The language seems intended to invoke the "blasted stump" (I:1:22 and note) that is
left after lightning strikes the tree near Bellerive, a manifestation of the power
of the "vital fluid," electricity, that can at once create and destroy.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines this unit of measurement as follows:

LEAGUE:

league lig, sb.1 Forms: 4-5 leghe, 4-6 lege, leuge, (4 lewge, 5 lewke, leuke, leeke),
5-6 leege, 6 legge, le(a)que, Sc. lig, 6-7 leag(e, 6- league. Late ME. leuge, lege,
leghe, etc., ad. late L. leuga, leuca (= late Gr. leu'gh, leu'kh), according to Hesychius
and Jordanes a Gaulish word; hence OFr. liue, liwe (mod.Fr. lieue), Pr. lega, legua,
Cat. llegua, Sp. legua, Pg. legoa, Ital. lega.

a. An itinerary measure of distance, varying in different countries, but usually estimated
roughly at about 3 miles; app. never in regular use in England, but often occurring
in poetical or rhetorical statements of distance.

MARINE LEAGUE

marine league: a unit of distance = 3 nautical miles or 3041 fathoms. Although the
league appears never to have been an English measure, leuca occurs somewhat frequently
in Anglo-Latin law-books (Bracton, Fleta, etc.); it is disputed whether in these works
it means one mile or two.

Although Victor had earlier moralized against letting the pursuit of knowledge run
away with one's sober judgment (I:3:12), here he portrays himself as indulging his
hatred with the kind of impulsiveness and lack of restraint he had displayed in Ingolstadt.
It is clear that what Alphonse Frankenstein had termed "immoderate grief" three paragraphs
earlier (II:1:3) is not Victor's problem.

This is a remarkable sentence, redolent of all of Victor's earlier obsessiveness but
now transposed into a kind of psychotic state. It is surely tied to earlier questions
about the unhealthy products of the human imagination.

This is not easy to visualize, but Mary Shelley twice emphasizes the presence of this
stye. She appears to do so for several interrelated reasons: in order to have a natural
bulwark against the Creature's being detected by the cottagers; to place the Creature
symbolically as close to the natural order as to human beings; and to reveal, against
our visceral repugnance at the accompanying noise and stench (if the De Lacey household
had been able to afford to keep a herd of swine), the level of subsistence to which
necessity has reduced this being after six weeks or so of his existence.

In the 1818 edition the last noun of Volume 1, in Victor's narration, is "misery"
(I:7:33), and the second volume opens on a scene in which he draws further into himself
and his despair (II:1:1). Given the technical mastery of Frankenstein, it is thus
perhaps only to be expected that the Creature's autobiographical account should conclude
with the Creature in the exact condition of his Creator, sharing an existential misery
compounded of solitude and guilt.

Although there was relatively little Swiss (or German) emigration to the New World
by the time this novel was written, there was of course a great amount of it from
the country in which Frankenstein was published. Indeed, Percy Bysshe Shelley's grandfather
had been born in the British Colonies of North America (in Passaic, New Jersey), whence
he reimmigrated to Great Britain. The closest parallel for the Creature's plan, and
probably one that would be uppermost in the minds of a contemporary reader, was the
British penal colony established in 1788 at Botany Bay in Australia. There hardened
convicts were transported so as to rid honest citizens from their threat to the common
welfare. Over time, of course, these outcasts "civilized" a new continent.