These days , damp , showery spells usually instigate us to curl up on the couch and watch over anAmerican Pickersmarathon ( differentiate me that ’s not just me ) . But back in 1816 - also known as " The Year Without a Summer " - the outcome were much different . The summer was showery and unnatural because India ’s Indonesia ’s Mount Tambora ( " Pompeii of the east " ) had latterly erupted , creating a volcanic winter .
Lord Byron and author John William Polidori were staying at a villa near Lake Geneva when Claire Clairmont ( Mary Shelley ’s stepsister ) and Percy and Mary Shelley dropped by to inspect for a few days . Their plans were dampened by the strange summertime , so to keep themselves amused , they acquire turns reading trace storey to each other , admit a Word of God of German tale translated into French calledFantasmagoriana .
As I suppose might happen when you get a mathematical group of blase writers together , they came up with a challenge to compose their own works in a similar vena . The result ? The beginnings of Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein , Polidori’sThe Vampyre(largely thought to be the commencement of the entire genre - you ’re welcome , Stephenie Meyer ) and Byron ’s verse form " The Darkness . "
It did n’t come easy , heed you . Mary once wrote ,
Byron did n’t come much well , at first - he start and stopped a story about a die gentleman who swears to come back after death to visit his friend . Polidori picked up this fragment and ended up turning it intoThe Vampyre . The opus Byron did unravel with - " The Darkness " - has a definite apocalyptic perceptiveness to it and was plain urge on by the summer ’s events , which some people took to be the closing of the world . Of naturally , Byron ’s late divorcement probably was n’t help his temper , either , nor the fact that his house guest , Claire Clairmont , was carrying a girl he did n’t want ( she was deliver in January of the undermentioned class ) .
