How a Volcano Birthed a Monster
How a Volcano Birthed a Monster
Inside the genesis of "Frankenstein," the eruption of Mount Tambora, and the complicated life of Mary Shelley.
‘Twas a dark and rainy afternoon when a group of writers gathered in a holiday home nestled in the Swiss Alps. In a house along the shores of Lake Geneva, what was supposed to be a summer of care-free fun and outdoor excursions had proven miserable, with hardly a day in which the sun could be bothered to poke its crown through the obstinate clouds.
With nothing to do but lounge indoors, one member of the group proposed an idea: they would take inspiration from the inclement weather, and each write a ghost story.
Thus, Frankenstein was born.
A year before and thousands of miles from that Swiss holiday home, on the island of Sumbawa in what is now Indonesia, a sleeping giant woke with a fiery vengeance in April of 1815. Mount Tambora, a volcano that had previously laid dormant for centuries, reached its peak state of eruption on April 10th of that year, with scattered, smaller eruptions occurring over the following months. It was the largest known eruption in recorded history, resulting in a catastrophic climate event.
The aftermath was disastrous for the people of Sumbawa; while numbers aren’t exact, and researchers over the centuries have debated the death toll, conservative estimates suggest that about 10,000 people died from the immediate eruption and another 50,000 in the surrounding area died of disease and famine.
For the rest of the globe, the eruption caused what is known as a “volcanic winter,” when a massive eruption unleashes sulfate into the atmosphere, blocking the sun’s rays and thereby causing global cooling.* The effects on agriculture were, of course, most brutal in Southeast Asia, but the eruption of Mount Tambora was so powerful that it impacted the climate all over the world, resulting in what is known as the Year Without Summer of 1816—just over a year after the initial eruption.
As Gillen D’Arcy Wood notes in Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World, the first person to make the connection between volcanic eruptions and climate disasters was Benjamin Franklin, following the smaller yet still impactful 1783 eruption of Laki in Iceland. However, Franklin’s theory was widely dismissed at the time, which meant that when the Year Without Summer arrived about three decades later, the cause of the climate disaster was unknown to those experiencing it.
In a time when most people were subsistence farmers, a year of cold temperatures and endless rain ruined harvests and plunged communities around the world into famine. For the working classes of Europe, this was particularly devastating, as they had just emerged from the Napoleonic Wars.
In the 1831 revised edition of Frankenstein (the version that your literature professor will assign to you), Mary Shelley notes in her introduction that the summer of 1816 “proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.”
Who was the “us” whom Shelley referenced?
Well, Mary Shelley at the time was still technically Mary Godwin.** Her introduction glosses over the fact that her “husband” Percy Bysshe Shelley was still married to his estranged wife, the poet Harriet Westbrook. Both Percy and Harriet suffered immensely from mental illness, and while they were already separated by the time Percy met Mary, their legal union wouldn’t officially end until Harriet took her life at the end of 1816.
The Romantic poet Percy Shelley was the heir to a baronetcy, and despite his aristocratic upbringing, he held radical views for the time—ranging from atheism to republicanism. He was also deeply suspicious of the institution of marriage. This was rather convenient for Percy, considering that he was a prolific philanderer.
When he met the sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin, Percy was twenty-one years old. He was studying under her father, William Godwin, the influential writer and political philosopher whose equally radical views—particularly his advocating for anarchy—made him a frequent target of Britain’s conservative establishment press. Mary’s mother, none other than the legendary feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died giving birth to Mary.
Mary and Percy fell in love, and much to her father’s dismay, the couple ran away together. (I suppose even William Godwin’s radical views had their limits.) Percy, as I’ve stated, was very much still married, so the “elopement” wasn’t legal. One could write an entire saga on the soap opera that was Mary and Percy’s tumultuous relationship, which included countless affairs (on both sides), illegitimate children, and tragically, several infant deaths. Only one of Mary’s four children survived to adulthood, which caused a great deal of depression in her life and likely contributed to Percy’s chronic mental health struggles.
I bring all of this up because the intense gloominess of Frankenstein makes sense when one considers the unrelenting drama of Mary Shelley’s life. By the time Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley arrived in Lake Geneva in 1816, they had already lost their first child. They were visiting Lord Byron, another famous Romantic poet with a very bad reputation. Accompanying Mary and Percy was their infant son William and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Claremont—who herself had once had an affair with Percy, and was at the time pregnant with Lord Byron’s baby. (See what I mean? Soap opera!) Also present was the writer and Lord Byron’s personal physician John William Polidori, a fifth wheel to the tangled web of lovers.
As the Year Without Summer marched onward with soggy feet, it was Lord Byron who proclaimed, “We will each write a ghost story.” Mary writes in her introduction that “there were four of us,” leaving out her stepsister and her son, perhaps to avoid public speculation regarding illegitimate children. Mary tells us that the group had already been reading ghost stories to pass the time, and she wished to come up with her own tale “to rival those which had excited us to the task.”
After many nights of pondering the assignment, Mary describes herself laying her head on her pillow and entering a liminal space between sleeping and waking:
I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I 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.
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Lord Byron’s proposal that they each write a ghost story proved fruitful for others in attendance as well. Lord Byron produced many poems that summer, including “The Prisoner of Chillon,” and Polidori wrote what may be the first modern vampire tale with his short story, “The Vampyre.” (“The Vampyre” would go on to inspire Bram Stoker’s Dracula.)
But it is Mary Shelley’s brainchild Frankenstein, written when she was only eighteen, that remains the most enduring legacy of that summer on Lake Geneva. What astounds me personally when I revisit Frankenstein is the novel’s prescience, as we now live in a time when scientific advancements have made miracles like organ donation possible, while also posing major ethical challenges from gene editing to artificial intelligence. Mary certainly earned her title as the “mother of science fiction.”
I’m also struck by the extraordinary loneliness of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, cast out by his creator and reviled by all who come across his grotesque existence. When I was in school, we were often taught to analyze the text itself and not dwell on the author’s background. I understand the argument—for the purposes of literary criticism, it can be a slippery slope when one attempts to psychoanalyze an author’s life story and dissect how the events of their past may influence their work. While I may close my eyes and see the cerulean blue of Lake Geneva, a gaggle of Romantics drifting along its shores, and an eighteen-year-old girl among them, her head spinning with ghost stories… At the end of the day, I wasn’t there.
Nevertheless, as a creative writer myself, I know personally how my own life experiences have provided a treasure trove of inspiration for my stories. Mary Shelley’s life, filled with complication and tragedy, seems to mirror the despondency of Frankenstein’s monster. Now that I’m an adult, I can look back on my teenage years and understand how spectacularly lonely it would have been to be an eighteen-year-old girl, already having buried a child, and living in precarious circumstances with an older man of fickle allegiances.
And despite all of that, she bestowed a gift to us in the form a short novel about the dangers of playing God, and the responsibility we owe to our creations. One can only hope that we listen.
*To learn more about the eruption of Mount Tambora, I would recommend Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World by Gillen D’Arcy Wood (Princeton University Press).
**To learn more about the life of Mary Shelley, I would recommend Mary Shelley by Miranda Seymour (Grove Press).
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incredible, incredible read
crossroads gazette always the highlight of my week