Victor's instinctive aesthetic sense has already allowed him to misjudge his teacher,
Professor Krempe (I:2:12). Now it operates to overpower any sense of shared humanity
with the Creature. In respect to the master categories of eighteenth-century aesthetics,
the Creature is exactly the opposite of the Beautiful: he is the embodiment of the
Sublime, at once awesome and terrifying. If most of our experience with sublimity
is mediated through art and literature, the Creature in all his encounters forces
it with stunning immediacy into normative human life, always with disastrous consequences

Readers have nothing at this point from which objectively to compare Walton's surmises.
From Victor's own narration, however, it will be clear, that he is not particularly
drawn to the natural world the way his friend Clerval is portrayed as being (I:5:17);
indeed, while engaged in his scientific pursuits, he confesses himself wholly oblivious
to the attractions of the natural world (I:3:10). Rather than sense a narrative disjuncture
from this evidence, however, we might consider it a deliberate attempt on Mary Shelley's
part to distance herself and her readers from Walton's increasingly inflated language.
The figure Victor will cut in his own narration is very much darker than the one to
whom we are being introduced through Walton's eyes. The underlying problem of how
perspective shapes reality is thus being subtly reinforced.

This is obviously a good French-sounding name for a citizen of Lucerne, but it is
at least a nice coincidence that the Beaufort Sea south of the Arctic Ocean, on the
northwestern coast of Canada and Alaska, was named after a contemporary of Mary Shelley's,
Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort (1774-1857).

In her account after the discovery of William's body Elizabeth had called it "a very
valuable miniature" (I:6:08).

Francis Barrett's Lives of the Alchemystical Philosophers with a Critical Catalogue
of Books on Occult Chemistry (1815) was listed in the advertisement sheet attached
to Lackington's edition of Frankenstein in 1818. Revised and republished in 1888 by
Arthur Edward Waite, this work contains brief accounts of two of the young Victor
Frankenstein's favorite authors: Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus.

These were wooden balls secretly selected by those judging a trial.

Justine is the third character, after the Creature (I:4:2 and I:4:3) and Victor (I:4:5
and I:6:19), to share this appellation. Perhaps, however, she applies it with a nuanced
difference of meaning from its usage in their circumstances.

The actual events of the novel, it is surprising to realize, take place within the
next month, with Walton's last letter to Margaret Saville (III:WC:21) being dated
September 7th.

Walton here assumes the position of ministrant that Clerval held during Victor's "nervous
fever" in Ingolstadt (I:4:17), pointedly an inversion of customary gender roles. Healers
are accorded a privileged value in this novel, though by no means in the world that
encompasses its fiction. Justine Moritz's attendance on Victor's mother in her final
illness earns for her no particular credence from her judges (I:7:10), and his mother,
contracting scarlet fever from nursing Elizabeth, dies as a result of her good offices
(I:2:2)

The novel slides, seamlessly and without calling attention to itself, from Walton's
nursing Victor Frankenstein back from a state of near-death to Caroline Beaufort's
attendance on her despondent father in his decline. Such nurturing is a continual
necessity in Frankenstein and a measure of a character's capacity for sympathy.