Dignity in this case signifies rank. But it is uncertain exactly how to construe what
this rank might be. It could be that Walton was offered the position of second mate.
But, depending on the size of the ship, it could have been an even more imposing rank
than that. In the terms Walton will employ about his own command in the ensuing letter,
the second dignity would be, after the captain's lieutenant, the master of the ship
(I:L2:3).

Mary Shelley, her half-sister Claire Clairmont, and Percy had arrived in Sécheron
by night on 3 May 1816 and took up lodgings at the Hotel d'Angleterre where they remained
for more than a month before moving to the opposite side of the Lake at Cologny. She
noted in a letter of 1 June (published in The History of a Six Weeks' Tour as Letter
II) that Geneva "is surrounded by a wall, the three gates of which are shut exactly
at ten o'clock, when no bribery (as in France) can open them."

Seasonal adjustments are very carefully marked in the novel, partly as a way of keeping
its several narratives joined in the reader's mind. In this case, we will recall Victor's
phrasing when we revert to the same moment in time at a later point (II:4:19) in the
novel.

An uncommon term today, though it was not so in Mary Shelley's age. Johnson's Dictionary
(1775) defines "searoom" rather grandly as "Open water; spacious main," and quotes
two seventeenth-century sources in support.

As with the diction of the previous sentence, here, too, Percy Bysshe Shelley attributes
to Mary Shelley's writing a bold originality he will, in prefatory remarks, later
claim for his own as well. See, for example, the opening paragraphs of the Preface
to Prometheus Unbound (1820).