What really happened at
Villa Diodati that fateful summer of 1816?
The summer residence of Lord Byron in 1816 was the Villa
Diodati, a manor house close to the shores of Lake Geneva. He invited Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin (Mary Shelley), Percy Shelley, John Polidori (his doctor) and others to
come and hang out. From all accounts, a lot of sex, drugs, talking and writing
went down.
1816 was known as the year without a summer because there
had been a volcanic eruption in Indonesia and the resulting ash in the
atmosphere affected the temperature and light conditions – making for spooky
conditions – very gothic indeed. Interestingly, the weather caused major crop
failures and things got pretty tense – there was a social emergency of sort and
people were rioting. This inspired Byron to write "Darkness". The
poem describes a time when the “sun itself has grown dark”, and people regress
to savage-like behaviour.
So because the weather was so dire, Byron and his
mates couldn’t really hang out outside so they holed up and wrote.
One night in June, so the story goes, after everyone
had been reading horror stories aloud (they were into séances too), Byron
challenged his company to all come up with a horror story of their own. Mary
Shelley started writing (what would later become) Frankenstein and John Polidori wrote The Vampyre, the first English story in the vampire
genre. This was particularly culturally significant because it transformed the
ugly vampire of Eastern European folklore into the cool sexy aristocratic dude
of modern times.
Byron was known as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”
and certainly that summer was pretty debauched.
