Victor reverts, as if by instinct (or psychological regression), to the nomenclature
in which he first invested his Creature on that dreary November night some twenty-one
months earlier when he brought him to life: see I:4:2-3 and note.

Although Victor continually flagellates himself for the deaths of William and Justine,
yet the hardening of his language as a means of self-exculpation and displacing his
guilt continues. As he interchanges "fiend" and "monster," he combines the diabolic
and the unnatural to objectify and distance his Creature from the norms he accords
his family.

This is a new term for the Creature, in its extremity indicating how far beyond "all
bounds of moderation" (as Victor puts it in the next paragraph) his hatred has carried
him. He will repeat it, virtually like a mantra, in that ensuing paragraph.

This recognition confirms how tellingly on the mark the Creature had been in earlier
confronting Victor with the habitual language of his father (II:2:7 and note).

The modern descriptive term for Victor's experience would be awesome. Although he
dwells on how satisfying is this kind of response to nature (and in the third edition
it is particularly accentuated), it is probably so because of its reliable alterity
from his own situation. In a few paragraphs, with startling irony, he will have that
dependability rudely broken, and the sublime will come directly home to the human
who, thinking to master it, had fled from its tremendous power.

This phrase carries a significant freight. Although it might be read as one more occasion
in which Victor yields up his distinctive identity, substituting an obscure destiny
in the process of fulfillment for his innate responsibility for events, in fact this
necessity is driven by his own remorse, which is so acute that it can never be assuaged.
Although he seems unaware of what he is doing, he is actually claiming responsibility
for that destiny.

Here one senses the imprint of Godwin's method of progressively discriminating the
necessary components of abstract ethical concepts. Virtue, and to a less degree vice,
are repeatedly used as markers for social justice in the Enquiry concerning Political
Justice, whose extended title continues as "and Its Influence on General Virtue and
Happiness." Particular attention is paid to these concepts in Book I, Chapter 3 ("The
Moral Characters of Men Originate in their Perceptions"), Book 4, Chapter 6 ("Inferences
from the Doctrine of Necessity"), Book 4, Chapter 8 ("Of the Principle of Virtue"),
Book 4, Chapter 9 ("Of the Tendency of Virtue"), and Book 5, Chapter 2 ("Of Education").

In a boating accident during the summer Percy Bysshe Shelley, who could not swim,
fell overboard and sank to the bottom of Lake Geneva, from which he had to be rescued.
Speculative biography has discovered an urge toward suicide in the event and has connected
it with these ruminations of Victor's.

The logic of desire is played out through this paragraph to such an extent that, in
the abstract at least, the answer to the question is already implicit in the disparity
the Creature feels between himself and the De Lacey household. The thirst for perfection
and incumbent awareness of personal inadequacy is a theme often encountered in the
poetry of Lord Byron (e.g. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto 4, 122ff.) and Percy Bysshe
Shelley (e.g. "Lines Written among the Euganean Hills") during this period.

A family reduced to this level of poverty would be unlikely to afford candles, which,
generally speaking, in the eighteenth century were among household luxuries. A peasant
in the northern part of Europe would be most likely to burn rush—dried reeds—for light.