Originating in late eighteenth-century Europe, Romanticism prized intuition and emotion over rationalism, valued nature and imagination, and elevated the heroic individual. Shelley critiques Romantic ideals.

The movement (1787–99) that replaced the monarchy in France with the Republic. The mob was frequently represented as a monster, a force out of control.

In 1791, Luigi Galvani suggested animal tissue contained a vital life force that electricity could release. Inspired, Shelley imagines the possible reanimation of a corpse.

By 1814, there was a rift between those scientists who saw life in purely material terms and those wanting to retain some metaphysical beliefs associated with the soul.

The search for a navigable sea across the North Pole was prompted by the desire to trade with the Orient and inspired Shelley's Arctic framework.