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Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and the Villa Diodati

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Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and the Villa Diodati

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This article describes the bizarre circumstances that gave rise to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the other works that emerged from the ‘ghost story challenge’ during the summer of 1816.

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Greg Buzwell describes the bizarre circumstances that gave rise to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and the other works that emerged from the 'ghost story challenge' at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816.

Introduction

The circumstances that gave birth to Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818) read like something from a Gothic story in themselves. Mary's unconventional life up to the summer of 1816 (when she was still only 18), along with the company in which she found herself in June of that year - and even the unusual weather conditions at the time - all contributed to the book's genesis. The vital spark that gave the novel life however was Lord Byron's suggestion one evening at the Villa Diodati, as candlelight flickered within the house and lightning flashed across the surface of the lake outside, that those present should turn their hands to the writing of ghost stories. It was a casual ploy to while away a few hours in an atmosphere of delicious fear, but it resulted in two iconic tales: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a story of scientific transgression and a cautionary warning about the need to take responsibility for one's actions; and John Polidori's The Vampyre, a tale which influenced Bram Stoker's novel .

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, 1831

The frontispiece illustrating the monster from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1831.

'The Year without a Summer'

The weather in the summer of 1816 was memorable for all the wrong reasons. The eruption of Mount Tamboro in Indonesia in April 1815 sent clouds of volcanic ash billowing into the upper atmosphere. The sun was obscured; levels of rainfall increased and temperatures fell. The summer of the following year was thus dismal and damp, with low temperatures and torrential rain causing disastrous crop failures throughout North America, Europe and Asia. For many living on the other side of the world to the eruption, the reason for the disturbances in the weather would have been a mystery, but one that lent a sinister and perhaps even a supernatural quality to the need to light candles at midday as darkness descended, and the sight of birds settling down to roost at noon. The discovery by scientists of large dark spots on the sun in the same year added to the growing sense of unease and impending doom, as reflected in Lord Byron's apocalyptic poem Darkness, written in Geneva in July 1816.

'The year without a summer', as 1816 became known, provided the perfect backdrop to the telling of bleak, macabre and doom-laden Gothic tales.

'Dreadful Weather on the Continent' from the Morning Post

This newspaper article refers to the weather in the 'year without a summer', 1816.

Usage terms Sourced from the British Newspaper Archive

Landscape

In May 1816 the poet Percy Shelley, together with Mary Godwin (she didn't become Mary Shelley until her marriage to Percy Shelley in December 1816, although she always referred to herself as 'Mrs Shelley' during the months immediately prior to the marriage) and their son William (nicknamed 'Willmouse') travelled to Geneva. Travelling with them was Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont - a former lover of Lord Byron. The journey across the French border and into Switzerland involved travelling through bleak, wintry landscapes. As Mary recorded afterwards in her travel volume History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817) 'Never was a scene more awefully desolate. The trees in these regions are incredibly large, and stand in scattered clumps over the white wilderness; the vast expanse of snow was chequered only by these gigantic pines, and the poles that marked our road: no river or rock-encircled lawn relieved the eye, by adding the picturesque to the sublime'. The landscape, with its frightening, lonely and bleak aspect, clearly haunted Mary, and she would describe similarly desolate locations in her novel Frankenstein, a book that both begins and ends amidst bleak snowy wastes.

The Villa Diodati

Within 10 days of the arrival of Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin in Geneva, Lord Byron himself arrived in a suitably dramatic fashion, drawing up at his hotel around midnight in a Napoleonic carriage fresh from a sightseeing trip to the battlefield of Waterloo with his physician, Dr Polidori. Byron and Percy Shelley met for the first time the following day, and within a short space of time both men had abandoned their hotel and took leases on two nearby properties: Shelley and his travelling companions at a small chalet called Montalègre and Byron and Polidori at the nearby Villa Diodati, a large porticoed house once occupied by the poet John Milton. Because the weather in June was particularly bad and denied the possibility of sailing journeys on the lake, the group spent their evenings discussing literary projects, talking late into the night as the rain fell outside. With thunder and lightning rolling down from the mountains and across the lake, the candlelit interior of the Villa Diodati became the home to discussions about galvanism and the principles of animation, with Polidori's medical knowledge acting as a balance for Byron and Percy Shelley's more speculative imaginings. As Mary recalled in the Preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein: 'Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered communicated'. The contemporary interest in galvanism, anatomy and the spark of life, together with the thunder storms outside and the candlelight within, all took root in Mary's imagination and found their way into her novel.

Ghost stories

When Byron suggested the idea of writing ghost stories, inspiration was taken from a collection of German horror stories, translated under the title Fantasmagoriana. Sexual tensions and frustrations were also on the increase in the Villa, with Polidori becoming amorously interested in Mary who did not reciprocate, while Claire's fixation with Byron showed no signs of abating. Shelley himself, as the atmosphere of tension and unease wound ever tighter, found himself slipping into a mood of morbidity and oppression. One evening Byron read some verses from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem 'Christabel' in which the character of Geraldine, (who appears as a woman, but is actually a Lamia, or disguised serpent), seeks both the spiritual and physical possession of the beautiful and innocent Christabel. Percy Shelly, clearly affected by the claustrophobic environment and the hypnotic power of Byron's reading of the poem fled the room screaming, apparently horrified, as he recounted later, by the sudden mental vision of a woman who had eyes instead of nipples on her breasts. Polidori made use of this 'fit of fantasy', as Byron later described it in a letter to his publisher John Murray, in his story The Vampyre.

The late night talks at the Villa Diodati continued as the weather outside remained stormy, and it was following one of these conversations that Mary had the nightmare that gave rise to the central idea of Frankenstein. Mary recounted the nightmare in her 1831 preface to the book, giving a startling example of how the heightened consciousness of terror could be transformed into brilliant and inspirational creativity:

Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw - with shut eyes, but acute mental vision - I saw the pale student of the 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 ...

Frankenstein's monster and Frankenstein the book had both been born.

Greg Buzwell is Curator of Contemporary Literary Archives at the British Library. He has co-curated three major exhibitions for the Library - Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination; Shakespeare in Ten Acts and Gay UK: Love, Law and Liberty. His research focuses primarily on the Gothic literature of the Victorian fin de siècle. He has also edited and introduced collections of supernatural tales by authors including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edgar Allan Poe and Walter de la Mare.

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Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and the Villa Diodati

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Greg Buzwell describes the bizarre circumstances that gave rise to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and the other works that emerged from the 'ghost story challenge' at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816. The circumstances that gave birth to Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818) read like something from a Gothic story in themselves.

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Frankenstein Was Born During a Ghastly Vacation

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Frankenstein Was Born During a Ghastly Vacation

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History.com article about the poets, the summer and the ghost story challenge that shaped the story of Frankenstein.

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Thunder, lightning and flickering candles. It sounds like the stuff of a horror story-and for Mary Shelley, it was. She wrote her masterpiece Frankenstein when she was just 19 years old, and the dark, stormy summer nights that helped bring her monstrous creation to life were nearly as dramatic as the novel itself.

Strangely enough, the saga of Frankenstein started not with a vision but with a volcano. In 1815, a gigantic volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora in Indonesia choked the air with ash and dust. The eruption killed roughly 100,000 people in its immediate aftermath, but the overall toll ended up being much higher-it is now considered to be the deadliest volcano eruption in history.

The next summer, the warm growing season never came. Instead of sunshine, most of Europe was covered in fog and even frost. Crop failures stretched across Europe, Asia and even North America for three years afterward. Famines, epidemics and political revolts followed. Historians estimate that at least a million people starved in the aftermath of Tambora's eruption, while tens of millions died from a global cholera pandemic that it unleashed.

During those three years of darkness and famine, some of Europe's greatest artists created their darkest and most enduring works. Mary Shelley was among them-but when she arrived at Lake Geneva in May 1816, she was looking for a vacation, not literary inspiration. Unfortunately the weather was so ghastly in Switzerland that she was trapped inside nearly the entire time.

Mary traveled with her lover, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, their four-month-old baby and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. At the time, Claire was pregnant with a child by Lord Byron, the groundbreaking poet whose personal affairs had made him one of England's most divisive celebrities. Most recently he had divorced his wife and, rumor had it, continued an affair with his half-sister. Plagued by gossip and debt, he decided to leave Europe.

After Byron's departure, the obsessed Claire convinced Mary and Percy to travel to Geneva with her. A few days later, Byron-clearly unaware that Claire would be there- arrived in town. Mary, who had eloped with her married husband when she was just 17 and was subsequently disowned by her intellectual family, sympathized with the scandalous poet.

Percy and Byron, who had been fans of one another's work, soon formed an intense friendship. They abandoned their other travel plans and rented nearby properties along Lake Geneva. During the frigid evenings they gathered with the rest of the group at the Villa Diodati, the stately mansion Byron had rented for his stay along with John Polidori, his doctor. They read poetry, argued, and talked late into the night.

The terrible weather kept them inside more often than not. Thunder and lightning echoed through the villa and their conversations turned to one of the big debates of the day: whether human corpses could be galvanized, or re-animated, after death. Mary, who described herself as "a devout but nearly silent listener," sat near the men and absorbed every word of their speculation about the limits of modern medicine.

As the days plodded on, conflicts between the vacationers began to simmer. Byron was annoyed by Claire's attempts to enchant him. Mary had to fight off sexual advances from Polidori, who had become obsessed with her. Percy was depressed. By the time three days of rain trapped them inside the villa, tensions had reached a boiling point.

They coped by reading horror stories and morbid poems. One night, as they sat the candlelit darkness, Byron gave them all a challenge: write a ghost story that was better than the ones they had just read. Inspired by a tale of Byron's, Polidori immediately complied. His novella "The Vampyre," published in 1819, is the first work of fiction to include a blood-sucking hero-which many think was modeled on Byron himself.

Mary wanted to write a story, too, but she couldn't land on a subject. "I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative," she later wrote. But one sleepless night, as thunder and lightning echoed off the lake, she had a vision. "I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out," she wrote, "and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life."

The next morning, she could say yes when she was asked if she had a ghost story in mind. Her book, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, incorporated the eerie setting of the Villa Diodati and the morbid conversations of the poets. The story she later called her "hideous progeny" asks what happens when men pretend they are gods-inspired, perhaps, by the hubris of the company she kept in Switzerland.

Though she did not know it, Mary's book, which was published in 1818, would go on to revolutionize literature and popular culture. But the lives of the vacationers did not end happily. Polidori committed suicide in 1821. Percy Shelley drowned during a freak storm in 1822, when he was just 29 years old. Byron took the daughter he had with Claire, Allegra, away from her mother and sent her to a convent to be educated; she died there in 1822 at age 5. Byron died in 1824 after contracting a fever.

Of the group, only Mary and Claire lived past age 50. But the book that creepy summer inspired-and its terrifying story of life after death-lives on today.
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'Frankenstein' Was Born During a Ghastly Vacation 200 Years Ago

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Thunder, lightning and flickering candles. It sounds like the stuff of a horror story-and for Mary Shelley, it was. She wrote her masterpiece Frankenstein when she was just 19 years old, and the dark, stormy summer nights that helped bring her monstrous creation to life were nearly as dramatic as the novel itself.

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You will need an Ottawa Public Library card to access this resource.

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Frankenstein (Streaming Video) : Frankenstein: the doctor who created life! Was the famed character invented in the mind of novelist Mary Shelley, or was Dr. Frankenstein based in reality, as some argue? This episode of Ancient Mysteries explores Shelley's possible influences.

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In Search of Mary Shelley by Fiona Sampson

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In Search of Mary Shelley by Fiona Sampson

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Chapter 6 - At Villa Diodati (33 pages)

You will need an Ottawa Public Library card to access this resource.

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A look at the life and literary influence of "Frankenstein" author Mary Shelley, her devoted yet troubled relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the complex and often deadly impacts of the various persons coming in and of their circle. Not nearly as exhaustive as Charlotte Gordon's "Romantic Outlaws," which also covers the life of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and a tendency to be overly speculative about the feelings and thoughts of the people she is discussing, but still an enjoyable work.

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In Search of Mary Shelley - Ottawa Public Library

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In Search of Mary Shelley (eBook) : Sampson, Fiona : We know the facts of Mary Shelley's life in some detail--the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, within days of her birth; the upbringing in the house of her father, William Godwin, in a house full of radical thinkers, poets, philosophers, and writers; her elopement, at the age of seventeen, with Percy Shelley; the years of peripatetic travel across Europe that followed.

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The summer Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in Switzerland.

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Around two hundred years ago, in May 1816, a small group of English travellers checked into the Hotel d'Angleterre, a large three-storey stone building facing the Alps on the north side of Lake Geneva. In the group was the 23-year-old poet Percy Shelley, his mistress, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, still only 18 years old, and their four-month-old son William. (Mary was to marry Percy in December that year, just two weeks after hearing about the suicide of his abandoned wife Harriet.) The final member of the company was Mary's step-sister Clare Clairmont, eight months her junior-"the type of young woman who today would be known as 'arty,'" in Muriel Spark's tart summary.

Exhausted after ten days of travel from London, during which Mary had suffered terribly from travel sickness, the friends were more like refugees than tourists. Shelley had been so tormented by emotional and financial difficulties that he had become dangerously ill. Mary was troubled by memories and dreams about the loss of her baby girl, who was born prematurely in February 1815 and died shortly after. A few weeks earlier, Clare Clairmont had set her cap at Lord Byron, who found her annoying but had sex with her anyway. It was Claire who had suggested that they should rendezvous with Byron in Geneva, and it's possible that Shelley agreed with her plans partly because he wanted to meet the older poet.

Byron had also fled London in February, expecting at any moment to be arrested by bailiffs. He brought along his new personal physician John Polidori, who had qualified as a doctor the year before, at the precocious age of 19. Unknown to Byron, Polidori was also something of a spy: Byron's publisher, John Murray, had slipped him £500 to keep a diary of his employer's adventures, which might form the basis of a racy best-seller.

Shelley and Byron were both a little shy on their first meeting by the lakeside, but an agreeable dinner soon thawed them and established that they had a good deal in common. Soon, they were all but inseparable, and joined in spells of speculative talk from which Mary, to her surprise and dismay, was often excluded.

By now, the management of the Hotel d'Angleterre had grown alarmed by the potential for scandal from these mad English folk, and it was time to find a new place to stay. Byron discovered two nearby properties-a large porticoed house called the Villa Diodati, and, a few minutes' walk away, a small chalet. Byron and his entourage took the former, and the Shelley group the latter, though a spell of bad weather soon forced everyone into the Villa. Some 15 years later, Mary Shelley wrote of their stay: "it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. Some volumes of ghost stories translated from the German into French, fell into our hands." This gave rise to an idea. "'We will each write a ghost story' said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to.

Oddly, the two established writers proved less apt for the task than the two novices. Shelley tried to write something inspired by his childhood, but soon gave up; Byron wrote a short, fragmentary vampire tale, later published but not much read, then or now. Mary recalled that "Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady"; this was so, but Polidori was working a more enduring story, too.

At first, Mary found herself stumped. She could not think of anything spooky enough to be worth turning into a tale. Instead, she listened to the two poets talk about ghosts and vampires, and the principle of life, and whether galvanism might-as seemed likely-be able to reanimate dead tissues. And then, finally, she suffered a night of insomnia. On the evening of the 17th, or possibly the 18th June (her diary is ambiguous), she read out the first passage of a strange fiction to her friends. It began:

"It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld my man completed and with an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected instruments of life about me, and endeavoured to infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet...."

This was, of course, the first stirrings of the novel she would later call her "hideous progeny"- Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. In those same days, Claire felt stirrings of her own: she was pregnant with a child that Byron, despite his resentment ("Is the brat mine?) was soon obliged to acknowledge, since the only other possible father was Shelley, whose word and conduct he trusted.

And Polidori? After some bitter arguments with both poets, which almost came to a duel, he went off in a sulk and, taking his inspiration from Byron's effort, started work on a short novel, The Vampyre. On its publication in 1819, readers noted how closely its villain, Lord Ruthven, resembled another well-known lord. Some took the tale as an accurate account of Byron's wicked adventures; others, especially in France, that it was not merely by Byron himself but one of his finest works. It became an international bestseller and established the notion of the vampire as a suave aristocrat rather than a smelly, slobbering peasant. It was this image that Bram Stoker had in mind some 70 years later, when he wrote Dracula.

We owe the two greatest horror tales of the last two centuries to a handful of troubled souls shut up together in an old house one wet summer. Within eight years, all the men who had taken part in the competition were dead: Polidori most likely of suicide; Shelley by drowning, after his yacht Ariel sank in a storm off the northwest coast of Italy; and Byron of illness contracted during his adventures in the cause of Greek freedom.

Mary Shelley lived on until 1851-the year of the Great Exhibition, a celebration of the wonderful, rather than the satanic potential of science and technology. A few years earlier, she had re-visited the Villa Diodati, and fell to musing. She glumly regarded herself as "the companion of the dead... For all were gone: even my young child... storm, and blight, and death, had passed over, and destroyed all." One can only hope that she foresaw how remarkably her "progeny" would survive into the 21st century. Mary Shelley's intelligence and literary talent is plain to see in other writings, but it took an emotionally charged house party to sting her into genius, and literary immortality.

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Around two hundred years ago, in May 1816, a small group of English travellers checked into the Hotel d'Angleterre, a large three-storey stone building facing the Alps on the north side of Lake Geneva. In the group was the 23-year-old poet Percy Shelley, his mistress, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, still only 18 years old, and their four-month-old son William.

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Mary Shelley: The Strange, True Tale of Frankenstein's Creator by Catherine Reef

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Mary Shelley: The Strange, True Tale of Frankenstein's Creator by Catherine Reef

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"On the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, comes a riveting biography of its author, Mary Shelley, whose life reads like a dark gothic novel, filled with scandal, death, drama, and one of the strangest love stories in literary history"

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Mary Shelley The Strange, True Tale of Frankenstein's Creator (Book) : Reef, Catherine : "On the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, comes a riveting biography of its author, Mary Shelley, whose life reads like a dark gothic novel, filled with scandal, death, drama, and one of the strangest love stories in literary history"--

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A synopsis of Mary's life, as well as how she came to write Frankenstein.

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The most eloquent summary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's position in English letters is still Leigh Hunt's much-quoted couplet from "The Blue-Stocking Revels": "And Shelley, fourfam'd,-for her parents, her lord, / And the poor lone impossible monster abhorr'd." Though recent studies have shown some appreciation of Mary Shelley by her own lights, the four "fames" Hunt mentioned have tended to outshine them.

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A Life of Learning: Behind the dominating presence of Frankenstein, the richness of Mary Shelley's life is in danger of being lost.

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A Life of Learning: Behind the dominating presence of Frankenstein, the richness of Mary Shelley's life is in danger of being lost.

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The article focuses on the life of novelist Mary Shelley, author of the 1818 book Frankenstein.

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Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein

You will need an Ottawa Public Library card to access this resource.

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Mary's Monster Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein (Book) : Judge, Lita : A free verse biography of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, featuring over 300 pages of black-and-white watercolor illustrations.