Victor's unassuming choice of language, on a second reading, immediately brings to
mind his treatment of his own "creature."

This seemingly offhand sentimentalism is in actuality an exceedingly subtle move on
Mary Shelley's part, suggestive of how dangerous unexamined metaphors can be, especially
those that stem from our day-to-day existence and common practices. Victor Frankenstein,
deeply aware from his scientific experiments that electricity achieves its dynamic
energy from the interplay of polarities, here sees in the heavens an example of that
polarity writ large and, as it were, iconically—as elemental warfare. He will almost
immediately transfer that icon into an earthly counterpart, a permanent struggle between
positive and negative poles, by which he respectively denominates himself and his
Creature as good and evil, as figures of God and Satan. Thus, almost unconsciously
adopting a quasi-divine sign, Victor reinforces the animosity that allowed him conveniently
to categorize, externalize, and thus alienate as Other the Creature whom he brought
to life and then left to his own devices (see I:4:3 and note).

It is probably too early in the novel for the intonation of this phrase to resonate
fully, but by the time Victor has finished recounting his experiences and Walton repeats
these same sentiments (I:L2:4 and note), the reader will be ready to identify the
prototype standing behind this characterization as being that of Satan in Milton's
Paradise Lost.

In I:L4:21, Walton also connects Victor with this attribute: "He must have been a
noble creature in his better days." Nobility would appear to include a capacity for
self-abnegation and thus to be incompatible with the burning force of vengeance that
drives so much of the action of this novel.

Isaac Newton wrote:

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only
like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding
a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth
lay all undiscovered before me.

-- Louis Trenchard More, Isaac Newton: A Biography (New York: Scribner's, 1934), p.
664.

Samuel Johnson alludes to this comment in Rambler 83:

To mean understandings, it is sufficient honour to be numbered amongst the lowest
labourers of learning; but different abilities must find different tasks. To hew stone,
would have been unworthy of Palladio; and to have rambled in search of shells and
flowers, had but ill-suited with the capacity of Newton.

That is, remorse.

The major symptom of a nervous fever in the eighteenth century is a total want of
strength. Thus, Victor's confinement to his bed in an invalid state for months would
not necessarily have seemed extreme to a contemporary reader. Still, by any measure
his appears to be no ordinary illness. Since medical terminology has changed radically
since the novel was written, it is not easy to transpose Victor's disorder into a
modern equivalent. Certainly, it would seem to originate in what is now called a nervous
breakdown: Victor's past record of constant fevers and what appear to be anorexic
symptoms suggest a systemic collapse of some magnitude.

This was the exact term Victor used two chapters earlier to describe his long illness:
see I:4:17 and note.

Again, as earlier (I:1:12) in this first chapter, Mary Shelley lays emphasis on a
non-competitive educational environment and the kind of non-coercive pedagogy employed
by her father.

Mary Shelley makes the intimacy with Lord Byron sound almost accidental. In fact,
it was all carefully arranged by Claire Clairmont, Mary's step-sister, who in a bizarre
case of oneupmanship that trumped Mary's affair with Percy Bysshe Shelley, had managed
to seduce Byron two days before he departed England in April 1816. By the time the
Shelley party reached Switzerland, Claire realized that she was pregnant from this
liaison. Although the relationship continued in Geneva, Byron soon tired of Claire
and came to dislike her, so much so that in subsequent years he would see the Shelleys
only on condition of her absence.