Isaac Newton wrote:

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only
like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding
a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth
lay all undiscovered before me.

-- Louis Trenchard More, Isaac Newton: A Biography (New York: Scribner's, 1934), p.
664.

Samuel Johnson alludes to this comment in Rambler 83:

To mean understandings, it is sufficient honour to be numbered amongst the lowest
labourers of learning; but different abilities must find different tasks. To hew stone,
would have been unworthy of Palladio; and to have rambled in search of shells and
flowers, had but ill-suited with the capacity of Newton.

That is, remorse.

The major symptom of a nervous fever in the eighteenth century is a total want of
strength. Thus, Victor's confinement to his bed in an invalid state for months would
not necessarily have seemed extreme to a contemporary reader. Still, by any measure
his appears to be no ordinary illness. Since medical terminology has changed radically
since the novel was written, it is not easy to transpose Victor's disorder into a
modern equivalent. Certainly, it would seem to originate in what is now called a nervous
breakdown: Victor's past record of constant fevers and what appear to be anorexic
symptoms suggest a systemic collapse of some magnitude.

This was the exact term Victor used two chapters earlier to describe his long illness:
see I:4:17 and note.

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.