How a Volcano Helped Inspire Frankenstein

The Year Without a Summer is why Robert Walton is important to Frankenstein: Like the newspapers, he's concerned about surviving climate chaos. He says that in the Arctic "the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour. Frankenstein begins with the search for new, more habitable lands because of environmental anxieties. People did not know that the cooling trend was a temporary result of volcanic activity. Rather, they thought the summer of 1816, with its famine, social unrest, and winter eternal, was the new normal.