As with "courage," the martial virtue to which Mary Shelley here yokes "resolution,"
this word also evokes the characteristic diction of Milton's Satan. In arising to
call his forces to assemble, he marks his agenda:

     how we may henceforth most offend
Our enemy, our own loss how repair,
How overcome this dire calamity,
What reinforcement we may gain from hope,
If not what resolution from despair.
-- I.187-191

When Satan ends the assembly by having his fallen legions endorse his plans to corrupt
the garden of Eden, Milton's language emphasizes the force of his resolution.

          Thus saying, rose
The Monarch, and prevented all reply;
Prudent, lest from his resolution raised,
Others among the chief might offer now,
Certain to be refused, what first they feared.
-- II.466-470

As understandable as this resolve is (and, perhaps more important to the reader, as
necessary to the plot line as it may be), still Victor's silence is fundamentally
problematical on moral grounds, constituting a denial of his own responsibility and,
through an absence of candor on both private and public levels, a failure of essential
human sympathy and justice.

Even as he honors Alphonse Frankenstein, Victor does so in terms that distance his
father into something of an icon for the principle of patriarchy itself.

Victor uses the same diction in thanking Walton for rescuing him: "You have benevolently
restored me to life" (I:L4:18 and note).

This long passage, almost a tirade, was omitted from the third and later editions.
It is one of the clear occasions where Mary Shelley reveals herself as her father's
daughter, justifying the Quarterly Review's attack on her novel for its Godwinian
politics. For Godwin's treatment of retribution, see Political Justice, Book VII ("Of
Crimes and Punishments"), particularly Chapter 4, "Of the Application of Coercion."

Victor's life, as he narrates its events, is full of good intentions, roads not taken,
and fatal postponements. A more disinterested observer might attribute all of these
elements to a slippery sense of personal responsibility on Victor's part.

Plain, in contrast to fancy, work consisted of hemming and other essential tasks of
household sewing. Mary Wollstonecraft discusses the place of plain-work in girls'
education in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 12.24.

Plainpalais is a promenade to the south of the city of Geneva.

A statue of Rousseau stands in the square. During the Geneva Revolution of 1792-1795,
Geneva's syndics were killed in an uprising in Plainpalais. Mary Shelley recounts
this incident in A History of a Six Weeks' Tour, Letter II:

To the south of the town is the promenade of the Genevese, a grassy plain planted
with a few trees, and called Plainpalais. Here a small obelisk is erected to the glory
of Rousseau, and here (such is the mutability of human life) the magistrates, the
successors of those who exiled him from his native country, were shot by the populace
during that revolution, which his writings mainly contributed to mature, and which,
notwithstanding the temporary bloodshed and injustice with which it was polluted,
has produced enduring benefits to mankind, which all the chicanery of statesmen, nor
even the great conspiracy of kings, can entirely render vain. From respect to the
memory of their predecessors, none of the present magistrates ever walk in Plainpalais.

Caius Plinius Secundus, CE 23-79, Roman naturalist.

Pliny the Elder was the author of Historia naturalis, the principal compendium of
scientific knowledge for the original Augustan age, a work to which Percy Bysshe Shelley
was introduced at Eton. He claimed there to have, for the most part, translated the
encyclopedic work on metallurgy, pharmacology, zoology, anthropology, and psychology
into English.

The Natural History is the only one of Pliny's seven writings to survive antiquity
entire. That work in thirty-seven books was an attempt to survey all natural knowledge
systematically in an unadorned style, and his methodical approach and careful regard
for citation make it a model of ancient scientific research, in spite of Pliny's superstitious
beliefs in magic. Book 1 is an introduction to the entire work. Book 2 addresses cosmology
and astronomy; books 3 through 6 are on geography. The next thirteen books treat biology:
zoology in books 7 through 11, botany in books 12 through 19. Books 20 through 22
address medicine; books 23 through 37 are concerned with metals, minerals, and precious
stones.

Pliny's authority was comparable to Aristotle's throughout the Middle Ages; only in
1492 did he come under attack in Niccolò Leoniceno's catalogue of his errors. From
then on its influence waned by degrees, and few regarded it seriously as science after
the end of the seventeenth century.

Pliny died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in CE 79, famously described in letters
by his nephew.

Mary Shelley deliberately joins the obsessiveness of artistic creation to that of
scientific pursuit. Although some commentators have assumed an implicit critique of
Percy Bysshe Shelley, he follows a similar path in "Alastor" (published in 1816).
Compare—

The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to
           heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

(Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, V.i.7-22)