Walton reiterates the terms used in the preceding entry (I:L4:21 and note).

This second son is Ernest, an even more shadowy figure in the 1831 text than in the
first edition. He appears to exist simply to inherit the name and estate when the
other Frankensteins die. Victor's ignoring his name, then effusively and sharply delineating
Henry Clerval's personality, might be seen as deliberate in its characterization.

It would seem more than coincidental that the father would invoke a concept (depravity)
that entered the arena of this novel only the night before, upon the son's once again
catching sight of his Creature, "a depraved wretch" (I:6:23 and note). Also, the tone
of class condescension, although it may accord generally with contemporary attitudes
toward servants, has resonance within the larger social attitudes revealed in the
ensuing chapter.

The work Mary Shelley cites is Fantasmagoriana; ou Recueil d'Histoires d'Apparitions,
de Spectres, Revenans, Fantômes, &c. Traduit de l'allemand, par un Amateur, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1812), anonymously published by Jean Baptiste Benoît Eyriès (1767-1846). The
following year, in turn, this text was translated into English as Tales of the Dead.
Principally Translated from the French (London: White, Cochrane, and Co., 1813).

No other account of the writing contest verifies this bizarre project as Mary Shelley
outlines it. Polidori himself, in the introduction to his realistic novel Ernestus
Berchtold; or, the Modern Oedipus 1819), identified that work as the one he began
as the response to the challenge given by Lord Byron. He did, however, also produce
a horror-story of his own in direct competition with Byron's unfinished fragment,
which he published in 1819 as The Vampyre; a Tale.

Although the term sounds innocent at first reading, we may be reminded here of the
"secret stores of knowledge" ("secrets of nature" in 1831) Victor found in Cornelius
Agrippa (I:1:15) and perhaps also, as a point of contrast, of the emphasis shared
by all modern scientific discourse on open inquiry and testing results of experimentation
in a court of learned opinion.

Fanciful representations of the North Pole as an edenic clime, however nonsensical
they might appear in the light of modern science, are fairly common in early mythology.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, writing contemporaneously with Frankenstein, stages part of
the first canto of The Revolt of Islam in such a polar paradise derived from Indian
sources. The oxymoronic combination of fire and ice is a conspicuous feature of the
edenic paradise of Xanadu in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," published in 1816 and read
that summer in the Geneva circle as Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein. A strongly
ironic version of this coexistence of opposites informs the Creature's plans for his
self-destruction in the penultimate paragraph of the novel (III:WC:47).

The physical implications of Victor's "unremitting ardour" (I:3:9 and note) are here
made explicitly clear.

The saccharine evocation of Caroline Frankenstein may be meant to offset the radical
import of this phrase: there is no mention at all of heaven here.

To facilitate his creation Victor has recourse to animal parts and tissues from the
abattoir. What Victor thus rightly distinguishes in the previous paragraph as his
"new species" would seem to be an amalgam of several orders of sentient life. The
Creature's mixed status perhaps explains his superhuman strength, also the curious
fact that—like the herbivore cattle and horses to whom he may be physically indebted—he
is a vegetarian.