At this point in the novel William is about seven years old. He is clearly modeled
in this description on Mary's infant son William.

Mary Shelley's infant son (b. 24 January 1816) was named William after her father.
Her arranging to have his namesake in the novel murdered has prompted some wonder.
Certainly, there was no lack of maternal affection: William Shelley's death in Rome
on 7 June 1819 was a devastating blow to Mary Shelley, issuing in something approaching
a nervous breakdown.

Although the prolonged illness that is to follow for Victor will justify this look
as symptomatic of his physical debility, the first interpretation for many a reader
(and certainly for Clerval), that it is a sign of incipient madness, cannot be discounted.
A derangement of Victor's mental balance is too frequently insinuated later in the
text for it to be dismissed out-of-hand this early in its progress.

The modern locution might be "like a horse in a pasture." A "common" was the common
ground set aside or simply taken over by a community for pasturage of the small flocks
and other animals belonging to its individual members. In the two generations previous
to the writing of Frankenstein commons had all but disappeared in the British Isles
as a result of their "enclosure" by landlords. The effect was enormously disruptive
of rural stability, as Oliver Goldsmith's well-known poem, The Deserted Village (1770),
recounts.

The phrase recalls the isolation of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, to which Walton will
directly allude later in the letter (I:L2:6).

Victor, like Walton (I:L1:6), foresees glory as crowning his scientific investigations.
The same unexamined connotations of the word touched on in Walton's honoring of it
as a goal (note) attend on Victor's as well.

In keeping with the tenor of this paragraph, the sentence bears a double freight.
On the one hand, one could see Elizabeth as wishing to hide from the darker realities
of the world and therefore as the embodiment of a kind of bland domesticity. On the
other hand, as we have witnessed in the previous two chapters, a human being can become
so inured to those darker realities as, like Victor Frankenstein, to lose perspective
and a due sense of social responsibility.

The phrase suggests the powders used in chemical analysis. Victor will be so converted
to modern scientific research as to lose his earlier aversion to such mundane and
messy experimentation. What he later calls his "workshop of filthy creation" (I:3:9
and note) seems to reflect this diction.

That this is secondarily a puff for the narrative that follows, openly charging us
as readers to respond to it with interest and sympathy, should not detract from its
main function, which is to return us to the opening sentence of the paragraph before
and its honoring of the essential human link inherent to fellow-feeling. That Walton's
sympathy for Victor Frankenstein should extend to the reader's sympathetic reaction
to them both is a fundamental tenet of Mary Shelley's notion of the value of, the
purpose for, writing.

1816 is famous as "the summer that never was." A remarkable worldwide climatic disturbance
was caused by the eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia the previous winter, which
filled the high atmosphere with a fine ash that limited solar penetration.