Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was first published 200 years ago.
IT WAS, quite literally, a dark and stormy night. The volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in faraway Indonesia had plunged Europe beneath unceasing cloud; 1816 was known as “the year without a summer”. Rain was falling on the shore of Lake Geneva as, on an evening in mid-June, five young people gathered in a swanky villa for a ghost-story competition.
The host was Lord Byron, at 28 already a jaded superstar, who was dodging a scandal in England. With him was John Polidori, a doctor of 20, one of those ambiguous retainers attracted by fame. That night they were joined for dinner by a trio of English runaways. They were Percy Bysshe Shelley, a 23-year-old poet of whom the public had then barely heard; his girlfriend Mary Godwin, who, though only 18 and not yet his wife, had by then given birth to two of his children (one of whom had died); and Mary’s stepsister Claire Claremont, also 18, who had been sleeping with Byron and probably with Shelley too.
The contest yielded two ideas that became gothic classics. One was Polidori’s “The Vampyre”, originally intended as a queasy satire on Byron and the bloodsucking nature of celebrity. The other, infinitely more famous outcome was Mary’s tale of a scientist who confects a humanoid out of body parts. During the lakeside competition she felt inhibited by the male poseurs. But she had staying power. In the following weeks her story grew into “Frankenstein”, which was first published two centuries ago, in 1818.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is not buried in Highgate and Elizabeth Siddal is. In my version of the gruesome exhumation of Elizabeth Siddal, there is a visual reference to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s tombstone and possibly a verbal reference to the grave digging in “Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus.”