Part of the mission of the Contexts Collection is to take moments in literary history—in this case, the notorious Year Without a Summer in which Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein—and present them in time capsule form. Disregarding the usual dividing lines of genre or author, they are instead presented with their influences, peer works, or, as is the case here, works written at the precise same place and time. In this way, the modern reader might experience them closer to the way in which a contemporary reader of the work would have originally experienced them, with their original context of era, background, and atmosphere. While this holds true for The Year Without a Summer, it is also true that this anthology’s particular moment comes with its own particular context.
In 1814 and 1815, a dramatic series of climate events—the volcanic eruptions of Mayon in the Philippines and Mount Tamboura (the largest in 1300 years) in modern day Indonesia—combined to form an ash cloud that decreased global temperatures by around 1 °F or 0.5 °C. What ensued is what a climatologist might call a Volcanic Winter. Temperatures in the European summer of 1816 were the coldest ever recorded until the year 2000. Crop failures and food shortages gripped the Northern Hemisphere. The food riots rivalled the French Revolution for violence and bloodshed.
Europe had not finished recovering from the Napoleonic Wars. It is important to remember that, prior to all despots being compared to Adolf Hitler, all world-conquerers had been measured against Napoleon, including Adolf Hitler. Napoleon, of course, was the Alexander of his time. Indonesia, where the eruption occurred, was the Dutch East Indies at the time, thanks to the Dutch East India Company, the first international corporation, formed, as most empires are, by pirates. They were essentially drug dealers.
In western Switzerland, where our writers would find themselves, an ice dam had formed below a tongue of the Giétro glacier in the Val de Bagnes, creating a lake. This dam would later collapse in 1818 and kill forty people in a flood. But in 1816, it still stood.
This is, overall, an edition of Frankenstein. The other works here are presented largely for their relevance to Frankenstein’s moment in time, but it is a great moment. The other works remain influential and important works—Byron is a magnetic figure in this period and the origin of the modern vampire through his friend, Dr. Polidori’s impression of him in his contribution.1 And of course, this is a continuation if not the consummation of Mary Godwin’s affair with Percy Shelley, who was married at the time to Harriet Westbrook.
Shelley was polyamorous and seemed drawn more to personal advancement than to women from the very beginning. Though he had been born to a high station, Westbrook came from new money which he bled often. He travelled frequently and rarely lived with her except to get her pregnant. During Harriet’s second pregnancy, he met sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin, daughter of author Mary Wollstonecraft and writer William Godwin. Mr. Godwin became a mentor to Shelley. Shelley had admired Godwin’s work as a youth, but admired his teenage daughter more. They soon eloped, taking her cousin Claire Clairmont with them. Rumours swirled that Godwin had sold his daughers to Shelley to pay off debts.
Percy, Mary, and Claire most likely all engaged in sexual relations. Eventually, though, Claire would begin a relationship with Lord Byron. At this point, they all travel together with John Polidori to Lake Geneva, where they would write ghost stories, here in one collection for the first time.
Shelley and Mary returned to England in September 1816, and in early October they heard that Mary's half-sister Fanny Imlay had killed herself. Godwin believed that Fanny had been in love with Shelley, and Shelley himself suffered depression and guilt over her death, writing:
Friend had I known thy secret grief
Should we have parted so.
Harriet, pregnant with a new lover’s child, alone, and in the dark of an Endless Winter, would drown herself in the Serpentine.
And we call Byron the Vampyre.
All this, to say that the young Mary Godwin, witnessing these ambitious, attractive men and their affect on those around them, outdid all of them that Summer before these deaths at depicting the mad results of an ambitious man and the horrors that ensued. There is likely no horror genre without Frankenstein, and the found footage craze of horror film that began in the late 1990s can ultimately trace its heritage back to the "Found Missive" horror of the 19th Century, whose apotheosis is Mary Godwin’s Modern Prometheus.
—DC