The following is an article from Uncle John’s All-Purpose Extra Strength Bathroom Reader.
It was a dark and stormy night... no, it really was. And that was the perfect setting for telling one of the scariest stories of all time. Here's how it happened.
CABIN FEVER
It all started in the summer of 1816. Percy Bysshe Shelley, the famed English poet, was vacationing along the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland with his 18-year-old future wife Mary Wollstonecraft. In adjoining villas were their friends, the poet Lord Byron, and Lord Byron's personal physician Dr. John Polidori. "It was a wet, ungenial summer," Mary Shelley later wrote, and then the rain "confined us for days."
The group passed some of their time reading German horror stories. Then inspired by the tales, Lord Byron announced to the group, "We will each write a ghost story." And with that challenge, two of the most enduring monsters in English literature came into being.
DYNAMIC DUO
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a tale about a mad scientist who assembles a monster out of body parts stolen from cadavers and then brings the monster to life. Polidori, she recounted later, "had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was punished for peeping through a keyhole." Percy Shelley came up with a story "founded on the experiences of his early life" ...and Lord Byron created a story about a vampire.
Wollstonecraft spent the rest of the summer turning her story into a novel-Frankenstein. Lord Byron never did complete his story, but Dr. Polidori was so intrigued by the vampire idea that he scrapped the skull-headed lady and, borrowing from Byron, later wrote The Vampyre, the first vampire novel of any substance to appear in English literature. The Vampyre was published in the 1819 edition of New Monthly Magazine, and earned Polidori £30.
REVENGE!
The Vampyre might have been just another simple retelling of the traditional vampire legends of Eastern Europe, were it not for the fact that Polidori and Lord Byron had once been lovers. Cooped up in the villa in Geneva that summer, they were driving each other crazy. Polidori was jealous of Byron's increasingly close friendship with Percy Shelley, and, perhaps because of this, he decided to make the vampire character a parody of Lord Byron.
The vampires of Eastern European lore were not that different from today's conception of werewolves: They were scary, uncivilized creatures, more animal than human. But Polidori's character was different. His vampire was a nobleman, and an immoral, sinister antihero named Lord Ruthven-not unlike Lord Byron, whose numerous sexual liaisons were the scandal of English society.
The name Ruthven was another dig at Byron. Polidori took the name from Ruthven Glenarvon, the main character of Glenarvon, a popular novel, written by Lady Caroline Lamb, another of Byron's former lovers. Lamb, too, had intended her character to be a satirical slap at Byron.
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It was a dark and stormy night... no, it really was. And that was the perfect setting for telling one of the scariest stories of all time. Here's how it happened.
CABIN FEVER
It all started in the summer of 1816. Percy Bysshe Shelley, the famed English poet, was vacationing along the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland with his 18-year-old future wife Mary Wollstonecraft. In adjoining villas were their friends, the poet Lord Byron, and Lord Byron's personal physician Dr. John Polidori. "It was a wet, ungenial summer," Mary Shelley later wrote, and then the rain "confined us for days."
The group passed some of their time reading German horror stories. Then inspired by the tales, Lord Byron announced to the group, "We will each write a ghost story." And with that challenge, two of the most enduring monsters in English literature came into being.
DYNAMIC DUO
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a tale about a mad scientist who assembles a monster out of body parts stolen from cadavers and then brings the monster to life. Polidori, she recounted later, "had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was punished for peeping through a keyhole." Percy Shelley came up with a story "founded on the experiences of his early life" ...and Lord Byron created a story about a vampire.
Wollstonecraft spent the rest of the summer turning her story into a novel-Frankenstein. Lord Byron never did complete his story, but Dr. Polidori was so intrigued by the vampire idea that he scrapped the skull-headed lady and, borrowing from Byron, later wrote The Vampyre, the first vampire novel of any substance to appear in English literature. The Vampyre was published in the 1819 edition of New Monthly Magazine, and earned Polidori £30.
REVENGE!
The Vampyre might have been just another simple retelling of the traditional vampire legends of Eastern Europe, were it not for the fact that Polidori and Lord Byron had once been lovers. Cooped up in the villa in Geneva that summer, they were driving each other crazy. Polidori was jealous of Byron's increasingly close friendship with Percy Shelley, and, perhaps because of this, he decided to make the vampire character a parody of Lord Byron.
The vampires of Eastern European lore were not that different from today's conception of werewolves: They were scary, uncivilized creatures, more animal than human. But Polidori's character was different. His vampire was a nobleman, and an immoral, sinister antihero named Lord Ruthven-not unlike Lord Byron, whose numerous sexual liaisons were the scandal of English society.
The name Ruthven was another dig at Byron. Polidori took the name from Ruthven Glenarvon, the main character of Glenarvon, a popular novel, written by Lady Caroline Lamb, another of Byron's former lovers. Lamb, too, had intended her character to be a satirical slap at Byron.