This phrase is accentuated by being repeated in adjoining sentences. Yet, for all
its unusual emphasis, the phrase dissipates its power, as the passive voice once again
deflects any sense of responsibility from Victor: see I:3:3 and note.

In order to place Walton's expedition in an objective perspective, the reader should
reflect on what it would cost for a private individual to organize and pay the complete
costs of an enterprise that in Mary Shelley's day was assumed by the British state
and, because of its not inconsiderable expense, was the subject of careful and even
suspicious scrutiny.

1816 is famous as "the summer that never was." A remarkable worldwide climatic disturbance
was caused by the eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia the previous winter, which
filled the high atmosphere with a fine ash that limited solar penetration.

That this is secondarily a puff for the narrative that follows, openly charging us
as readers to respond to it with interest and sympathy, should not detract from its
main function, which is to return us to the opening sentence of the paragraph before
and its honoring of the essential human link inherent to fellow-feeling. That Walton's
sympathy for Victor Frankenstein should extend to the reader's sympathetic reaction
to them both is a fundamental tenet of Mary Shelley's notion of the value of, the
purpose for, writing.

The phrase suggests the powders used in chemical analysis. Victor will be so converted
to modern scientific research as to lose his earlier aversion to such mundane and
messy experimentation. What he later calls his "workshop of filthy creation" (I:3:9
and note) seems to reflect this diction.

In keeping with the tenor of this paragraph, the sentence bears a double freight.
On the one hand, one could see Elizabeth as wishing to hide from the darker realities
of the world and therefore as the embodiment of a kind of bland domesticity. On the
other hand, as we have witnessed in the previous two chapters, a human being can become
so inured to those darker realities as, like Victor Frankenstein, to lose perspective
and a due sense of social responsibility.

Victor, like Walton (I:L1:6), foresees glory as crowning his scientific investigations.
The same unexamined connotations of the word touched on in Walton's honoring of it
as a goal (note) attend on Victor's as well.

Candor is an important character trait in the novel, and it is to Walton's credit
that he so naturally evinces it. His openness will elicit a similar frankness from
Victor Frankenstein, who for the first time in his existence will tell his entire
story. But that narration, then, raises a serious problem. Not only are there many
signs of instability in it, the major one being Victor's wish to revise it even as
it goes along (Walton, and note); but his earlier lack of candor with his family and
friends is akin to dishonesty, which, if so common a practice throughout his mature
life, must raise serious doubts about the truthfulness of the narration that comprises
the bulk of this novel.

The "wondrous power" is magnetism. Mary Shelley, working within the accepted scientific
discourse of her time, in this second paragraph of her novel, is carefully establishing
a conceptual—the term in her time would have been "philosophical"—base for it in physics.
The key is provided by Percy Bysshe Shelley's citation, in the opening sentence of
the Preface (I:Pref:1), of Erasmus Darwin, to whom the reader may turn for further
elucidation of the scientific grounding of the novel.

However odd this may sound to contemporary ears, it is certainly true that Percy Bysshe
Shelley deeply romanticized Mary's origins, seeing her as singled out by her birth
for great literary accomplishment. He pays tribute to her in these terms in his Dedication
to The Revolt of Islam, the epic-romance he wrote simultaneously with her composition
of Frankenstein. Although some commentators have seen the pressures to write to which
her lover/husband subjected Mary Shelley as pernicious, it did not originate with
him so much as in the milieu in which Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was raised. There,
writing (William Godwin) and publishing (Mary Jane Clairmont, his second wife) was
what one did.