Victor's characteristic passive verb construction reasserts itself here, in circumstances
where, since he has been out of the country for so long, he is the only member of
his family without an understood obligation to the court. The passive mood does suggest
his sense that he is trapped without a means of exonerating a person he is certain
is innocent. At the same time, in being attached to his own withdrawal from family
obligations, it may also indicate a more complicated pattern of causality than Victor
might like to believe in, one in which from the first he bears responsibility.

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.

The phrase recalls the isolation of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, to which Walton will
directly allude later in the letter (I:L2:6).

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.