Without a Summer

The Contexts Collection puts moments from literary history into amber. Without a Summer is a time capsule of a moment in 1816, when Mary Shelley wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein or: The Modern Prometheus. Western Europe was in a volcanic winter caused by successive eruptions in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) that had lowered the global temperature 1 degree Fahrenheitenough to cause the Year Without a Summer. Crops died, food riots rivaled the French Revolution, and an ice dam formed in Switzerland that created a lake that never before existed. It is this atmosphere that Lord Byron, his friend Percy Shelley, and his mistress, Mary Godwin, would abscond to the lake house in Geneva where Frankenstein was born. Occupying themselves in the dark, damp, and cold, they competed to tell the best ghost story. Byron began a vampire novel called The Burial, but only completed a fragment. When his friend, John Polidori, fleshed it outusing Byron...