1815 1816 is known, in European history, as ‘the year without a summer’. The missing season was caused by the eruption the previous year, far away in Indonesia, of Mount Tambora. It began on 5 April 1815 and climaxed with three massive explosions on 10 April. They hit seven on the Volcanic Explosivity Index – making it the largest such event in a thousand years. Debris in the atmosphere formed a year-long dark mantle over the earth. It meant wonderful sunsets, but obstructed the daily sunlight required for crop ripening. Famine, and bread riots, swept through northern Europe. Switzerland was particularly badly affected.
It happened that a distinguished party of literary people were holidaying in that country in June 1816, at the Villa Diodati alongside Lake Geneva. (The villa had literary associations: Milton once stayed there, which clearly impressed one of the 1816 guests.) They comprised: Lord Byron and his current mistress; Percy Bysshe Shelley and the eighteen-year-old he had left his wife and children for, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (soon to add the surname ‘Shelley’ to that illustrious literary pedigree); and Byron’s personal doctor, John Polidori.
The dismal weather precluded excursions. Confined to the villa, and tiring of the few German ‘tales of terror’ on the library shelves, the company resolved on a competition to see which of them could write the best spine-tingler. Shelley’s spine soon proved inadequate to the task, as an entry in Polidori’s diary, for 18 June, testifies:
L[ord] B[yron] repeated some verses of Coleridge’s Christabel, of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. Threw water in his face, and after gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs S[helley], and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him.
(The relevant lines from ‘Christabel’ describe the witch Geraldine, whom the heroine has rashly invited into her castle:
Beneath the lamp the lady bowed,
And slowly rolled her eyes around;
Then drawing in her breath aloud,
Like one that shuddered, she unbound
The cincture from beneath her breast:
Her silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold! her bosom, and half her side—
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!)
Shelley’s partner Mary, despite her youth, was made of sterner stuff and came up with Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (the tale, when published, had an epigraph from Milton, whose epic Paradise Lost was an acknowledged source). Byron, ever the narcissist, toyed with a blood-sucking, irresistibly handsome, immortal aristocrat. His sketch was picked up by Polidori and used as inspiration for his short story, The Vampyre.
Thus were two of the most profitable franchises in popular fiction (the McDonald’s and Burger King of Horror, one might say) established. It’s an ill wind (or volcano) that blows no literary good. Tambora is popularly known as ‘Frankenstein’s Volcano’.