Foreword
Kevin J. Anderson
The story behind a story can be a compelling story in itself.
One stormy night in July 1816, a group of prominent figures gathered at Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in a villa rented by George Gordon Byron, a prominent literary figure better known as Lord Byron. His influential, controversial guests were political activists, groundbreaking poets, outspoken commentators. They all led turbulent, scandalous lifestyles that broke the societal norms of the day.
In the Villa Diodati, Lord Byron was joined by his personal physician, Dr. John Polidori; the renowned poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley; his mistress, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (much better known by her later married name, Mary Shelley); and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont (who was sexually involved with both Byron and Percy).
1816 is known historically as the “Year Without Summer,” a miserable year with Europe’s lowest recorded average summer temperatures, a severe climate event likely caused by the massive volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies. Europe was already suffering from terrible food shortages and the ravages of the Napoleonic wars, and the climate turmoil only made daily life more bleak.
A perfect setting for a ghost story.
While gathered in the Villa Diodati, trapped by the cold, rainy weather outside—and bored—Byron, Polidori, Percy, Mary, and Claire turned to reading one another chilling tales, including the Fantasmagoriana, a French collection of German ghost stories. On a whim, Byron proposed a literary challenge: they should each try their hand at writing an original ghost story.
On that night, the face of world literature changed forever.
Though the literary challenge was Byron’s idea, oddly neither he nor Percy Bysshe Shelley—the two most accomplished writers in the circle—finished their contributions. But after listening to a conversation between Dr. Polidori and Percy, Mary developed a story that would become the groundbreaking classic Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, one of the foundational works of science fiction. Byron suggested a character that Polidori would develop into the basis for The Vampyre, the world’s first vampire story written in English.
Percy Shelley barely managed to write down notes for his own idea, and soon abandoned it. Byron also wrote a fragment of a story partially inspired by his conversations with Dr. Polidori, but also set it aside uncompleted. Three years later, Polidori’s The Vampyre was published without his permission in the New Monthly Magazine, and was wrongly attributed as a new work by Lord Byron, much to the chagrin of both Polidori and Byron. In an attempt to clear up the matter, Lord Byron published his own rough attempt, A Fragment, insisting that the other work had been written by his physician, but The Vampyre was still often credited to Byron.
After developing her own idea, expanding and reworking the manuscript, Mary (now Mary Shelley) published Frankenstein in 1818. Although Percy never completed his own contribution to the literary challenge, he did contribute an original preface to his wife’s novel when it was first published.
All of these works are included here in this volume.
The lives of the various writers themselves were as twisted, tragic, dramatic, even melodramatic as any of their characters. Dr. John Polidori, the least known of the four, became a medical doctor in 1815 at the age of 19 after completing his thesis on sleepwalking. The following year he entered service as the personal physician to the flamboyant and radical George Gordon Byron, and accompanied him on a trip throughout Europe. He was commissioned by British publisher John Murray to keep a diary of his travels with Lord Byron. His recountings in this diary provide much of the details of that stormy night on Lake Geneva.
After that summer in Switzerland, Polidori was dismissed by Byron, and he continued his travels in Italy before returning to England. Even the (unauthorized) publication of The Vampyre in 1819, which caused something of a stir, did not turn his fortunes around. Two years later, plagued by depression and gambling debts, Polidori died. Although the cause of his death was ruled “natural causes,” many experts believe he committed suicide using prussic acid (cyanide).
In his own life, George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron, was a larger-than-life figure with his own heroic actions and grand adventures that rivaled those of his poetic heroes. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement in literature and is considered one of the greatest English poets, known for his narrative poems “Don Juan” and “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.”
Byron traveled extensively throughout Europe in a whirlwind of romantic affairs and scandals, followed by debts and controversy. Although he married a likely heiress in 1815 and had a child by her before the end of the year, his continuing sexual escapades with actresses and others resulted in legal separation with his wife. The resulting societal backlash, other wild rumors, and his mounting debts caused Byron to leave England in April 1816 for a self-imposed exile in Europe, and he would never return home.
After meeting with his writer friends in the villa near Lake Geneva in June of that year, Byron moved on to Venice, where he had affairs with two married women, one of whom committed suicide afterward by throwing herself into a canal. He continued his writings and explorations, and eventually became enamored with the Greek independence movement from the Ottoman Empire. He joined the fighting and even received command of a small rebel contingent despite having no actual military experience, but before his main expedition could set sail, Byron caught a fever. He fell ill and underwent therapeutic bleeding with unsterilized medical instruments, which only made his condition worse, possibly leading to sepsis, and he died on April 19, 1824.
The tragic lives of Mary and Percy were intertwined almost from birth. Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was an outspoken feminist and novelist who, after a long-term affair, married political writer William Godwin and soon became pregnant with Mary, but she died only 11 days after giving birth. This left Godwin to raise the new daughter, along with Wollstonecraft’s first daughter by another man—Fanny Imlay—and a year later her stepsister Claire Clairmont, when Godwin remarried. Godwin provided Mary with a broad education in philosophy, political matters, and free-thinking.
One of Godwin’s young protégés was the groundbreaking Romantic poet and outspoken atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley, who while studying under Godwin, became infatuated with his 16-year-old daughter Mary. During a visit to Wollstonecraft’s grave in June 1814, Mary and Percy declared their love for each other—which was problematic, since Percy was already married to Harriet Westbrook. William Godwin denounced the relationship and banished Percy, so Percy and Mary eloped to Europe in July, taking her stepsister Claire with her.
Mary became pregnant, and deeply depressed, as they made their way across war-ravaged Europe. Percy tried to reach an accommodation with his wife Harriet, but she refused to communicate. The three traveled from Switzerland to Germany and Holland, one step ahead of bailiffs and debt-collectors, and finally returned to England, where in February Mary gave birth to a daughter, who died ten days later.
Meanwhile, Percy was likely having an affair with Mary’s stepsister Claire, and Mary was herself believed to be in an open sexual relationship with another man. Mary became pregnant and in January 1816 she gave birth to a son, William Shelley. Claire then initiated her own affair with Lord Byron and introduced him to Percy Shelley.
All of which eventually led them to meet together in Lake Geneva that July.
In September 1816, Mary’s half-sister Fanny—who professed to be in love with Percy—took her own life, and bearing the guilt of that sent Percy into a deep depression. That December, Percy’s estranged wife Harriet—pregnant and then abandoned by her new lover—drowned herself in a lake, which allowed Percy to legally marry Mary later that month.
Percy suffered from nephritis and tuberculosis, in addition to his depression. Dogged by scandals and ostracized by society, not only for their open infidelities but by Percy’s outspoken atheism, the couple kept moving. Mary gave birth to two more children, both of whom died. In November 1819, Mary had a fourth child, Percy Florence Shelley, who survived.
In 1822, Percy commissioned the construction of a sailboat in Genoa, Italy—the Don Juan, named after Lord Byron’s most famous work. Percy sailed to Livorno to meet Byron and a writer named Leigh Hunt to discuss publishing a new journal, The Liberal. A week later, on July 8, Percy set off from Livorno, bound for Lerici with a friend and a boat boy, none of whom were experienced sailors, and the boat and all hands were soon lost in a storm.
Ten days later, Percy’s badly decomposed corpse washed ashore, identified only by his clothing and a copy of Keats’s poetry in his pocket. Mary, weakened from yet another miscarriage, could not travel to the funeral. Percy’s body was cremated on the beach and his “unusually small” heart resisted the fire, possibly because of calcification from his tuberculosis. Leigh Hunt obtained the scorched heart, preserved it in spirits, and refused to give it to Mary Shelley. Later, however, Byron supposedly convinced Hunt to return the heart to Mary, and she kept it in secret. The English newspaper The Courier rather flippantly reported Percy’s death: “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned; now he knows whether there is God or no.”
For her own part, after the publication and success, and infamy, of Frankenstein, and then the death of her husband, Mary returned to England and devoted herself to raising their son and to her own writing. She never remarried, and also worked tirelessly to promote and preserve the work of Percy Shelley. She died of a brain tumor at age 53. After her death, found among her belongings locked in a desk drawer, was the heart of Percy Shelley, wrapped in a copy of “Adonais,” one of his last poems.
It all gets rather dizzying to follow, as convoluted as a tragic plot in a novel.
This foreword is not meant to be a scholarly essay, nor is this book an academic collection to be relegated only to university libraries, because I think these seminal works are readable and of vital interest to anyone who cares about the origins of the science fiction and gothic horror genres.
The Vampyre and its countless literary progeny influenced the lore and stories of vampires worldwide. I first read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when I was a wide-eyed eleven-year-old and loved it, amazed that the story was so different from the film versions. I’ve read the book many times since and even used the materials for my own take in a project with Dean Koontz, Frankenstein: Prodigal Son.
Scholars, writers, and readers alike will be fascinated by this compendium of amazing works by incredible authors, all of which came about because of one stormy night in a villa on Lake Geneva.
—Kevin J. Anderson