LiteratureA House Full of Rain
In the middle of June 1816, rain repeatedly closed over Lake Geneva. The weather kept driving two neighbouring households indoors: Lord Byron, at twenty-eight the most famous poet in Europe, and his twenty-year-old travelling physician John Polidori; Percy Bysshe Shelley, twenty-three; Mary Godwin, eighteen and not yet married to him; and Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, whose earlier relationship with Byron had brought the group together.
To pass the wet evenings they read ghost stories aloud from Fantasmagoriana, a French collection of German hauntings, until the host made a proposal. Mary set it down later in the sentence that has carried the scene ever since:
“We will each write a ghost story,” said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us.
Claire belonged to the Lake Geneva party, but not to Mary's later count of four storytellers; whether she was absent from that particular scene or simply excluded from the challenge is not recorded. The dare did not produce two finished works in one night. It set several attempts moving on different timelines. Two of them endured: Mary's creature, assembled and abandoned in Frankenstein, and Polidori's aristocratic predator in The Vampyre.
The Year Without a Summer
None of them knew why the weather had broken. Fourteen months earlier and half a world away, Mount Tambora in Indonesia had produced the largest documented volcanic eruption in history. Sulfur gases from the eruption formed sunlight-reflecting aerosols high in the atmosphere. By 1816 the cooling was being felt across Europe. Geneva's surviving instruments show afternoon temperatures shifted about three to four degrees below the 1799–1821 reference period. The season became known as the year without a summer.
It was not one endless storm. There were bright days, and the party sailed and rode between the downpours. But the cold returned, the rain kept closing over the lake, and when the thunderstorms came they were unlike anything the English guests had seen. Mary described one in a letter written that June — in real time, with none of the retrospective gloom the summer later acquired:
One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld. The lake was lit up — the pines on Jura made visible, and all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness.
The geography of the party was simple. The Shelleys had reached Geneva first, in mid-May; Byron arrived two weeks later, entering his age in the hotel register as 100. By the start of June the Shelley household had taken Maison Chapuis, a small house at Montalègre right on the water, and on 10 June Byron and Polidori moved into Villa Diodati, the square, balconied house in the vineyard just above it — eight minutes' walk apart. Most evenings, everyone climbed the slope to Diodati.
On the map Villa Diodati and the Cologny shore →“Begun by All but Me”
Byron's dare fell somewhere in the week after the move to Diodati; no one wrote down the exact evening. The only day-by-day witness is Polidori, who kept a diary all summer — the physician's journal remains the single contemporary record of those weeks. On 17 June he noted, with an ambitious young man's wounded honesty:
The ghost-stories are begun by all but me.
The next night his diary catches the gathering at its most gothic. Around midnight the company “really began to talk ghostly.” Byron recited the witch's-breast lines from Coleridge's Christabel; in the silence that followed, Percy Shelley “suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle.” Polidori threw water in his face and gave him ether — the dry clinical notes of a doctor on duty at the birth of Gothic legend. Staring at Mary, Shelley had imagined a woman with eyes in place of nipples, and his nerve had given out.
Byron began a vampire tale, dated 17 June, and dropped it after a few pages. Percy's story has not survived; of Claire's, no record remains. Polidori's first attempt became the novel Ernestus Berchtold, published in 1819. His more consequential answer came by a less direct route: he later took the premise of Byron's abandoned fragment and made a different story from it.
Mary's Waking Dream
What happened next comes to us from Mary herself, with one necessary limit. Her journal for these weeks is lost. The famous account of Frankenstein's origin was written fifteen years later for the revised 1831 edition, after Percy, Byron and Polidori were dead. It is a crafted memory, not a diary entry, but it remains her fullest account of the moment.
She remembered the long midnight conversations she listened to — Byron and Shelley on galvanism and the experiments of Erasmus Darwin, on whether “the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.” Then, lying awake behind closed shutters, she saw her story arrive:
I saw — with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, — I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.
She remembered the moonlight struggling through the shutters, and “the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond.” The detail is precise enough that astronomers have tried to date the dream by it, tracing the moon's path over Cologny to the small hours of 16 June — a reconstruction from the sky, not an entry in anyone's diary. The next morning she announced that she had thought of a story, and began with the words It was on a dreary night of November — the sentence that still opens the creation scene of the novel.
What she did not do is write the book in that night, or in that house. The story conceived at Diodati was first worked on at Maison Chapuis below it, then carried home to England and expanded through the following year. The surviving notebooks show Mary's hand dominating the draft and Percy's hand revising it: not a single flash of invention, but a long act of authorship and collaboration. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus appeared anonymously on 1 January 1818, with a preface by Percy. Mary was twenty.
The Other Monster
_-_Vampyre,_1819.jpg)
Polidori's monster took a stranger road into print. He picked up the premise of the tale Byron had abandoned — a gentleman who dies in the East after extracting a terrible oath from his companion — and developed it into The Vampyre. Its Lord Ruthven moves through London drawing rooms, seducing and ruining behind an aristocrat's manners. The name was already a barb: “Ruthven” belonged to the Byron-like antihero of Glenarvon, Caroline Lamb's novel about her former lover. Earlier European vampire writing often kept the revenant at the edge of village or graveyard; Polidori brought him into fashionable society.
Publication then tangled the authorship. In April 1819 Henry Colburn's New Monthly Magazine printed the tale under the heading “A Tale by Lord Byron.” Byron denied writing it; Polidori publicly claimed his part, writing that “the groundwork is certainly Lord Byron's, its development is mine.” An anonymous “Extract of a Letter from Geneva” published with the tale compressed the challenge into a single stormy evening. Polidori's diary preserves a messier sequence across several days, but the one-night version proved easier to remember.
Byron's Summer on the Water
The ghost stories were only one thread of a summer in which the bad weather kept turning into literature. On 22 June, Byron and Percy Shelley sailed off around the lake. At the Château de Chillon they went down into the dungeon below the waterline, where the Genevese prior François Bonivard had been chained to a column for years. Shelley wrote of the cell: “I never saw a monument more terrible of that cold and inhuman tyranny, which it has been the delight of man to exercise over man.” Days of rain then held the travellers at Ouchy, near Lausanne — where Byron, shut in once again, wrote The Prisoner of Chillon. Back at Diodati in July he wrote “Darkness,” a poem in which the sun goes out and the world freezes: the year without a summer, pushed one step further.
In late July, Percy, Mary and Claire made their own excursion, to the glaciers of Chamonix — the trip that produced Percy's poem “Mont Blanc.” The whole radius of that summer, from the dungeon on the lake to the ice under the mountain, kept feeding the same small circle of writers.
Gustave Courbet, The Château de Chillon, 1874. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
On the map Château de Chillon →Standing at Pré Byron
Villa Diodati still stands at 9 chemin de Ruth, shuttered and private; it cannot be visited. But the commune of Cologny keeps the meadow beside it, Pré Byron, open to everyone — a quiet lawn with a memorial stone to the poet and the same wide view the household had: the lake below, the Jura across the water, where Mary watched the lightning “dart in jagged figures upon the piny heights.” A commemorative plaque hangs on a building along chemin de Ruth. Down the slope, Maison Chapuis is long gone; only the shore remains where the Shelleys' boat was kept, and the short climb through the vineyards that they made almost every evening. Chillon, for its part, is open to visitors, seven columns and all.
Stand on the meadow in unsettled weather and the view assembles itself into the last image of Mary's waking dream: the glassy lake, and the white high Alps beyond. Nothing in the quiet shore reveals a single legendary night, because there was no single night to reveal. The place held a season of conversation, rivalry, failed starts and unfinished fragments. Mary and Polidori carried different pieces away. Years of writing, editing and disputed publication turned them into the creature and the aristocratic vampire that still haunt the landscape.
Sources and Further Reading
- The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, 1816, ed. W.M. Rossetti (1911) — the only day-by-day record of the Diodati weeks
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1831 edition, with her Introduction on the novel's origin) — Project Gutenberg
- Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817) — the 1816 letters from Geneva, Project Gutenberg
- John Polidori, The Vampyre (1819), with the “Extract of a Letter from Geneva” — Project Gutenberg
- Auchmann et al., “Extreme climate, not extreme weather: the summer of 1816 in Geneva” — Climate of the Past 8 (2012)
- The Shelley-Godwin Archive — Frankenstein manuscripts and chronology
- Commune de Cologny — Villa Diodati and Pré Byron