censure. An unusual word.

In the Genevan political system, according to the account in the 4th edition of the
Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1797), there were only four syndics chosen from among the
magistrates and these held the greatest authority in the republic. Geneva's syndics
passed a sentence of exile on Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762, a time we might suppose
included in Alphonse Frankenstein's "many years." Mary Shelley mentions the event
in History of a Six Weeks' Tour, Letter II.

Doubtless, this will seem only a natural human reaction, but once we have experienced
Victor's narration of the agon through which he and his Creature have suffered, such
sympathy will appear to be a rarer attribute, all the more prized for how seldom it
is actually practiced by the major characters of the novel. Walton's reaching out
in sympathy stands in marked contrast to the universal reaction elicited by the presence
of the Creature.

Clerval, who has already exhibited an instantaneous fellow-feeling for Victor where
others might be oblivious to his pain (see I:5:18), functions in the novel as a paragon
of sympathy.

This seems an innocent-sounding phrase, but if read carefully, it manifests what the
final chapter of Volume 1 will likewise suggest, that this novel resolutely refuses
to invoke a supernatural or transcendental framework for support. As human beings
can create other beings, they also mentally create a divinity to structure their universe:
the same human fallibility can attend both operations with tragic consequences.