Stormy nights. That’s how Frankenstein came to be

"I had a dream that was not quite a dream. The shining sun had long since gone out, and the stars wandered in the darkness of eternal space, devoid of light and without purpose, whilst the frozen earth swayed, blind and lifeless, in the moonless air; morning came and went without bringing the day, and men, in the terror of this desolation, forgot their passions; whilst their hearts froze in a selfish prayer for light”. Thus begins "Darkness", a poem by Lord Byron from 1816. But this is not merely the fantasy of a Romantic poet. The poem was in fact written during the so-called ‘Year Without a Summer’. It all began on 10 April 1815 on the island of Sumbawa, in what is now Indonesia. Mount Tambora, which stood 4,300 metres tall at the time, gave rise to a spectacular eruption that remains the largest ever recorded since eruption records began. The columns of material ejected by the eruption rose to over 43 km, spewing 100 cubic kilometres of ash, pumice and aerosols into the atmosphere, along with 60 megatonnes of sulphur. Ten thousand inhabitants were killed instantly. The effects of that eruption compounded those of previous eruptions. The consequences in other parts of the world were felt most acutely the following year.

In the eastern United States, a kind of mist shrouded the sky for long periods. Average temperatures fell by at least one degree, with frequent temperature swings and frosts even in summer, causing severe damage to crops. In September of that year, Thomas Jefferson, who had retired to his villa at Monticello, wrote to his friend and colleague Albert Gallatin, the ambassador to Paris: “We have had the most extraordinarily cold and dry year in American history.” Jefferson himself suffered substantial damage to his own crops, forcing him to run up considerable debts. Many rivers were unnavigable. There was snow in New England and Vermont. Flour prices soared. Some families were driven to move to the Midwest.

In Europe, spring was extremely late, and the summer was the coldest on record. But unlike in North America, the main problem was not drought, but rather an abundance of rain. There were snowfalls in June and at the end of August. Almost everywhere, the grape harvest produced ‘undrinkable’ wines; the bread was damp and sticky. In many parts of Europe, there were famine-related problems, partly due to the difficulty of transporting goods along the rivers because of the flooding. There were epidemics of typhoid and other diseases. The shortage of food and fodder led to the slaughter of vast numbers of pigs, and in many areas people were reduced to eating cats and moss. Switzerland, where the death rate rose by 50 per cent, was among the hardest-hit areas. “It is terrifying,” wrote a priest from Glarus, “to see these walking skeletons devouring the most repulsive foods with such greed: the carcasses of livestock, stinking nettles, and to watch them fighting with animals over the scraps.” Various theories were put forward regarding the possible causes of such an anomalous season. One concerned the presence of sunspots, visible even to the naked eye at various times during the summer. Others pointed the finger at the persistent presence of vast masses of ice in the lakes and in the northern Atlantic. A third explanation focused on electrical anomalies in the atmosphere, going so far as to blame “Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rods for disrupting the natural flow of electricity”. The influence of the moon and increasing deforestation were also cited.

Today, the most widely accepted explanations focus on the role of the massive eruption of Mount Tambora and other volcanic eruptions, perhaps in conjunction with other factors. This explanation is supported by numerous contemporary accounts referring to a thick, persistent haze that often obscured the sun’s rays and to dusty, unbreathable air. Some paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and Joseph William Turner, produced during that period, seem to evoke those gloomy skies or those streaked with bright light.

The hardships of that bleak season also inspired a unique invention in the field of transport. The German baron and inventor Karl Drais was accustomed to travelling by horse-drawn carriage in Baden, but the food shortage had decimated the animals, which were exhausted by hunger, often forcing their owners to slaughter them. Drais thus developed what is considered the first two-wheeled vehicle for personal transport: a sort of pioneering pedal-less bicycle that was propelled by the feet and steered by manoeuvring the front wheel, which he named the Laufmaschine, or ‘running machine’. Drais was able to test his invention for the first time in June of the following year, when he set off from his home in Mannheim for a ride in the surrounding area, covering around seven kilometres in an hour. A month later, he publicly announced that he would travel from Mannheim to Kehl in under four hours, covering over seventy kilometres – a feat confirmed by the local police. Drais saw his invention as an efficient and economical means of transport compared to horse-drawn vehicles, but he encountered considerable difficulties: poor roads, worn-out shoe soles and falls. It would be another seventy years before the first bicycle models appeared. Today, a version of the so-called ‘draisina’ is once again being used as a means of teaching children to ride a bicycle.

But the most important and influential invention of that summer was undoubtedly in the literary sphere. To tell its story, we must return to Byron and Switzerland. In the spring of 1816, Lord Byron was going through an extremely difficult period: he was overwhelmed by debt and still reeling from the breakdown of his marriage. To escape his creditors, he set off by carriage for Switzerland with his doctor and friend John Polidori. The journey was slow and arduous due to numerous breakdowns of the carriage. On arrival, the two found three other English travellers waiting for them. The first was the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was also fleeing financial and family problems. Two years earlier, Shelley had abandoned his wife and daughter to run off with the sixteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Their relationship had produced a daughter who died in infancy, and then a son, William. The three set off with her half-sister, the eighteen-year-old Claire Clairmont. She was expecting a child following a relationship with Byron, and had persuaded Shelley and Godwin to take her with them, in the hope of seeing him again. The two groups met on the shores of Lake Geneva. Shelley settled at Maison Chapuis in Cologny, whilst Byron and Polidori rented the elegant Villa Diodati. During that spring, which would soon give way to a summer without summer, that unusual group went on several excursions on the lake and into the mountains, where they witnessed the devastating consequences of the climatic disturbances. ‘[The children] looked extraordinarily deformed and ill. Most of them were hunchbacked and had swollen throats.” But the adverse weather conditions forced them for the most part to stay indoors, discussing, amongst other things, the latest developments in philosophy and science. On some evenings, they were joined by the writer Matthew Lewis, author of the highly successful yet scandalous Gothic novel "The Monk" (1796).

On 1 June 1816, Mary wrote in a letter to Fanny Imlay: “Almost incessant rain is forcing us to stay indoors for the most part. One night we were treated to a storm more spectacular than any I had ever seen. The lake lit up – the pines of the Jura became visible, and the whole scene was illuminated for an instant, when immediately afterwards a pitch-black darkness descended, and thunder cracked with terrifying roars above our heads, amidst that darkness”. It was Byron, on 16 June 1816, who suggested a peculiar challenge to keep us occupied in those difficult circumstances: to write the most terrifying ghost story one could imagine. Byron sketched out a vampire story, though he never finished it. Polidori drew inspiration from it for a short story entitled "The Vampyre" (published in 1819), whose aristocratic protagonist bears more than a passing resemblance to Byron himself (so much so that it was attributed to him). The story is considered the first example of prose on the vampire theme, predating Bram Stoker’s far more famous "Dracula" (1897) by almost a century. Byron also wrote a number of poems, including the aforementioned "Darkness".

Mary Godwin initially underestimated Byron’s challenge. But two days later, in the midst of another stormy night, they all found themselves gathered together, reading Coleridge’s verses by candlelight. It was on that night, according to some accounts, that Mary conceived the central idea for her story.

It was, in fact, a violent storm that marked a turning point in Victor Frankenstein’s life. “When I was about fifteen years old, we witnessed a most violent and terrible storm. It came from behind the Jura Mountains, and the thunder immediately burst forth with a terrifying roar from various parts of the sky. For as long as the storm lasted, I stood watching it with curiosity and delight. As I stood in the doorway, I suddenly saw a streak of fire burst forth from an old and beautiful oak tree standing about twenty yards from our house; and as soon as the dazzling light faded, the oak had vanished, leaving only a dry stump. When we went to look the following day, we found the tree destroyed in a most peculiar manner. It had not been shattered by the impact, but had been entirely reduced to splinters of wood. I had never seen anything so thoroughly destroyed. Before this incident, I was not unaware of the most obvious laws of electricity. On this occasion, a man of great learning in natural philosophy was with us; stirred by this catastrophe, he launched into an explanation of a theory concerning electricity and galvanism, which was new and surprising to me.” Thus, ‘in the magnificent energy and swiftness of the storm’ (as Percy Shelley would later put it), the ‘modern Prometheus’ was born – the man who has been described as ‘the anti-superhero of modernity’, the scientific genius who brings a terrifying monster to life.

Although references to her stay in Switzerland in 1816 recur in various passages, Mary Shelley wrote much of the novel after returning to England, in Bath, and after marrying the poet whose wife had taken her own life. On New Year’s Day 1818, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus" was published anonymously in a print run of five hundred copies, printed by a London publisher on cheap paper, with a preface by Percy Shelley and a dedication to Mary’s father, William Godwin (hence the misconception that the poet was the actual author). It was not until four years later, when the novel had already enjoyed some success and a first stage adaptation, that the author decided to publish a new version under her own name. In 1831, in the third edition, she cited among her sources of inspiration – in addition to the evenings and discussions during her stay in Switzerland – her own childhood in Scotland, the theories of galvanism, the experiments of Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of the more famous Charles) and certain nightmares that had tormented her.

Frankenstein also made his cinematic debut in 1910, in a pioneering film produced by Thomas Edison. But it was James Whale’s hugely successful 1931 film starring Boris Karloff that definitively established Frankenstein’s creature as one of the icons of popular culture, whilst also cementing the shift in the name from the scientist to his creation. Mel Brooks’ 1974 parody, "Young Frankenstein" (Frankenstein Jr.), is also unforgettable.

It did not end well – nor could it have ended well – for the protagonists of that cursed summer. Polidori took his own life in 1821; Percy Shelley drowned the following year; Byron died after a severe fever in 1824. Of Mary Shelley’s four children, only one survived. The author of Frankenstein died in 1851 at the age of fifty-three. In the preface to the 1831 edition of the novel, recalling those weeks of 1816, she wrote: "And now, once again, I bid farewell to my monstrous offspring, wishing it well as it goes out into the world and thrives. I feel a deep affection for it, for it was conceived in happy days, when death and sorrow were merely words that found no true echo in my heart. Its pages bring to mind so many walks, so many carriage rides and so many conversations, when I was not alone.”