The Year Without a Summer

No, it’s not 2020.

What a typical 18-year-old does on their summer holidays would not make for very edifying reading. From personal experience it is likely to include a trip to a less-than-reputable European resort town (Magaluf ’07 woohoo!), a little too much time spent in the pub for post A-Level celebrations, and perhaps a brief spell of work experience in an attempt to fend off parental criticism.

Not so for a young woman named Mary Godwin, who, in 1816, spent the summer she was 18 in Switzerland with her boyfriend Percy, stepsister Claire, and pals George and John. Their days of sailing on Lake Geneva and walking its shores were interrupted in June by inclement weather, which forced the group to take up different pursuits inside their temporary home, the Villa Diodati.

It being the early 19th century, they could not distract themselves with the latest Netflix series or the villa’s eclectic library of DVDs. Nor could they even plunge themselves into arguments over Monopoly (a 1935 invention). What they did have, though, was Fantasmagoriana, a French anthology of German ghost stories, which they read to each other to pass the time. The roguish George then suggested they each try their hand at writing their own ghost story (Claire sat out of the competition, maybe she just wanted to do her own thing). Mary struggled initially, being “forced to reply with a mortifying negative” each morning when she was asked by her companions if she’d come up with a story yet.

Finally, though, inspired by Percy and George’s droning on about “the nature of the principle of life” until three in the morning, Mary had a “waking dream” of a “hideous phantasm” that would become the basis of her 1818 masterpiece, Frankenstein.

For clarity, Godwin was Mary Shelley’s maiden name. Percy is Percy Bysshe Shelley (he and Mary were married later in 1816 after the suicide of his first wife, Harriet), and George is Lord Byron. John, meanwhile, is John William Polidori (whose short story ‘The Vampyre’, a precursor to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, also came out of the competition), and Claire is Claire Clairmont, stepsister of Mary, but also a lover of Byron’s (their daughter, Allegra, was born in January 1817).

In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley tells the story in greater detail, including the fact that it was only initially Byron who did any writing on the holiday. But the weather soon changed that. “It proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.” Thus ensued the story-writing competition.

The Byron-Shelley gang weren’t the only ones whose holidays were impacted by bad weather in 1816, later dubbed the Year Without a Summer. The eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, in what is now Indonesia, in April the previous year had a devastating immediate impact, killing around 10,000 people in the vicinity, with tens of thousands more dying from starvation or disease in the aftermath. It was the most powerful volcanic eruption of the 19th century. A witness 10 miles to the south recollected the whole mountain turned to “liquid fire”. The detonation could be heard on the Molucca Islands, nearly 900 miles away. An entire island culture on Sumbawa was wiped out. The volcanic dust blotted out the sun, plunging neighbouring islands into daytime darkness.

And even half the world away, people were not left untouched. The eruption injected a mass of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere (see here for the actual science) which had a major influence on the cold, wet summer in Central and Western Europe in 1816. Basically, the eruption of Mount Tambora is at least partly responsible for Frankenstein, and can thus also take some credit for the multitude of science fiction offerings we have at our disposal over two centuries later.

Some of the best sci-fi stories terrify and unnerve us because the science fiction elements look alarmingly close to being science fact (see 1984, Brave New World, Blade Runner, Black Mirror, and numerous others). This would certainly have been true of Frankenstein at the time of its publication.

In her 1831 introduction, Mary Shelley explains that one of the subjects touched upon by Percy and Byron in their late-night conversations was galvanism, which posited the idea that electrical charges could reanimate dead tissue and potentially restore life. She wrote: “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.” And in his preface for the 1818 edition, Percy wrote: “The event on which this fiction is founded, has been supposed, by Dr Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence.” (Dr Darwin is Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles of evolution fame.)

Given electricity was a new and widely misunderstood phenomenon in the early 1800s, Shelley herself, and many of her contemporary readers, may well have feared a coming age when Victor Frankenstein and his hideous creation manifested in reality. Cue many a sleepless night.

Merely scratching the surface of Frankenstein’s origins uncovers a treasure trove of influence, inspiration, and invention. I haven’t even been able to touch upon the impact of her remarkable parents, radical philosopher William Godwin and feminist trailblazer Mary Wollstonecraft, but this In Our Time episode is not a bad place to start. Most importantly of all, though, the story of how Frankenstein came to be provides incontrovertible proof that, given the right circumstances, even an 18-year-old can be productive on their summer holidays.