Mary Shelley’s *Frankenstein* grew out of a remarkable collision of natural events and scientific discoveries. A volcanic eruption on the other side of the world trapped Shelley indoors during a freakishly cold and stormy summer. Electrical experiments on dead bodies suggested that science might reanimate the dead. And new ideas about the origins of life, the power of chemistry, and the mysteries of the Arctic all fed into a novel that remains the founding work of science fiction.
The Eruption That Stole Summer
On April 10, 1815, Mount Tambora in present-day Indonesia exploded in one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history. Within roughly 24 hours, the volcano released an estimated 53 to 58 teragrams of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, enough to generate between 93 and 118 teragrams of sulfate aerosol particles. These particles spread across the globe and reflected sunlight back into space, cooling temperatures worldwide and destabilizing weather patterns for more than a year.
By the summer of 1816, the effects were dramatic. In Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary Shelley was staying with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, afternoon temperatures dropped by about 3.8°C compared to normal summers. Not a single cloud-free day was recorded in June 1816, and only 15 clear days occurred across the entire summer. The number of fully overcast days nearly doubled. High-pressure weather, which normally accounts for about 20 days per summer, appeared on just one day. Low-pressure systems with southwesterly winds tripled in frequency. Rain didn’t fall harder than usual, but it fell far more often, turning the season into a near-constant gray drizzle punctuated by violent thunderstorms.
This was the “Year Without a Summer.” It confined Shelley, Byron, John Polidori, and Claire Clairmont to the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Byron proposed their famous ghost story competition. Without that volcanic winter trapping the group indoors, the challenge that produced *Frankenstein* might never have happened.
Galvanism and the Dream of Reanimation
The idea that electricity could restore life to the dead was not pure fantasy in the early 1800s. It was a live scientific question. In the 1780s and 1790s, the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani had shown that electrical current applied to the legs of dead frogs caused them to twitch and kick. Before Galvani, the dominant theory of how nerves worked had barely changed since the second century, when the Roman physician Galen proposed that nerves were hollow tubes carrying invisible “animal spirits” from the brain to the muscles. Galvani’s frog experiments shattered that framework and suggested something far more radical: that electricity itself was the vital force animating living creatures.
Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini took the idea to its most dramatic extreme. In 1803, at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, Aldini applied electrical arcs to the corpse of George Forster, a man executed for murdering his wife and child. The results stunned the audience. Forster’s jaw quivered. His left eye opened. His face convulsed. When conductors were applied to his ear and rectum, the muscular contractions were so powerful they “almost gave an appearance of reanimation.” One hand clenched, and the right chamber of his heart contracted. Spectators reportedly believed, for a moment, that the dead man was coming back to life.
These public demonstrations were widely discussed in the years before Shelley began writing, and the concept of using electricity to cross the boundary between life and death sits at the heart of Victor Frankenstein’s project. Shelley never specifies exactly how Frankenstein animates his creature, but the “spark of being” he describes clearly echoes galvanic science.
Erasmus Darwin and Spontaneous Life
In her prefaces to *Frankenstein* (both the 1816 and 1831 editions), Shelley singled out one scientific thinker by name: Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather. Darwin was a physician, poet, and natural philosopher who proposed that life could arise spontaneously from nonliving matter. The most famous claim attributed to him involved a piece of vermicelli (a type of pasta) that supposedly began to move on its own, suggesting that the boundary between the organic and inorganic was more porous than anyone assumed.
Darwin’s ideas about spontaneous generation were radical and anti-establishment for their time, but they captured something essential for Shelley’s imagination: the possibility that life was not a divine gift but a material process that science could understand and, potentially, replicate. Of all the influences she discussed, Darwin is the only one she mentioned consistently across both editions, making him arguably the single most important scientific inspiration she acknowledged.
Chemistry’s Promise of Transformation
The real-world chemistry lectures of Humphry Davy left clear fingerprints on the novel. Davy was one of the most celebrated scientists in Britain, and his 1812 book *Elements of Chemical Philosophy* argued that the elements of matter are simply rearranged in living organisms. Life and nonlife, in Davy’s view, were separated by organization, not by some unbridgeable gulf.
This idea maps directly onto Victor Frankenstein’s thinking. In the novel, Frankenstein comes to see life and death as “ideal bounds” that he can “break through,” meaning they are theoretical categories rather than hard physical limits. His chemistry professor, Waldman, delivers a speech praising modern chemistry that closely echoes Davy’s own rhetoric, declaring that chemistry “is that branch of natural philosophy in which the greatest improvements have been made and may be made.” Waldman describes modern chemists as having “performed miracles” and traces their lineage back to the ancient alchemists, just as Davy connected modern chemistry to its pre-scientific roots. Even Waldman’s remark about chemists who seem merely to “dabble in dirt” may be a nod to Davy’s popular work on agricultural chemistry.
For Shelley, Davy represented the intoxicating promise of chemistry to remake the natural world, and the danger of a scientist who believes no boundary is real enough to stop him.
Arctic Exploration and the Unknown Polar Sea
The novel’s framing narrative takes place in the Arctic, where Captain Robert Walton is on an expedition toward the North Pole when he encounters Victor Frankenstein on the ice. This was not an arbitrary setting. In the early 1800s, the Arctic was one of the great obsessions of British science and imperial ambition.
John Barrow, the powerful Secretary of the Admiralty, was a major force behind polar exploration. He promoted the theory of an “Open Polar Sea,” the idea that beyond the pack ice lay navigable warm water, perhaps even a paradise. Barrow’s writings were filled with competing opinions, tales, and arguments about attempts to reach the pole, yet they could never describe the end of the quest because no one had gotten there. The Northwest Passage, meanwhile, carried a romantic connection to Elizabethan-era voyagers that made it feel almost mythical.
Walton’s journey mirrors this real-world fever. He is chasing a “perennially postponed Paradise beyond the pack ice,” driven by the same mix of ambition, curiosity, and hubris that defined the actual polar explorers of Shelley’s era. The Arctic functioned as a natural phenomenon in its own right: a vast, hostile, largely unknown landscape that embodied both the promise and the limits of human knowledge.
Storms Over Lake Geneva
Beyond setting the stage for the ghost story competition, the extreme weather of 1816 shaped the novel’s atmosphere directly. The thunderstorms that rolled across Lake Geneva were products of the anomalous low-pressure systems dominating that summer, with southwesterly storm patterns arriving at 3.5 times their normal frequency. Shelley experienced these storms firsthand, and electrical storms appear at key moments in the novel, including a scene in which young Frankenstein watches lightning destroy a tree, sparking his fascination with the hidden forces of nature.
The relentless gloom also matters. With afternoon temperatures suppressed by nearly 4°C, skies almost perpetually overcast, and rain falling on far more days than normal, the summer of 1816 was a season of enclosure and unease. That claustrophobic mood, the sense of nature turned hostile and unpredictable, permeates *Frankenstein* from its Arctic ice to its Alpine storms. The natural world in the novel is never simply a backdrop. It is an active, sometimes threatening force, shaped by the same volcanic disruption that trapped its author indoors and dared her to write something frightening.