Journal · Frankenstein · The Vampyre

One wet summer, two monsters: the 1816 ghost-story dare

In June 1816 a handful of English travelers were stuck indoors by Lake Geneva while it rained and thundered. One of them proposed a game: each should write a ghost story. Out of that dare came two of the most famous monsters in fiction.

The year without a summer

A huge volcanic eruption in the East Indies the year before had filled the upper air with ash, and 1816 was remembered across Europe as the year without a summer. In Geneva the days were cold and wet and the nights loud with thunderstorms.

Who was there

Lord Byron, twenty-eight, the most talked-about poet in Europe, had left England for good that spring amid a scandal that made London impossible for him. He rented the Villa Diodati, a handsome house on the slopes above the lake. With him was his personal physician, John William Polidori, a clever, touchy, ambitious young man hoping to make his name as a writer; Byron's publisher had offered Polidori a generous sum to keep a journal of the journey. A short walk down the hill lived the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (daughter of two famous radical writers, who would marry Shelley at the end of that year) and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont.

The dare

Kept indoors, the friends read aloud from a French translation of German ghost stories, and Byron proposed that each of them write a ghost story of their own. Shelley soon lost interest. Polidori began a tale. Mary Godwin, eighteen, struggled for days to find an idea, until, by her own later account, one came to her in a kind of waking dream. Over the following months it grew into Frankenstein, published in 1818. Byron began a story about two travelers heading east toward the ruins of Ephesus, dated the manuscript June 17, 1816, wrote a few pages and put it aside.

The vampire who walked into the drawing room

On April 1, 1819, The Vampyre appeared in The New Monthly Magazine, presented as a tale by Lord Byron. Polidori had not agreed to its publication in that form, and Byron, then living in Venice, had never seen it. A book edition followed within weeks and sold briskly. Polidori's vampire is a pale, cold, fascinating nobleman who glides through the London season, courted by hostesses: the menace no longer lives in some remote village but in society, which opens its doors to it. Many readers took him for a portrait of Byron himself.

Polidori did not live to enjoy it. He died in London in 1821, at only twenty-five. His sister Frances later married the Italian exile Gabriele Rossetti; the poets Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti were her son and daughter.

Read them side by side

Our Frankenstein prints the 1818 text as first published, with a note before every letter and chapter, and Mary Shelley's own 1831 account of that summer at the back. Our Carmilla and The Vampyre prints Polidori's tale complete, with Byron's abandoned Fragment of June 17, 1816 at the end, so you can read it beside the tale it became, and Le Fanu's Carmilla of 1872, a quarter of a century before Dracula.