Original photo by cineclassico/ Alamy Stock Photo
Difficult times can lead to great art. Case in point: the volcanic explosion that caused a “year without a summer” in 1816 — and inspired the novel Frankenstein. The eruption took place at Indonesia’s Mount Tambora, many thousands of miles away from author Mary Shelley’s home in England. In addition to a harrowing death toll, the April 1815 explosion ejected mass amounts of sulphur dioxide, ash, and dust into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and plunging the global temperature several degrees lower, resulting in the coldest year in well over two centuries. In part because of the volcano, Europe and North America were subjected to unusually cold, wet conditions the following summer, including a “killing frost” in New England and heavy rainfall that may have contributed to Napoleon’s infamous defeat at Waterloo.
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It's a factThe literary world didn’t exactly welcome female authors with open arms in the early 19th century, and Shelley wasn’t alone in initially publishing her book anonymously. Many believed that Percy Shelley was the author of “Frankenstein,” a falsehood Mary later had to correct many times.
So what does that have to do with Shelley’s masterpiece? Then 18 and still going by her maiden name of Godwin, she and her lover/future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, traveled to Lake Geneva in April 1816, a time of extremely gloomy weather. One fateful night that July, the two were with their friend Lord Byron, the infamous poet, when he suggested, “We will each write a ghost story.” Shelley completed hers in just a few days, writing in the introduction to Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus that “a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.” Who knows: If it had been bright and sunny that week, we might never have gotten the endlessly influential 1818 book, which later spawned an assortment of movies, TV shows, plays — and of course, iconic Halloween costumes.
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Mary Shelley’s second novel was called “______.”
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Mary Shelley’s second novel was called “Valperga.”
Shelley claimed the idea for Frankenstein came to her in a waking dream.
After agreeing to Lord Byron’s ghostly prompt, Shelley initially struggled to come up with an idea for her tale. “I busied myself to think of a story,” she later wrote. “‘Have you thought of a story?’ I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.” The idea eventually came to her one sleepless night, when her “imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided [her].” She then saw “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.” Two years later, her book was published, and Mary Shelley would eventually be hailed as the foremother of science fiction.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
