Although Clerval seems lighthearted in his exaggeration, his phrasing resonates with
startling irony. Not only does it play against Victor's obsession with acquiring knowledge
at any cost, only just now having attained its fateful consequence, but the diction,
so like the language of Walton's first letter (I:L1:2), reminds us that Walton himself
would not be an auditor of Victor Frankenstein's life story had not both of them been
in peril of their lives in the Arctic wilderness.

Surely, Victor, like any human being, has a right to pursue happiness. But it is the
case, that, beginning here, on every occasion when he anticipates a return to normal
human pleasures he experiences instead a disastrous reversal of expectations. From
this moment on his joy will never again be "unbridled," but rather, at best, what
Thomas Gray, in his "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," called "fearful."

Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of their little reign,
And unknown regions dare descry:
Still as they run they look behind,
And hear a voice in every wind,
And snatch a fearful joy. (lines 35-40)

This double emphasis on his impotence calls into play both the heavy irony of Victor's
having given birth by himself and his habitual manner of ducking responsibility for
his actions.

This is the first indication of the age of a character in the novel, but a careful
tracing of its chronology would prove that Mary Shelley maintains a shrewd sense of
the relative ages of all of them. The emaciated figure of Victor Frankenstein who
will appear before Walton four months after this letter ("I never saw a man in so
wretched a condition"— I:L4:9) is actually Walton's junior by a year.

Alphonse Frankenstein's delay in proposing marriage is motivated by a sense of decorum
and of tact. He neither intrudes on Caroline's grief nor openly plants a sense of
obligation in her mind.

This seems to allude to Lord Byron (who is the unidentified figure in the following
parenthesis) and Percy Bysshe Shelley. John William Polidori, Byron's physician, also
wrote a tale, "The Vampyre," which he managed to have published under Byron's name
in the New Monthly Magazine of April 1819. His strained relations with Byron were
broken by this act.

It is easy to pass over this diction as simply an exaggeration brought on by the emotional
duress of this meeting. But if we take the language at its face value, it asserts
an uncanny oneness between Creator and Creature that will continue to reassert itself
through the subsequent course of the novel.

This unattractive portrait of Henry Clerval's father relies on common prejudices of
British society in the early nineteenth century. Trade was looked down upon as narrowing
the mind and depraving the soul. One can sense the disparagement as Johnson offers
two definitions for "trader" in his 1755 Dictionary:

1.One engaged in merchandise or commerce.
2.One long used in the methods of money getting; a practitioner.

The same tone insinuates itself into cognate definitions: Trade

1.Traffick; commerce; exchange of goods for other goods, or for money.
2.Occupation; particular employment whether manual or mercantile, distinguished from
the liberal arts or learned professions.
3. Instruments of any occupation.
4. Any employment not manual; habitual exercise.

To trade

1. To traffick; to deal; to hold commerce.
2. To act merely for money.
3. Having a trade wind.

Victor's egocentric concentration on his own reaction is more than simply ungenerous:
it reveals a sense of class and gender superiority that is deeply troubling.

The details of this paragraph are all intended to be ugly and repulsive to the reader,
but this quick reference has a particular force to it, reminding us that the Shelley
household was vegetarian. The torturing of animals in medical experimentation would
have been felt by Mary Shelley to be thoughtless cruelty. It is ironic, and clearly
not intentional on Victor Frankenstein's part, that his Creature turns out also to
be a vegetarian.