Again, as earlier (I:1:12) in this first chapter, Mary Shelley lays emphasis on a
non-competitive educational environment and the kind of non-coercive pedagogy employed
by her father.

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.

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.

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.

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.