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.

In contrast to the shared grief and affection of Elizabeth and Justine, Victor has
immured himself in a barricaded isolation, unable to attract sympathy and, through
his lack of candor, unable also truly to offer it.

Mary Shelley here suggestively reveals that Victor's self-education involves no sense
of social responsibility for the knowledge he might attain. Victor's withdrawal from
Elizabeth and barring of Clerval from his confidence also initiates a pattern of being
secretive about that knowledge, whether it is in the construction of the Creature
(I:3:10) or the withholding of evidence from a court examining a murder (I:7:1). That
he has conducted his entire life without candor will increasingly be seen to have
implications for the veracity of the narrative, since, after such a pattern of evasion
becomes clear, the reader might well begin to wonder why we should credit what he
says in the present instance as the unvarnished truth.

Justine in her honesty unwittingly testifies against herself. Yet such a detail, so
indicative of her candor, could have easily weighed in her favor in a less hostile
courtroom environment.