Frankenstein

:For the actual monster, see Frankenstein's monster.

Genesis

:"How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?"

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

During the snowy summer of 1816, the "Year Without A Summer," the world was locked in a long cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Tambora in 1815. In this terrible year, the then Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, age 19, and her husband-to-be Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. After reading Fantasmagoriana, an anthology of German ghost stories, Byron challenged the Shelleys and his personal physician John William Polidori each to compose a story of their own. Mary conceived an idea after she fell into a waking dream or nightmare during which she saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together." This was the germ of Frankenstein. Byron managed to write just a fragment based on the vampire legends he heard while travelling the Balkans, and from this Polidori created The Vampyre (1819), the progenitor of the romantic vampire literary genre. Thus, the Frankenstein and vampire themes were created from that single circumstance.

Related Topics:
1816 - Year Without A Summer - Volcanic winter - Tambora - 1815 - Percy Bysshe Shelley - Lord Byron - Lake Geneva - Switzerland - Fantasmagoriana - John William Polidori - Vampire - Balkans - The Vampyre - 1819 - Genre

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~