This is one of the two clearly identifiable but irreconcilable dates in the novel:
the other (Monday, 31 July) is contained in Walton's fourth letter to his sister (I:L4:1).
It has been noted, however, that the shift of one day here (to Thursday, May 8) would
reconcile the timeframe, allowing us to date the year of William's death as 1794 and
of Walton's letter as 1797.

The sense here of the son's challenge to the father's authority surfaces generally
throughout Victor's narrative. The question of justice that is here quietly insinuated
will become central to the conclusion of Volume 1 of the novel.

Thonon, or Thonon-les-Bains, the capital of the Cablais district in Savoy, located
on the southern edge of Lake Geneva, in the Rhône-Alpes region of southeastern France.
Its mineral springs have long made it a popular summer resort.

Thonon was at the center of a number of battles between the Duke of Savoy and the
Bernese during the Reformation. St. Francis of Sales performed missionary work in
the region, and worked to keep Thonon Catholic in the sixteenth century. It was taken
by France in 1792, but restored to Piedmont and Sardinia in 1816 after the fall of
Napoleon.

As its repeition two paragraphs later might make apparent, this will become the epithet
on which Victor—and the many generations of his auditors—most often settle for purposes
of the Creature's identification.

Before, we had only Victor's intimation that he had somewhat procrastinated in communicating
with his family (I:3:10). From Clerval's remark we learn that he had all but ceased
to write them.

Victor quickly recapitulates the process of naming his Creature with attributes of
the alien and supernatural first undertaken on the night of his creation: see I:4:3
and note.

Walton's highly refined sense of good manners here keeps him from inquiring about
what had brought Victor to this desolate northern wilderness. His crew is much more
natural in its reaction. One may sense a certain class snobbery in Walton's tone here,
as there was in his earlier description of the sailors with whom he had to consort
(I:L2:3, I:L2:4). Of course, it might be argued that the class system that so rigidly
divided a ship's officers and its crew resulted in just such a dichotomy: it is not
to the crew that Victor will retail his painful autobiography, but rather to a person
of social breeding and intellectual ambition, if not education, comparable to his
own. On the other hand, it could be maintained that the tone here is wholly unintentional,
an unwitting reflection of the residual bourgeois tonality that Mary Shelley occasionally
betrays in her contemporary publication, A History of a Six Weeks' Tour, when confronted
with what she considers vulgar behavior.

The plural pronoun, following upon the substantive "species," makes us realize that
Victor planned from the first to create a mate for his Creature. It is hardly surprising,
then, that he acknowledges the justice of the Creature's desire when he is recalled
to this expectation in Volume 2 (II:9:8). What in retrospect should be surprising
is the fact that he simply forgets his original design.

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.