As was the case three paragraphs earlier, here the Creature evokes essential Enlightenment
values, twice privileging the notion of sympathy, but the affirmations are so hedged
as to be ominous.

In the ongoing education of the Creature this is the point at which he is first able
to conceptualize that refinement of affection that constitutes kindness. As with much
of the ongoing development of his awareness, there is an ironic undertone here, however,
since he will never experience the sort of solicitude that, despite his poverty and
blindness, is the elder De Lacey's daily expectation and comfort.

These exact words were uttered in the previous chapter when the Creature described
burning down the De Lacey's cottage (II:8:13 and note).

This phrase is ambiguous: "fellow-creatures" in this contexts appears to be limited
to his family and friends. Later, Victor will revert to what he owes the human race
as a separate entity from the Creature, and justice will be construed quite differently.

Perhaps the Creature comprehends that is he talking to a person from a long line of
civic magistrates, or perhaps his plea has simply been predicated on their shared
Enlightenment discourse. Whatever the case, in his long narration he has consistently
been touching on the nerve from which he at last gets a response. For the first time
in his dealings with the Creature, from the original thought of his creation down
to this moment of moral decision, Victor acknowledges an abstract concept of the justice
owed him.

By this point in the novel, after two trials and an education in ancient and modern
political science, this word may be thought to carry large public as well as private
associations. But in this context they are theological as well, invoking the notion
of a theodicy (from Greek theou dike), a justification of God, which is Milton's announced
purpose for Paradise Lost: that is, to "justify the ways of God to men" (I.26).

Behind this utterance, one can hear what is truly the locus classicus, the classic
statement, of how one is impelled by exile to provide sympathetic assistance to other
exiles, that of Dido before the shipwrecked Aeneas: "Non ignari mali, miseris succerere
disco—Not ignorant of evils myself, I learn to succor the miserable" (Aeneid, I.630).
Without question Mary Shelley's educated readers would have heard the resonance of
this Latin tag, an allusion few women novelists of this time would have had sufficient
classical training to make.

This is the route from Geneva to Chamonix represented in the standard nineteenth-century
British guidebook to the region.

From Edward Whymper, Chamonix and the Range of Mont Blanc (London: John Murray, 1896).

Evidently the journal is written in French, and it suggests that Victor's claim to
Walton that he had thought his creation beautiful until it was infused with life (I:4:2
and note) to some extent masked his original feelings.

Here, as elsewhere in the novel, we sense some strain in Victor's relationship with
his strict father. Usually it is marked by his being recalled by a paternal admonition
to obligations that he has not met: see, for instance, I:3:10 and note; I:3:12 and
note.