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

The modern locution might be "like a horse in a pasture." A "common" was the common
ground set aside or simply taken over by a community for pasturage of the small flocks
and other animals belonging to its individual members. In the two generations previous
to the writing of Frankenstein commons had all but disappeared in the British Isles
as a result of their "enclosure" by landlords. The effect was enormously disruptive
of rural stability, as Oliver Goldsmith's well-known poem, The Deserted Village (1770),
recounts.

Although the prolonged illness that is to follow for Victor will justify this look
as symptomatic of his physical debility, the first interpretation for many a reader
(and certainly for Clerval), that it is a sign of incipient madness, cannot be discounted.
A derangement of Victor's mental balance is too frequently insinuated later in the
text for it to be dismissed out-of-hand this early in its progress.

Mary Shelley's infant son (b. 24 January 1816) was named William after her father.
Her arranging to have his namesake in the novel murdered has prompted some wonder.
Certainly, there was no lack of maternal affection: William Shelley's death in Rome
on 7 June 1819 was a devastating blow to Mary Shelley, issuing in something approaching
a nervous breakdown.

At this point in the novel William is about seven years old. He is clearly modeled
in this description on Mary's infant son William.

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 (III:WC:4 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.

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.

This phrase recurs with frequency in the critical literature about the novel, partly
because it stands in such contrast to the almost divine attributes with which Victor
has up to now been honoring himself and his discovery. In the phrase there is not
only a sense of the irreducibly brute physical reality of what would have actually
constituted a butcher-shop but as well a decided undertone of self-loathing.

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.