Mary Shelley's Monsters
How three extraordinary days produced two Gothic horror classics
The setting:
A stately old mansion, relentlessly dreary weather, and ghost stories told by candlelight.
The tale of the infamous weekend which spawned two dark literary classics sounds very much like the beginning of a Gothic horror story itself.
The Year Without a Summer
Storms raged both outside and inside a Swiss villa; with dark clouds hanging over a volatile group fueled by wine, liquid opium, ego, and dangerous liaisons. This exceptionally cold and rainy weather was part of a phenomenon known as volcanic winter.
Mt. Tambora, located in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) had erupted the previous April, kicking a substantial amount of dust into the atmosphere. The debris blocked out the sun’s rays, lowering global temperatures, causing heavy rains, and destroying crops. It is now considered the deadliest volcanic eruption in history, with roughly 100,000 killed in its immediate aftermath. As a result, 1816 has come to be known as “The Year Without A Summer.”
A Weekend at Lake Geneva
In May of that year, a band of free-love bohemians traveled to Lake Geneva, which straddles the borders of France and Switzerland.
English writer Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, her future husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their 4-month-old son were there to spend the summer with Percy’s good friend Lord Byron. The daughter of radical political philosopher William Godwin and feminist philosopher/women’s rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary had first crossed paths with Percy while her father was acting as his mentor.
They began having secret trysts in the churchyard of St. Pancras Old Church in Camden, where they soon professed their love for each other. The couple is also said to have consummated the union there, on top of her mother’s grave. She had died from postpartum complications 11 days after giving birth to Mary, and her daughter learned to write their shared name by tracing the letters on her tombstone.
Mary and Percy initially ran off together in 1814, after William banished him from the house and forbade Mary to see him. At the time, Percy was estranged—but still married to—his first wife Harriet. She would later commit suicide by throwing herself into London’s Serpentine.
Lord Byron, a poet and notorious libertine, had fled England in the aftermath of several scandals. These included crushing debt, a failed marriage and the possibility that he had fathered a child with his half-sister Augusta in 1814.
John William Polidori was Byron’s personal physician and an aspiring writer in his own right.
Claire Clairemont, Mary’s stepsister, had also come along. She was an off-and-on lover of Lord Byron (and likely of Percy as well) and was pregnant with his child at the time, though it’s unclear whether she was aware of this. They’d had an affair before he left England and Claire convinced Mary and Percy to follow him to Switzerland.
Percy and Byron shared a mutual admiration anyway, and took their literary bromance to the next level by renting homes near to each other in the hamlet of Cologny. Byron and Polidori stayed in the lavish Villa Diodati, with the others in the more modest Maison Chapuis. Mary wrote in 1831:
“It proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house."
Gathered around a fire, they spent most nights talking, debating, reading poetry, drinking, and indulging in tincture of opium, also known as laudanum. The combination of recreational substances and the claustrophobic atmosphere is likely what led to Shelley at one point fleeing the room during a reading of Coleridge’s Christabel, having hallucinated that Mary’s nipples had transformed into demonic eyes.
Another night, after reading from the Fantasmagoriana, a French-language anthology of German ghost stories, Byron challenged them to write a better horror story than the ones they’d just heard. Mary initially had writer’s block, but after hearing the men discuss galvanism, a subject which greatly interested her, an idea came to her in a waking nightmare:
“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”
Afterwards, Mary wrote the first draft of what would become both the first science fiction novel and her defining work: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a giant, grotesque being through unorthodox experimentation.
Literary scholar Sandra Gilbert has argued that Frankenstein is an allegorical retelling of Mary’s own origin story:
“Perhaps most of all, though, Mary's sense of the fearful significance of legitimate and illegitimate names must have been formed by her awareness that her own name, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was absolutely identical with the name of the mother who had died in giving birth to her. Since this was so, she may have speculated, perhaps her own monstrosity, her murderous illegitimacy, consisted in her being -- like Victor Frankenstein's creation -- a reanimation of the dead, a sort of galvanized corpse ironically arisen from what should have been "the cradle of life."
The novel may also have been inspired by Mary’s dreams of bringing her first child back to life.
Strange Days
At Villa Diodati, Mary focused on her writing, while Byron and Percy headed off on an 8-day trip to Montreux. During this time, she had to fight off the romantic overtures of the morose Polidori, who had also fallen in love with Byron.
Polidori, to his credit, wrote The Vampyre over that same weekend, which many consider to be the first modern vampire novel. It was inspired by Byron’s Fragment of a Novel, and the protagonist, Lord Ruthven, was based on Byron himself. The story would later inspire Bram Stoker to write 1897’s Dracula.
Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818 and many speculated that Percy, who wrote the preface, was the actual author. Mary acknowledged her husband’s contribution and encouragement, but she was very clear on the fact that it was hers and hers alone:
“I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world."
When the group left Lake Geneva in September, darkness followed.
Polidori died in 1821, at just 25, depressed and deeply in debt. Though he is popularly thought to have committed suicide by swallowing prussic acid, the coroner determined that his death was due to natural (but unspecified) causes.
Percy died in 1822, after his ship, the Don Juan, was caught in a storm in Italy’s Gulf of La Spezia. His body was found 10 days later, with his hands and face eaten away. Percy was only identifiable by his clothes and the book of Keats poems in his pocket. His heart (though some say it was his liver or kidney) was calcified and would not burn on his funeral pyre. It was eventually presented to Mary, who kept it in her writing desk, wrapped in silk, until her death.
Claire Clairmont gave birth to a daughter, Allegra, in 1817, and Byron continued to ignore both her and his child. Eventually, he agreed to take full custody of her if Claire would leave him alone. After she reluctantly complied, he sent Allegra to a convent, where she died at age 5, possibly from typhus.
Lord Byron died in 1824, after falling ill with a severe cold and fever, while fighting against the Turks in the Greek War of Independence.
Mary lived the longest, dying from a brain tumor at 53.
However, one thing from that weekend has outlived all others, revolutionizing literature, spawning countless adaptations, and making an indelible impact on horror and popular culture.
The novel is about Victor Frankenstein’s monster, but the tale itself is born from Mary Shelley’s own.
This is one of my favorite literary stories! I used to teach some of the “milder” parts of it as background for reading “Frankenstein” in English IV (Brit Lit). They were quite a debauched group, weren’t they?