The coupling of "enthusiasm" and "ardent" in this paragraph seems to indicate an intention
on Mary Shelley's part to underscore how associated are the two and how problematic
they may be in that association. The two notions have already been mentioned in proximity
in the previous letter (I:L1:2) and (I:L1:3). They will once again be linked in contiguous
paragraphs by Victor Frankenstein, when he recounts the frenzied rush of discovery
that accompanied his search for the secret of life (I:3:6 and I:3:8).

The seemingly admirable discipline by which Walton defers fulfillment and prepares
himself for the challenge of his expedition may take on less favorable connotations
once the reader has witnessed the introversion and compulsive self-denial into which
Victor Frankenstein throws himself as he pursues his own ambitious project. Furthermore,
the phrase itself, though seemingly innocent of allusive force, in the context provided
by the diction of the ensuing paragraph takes on a mythological resonance. In the
first book of Paradise Lost Satan, upon discovering himself on the floor of hell,
discerns next to him Beelzebub, his associate in what he terms the "glorious enterprise"
of the revolt against God:

     he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope
And hazard in the glorious enterprise
Joined with me once, now misery hath joined
In equal ruin.
-- I.87-91

This is the first of the many such deliberate and, in the aggregate, complexly interwoven
echoes of Paradise Lost in Frankenstein.

This addition to the 1831 text is prepared for by a similar ambition stressed in Henry's
youth (see 1831:I:2:2 and note) and may be generally accounted for by the importance
the intervening decade and a half had attached to the growing eastern empire of Great
Britain, not just in India but also in Afghanistan, on the edge of the Ottoman empire.
It would have not seemed questionable to the author or her readers in 1831 that Henry
Clerval would wish to distinguish himself as an imperialist. Mary Shelley would have
been well aware that one of her former husband's closest friends, Thomas Love Peacock,
though sharing Victor Frankenstein's privileging of the European classical tradition
over "oriental" literature, had carved out a career in the East Indian Office, the
bureaucracy that oversaw commerce with the imperial East.

There is no explanation for why Mary Shelley remakes Henry Clerval in so robust an
athletic mode, replacing the dreamy, poetical (and Shelleyan) figure of the first
edition. Perhaps it is Victor who renders the substitution, mindful of Walton's commitment
to "enterprise," a word that, starting with the first sentence of the novel (1831:I:L1:1),
he uses six times in his initial letters to his sister (see also 1831:I:L1:5, 1831:I:L2:1,
1831:I:L2:3 twice, and 1831:I:L4:20). (A context in Milton's Paradise Lost is noted
in the latter.) Admittedly, it requires some stretching of the imagination and the
text to force a Satanic context upon Henry Clerval: it may well be that by 1831 the
original contextual referents for Mary Shelley have diminished or have been replaced
by new emphases, in this case that of masculine heroism—the ardour so repetitiously
invoked by her male protagonists.

As in Walton's first letter (I:L1:5 and note) this may seem an innocent enough term,
but accentuated through repetition here as the last word of Walton's paragraph and
set within the context of the other substantives in this sentence, the echo of Satan's
first speech in Paradise Lost is unmistakeable.

The seemingly admirable discipline by which Walton defers fulfillment and prepares
himself for the challenge of his expedition may take on less favorable connotations
once the reader has witnessed the introversion and compulsive self-denial into which
Victor Frankenstein throws himself as he pursues his own ambitious project. Furthermore,
the phrase itself, though seemingly innocent of allusive force, in the context provided
by the diction of the ensuing paragraph takes on a mythological resonance. In the
first book of Paradise Lost Satan, upon discovering himself on the floor of hell,
discerns next to him Beelzebub, his associate in what he terms the "glorious enterprise"
of the revolt against God:

                         he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope
And hazard in the glorious enterprise
Joined with me once, now misery hath joined
In equal ruin.
-- I.87-91

This is the first of the many such deliberate and, in the aggregate, complexly interwoven
echoes of Paradise Lost in Frankenstein.

Quietly insinuated into the text, England's class system is here firmly condemned.
On the other hand, we will shortly see how much credit is actually accorded a servant
in Switzerland as well, for Justine will be victimized by its prejudices as Elizabeth
stands by helpless to assuage the inherent biases of class.

Mary Shelley's independent comments on the character of servants in republican Switzerland
are contained in a letter of 1 June 1816 that she appended to her History of a Six
Weeks' Tour.

Inevitably, language like this calls to mind the, by now, obligatory laboratory equipment
so characteristic of cinematic versions of the novel. That is all the more reason,
then, for us to recognize that Mary Shelley is deliberately evoking not mere instrumentation
but rather what we would now call a dynamo to infuse the creature with what she called
at the close of the previous paragraph "vital warmth." Since the first successful
electric generators were demonstrated only in the 1860s, Mary Shelley's vagueness
("some") reflects her sense that such an engine is a necessary technological development
of current scientific knowledge but has not yet been invented.

The vernacular idiom, when taken with its full weight, suggests a compulsion equivalent
to that of being possessed: it will be repeated in I:3:10.

Victor's diction here reflects experiences to which we as readers have yet to become
privy, experiences that have forced upon him a psychological condition that conceives
of the world in terms of adversarial struggle. This is an example of the shrewd linguistic
forecasting that we find everywhere in the early chapters of Mary Shelley's revised
1831 text. In this case we are alerted to how much those experiences have warped Victor's
notion of reality into a series of antagonistic states. The "palpable enemy," which
is here figured in spiritual terms, will become objectified in the Creature that he
unleashes upon the world and who becomes dangerous precisely because he is treated
as an enemy.