This is a common cultural popularization from the early British empire, voiced, for
instance, by Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Chapter
5, Section 4.

Although Mary Shelley finesses the scientific instrumentation of her novel—and she
could hardly do otherwise in allowing Victor to overstep the known boundaries of science—in
this scene she clearly prepares us to understand that the dynamic secret of life Victor
will discover is intimately connected to electricity as a "vital fluid." Her use of
the term "spark of being" at the point of the Creature's coming into existence (I:4:1)
seems intended to follow through on this conceptualization.

Victor's admission of his arbitrarily foolish decision would be almost comic did it
not subsume such tragic consequences. In his very hubris over the "creation of a human
being," Victor unthinkingly excludes the being from a humanity that is defined by
its dependence on shared characteristics, alienating him in advance through a structural
flaw of design. For all his preoccupation with the destiny he thinks controls his
own life, Victor seems quite unconscious of how wholly his assumption of the role
of God will determine the course of this being's existence.

That is, in the morning.

Mary Shelley is so insistent on this point that she has Walton repeat it to Victor
Frankenstein (I:L4:6), whose formal education, by contrast, is extensive. It could
be that she is trying to make a point about the primacy of moral education or the
essential importance, in a novelistic tradition one associates with Henry Fielding,
of a good heart. But it is more likely that she is establishing a perspective by which
to engage larger questions concerning the means and ends of education. Victor Frankenstein's
Creature is also self-educated and likewise has his identity strongly molded by what
he happens to read.

Victor's education to this point reveals him to be a strong but indulgent student,
well-trained in languages and mathematics, undirected in the sciences (I:1:26).

Victor has been laid up by his illness for some five to six months and feels himself
reborn by the season. In the meantime, his Creature has been through a similarly confining
experience and reacts to the arrival of his first spring with a like elation: see
II:4:19.

In Geneva Mary Shelley hired a local nursemaid for her son William named Louise Duvillard,
who would remain with the Shelley family until 1818, when she left them to marry in
Naples. William Frankenstein's sweetheart bears her first name, and this rich banker
her second. To some extent Justine Moritz may be modeled on her.

As the subsequent paragraph will bear out, here begin conflicting claims of duty that
Victor will be unable to sort out.

Suddenly Elizabeth has her gender role thrust upon her, and the reader cannot but
be conscious that it is a subordinate one. At the same time, the discipline with which
she reacts to this family crisis clearly elicits Victor's respect, and with his follows
the reader's.