In England at this time a man without property had no vote: thus the very idea of
citizenship, of having a "stake" in the system, was tied to possession of property.
Of course, as the Creature will learn in the subsequent chapter, both Safie and the
De Laceys as exiles are also excluded from this polity, but they have family or friends
to rely on for support.

That the root cause of the family's sorrow is not exile nor even a personal loss,
but rather an economic condition, carries radical political overtones of a type that
a later generation would call Marxist.

A large carrying-case with two compartments, what in modern English is called a suit-carrier.

Again (see paragraph 2 above), the Creature names himself by the same word (although
it here carries a different connotation) that Victor first uses in I:3:2.

Like the deaths of Justine's siblings (see I:5:6 and note), this is an intrusion not
necessary to the plot, but underscoring the tentative nature of the human condition
and the threats to happiness to be remarked everywhere in this novel.

Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans are sometimes known as "Parallel
Lives" because of the author's method of presenting a prominent Greek and Roman in
tandem, then comparing their achievements.

Rousseau testifies to the importance of the Lives in his early education in Confessions,
book I.

It would appear that Safie has sold some of the jewelry with which she left Livorno
(II:6:19).

Paradise Lost, John Milton's epic poem, was originally published in 1667 in ten books,
then revised by its author into the twelve-book form in which we read it today shortly
before his death in 1674. Containing the major creation myth of modern Europe, its
impact on Frankenstein is major and discernible from beginning to end. In the immediate
context of the Creature's discovery rather than of Mary Shelley's intertextual conception
of her novel, however, what is most significant is how he reads the epic as a key
to his self-understanding, even perhaps his self-fashioning.

Although we have no guide to Mary Shelley's thought processes as she wrote this passage,
it is probable that the stanza from Percy Shelley's poetry she quotes at the end of
the paragraph caused her to think of another from the volume in which it was published
(or the causality might have been reversed, with that other passage first coming to
mind and prompting the remembrance of this stanza): whatever the case, this description
of mountain conifers strongly resembles the desolate final scene, actually drawn from
Shelley's experiences in Wales before he met Mary, of his poem "Alastor" (see lines
550-70). An early sketch of this same subject is contained in a poem in the early
notebook known as the Esdaile Notebook, a poem Shelley wrote in 1811 and never published,
called after its first line "Dark spirit of the desart rude."

On the other hand, the scenery of Switzerland, far more sublime than that of Wales,
afforded ample opportunity for Mary Shelley to observe the desolation that alpine
storms and glacial movement could visit on the pine forests of the mountains. There
is a description of such shattered trees in Letter 4 of A History of Six Weeks' Tour.
Byron offers another such passage in the second scene of Manfred, I.ii.66-74, which,
though begun later than Frankenstein, indicates at many points a common conceptual
origin.

That is, a family where seniority is honored for its wisdom and the generations respect
and support each other provides a model for a civilized community.