Chasing the Ghost of Frankenstein

In my recent research into the beginnings of love for modern ghost tales I hit upon the story surrounding the birth of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein".
Here we have the cauldron that conjured and stirred the great ghostly stories of our time.
The night and circumstances themselves would make a brilliant story!

                                                                                                  Frankenstein (courtesy wikipedia.org)


The circumstances that gave birth to Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) read like something from a Gothic story in themselves. Mary’s unconventional life up to the summer of 1816 (when she was still only 18), along with the company in which she found herself in June of that year - and even the unusual weather conditions at the time - all contributed to the book’s genesis. 
The vital spark that gave the novel life however was Lord Byron’s suggestion one evening at the Villa Diodati, as candlelight flickered within the house and lightning flashed across the surface of the lake outside, that those present should turn their hands to the writing of ghost stories. It was a casual ploy to while away a few hours in an atmosphere of delicious fear, but it resulted in two iconic tales: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a story of scientific transgression and a cautionary warning about the need to take responsibility for one’s actions; and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, a tale which influenced Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula.

                                                                                          Mary Shelly ( courtesy biography.com)

The weather in the summer of 1816 was memorable for all the wrong reasons. The eruption of Mount Tamboro in Indonesia in April 1815 sent clouds of volcanic ash billowing into the upper atmosphere. The sun was obscured; levels of rainfall increased and temperatures fell. 

The summer of the following year was thus dismal and damp, with low temperatures and torrential rain causing disastrous crop failures throughout North America, Europe and Asia. For many living on the other side of the world to the eruption, the reason for the disturbances in the weather would have been a mystery, but one that lent a sinister and perhaps even a supernatural quality to the need to light candles at midday as darkness descended, and the sight of birds settling down to roost at noon. 

The discovery by scientists of large dark spots on the sun in the same year added to the growing sense of unease and impending doom, as reflected in Lord Byron’s apocalyptic poem Darkness, written in Geneva in July 1816. Here are the first few lines...

Darkness

By Lord Byron (George Gordon)

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread

Of this their desolation; and all hearts

Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:

‘The year without a summer’, as 1816 became known, provided the perfect backdrop to the telling of bleak, macabre and doom-laden Gothic tales and it seems that from this point the rest of the world became compulsively drawn to the tar side of what men and women could conjure in their minds.

Certainly Frankenstein gave birth to all sorts of creatures and unnatural forces that captured people's imaginations and the delight of losing oneself in this unreal world lead to the Gothic undertones that were so prevalent during Victorian England and their obsession with death.

                                                                                           Lord Byron (courtesy theguardian.com)