Creating the creature

Picture the scene… It is May 1816. An unmarried young woman, her poet lover and their young son travel from London to Geneva. They rent a house close to Lord Byron, currently residing at the Villa Diodati, an impressive house on the hills overlooking the southern shore of the lake. The cast list reads like a who’s who of Gothic literature. The young woman is Mary Godwin (daughter of the radical philosopher William Godwin and the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft); her lover is the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. With them is Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, pregnant with Byron’s child, and John Polidori (Byron’s doctor and author of The Vampyre – the progenitor of all vampire novels). Other visitors include Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis, famous for his novel The Monk (1796), which owed its runaway success to its mixture of sex and horror. Lord Byron himself presides.

Fifteen years later, Mary Shelley recalled that it was ‘a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house’. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia had caused ‘the year without a summer’, though no one knew this in 1816. She noted that the topics with which the guests occupied themselves included ‘the experiments of Dr. Darwin’ who was supposed to have observed movement in ‘a piece of vermicelli’ (literally pasta, but Darwin’s reference was to some kind of worm) and ‘galvanism’. (Erasmus Darwin [1731– 1802] was a natural philosopher and poet whose theories of the evolution of living things anticipated the more systematic work of his grandson Charles. Luigi Galvani [1737–98] had stimulated a twitch in a dead frog’s leg with an electric impulse.) They also read German ghost stories, and this led Byron to suggest that each should write their own tale of the supernatural. The others soon gave up, but Mary struggled on. A waking dream prompted her imagination, stirred by the company’s talk that evening of whether a corpse might be ‘galvanised’ back to life: