Upon the first reading of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, you might be surprised to discover it opens and closes the story in the Arctic. While this may have metaphorical connotations, the Arctic was actually a subject of interest within the 1800s. There was a genre dubbed "polar-fiction" that came about after the romantic period, but we can still see it's coming within Romantic and Gothic literature. In Coleridge's "Rhime of The Ancient Mariner", the poem mentions ice around the ship. In Frankenstein, we open up to an explorer who witnesses the monster and Victor while chasing a dream he'd conceived while reading about other polar explorations as a boy. Other authors like Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, and Connon Doyle added contributions as well.
There are many reasons explorers and expeditions went north. A lot of it dealt with money. Some went for the whales, which fetched a VERY high price. There were also talks of finding a route from Europe to Asia, hoping that it could shorten trading expeditions. And then there was the glory aspect. The simple idea of discovering what was in the north, who could go the farthest, who was the bravest, etc. There is actually a belief that the Greeks once thought the North Pole held a utopia that was actually warm and peaceful. This bled into the 19th century where it became a serious theory. Some believed that not only was there a utopia, but a lost civilization that would bring great wealth. Like a polar El Dorado, so to say.
Though polar exploration really picked up in 1850, it's still seen in the years before within literature.