William Frankenstein is some seven years old. Infancy thus here means "childhood."

The Creature's imagery tends to be poetic and generally, as is the case here or in
his description of Safie's singing three paragraphs before, where he compares her
to a nightingale, his imagery is drawn from nature. In his temperament he seems, interestingly,
to be something of a cross between Elizabeth, with her love of nature, and Clerval,
with his refined poetic sensibility. Victor, of course, does not intrude upon the
narrative he is recounting to note such linkages nor, indeed, the irony of the internal
delicacy of the figure he so brutishly names.

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.

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").

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.

The reference is to the famous last lines of Paradise Lost in which Adam and Eve forever
depart Eden (XII.646-49). That the Creature speaks in these elegiac tones suggests
that, for him, this is the moment in which he can no longer define himself, as he
did in his appeal to the elder De Lacey (II:7:26), as a being of innocent and benevolent
disposition. A second Adam, he has experienced his fall.

The issue of self-control that has been an undercurrent throughout this volume here
near its end surfaces as an important component of its pattern of complex ambivalences.
Even as such discipline appears a principal aim of the emphasis on education, it also
directly counters the natural values elsewhere generally honored.

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.

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.

The Creature's experiences have given a nuanced sense of the meaning of sympathy.
It is not a superficial kindness or momentary expression of compassion, but an essential
aspect of what it is to live as a human being, a necessity.