Haunted Summer of 1816

It was a cold and stormy summer. In 1816 Switzerland, near Geneva, violent storms lit up the sky for weeks in June and July. Lake Geneva flooded the region, and animal corpses filled the area’s swollen rivers. Some would call it the “year without a summer,” while others called it the “haunted summer.” True, it introduced two of the most enduring archetypes in horror fiction: the “mad scientist” who creates a monster and the strikingly debonair vampire. But other important works of English Romanticism were produced as a group of young artsy types and intellectuals took refuge from the inclement weather in a rented villa in Cologny. Discover who was who—and what they wrote—during that haunted summer of 1816.

The group in Cologny

In the spring of 1816 Lord Byron, a notoriously fast-living poet who had gained renown four years earlier with the publication of his autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, was 28, deeply in debt, and stinging from the breakup of his unhappy marriage. During the separation, he became permanently estranged from his infant daughter. In April 1816 bailiffs came to his home in London and seized his possessions—including his pet squirrel. To escape the tumult Byron hit the road, traveling to Switzerland in a personally commissioned (but not fully paid for) replica of a coach that had belonged to French general Napoleon Bonaparte, with “Trust Byron” emblazoned on its side in Latin. (As one does.)

Accompanying Byron was his physician, John Polidori, the 20-year-old handsome but drifting son of Tuscan-born publisher and teacher Gaetano Polidori. Before finishing his studies in medicine, John had been interested in entering a religious order, then in joining the army, but both ideas were quashed by his father. In the meantime he nurtured literary aspirations, and he had a secret arrangement with Byron’s publisher to keep a diary of his adventures with the poet. Undoubtedly, the publisher expected juicy gossip about the man who had been declared by one of his lovers to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

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Lord Byron: Creative productivity during the haunted summer of 1816

Byron’s Napoleonic coach had numerous breakdowns on the journey. By the time he and Polidori arrived in Geneva in May 1816, three other English travelers had beaten them there. Twenty-three-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley was, like Byron, a free-thinking poet with a mess of financial and familial troubles. In 1814, after abandoning his first wife and child (with another baby on the way), he had impregnated and run off with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the 16-year-old daughter of radical philosopher William Godwin and feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. These events caused a rift between Mary Godwin and her father (her mother had died shortly after her birth). Now, two years later, Shelley and Godwin had already lost their first baby and had come to Geneva with their infant son and Godwin’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont.

If anyone can be credited with bringing this group together, it is Clairmont. Like Godwin, she was an 18-year-old with unconventional views on life and love. She had begun an affair with Byron in England. Always the pursuer in their relationship, Clairmont was determined to continue seeing him, despite his casual and callous treatment of her. She persuaded Shelley and Godwin to travel with her to Geneva. In fairness, it was a popular destination for English tourists because of its stunning lake and proximity to the Alps. But there may have been another reason for Clairmont’s insistence. The following January she would give birth to Byron’s child, and she may have already been pregnant when they left for Switzerland.

The setting of Byron and Shelley’s first meeting was on the shores of Lake Geneva. The two iconoclasts immediately hit it off. Before long Shelley’s party rented a house in nearby Cologny, and Byron’s party rented the posh Villa Diodati, also in Cologny. Thus began a summer of boating on the lake, jaunts to nearby sites (including the Château de Chillon and Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps), and long talks about the pressing philosophical ideas and scientific breakthroughs of the day. Others who showed up at the villa that summer included Matthew Lewis, the author of the Gothic thriller The Monk (1796), who joined Byron on an excursion to Voltaire’s home in the French town of Ferney, where the great philosopher’s heart was preserved in a box.

Inevitably, tensions erupted among the group. Byron frequently made Polidori the butt of jokes, including mocking the young doctor’s attempts at playwriting. He was also dismissive of Clairmont, even as they continued an affair. Shelley persuaded his new friend to accept responsibility for Clairmont’s pregnancy and provide for the child. Polidori fell in unrequited love with Godwin, and rumors spread throughout Geneva and all the way to London of the supposed free-love escapades at Villa Diodati.

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The summer itself, meanwhile, brought more complications. The previous year’s eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia had produced such a lasting influence on weather across the globe that 1816 became “the year without a summer.”

The ghost story contest: From Frankenstein to “The Vampyre” to “Darkness”

In Cologny, Byron described the gloomy daily forecast to a friend: “We have had lately such stupid mists—fogs—rains—and perpetual density.” In a letter of her own, Godwin wrote of the thrill of watching storms move across the lake, with thunder that “came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness.” One day while sailing, Byron and Shelley were caught in a squall and nearly drowned. (Several years later, in another boating incident, Shelley would not be so lucky.)

The group frequently gathered in Byron’s villa, where one night he proposed a ghost story contest.

Several members of the group took up Byron’s challenge. The most famous creation of the contest was Godwin’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a novel about a scientist named Victor Frankenstein who artificially creates a human being who ultimately brings tragedy to his life. There were several sources of inspiration for the novel. Earlier Godwin had experienced a dream in which she coaxed her and Shelley’s dead daughter back to life. In Cologny she had a waking nightmare that conjured a student horrified by his vivification of assembled human body parts. That summer she and Shelley also visited the Alps, the vistas of which found their way into her story. She published Frankenstein in 1818, by which time she had married Shelley. The rest is horror novel history.

Byron came up with an atmospheric (but unfinished) vampire story for the contest. Polidori took his idea and ran with it, completing a tale called “The Vampyre,” about a ruthless aristocrat who bears more than a passing resemblance to Byron. Initially, the title character in Polidori’s story was named Ruthven, the same name of a rakish character in Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon (1816), a thinly disguised account of her affair with Byron. “The Vampyre” was published in 1819, but much to Polidori’s woe, it was misattributed to Byron (though not through the poet’s doing). Two years later Polidori died, likely by suicide. His tale, however, is believed to be the first prose vampire story published in English. With its depiction of a vampire as an attractive noble instead of a ghastly bloodsucker, the story is an important precursor to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) as well as modern works such as Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (1976–2018) and Stephenie Meyer’s original Twilight Saga (2005–08).

One night during the contest, as Byron recited a suitably chilling poem to set the mood, Shelley’s imagination conjured a vision of Godwin with eyes where her nipples should be, spooking himself out of storytelling for the evening. But he did produce two great works that summer: the poems “Mont Blanc” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” The first, which bears the subtitle “Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni,” was inspired by his visit to the Alps. The poem is a powerful meditation on nature that uses varying attributes of the landscape (“Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— / Now lending splendour”) to express the poet’s romantic atheism. The second poem is a musing on the mysterious, intangible awareness of nature’s potency and beauty, beginning with the lines “The awful shadow of some unseen Power / Floats though unseen among us.”

With Clairmont enlisted as his transcriber, Byron wrote Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Compared with the poem’s first two cantos, the third focuses more on themes of isolation and despondency, inspired by Byron’s separation from his wife and child. It also describes many places he saw in Switzerland and shows Shelley’s influence in its attention to nature and the sublime. The Prisoner of Chillon was another of Byron’s creations that summer, drawn from his visit with Shelley to the Château de Chillon, where the 16th-century Swiss patriot François Bonivard had been imprisoned for four years in a dungeon.

But the months in Cologny were probably best captured in Byron’s poem “Darkness.” A brooding ode to that year without a summer, it begins with a line much like the events that inspired Frankenstein: “I had a dream, which was not all a dream.”

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