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.

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.

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.

However unthreatening such language may sound today, in 1818, with England racked
by unrest and governed by reactionaries, these were what we might today call fighting
words. They certainly signaled the anonymous author's radical sympathies to readers—and
reviewers. This is the point in the novel where discerning readers, not knowing who
the author was, would comprehend the significance of the dedication to William Godwin,
whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice of 1793 remained the most radical analysis
of "the strange system of human society" for the generation of his daughter. This
work, rather than the more tempered redaction of 1798, when the extreme antiestablishment
perspective of the original might have been taken for treason, in many respects underlies
the Creature's sense of alienation, his understanding of the structured injustice
that allows him no place in human society, and his recognition of endemic restraints
upon individual self-fulfillment.

However this veneration of an ideal to which he might aspire testifies to the underlying
human sensibility of the Creature, the awareness to which his logic carries him, that
he is not part of the human family, places it within another and more pernicious construction.
In effect, he is internalizing a sense of profound alienation, becoming the Other
that society would make him.

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").

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.