A word in late eighteenth-century physiology used to cover the nervous and lymphatic
networks and various filaments within the body.

As earlier at the trial (I:7:11), Victor's egocentricity impels him to assert his
prior claim as sufferer, even as he stands in the presence of the condemned innocent.
His grounds seem to be that Justine, although surely a victim of injustice, has the
integrity of her innocence to depend upon, whereas he, although powerless to alter
the verdict, knows the grounds of its falsehood and stands morally self-perjured and
divided.

The reader will detect here the first sign of a distance between father and son that
will recur at crucial points in their subsequent relationship.

As Victor underscores his sense of being wholly out of control of his destiny, he
also suggests that, at least as a student, he had little knowledge of himself. At
Ingolstadt he finds himself transformed before his own eyes, without an understanding
of how or why this process should have happened. The lack of knowledge, of which he
has just complained to Walton, thus extends far beyond the rudiments of science.

Victor uses the term with a wholly different emphasis from that given to it by Walton
in the previous paragraph. Walton's wish to "ameliorate his fate" refers to the despondency
to which he thinks Victor has been driven by hard, but as yet undiscriminated, circumstances,
a despondency that could be alleviated by time and compassion. Victor, on the other
hand, as his narrative will begin to underscore, has come to see himself as a destined
victim of these circumstances, one who can neither alter them nor their effect on
his own condition. The disparity in usage is actually a window into character.

It is probably no accident that Victor employs diction that could also be used to
describe a massive jolt of electric current. His Creature will receive such a "fatal
impulse" at the beginning of the fourth chapter (I:4:1), when Victor "infuse[s] a
spark of being" into its flesh.

This may appear a surprising choice of diction on Walton's part. Johnson's Dictionary
defines the word pejoratively:

Disdainful; squeamish; delicate to a vice; insolently nice.

The Oxford English Dictionary somewhat refines the range of possible meanings:

1. That creates disgust; disagreeable, distasteful, unpleasant, wearisome. Obs.
2.
   -- a. That feels or is full of disgust; disgusted.
   -- b. Full of pride; disdainful; scornful. Obs.
   -- c. transf. Of things: 'Proud', magnificent.
3. Easily disgusted, squeamish, over-nice; difficult to please with regard to matters
of taste or propriety.

The connotation of Walton's usage indicates that he is using the word in the third
sense here, suggestive of a well-educated and highly refined sense of taste.

What may be most interesting about this sentence is what it says about Mary Shelley's
values. A woman who has been "tutored and refined by books" is still an uncommon being
in eighteenth-century culture, often referred to contemptuously as a "learned lady."
Here, in contrast, Margaret Saville is a paragon of judgment and the conduit through
which this entire history, with its multiple internal narratives, flows.

With this phrase Mary Shelley insinuates a theme into her novel that will develop
exponentially over its course. We recall that Victor expressed "the greatest remorse"
for having kept Henry Clerval from his studies during his long illness (I:4:20): that
diction, for all its hyperbole, was utterly conventional. Now, Victor is bitten by
remorse as by a poisonous viper, and it will poison his system for the rest of his
existence. For the later course of this poison where it results in agony, for instance,
see the last sentence of III:5:8. This same poison infects the Creature as well, he
bitterly admits to Walton (III:WC:37). The contemporary definition of remorse accentuated
so painful a condition.

Although Charles Perrault (1628-1703) is firmly a citizen of the seventeenth century,
his Contes des fees, popularly known as Mother Goose Stories, had by late in the eighteenth
century become staples of children's literature and had prompted many imitations.
William Lane of the Minerva Press in London, publisher of numerous fictional pot-boilers,
for instance, also brought out two-volume sets of fairy tales in 1788 and 1794. Closer
to home, Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin, under his psuedonym of Edward Baldwin,
in 1805 published a set of Fables Ancient and Modern for very young children that
went through numerous editions; and the Juvenile Library, which he ran with his second
wife Mary Jane Clairmont, specialized in children's books with useful morality appended.
This series published the first English translation of Johann David Wyss's perennial
Swiss Family Robinson in 1814. Mary Shelley was thus as a child uniquely conditioned
by contemporary notions of children's literature, and she was also encouraged to become
a writer at a very young age. The careful noting of Clerval's age (9) when he wrote
his fairy tale indicates that Mary Shelley has in mind her own debut at the age of
11, in a satirical parody about an Englishman in France, Mounseer Nongtongpaw, that
was published in January 1807.

The diction here is deliberately resonant with the conventions of a highly artificial
poetry. The "fair enemy" is the lady to whom these seductive verses would be addressed,
an "enemy" in the sense that she resists their appeal to abandon herself to the sensuousness
they invite.