The first-time reader of this sentence would see no reason to pause and ponder its
import, but for one returning to the text and tracing its linguistic and thematic
linkages, it would hard to understand how Victor could speak in such bland terms about
circumstances his mother could not foresee but through which he has suffered inordinately.
Moreover, not only does he have strong personal reason to repent this "design," but
its fulfillment, as he bitterly knows, will result directly in the death of his father
(III:6:16).

By the time Mary Shelley made these revisions, Goethe's Faust, Part I, had become
a European classic. She knew the work well, not only because Percy Bysshe Shelley
had translated parts of it during his last months, but because she had twice prepared
the text of these—a partial version the first time, in The Liberal, the shortlived
periodical the Shelleys, Byron, and Leigh Hunt had projected—and then in full in her
1824 publication of Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Faustian desire
for knowledge, of course, was also deeply implicated in the 1818 edition. Mary Shelley
was introduced to it shortly after she began work on her novel when Matthew (Monk)
Lewis, visiting Byron during the 1816 summer at Geneva, translated parts of it to
the assembled company. Faust also had a profound effect on Byron's dramatic poem Manfred,
begun shortly thereafter.

The extent to which Walton here throws all caution to the winds will be balanced late
in the novel by Victor Frankenstein's adoption of the same kind of rhetoric in appealing
to the sailors on Walton's vessel to risk everything for the mission's success (See
III:WC:14). It is at that point that Walton's prudence and essential humanity return,
perhaps as a secondary effect of his having, in the meantime, by this outburst elicited
Victor's sobering account of the cost to him and to those he loved of his passion
for knowledge.

Victor's native tongue is French, which, the reader will recall, is a language Walton
cannot speak (I:L2:02 and note).

Victor is at this point twenty-three years old.

Victor is at this point twenty-three years old.

After the allusions to hell in these paragraphs the absence of any conventional sign
of heaven is starkly telling. So "hellish" has Victor's psychological state become
that the universe seems to have changed to reflect it. Even as one posits moral or
theological implications to this language, however, one must be conscious that the
megalomania that allowed Victor to presume to usurp God's prerogatives in the first
place might just as easily issue in changing the universe to suit the mood of his
mind.