Joseph Priestley, 1733-1804, a founder of modern chemistry particularly noted for
his discovery of oxygen, was a friend of Mary Shelley's father Godwin in the 1790s.

An interesting phrase, suggesting Victor Frankenstein's mature awareness of his own
limitations as well as Mary Shelley's compassionate sense of human fallibility, a
characteristic that, since it is commonly shared, might well serve as a universal
restraint upon human overreaching.

Walton refers to previous explorers of the northern wilderness. Sir John Ross, in
the Introduction to his Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a north-west passage
and of a residence in the Arctic Regions during the years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832,
and 1833 (London: Webster, 1835), pp. i-xxiv provides a useful, near-contemporary
history of such expeditions.

Mary Shelley makes the intimacy with Lord Byron sound almost accidental. In fact,
it was all carefully arranged by Claire Clairmont, Mary's step-sister, who in a bizarre
case of oneupmanship that trumped Mary's affair with Percy Bysshe Shelley, had managed
to seduce Byron two days before he departed England in April 1816. By the time the
Shelley party reached Switzerland, Claire realized that she was pregnant from this
liaison. Although the relationship continued in Geneva, Byron soon tired of Claire
and came to dislike her, so much so that in subsequent years he would see the Shelleys
only on condition of her absence.

Isabel Baxter became Mary's close friend almost by accident. Mary's early adolescence
had been troubled, particularly fractious where her stepmother was involved; and Godwin
decided that some distance would have a salutary effect on her rebelliousness. He
contacted a radical acquaintance from the 1790s, Richard Baxter, a Scotsman who was
a good friend of his own friend David Booth, who agreed to accept Mary into his family
in Dundee. There at the age of fourteen she took up a happy residence that, as this
account indicates, combined a closeness to nature with a warm affection for the Baxters'
middle daughter Isabel. With this family she resided from June to November 1812, and
from June 1813 to March 1814. Her elopement with the married Percy Bysshe Shelley
not long after her return from this second residence ruptured her friendship, since
David Booth, who had married Isabel in the meantime, refused to allow his wife to
continue her intimacy with a woman who had so abandoned customary propriety.

Victor's language, after so many months of silence, is transparently insincere. Since
Clerval does not seem to notice, perhaps Victor does not either. Victor, however,
has himself already expressed the terms of his own indictment for such neglect of
his loved ones: see I:3:10.