Lord Byron

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June 16, 1816 – A party at the Villa Diodati inspires Mary Shelley to write “Frankenstein”

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It must have been some party. George, Lord Byron was the host, and his guests were the recently married Percy and Mary Shelley, Dr John Polidori and Claire Clairmont (Byron’s lover and Mary’s step-sister). It was the summer of 1816, or should have been: 1816 is sometimes called ‘the year without a summer’, so gloomy was the weather. In this mood of darkness and gloom, Byron read aloud from one of his works, Fantasmagoriana, and challenged them all to write something in a similar vein.

Byron himself wrote the poem Darkness in response to his challenge; Polidori wrote The Vampyre, which is largely forgotten today but was a bestseller in the 19th century, and influenced Stoker’s Dracula greatly. Finally, Mary Shelley wrote the first parts of what is often considered to be the first modern science fiction novel: Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.

The party thus set a creative standard to which all subsequent goth parties would aspire, and few if any would reach.

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April 19, 1824 — Lord Byron dies

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George Gordon Byron, the 6th Baron Byron, was one of the greatest of the Romantic poets, responsible for such works as Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the short lyric “She Walks in Beauty.” He was only 36 when he died, although that probably came as little surprise to those who knew him by his “mad, bad and dangerous to know” reputation – think of him as an 18th century Jim Morrison and you won’t be too far wide of the mark.

A restless man, in the months before his death Byron had cast his lot with the Greek side in their War of Independence. But he saw no combat in his time with them. Before Byron could reach the front, he was struck ill, and his condition only worsened when the doctors treated him with bloodletting, which weakened him further and led to an infection. He developed a terrible fever which quickly led to his death on April 19, 1824, in Missolonghi, Greece, but his body was then transported back to England, and the Baron was buried at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.