Section V: The Age of Revolutions Sheltering in Place with Mary Shelley
Dr. Roberta Barker, Associate Professor of Theatre; Assistant Dean Academic of FASS, Dalhousie
The “year without a summer” proved that sheltering in place can result in tremendous creativity: many great poems and not one but two novels, Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre, were begun at Villa Diodati that year.
“In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation.” - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Chapter IV
Tamboro, cold rain fell all year long as the sun was obscured by clouds of volcanic ash. Global disaster ensued. Crops failed and most of the agricultural work force went jobless, with many dying of disease or starvation. For the privileged young people hunkered down at Villa Diodati, these dire economic threats remained relatively distant. Still, the rain and cold kept them locked together indoors—and locked in their own inner turmoil. Mary and Percy’s first daughter had died the previous spring after only a few weeks of life, plunging Mary into deep sadness. Byron and Claire Clairemont began an affair, but he did not return her passionate love for him; she was left pregnant and in crisis, while he too sank into depression. At about the same time as Mary began writing Frankenstein, Byron wrote a poem called “Darkness” that evokes the gloom of the summer-without-summer:
One of the many remarkable things about Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus is that it was begun while its author was more or less sheltering in place. Along with her lover (and later husband), the poet Percy Shelley, the eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) spent the summer of 1816 by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. They were joined by Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairemont; the most celebrated poet and ‘bad boy’ of the Romantic era, Lord Byron; and Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori. It should have been a glorious summer holiday with a group of glamorous and gifted young people, but natural catastrophe intervened. Thanks to the eruption of Mount Tamboro in Indonesia in April 1815, 1816 came to be known as “the year without a summer.” Even in Europe, halfway around the world from Mount
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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
