Crusades Against Frost: Frankenstein, Polar Ice, and Climate Change in 1818

Abstract

This paper recovers the climatological dimension to the controversy that surrounded John Barrow's early Quarterly Review articles on the Arctic and uses this intervention as an entry point for an exploration of the link between polar ice and climate change in Romantic Britain. 1818 attacks on Barrow's “poetic” views of polar ice – attacks that M. W. Shelley's Frankenstein has been read as anticipating – drew on a well-established association of polar ice with visions of climate improvement such as that articulated in Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden. In 1816, Darwinian faith in the ability of Europeans to combat a spreading “empire of ice” was severely tested by the climate crisis of the “year without a summer.” Newly urgent anxieties over the efficacy and wisdom of climate modification surface, I argue, not only in Barrow's Quarterly articles, but also in Shelley's Frankenstein, where Victor's and Walton's rhetoric allies their scientific projects to “poetic” schemes for climate improvement. Such problematic scientific interventions may, Frankenstein suggests, represent the only productive response to global catastrophe, but such schemes will be undermined by Europeans' unwillingness to embrace the cosmopolitanism of ecological crisis.