It Was a Dark and Stormy… Summer by Witch Hydra M. Star

Any fan or author of Gothic fiction worth their salt will tell you that setting is immensely important to a story. The setting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is no exception. Most of us have no problem picturing the Frankenstein castle or the good doctor’s lab, but what of the setting in which the book was written? In the case of Frankenstein this setting might be just as important as any of the backdrops from the story itself.

In the summer of 1816, Mary Godwin (soon to be Shelley) was 18-years-old and traveling through Europe for the second time with her future husband Percy Shelley. The pair had begun their romance and gone on their first tour of Europe in 1814, but had been unable to marry owing to the fact that Percy was already married. They would, however, finally marry in late 1816, after Percy’s first wife back in London drowned herself in the Serpentine river. This was all quite scandalous by 19th century standards—or even the standards of today—and the pair did face some ostracism as well as other hardships, including the death of a daughter that was born to them prematurely and financial woes, but they were despite their debt and money troubles still members of the privileged class of society with writing in their blood. Percy was the poet son of nobility. Mary was the daughter of noted feminist philosopher, educator, and writer Mary Wollstonecraft and her journalist husband William Godwin. The lovers were also close friends and companions of the infamous Lord Byron. It was at his Villa Diodati near Geneva, in the company of Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont, who was both Mary’s step-sister and Lord Byron’s lover at the time, that the couple passed the summer of 1816.

Surrounded as she were by talented peers, all was not happy and bright that summer in Switzerland. In fact, things were not happy or bright nearly anywhere that cold and wet summer. There was quite literally a much bigger, dark cloud than anything Mary Godwin counted among her recent or future personal tragedies hanging over the whole of the Earth during that summer. It wasn’t understood or even recognized until much later, but in 1816 Earth was towards the end of what would later be called a “Little Ice Age”, a period of global cooling that had started in the 1300s and would not end until about 1850.

Of course, by the early 1800s, when the Mary and Percy embarked on their grand tour of Europe, humanity had adjusted to this climate change and weather patterns were fairly stable and predictable. However, that year had more working against it than just a miniature ice age. Known today as the Year Without a Summer, it was actually a volcanic winter that was causing the strange weather that was being seen around the world. This particular volcanic winter had been triggered by the massive eruption in 1815 of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia. It was one of many eruptions in the area that spanned back nearly a decade and lasted for days, killing thousands of locals and devastating the island’s ecology. The ash and dust that were deposited into the atmosphere caused the area around the volcano to become dark for three days and eventually resulted in a drop in the already lowered average global temperatures of an additional 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F). This drop in temperatures might not seem so great, but averages can be deceptive.

There were wild fluctuations in both the temperature and weather that year. In some areas of the United States that summer the temperatures dropped to freezing, with snow fall and frost, only to then become unseasonably warm a short time later and then back again. In Europe, in addition to the cold, they got a lot rain. This shift in the weather caused crop failures throughout the Northern Hemisphere that resulted in the worst famines of the 19th century. All of this caused food prices to skyrocket. Citizens began to demonstrate in front of grain markets and bakeries and there were riots throughout many major European cities. People were hungry, upset, and in some cases displaced. The government of Switzerland issued an advisory to the public regarding which wild plants could safely be eaten and which were poisonous.

At the Villa Diodati things were not so dire. The future Mrs. Shelley and the other companions of Lord Byron weren’t so much worried about where their next meal would be coming from as they were a bit put out by all the rain that was keeping them indoors and, as tends to happen in such weather, a sort of melancholic mood overtook the group of friends. In an attempt to break this mood, or perhaps to put it towards productive use, Lord Byron issued his now famous challenge to them all that they should each write a ghost story. It was a challenge that was taken up by all of them in earnest.

Percy Shelley started to write something about his early life, John William Polidori conceived of a tale about a skull-headed lady, while Byron only wrote a fragment of a story about a gentleman traveling through Europe before giving up on the challenge. Polidori would later take up and expand on Byron’s fragment. The resulting novella, called The Vampyre, though largely forgotten today by mainstream culture would introduce British readers to the vampire. It is unknown what, if anything, Claire Clairmont wrote. Mary would later exclude her step-sister from her retelling of the events of that summer, likely due to the tragic results of Claire and Byron’s affair. Mary, herself, struggled to even get started on her story and so it seemed for a time that the writing challenge would be a bust, with the poets having mostly lost interest and Lord Byron returning to his work on the final part of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

The accounts of what happened next conflict. At some point a conversation was had between two of the men regarding physicians of the time that were experimenting with electricity upon dead things with the idea of restoring some semblance of life. This was a more widespread and common practice during the early years of the 19th century than one might suspect. So much so, that there is some debate as to which of these physicians’ experiments were discussed at the Villa Diodati in 1816, though Mary herself sited Dr. Erasmus Darwin and his work in this area as the subject of interest to her and her friends.

Whichever man’s work it was that was discussed that summer it was after this talk of partially reanimating the dead that Mary went to bed and dreamed of the infusing with life that which was lifeless and created by scientific means. When she awoke it was with the idea to write a story just as frightful as this dream had been to her, which was so deeply frightful and unsettling to her because, “Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

Eventually, the sun and summer returned to Europe. The Shelleys married, but never quite got a happily ever after. In fact, what they got were more dead children, a drowning, and a brain tumor, but tragedy breeds better monsters and it was out of this environment that one of the most iconic monsters of all time was born, because Mary wrote her dream. She became the creator of a creator that mocked the Creator… and we love her for it.

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