Buzz
Nowadays, wet, dreary weather often makes us want to lounge on the sofa and binge-watch shows like American Pickers (I can't be the only one). However, in 1816, famously called "The Year Without a Summer," the outcome was entirely different. The unusual weather was caused by the massive eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, often referred to as the "Pompeii of the East," which triggered a volcanic winter.
Lord Byron and author John William Polidori were residing in a villa close to Lake Geneva when Claire Clairmont (Mary Shelley's stepsister) and Percy and Mary Shelley paid them a visit. The bizarre summer weather disrupted their plans, so to entertain themselves, they took turns reading ghost stories, including a collection of German tales translated into French titled Fantasmagoriana.
As often happens when creative minds gather, they decided to challenge each other to write their own stories in a similar style. This friendly competition led to the inception of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Polidori's The Vampyre (widely considered the foundation of the vampire genre - thank you, Stephenie Meyer), and Byron's haunting poem "The Darkness."
It wasn’t an effortless process, of course. Mary once reflected,
"I pondered and thought—fruitlessly. I experienced that frustrating creative block, the bane of every writer, when your mind offers nothing but emptiness in response to your desperate calls for inspiration. Each morning, I was asked, 'Have you come up with a story yet?' And each morning, I had to shamefully admit I had not."
Byron didn’t have an easier time initially—he began a tale about a dying man who vows to return from the grave to haunt his friend but abandoned it. Polidori later took this idea and transformed it into The Vampyre. The work Byron did complete—"The Darkness"—carries a distinctly apocalyptic tone, clearly influenced by the eerie summer events that many believed signaled the end of the world. Byron’s recent divorce and the added stress of Claire Clairmont, his houseguest, expecting a child he didn’t desire (born the following January) likely didn’t improve his disposition.
