Mary Shelley began to write Frankenstein in the summer of 1816 and was heavily influenced by the social changes that were making their way across Europe. Shelley was obviously influenced by the idea of Romanticism and the importance of imagination and creativity and people such as her father William Godwin, who was a social and political journalist and mother Mary Wollstonecraft, who was one of the first feminists would have heavily influenced her. Also her husband Percy Shelley wrote a number of poems and was greatly into the Romantic Movement. Shelley includes references to Percy Shelley's poems and other Romantic poems such as the 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Milton's 'Paradise Lost', the references to these show to the reader the Romantic view of the importance of emotions and the imagination, and also the importance of the individual. The industrial revolution, which took place in 1789 changed and revolutionised the productive capacity of Europe and transformed European society and was a social revolution with social causes and social affects. Shelley would have experienced the Luddite uprising and the Mill workers strike. Science and Industry were moving on, factories and machined changed the way people thought and many people supported the Miller's strike. Others believed that this would bring England down and various people were saying Europe needed a new society, and it is during Shelley's book that this is allowed to happen. Women during the nineteenth century had little choice but to obey their father's and then their husbands. Women announcing her intention to remain single would attract social disapproval.
Romanticism began in the early nineteenth century and dramatically changed the way people saw themselves and nature around them. The Romantic Movement marked the practice and reaction in literature, art, religion and politics.