This is in English an obsolete usage, though it is still current in French and Italian,
meaning "to await."

Victor's egocentric concentration on his own reaction is more than simply ungenerous:
it reveals a sense of class and gender superiority that is deeply troubling.

This unattractive portrait of Henry Clerval's father relies on common prejudices of
British society in the early nineteenth century. Trade was looked down upon as narrowing
the mind and depraving the soul. One can sense the disparagement as Johnson offers
two definitions for "trader" in his 1755 Dictionary:

1.One engaged in merchandise or commerce.
2.One long used in the methods of money getting; a practitioner.

The same tone insinuates itself into cognate definitions: Trade

1.Traffick; commerce; exchange of goods for other goods, or for money.
2.Occupation; particular employment whether manual or mercantile, distinguished from
the liberal arts or learned professions.
3. Instruments of any occupation.
4. Any employment not manual; habitual exercise.

To trade

1. To traffick; to deal; to hold commerce.
2. To act merely for money.
3. Having a trade wind.

Surely, Victor, like any human being, has a right to pursue happiness. But it is the
case, that, beginning here, on every occasion when he anticipates a return to normal
human pleasures he experiences instead a disastrous reversal of expectations. From
this moment on his joy will never again be "unbridled," but rather, at best, what
Thomas Gray, in his "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," called "fearful."

Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of their little reign,
And unknown regions dare descry:
Still as they run they look behind,
And hear a voice in every wind,
And snatch a fearful joy. (lines 35-40)

Although Clerval seems lighthearted in his exaggeration, his phrasing resonates with
startling irony. Not only does it play against Victor's obsession with acquiring knowledge
at any cost, only just now having attained its fateful consequence, but the diction,
so like the language of Walton's first letter (I:L1:2), reminds us that Walton himself
would not be an auditor of Victor Frankenstein's life story had not both of them been
in peril of their lives in the Arctic wilderness.

Although it dates from June 1818, and thus postdates the publication of the first
edition of Frankenstein by several months, Percy Bysshe Shelley's fragment of an essay
"On Life" has a passage that may shed light on Mary Shelley's own attitude to her
adolescent student's disenchantment with a philosophical discipline that deconstructs
rather than creates:

Philosophy, impatient as it may be to build, has much work yet remaining as pioneer*
for the overgrowth of ages. It makes one step towards this object; it destroys error,
and the roots of error. It leaves, what is too often the duty of the reformer in political
and ethical questions to leave, a vacancy.# It reduces the mind to that freedom in
which it would have acted, but for the misuse of words and signs, the instruments
of its own creation. —By signs, I would be understood in a wide sense, including what
is properly meant by that term, and what I peculiarly mean. In this latter sense almost
all familiar objects are signs, standing not for themselves but for others, in their
capacity of suggesting one thought, which shall lead to a train of thoughts. —Our
whole life is thus an education of error. (Reiman-Powers, eds., Shelley's Poetry and
Prose, p. 477)

*advance guard.

#see I:1:10, and note.

This additional blindness removes all doubt that Victor himself, at the very least,
sees a moral flaw in his having spurned his family. In essence, to ignore one's loved
ones is to break one's basic ties with the natural.

Victor is implicitly drawing a contrast between the educational program he was provided
by his father and the lack of such a discipline in Walton's formative years lamented
by the mariner in his conversation with Victor some ten days earlier ( I:L4:25 and
note). The recurrence of this theme is manifestly deliberate on Mary Shelley's part.
What the reader is to derive from it, however, is not so certain, since there are
clearly ways in which, whatever his deficiencies in languages or in systematic application,
Walton's moral education will serve him better in the course of this novel than does
Victor's.

These were, as Victor Frankenstein had been reminded the evening before (I:6:20 and
note), shut at 10 o'clock every night.

The plural pronoun, following upon the substantive "species," makes us realize that
Victor planned from the first to create a mate for his Creature. It is hardly surprising,
then, that he acknowledges the justice of the Creature's desire when he is recalled
to this expectation in Volume 2 (II:9:8). What in retrospect should be surprising
is the fact that he simply forgets his original design.