What really happened at Villa Diodati that fateful summer of 1816?

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.