Walton begins his journey to the pole almost at the dark of the year, an ominous sign.

Although there have been several deaths already confronted in the novel—those of Walton's
cousin (I:L1:4), of Caroline's father (I:1:5), and of Elizabeth's mother (I:1:7)—this
is the first that is not simply reported, but is enacted before the reader. That Caroline's
death is a consequence of selfless nurture suggests that this is an expectation of
women that is not without danger. Mary Shelley could not have failed to recognize
that, in focusing so sharply on the death of Caroline Frankenstein as being brought
on by her stepdaughter, she was in some sense rehearsing the death of her own mother
Mary Wollstonecraft following her birth. Critics have likewise traced the novel's
twin emphases on responsibility and guilt to this crucial biographical detail.

This intermixture of day and night recalls the diction with which the chapter opened
(I:3:1) as well as Walton's description of his own educational drive (I:L1:3).

The customary term for such a faculty in literature of the Romantic period is imagination.
Yet, the connotations of Walton's diction do not aspire to such a level of import,
a "day dream" implying something less substantial than a reverie, which itself signifies
a mental state much less imposing than a vision. This implicit deflation of the power
or value of the imagination will become a thematic undertone in the novel.

In his earlier letter (I:L1:3 and note) Walton had also singled-out this faculty of
imaginative reverie. As there, the tone here is ambiguously self-critical, suggesting
something tenuous and escapist about Walton's flights of fancy.

This intellectual obsessiveness links Walton with Frankenstein as he pursues the secret
of life (I:3:3, I:3:9).

Having in the previous letter (I:L1:4) already employed language associated with Milton's
Satan, here Mary Shelley directly echoes his description:

     his face
Deep scars of thunder had intrencht, and care
Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows
Of dauntless courage, and considerate pride
Waiting revenge.
-- I.600-604

The author's purpose seems not to be one of branding this crew with a diabolic association
(though it is true that they will later become united in rebellion against their master),
but rather this early on in the novel to plant motifs that will serve as unifying
structural and thematic devices as Mary Shelley begins to interweave multiple narrative
lines. In this case the association of the heroic and the Satanic will provide a perspective
in which the reader will later frame both Victor Frankenstein and his Creature.

Although Mary Shelley publishes this revision of her novel pseudonymously, as by "The
Author of The Last Man, Perkin Warbeck, &C. &C.," she writes as though she had signed
her full name to the title page, speaking familiarly of her husband toward the end
of the Introduction as "Shelley" (see I:Intro:7) and here casting her parents, William
Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, as almost legendary, if historical, figures whom she
need not bother to name. Constrained to keep the Shelley name out of the press by
the meager allowance Sir Timothy Shelley had reluctantly settled upon his grandson,
and thus remaining, as her opening paragraph indicates, "very averse to bringing [her]self
forward in print" (see I:Intro:1), Mary Shelley nonetheless goes out of her way here
to establish her major credentials as an artist and her strong claim to public notice.
An appearance of modesty to cloak an unladylike presumption is a standard ploy of
women writers at this time.

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). The reference is almost certainly to his last work, The
Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society: A Poem, with Philosophical Notes, published
posthumously in 1803.

Its cryptic citation in the opening paragraph of the Preface testifies to the major
importance of this work for the conceptual structuring of Frankenstein, particularly
in the electromagnetic linkage of the scientific concerns of Victor Frankenstein and
Robert Walton, as well as for the conspicuous and strange polar setting of the novel.
The relevant note is the twelfth in the appendix.

What exactly Percy Bysshe Shelley is referring to in his glancing citation of The
Temple of Nature is harder to discern. That he knew the work intimately can be discerned
by how much its form, as well as its science, contribute to the underlying conception
of Queen Mab (1813) and its two-book redaction published in the Alastor volume in
March 1816, "The Daemon of the World." In respect to Frankenstein, he is probably
thinking of Darwin's notion of creation as occuring from the dynamic interaction of
polar opposites in Book I.227ff, or its extension in the notion of life and death
as interacting forces in Book IV.375ff. Likewise, of relevance (though wholly erroneous
in its suppositions) is the first of the Additional Notes in the appendix, on "Spontaneous
Vitality of Microscopic Animals." Darwin also has a curious exposition of male reproduction
in nature without the intercession of females: see Book II, section III, somewhat
elaborated in the eighth of the Additional Notes.

The theme of dejection is a significant component of "dark" Romanticism. The most
influential exploration of it in the canon of British Romanticism is that found in
"Dejection: An Ode" by Coleridge, whose "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" has already
figured in the structure of the novel (I:L2:6). Of the major Romantic poets (besides
Percy Bysshe Shelley), Coleridge seems to have had the greatest impact on Mary Shelley's
writing in Frankenstein.