Although Mary Shelley surely exaggerates the time it took her to begin her novel as
well as the anxious writer's block that inhibited her starting forth, there is a more
serious aspect to this account than her personal uncertainties. Questions concerning
the circumstances of and responsibility for creativity, the attitude with which intellectual
ambition approaches the unknown, and the moral neutrality of the human imagination,
are deeply inlaid within the structure of Frankenstein. There is thus a sense in which
this personal account in her Introduction seems intended to focus attention on such
larger, more public concerns with which the reader will soon be asked to grapple.

That the power that Victor will use to create life is initially associated with destruction
is significant for the symbolic course of the novel. The Creature thus empowered will
ultimately be responsible for three murders.

Erasmus Darwin explains the destructive force of lightning as resulting from the emission
of light and heat through the admixture of what he calls the vitreous and resinous
ethers, in modern terms essentially positive and negative electrical charges (though
he is arguing against Benjamin Franklin's mechanical model of electricity). See Note
XII, sections 2.7, 8.1, and 11.2 of the Additional Notes to his Temple of Nature.

That the forces of nature are equally devoted to creation and destruction is an issue
whose dynamics are central to Byron's conception in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto
3, and one, likewise, that Percy Bysshe Shelley will later explore in such poems as
"The Cloud" and the "Ode to the West Wind," poems dating from 1819. In those latter
poems one can sense the influence of Indian sacred texts like the Bhagvat-Gita. It
is by no means far-fetched to suggest their applicability to Mary Shelley's large
framing conception of this novel.

The circulation of the blood was established by William Harvey, 1578-1657.

Walton's continuing preoccupation with the bravery of his crew (I:L2:1, I:L2:3) and
assurance to himself of their sense of purpose indicates a level of worry that will
return as a stark reality in the late pages of the novel. There he will confront what
is close to mutiny (III:WC:15).

Even more directly than in I:4:5, Victor casts himself in the guise of Satan, whose
hell is a mental before it is a physical state: cf. Paradise Lost, IV. 75ff.

The difference in the Genesis account of human creation could not be more pronounced:

1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them
have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the
cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the
earth.

1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male
and female created he them.

1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and
replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and
over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Victor's adjective "breathless" may be intended by Mary Shelley to resonate ironically
against the moment in Genesis in which Adam is actually brought to life: 2:7 And the
LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the
breath of life; and man became a living soul.

At 15,781 feet, Mont Blanc is the highest mountain peak in Europe: its top remains
perpetually snow-covered, white ("Blanc"), thus "bright." Walking southwest toward
Geneva, Victor would have Mt. Blanc firmly in his sights.

Victor is sixteen years older than his brother William, who is of the age of 7 when
he is murdered by the Creature. He is just six years older than his shadowy second
brother Ernest, who, left an orphan at the age of 20, is the only member of the Frankenstein
family to survive the novel.

Walton is referring obliquely to the wide-spread practice of flogging to keep discipline
aboard ship. It had been a serious issue in Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars,
a spur to the mutinies that took place in the British navy at Spithead and the Nore
in the spring of 1797. The Shelleys' friend Leigh Hunt wrote several attacks on the
practice in his weekly newspaper The Examiner. The ship's master would have the responsibility
for maintaining order, and what most attracts Walton to this veteran mariner is his
capacity to do so without violence.

The same noun is employed by Alphonse Frankenstein in the previous chapter (I:6:37).
The word conveys a sense of obligation and therefore of class difference. Again and
again it is emphasized that Justine has been raised above her rank in life by the
active interest of the Frankenstein household in her welfare. But has she really altered
her condition? Not just the family but the whole of Geneva society condescend to her
as having less than full rights to her supposedly respectable condition. The ease
with which her claims to equity are abrogated implicitly places her on a par with
Victor's Creature, named a wretch and denied the claim of human sympathy.