Walton is more specific later in I:L4:19, recalling to Victor that the "ice had not
broken until near midnight," that is, some seven hours after the ground sea was heard.

Victor suddenly shows a political consciousness that has not been active up to this
point. The context suggests that the enclosed world of the domestic affections, governed
by a feminine sensibility, is threatened—and through history actually destroyed—by
the masculinist drive for power. This is a sentiment with which both her father William
Godwin and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley would have agreed. In the shadow of the
Napoleonic Wars and the reinstitution of reactionary monarchies across Europe, it
is a sentiment not in accord with the prevailing state of political opinion in England.

It could be argued that Victor simply serves momentarily as mouthpiece for the author's
pointedly liberal views to surface. What would complicate that supposition is the
fact that this series of political failures is identical with those the Creature derives
from the oral reading of Volney's Ruins of Empire by Felix De Lacey (see II:5:14).
If we focus on that identity retrospectively, we are suddenly confronted with the
amazing fact that Victor, whether he registered it or not, will actually learn something
concrete from the Creature's narration in the second volume of the novel.

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.