This seems an innocent-sounding phrase, but if read carefully, it manifests what the
final chapter of Volume 1 will likewise suggest, that this novel resolutely refuses
to invoke a supernatural or transcendental framework for support. As human beings
can create other beings, they also mentally create a divinity to structure their universe:
the same human fallibility can attend both operations with tragic consequences.

Clerval, who has already exhibited an instantaneous fellow-feeling for Victor where
others might be oblivious to his pain (see I:5:18), functions in the novel as a paragon
of sympathy.

Doubtless, this will seem only a natural human reaction, but once we have experienced
Victor's narration of the agon through which he and his Creature have suffered, such
sympathy will appear to be a rarer attribute, all the more prized for how seldom it
is actually practiced by the major characters of the novel. Walton's reaching out
in sympathy stands in marked contrast to the universal reaction elicited by the presence
of the Creature.

Civil magistrates; government functionaries. The word does not appear in Johnson's
1755 Dictionary, but he does include the cognate verb, to syndicate:

To judge; to pass judgment on, to censure. An unusual word.

In the Genevan political system, according to the account in the 4th edition of the
Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1797), there were only four syndics chosen from among the
magistrates and these held the greatest authority in the republic. Geneva's syndics
passed a sentence of exile on Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762, a time we might suppose
included in Alphonse Frankenstein's "many years." Mary Shelley mentions the event
in History of a Six Weeks' Tour, Letter II.

Main text here.

Byron recorded an equally powerful Alpine storm issuing from the Jura in Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage, Canto III, stanzas 92-96, during the summer of 1816.

Here, in a sudden reversal, Victor indicts himself, recognizing his responsibility
for the consequences of a scientific experiment over which he exerted no intellectual
or moral control. And yet, since he has neither evidence to offer nor can even place
himself within Switzerland when the crime was committed, he is effectually without
any responsibility in the eyes of society. Also, of course, he does not truly know
that the Creature was William's murderer and thus has, in any objective sense, nothing
to offer but supposition that would be inadmissible in a judicial proceeding.

Here the succession of names brings Victor at last to the ultimate moral distancing,
positioning his creature as an avatar of Satan and thus grounding the extensive analogy
with Milton's Paradise Lost that is a marked feature of the novel.

Novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth century reveal many instances of the antipathy
of a second wife to the children of an earlier marriage: it is the impulse behind
the Cinderella story. More to the point is the fact that Mary Shelley was brought
up by a stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin, for whom she felt little affection.

Mary Shelley comments at length on the "terrific" storms she witnessed in the environs
of Geneva, including one that so illuminated the lake, in her letter of 1 June 1816.
Byron likewise includes a description of such a night-time storm in Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage, Canto 3, stanzas 92-95.