Polidori already came from a literary family, members of which had made, and would continue to make, their marks in the field. His father, originally a lawyer, had been a secretary to the famous and infamous writer Vittorio Alfieri; he had also taught Italian in England and translated many literary and critical works. And one of Polidori’s sisters, Frances, would go on to marry another Italian, Gabriele Rossetti. The couple would give birth to a brood of children, one of whom would become known in literary circles as the poetess Christina Rossetti, and another who would make a name as a poet and a painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
When he was recruited for the trip abroad, Polidori also received another cushy assignment: he had been hired by Byron’s publisher, John Murray, to keep a diary, a journal of his travels with Byron. In it, Polidori was to catalog details of what they saw and visited as they crossed the various countries, of the changing landscapes and picturesque rides down rivers and valleys, of the people they encountered, of the details of taking care of Byron’s health, as well as the changing moods of the poet’s capricious nature. Titled “Journal of a Journey Through Flanders,” Polidori’s travelogue was to be published upon his return to London. Few knew he was keeping track of his—and Byron’s—doings, not even Percy Shelley and his new family, who would become subjects of the journal as well.
The journal has had a very convoluted history. It spanned from April 24, 1816, through December 1816, when Polidori abandoned it. It was, and is, an interesting read because Polidori’s diary has remained one of the only written records, albeit in short passages, of the famous ghost story competition that gave birth to Frankenstein, or so Mary Shelley said it did. Polidori began his journaling on the day of their departure from London, keeping if not meticulous notes, at least a somewhat scanty log of his doings and his impressions of Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, and Claire Clairmont, which were not always positive.
But Polidori’s words have to be carefully scrutinized. Upon his death the diary ended up in his sister’s hands. Charlotte Lydia Polidori then set it aside for later scrutiny and did not read it until she was an older woman. What she read scandalized her. Many passages—those that spoke of Byron’s excessive sexual appetite and of her brother’s jaunts to a bordello (which usually ended with a visit from the local police)—she found too “salacious.” They were improper, and she would not have her brother’s name associated with them. So she transcribed the diary onto fresh pages, omitting the more raunchy passages. She then handed this new edition over to her nephew William Michael Rossetti and burned the original diary. Rossetti, who eventually edited Polidori’s diary, assured readers that “the authority is only a shade less safe than that of the original,” though in reality he could not have been sure of Charlotte’s accuracy.
Problems between Byron and Polidori arose right away because Polidori believed he was traveling with Byron as a companion, a friend who was on par with Byron, and not as a doctor. In a letter Polidori sent to his sister, this became painfully obvious when he declared proudly, “I am very pleased with Lord Byron. I am with him on the footing of an equal, everything alike . . . He has not shown any passion; though we have had nothing but a series of missteps that have put me out of temper though they have not ruffled his.”
The cold, misty, and ashy-gray weather as they crossed the channel often caused temper tantrums in the group, and Polidori’s only description of the other passengers on board was to say they “looked dreary.” He had yet to experience the excitement he had envisioned for the journey.
For Byron, the changes of scenery appeared to be doing wonders already, especially in regard to his sexual nature. “As soon as he reached his room,” Polidori commented, “Lord Byron fell like a thunderbolt upon the chambermaid.”
When they reached Switzerland, Lord Byron learned that a note had been left for him at the local post office. It was from Claire, who was writing to tell him that she, along with Mary and Shelley, had already arrived and were staying in the area. She also seemed disturbed that he was not already there and feared he may have lied about coming to Geneva in the hopes of avoiding her. The impassioned letter, Polidori wrote, was “worthy of a novel.” Lord Byron had not planned on seeing Claire while in Switzerland, and he wasn’t pleased that she was there. Though he had initially been charmed by her features, which were bewitching in their exoticism, she was now encumbering him. He was always pestered by English expatriates when he was traveling abroad. It did not matter to him that Claire had been his lover.
The Shelley party had not departed London until May 3, eventually arriving in the Sécheron neighborhood of Geneva nearly two weeks later. They had retraced part of the route they had taken two years earlier, but this time they had a child with them. And as before, Mary was struck by the dullness of the French.
Mary’s and Claire’s lives now revolved around lovers, affairs, children, all of which distracted them from worrying about their sister Fanny Imlay. Quiet and prudish, she had now reached the age of twenty in the dingy Skinner Street household, under the naughty eye and wagging tongue of Mrs. Godwin. Fanny had no romantic entanglement of her own, nor any real prospects; she did not inspire love, lust, or maddening outbursts or passions, and she knew it. Not an intellectual, she received no stimulation from books or translations, nor was she taken to see the electrical shows and lectures on phantasmagoria.
She existed in a sort of limbo, her life standing as still as a murky pond. Far removed from her sisters’ lives on Lake Geneva, she read and reread the letters she received and lived voyeuristically through their adventures, travels, and doings. She often replied to Mary’s letters and asked about the people they were with, most especially Lord Byron, whose reputation she, like all of England, had heard of: “Does he come into your house in a careless friendly dropping in manner,” she asked in a July letter. “I wish to know though not from idle curiosity whether he was capable of acting in the manner that the London scandal-mongers say he did?” Still on the topic of Byron, she said: “I cannot think that from his writings that he can be such a detestable being—Do answer me these questions! For were I to love the poet I should like to respect the man.”
There had been talk of Fanny’s moving to Ireland with her aunts Everina Wollstonecraft and Eliza Bishop—her mother’s sisters—but those two women did not seem willing to take her in. Various reasons were put forth, but the most probable was that they despised William Godwin and did not want to make his life easier, which taking Fanny would have done. But Fanny was the one to suffer. Not that Ireland would have been the perfect situation either: in Dublin, Eliza and Everina ran a school with a strict code of conduct, Eliza teaching the girls and Everina the boys. Fanny’s life there would have been just as glum as it was already at Skinner Street.
Fanny occupied a tricky spot in the household—part mediator and part referee between her sisters and the rest of the family—and the attempts to find balance were trying and tiresome. This also gave Mrs. Godwin a chance to show her petty and vengeful side by often gleefully telling Fanny that her sisters were making fun of her. Unfortunately, Fanny came to believe Mrs. Godwin’s view that her life was going nowhere. In time, Fanny came to think that indeed she had become an object of their mockery, though in reality nothing of that sort had occurred. It was only a matter of time before Mary Wollstonecraft’s melancholy and depression began to show themselves in Fanny.
But Mary, Claire, and Percy did not notice anything wrong with Fanny. Instead, Mary wrote her lengthy letters about the European landscape, and upon arriving at Poligny she included accounts of her pleasant and not-so-pleasant encounters; of cities ablaze with life and grandeur; of lofty and obscure forests populated by the tallest trees ever seen that seemed to guard their own secrets; of a lake so blue that like the tantrums of a child changed its colors at any moment, from cerulean blue, to hazel, to gray, depending on the time of day. “The town is built at the foot of the Jura,” she wrote, “which rises abruptly, from a plain of vast extent. The rocks o
f the mountains overhang the houses.”
One reason they left England was to find more suitable weather for Shelley, and to their unhappiness, spring had not yet arrived on the lake. The villagers told them the season had dawned unusually cold and rainy, which they soon discovered themselves. “As we ascended the mountains,” Mary wrote to Fanny, “the same clouds which rained on us in the vallies poured forth large flakes of snow thick and fast.” The desolation and coldness of the weather seemed to permeate the village and did nothing to aid Mary’s temperament. “Never was a scene more awfully desolate. The trees in these regions are incredibly large, and stand in scattered clumps over the white wilderness; the vast expanse of snow was chequered only by those gigantic pines.”
They scoured the lake region for a place to stay and finally settled on Maison Chapuis, a short walk from Villa Diodati. There, Byron had set up residence in a sprawling estate that was too large for his personal party but large enough to contain his reputation.
The weather followed a certain pattern: it moderated during the daylight hours, while the evenings were punctuated by thunderstorms and lightning. The group took advantage of the morning hours and spent them on the lake. The air was perfumed with the scents of newly bloomed flowers and the still-frigid waters matched the crisp air. Mary soon began to revel in her surroundings and a change occurred in her. “You know that we have just escaped from the gloom of winter and London,” she wrote again to her sister, “and coming to this delightful spot during this divine weather, I feel as happy as a new-fledged bird, and hardly care what twig I fly to, so that I may try my new-found wings. A more experienced bird may be more difficult in its choice of a bower; but in my present temper of mind, the budding flowers, the fresh grass of spring, and the happy creatures about me that live and enjoy the pleasures are quite enough to afford me exquisite delight.”
As the English expatriates settled on the banks of the lake, a peculiar dichotomy soon arose among them. Byron was drawn to Shelley, and the two poets enjoyed spending time together, touring the lake and the region around it, the scattering of villages on its shores, bantering with each other and discussing philosophical subjects. More often than not, Byron expressed his less-than-praising opinions of his fellow Englishmen. He liked stories that let him shock those with a more delicate disposition. Anyone who knew him knew he liked to be scandalous, but others could be surprised by his candor, particularly when he talked about his own love life and the women he had bedded.
According to Claire Clairmont, who spoke of those months on the lake later in life, Byron often talked of his half sister Augusta, detailing the relationship they had enjoyed and that she had given him two children. Though Claire and Mary were stunned, Shelley had already had the experience of reassuring the women that Byron was out to startle them and nothing more. A good example of this was Bryon’s tale of a lover in Constantinople whom he had had killed. As Byron recalled, the young woman had been unfaithful to him and as an act of revenge, he had hired a killer to dispose of her; this hired man had stitched the woman inside a fabric sack, then thrown her into the water and allowed her to drown.
The rest of the group seemed to hover around the two poets. Whenever Polidori tried to inject himself between the two of them—always too eager to have his literary works discussed and to get in Byron’s good graces—he was quickly rebuffed. He became increasingly jealous of Shelley, who he believed had stolen away Byron’s attention. With time on his hands, Polidori often frequented the bordellos and gambling halls that bordered the lake.
Mary, on the other hand, felt abandoned by Shelley and began to spend her time with Polidori, whom she saw as a younger brother, even though he was older. And Claire found that whenever she tried to see Byron, she was derailed by either Shelley or Polidori, one of whom was always in the way. Claire often snuck away from Maison Chapuis at night to meet Byron but came face-to-face with a vigilant Polidori. She eventually came to despise the doctor and had no qualms about expressing those feelings. She tried to convince Byron to dismiss the young doctor, but Byron seemed to take a certain pleasure in her despair. “Pray if you can send M. Polidori either to write another dictionary or to the lady he loves,” Claire wrote Byron in a moment of heat. “I hope this last might be his pillow & then he will go to sleep; for I cannot come at this hour of the night & be seen by him; it is so extremely suspicious.”
The villas and cottages surrounding the lake were occupied by local residents, but also by English expatriates who had heard about Byron’s sexual perversions as well as Shelley’s elopement. Often, while clamoring for tidbits, they directed their expensive telescopes toward the group’s villas, hoping to catch a glimpse of something disreputable going on. On one occasion colorful tablecloths that had been left to dry in the open air were mistaken for the girls’ petticoats. These eavesdroppers buzzed with gossip about the strange and scandalous ordeals taking place. They spun saucy tales to while away the sleepy afternoons, and some of them even reached all the way back to London.
Byron, Shelley, Mary, and Claire were well aware of the rumors being spread, and not surprisingly Byron enjoyed them. Some years later, in a letter Percy Shelley wrote to Countess Guiccioli, Byron’s Venetian lover, he made his true feelings known:
Our dwellings were close together; our mode of life was quiet and retired; it could be impossible to imagine an existence simpler than ours, less calculated to draw down the aspersions cast upon us . . . Both Genevans and English established at Geneva affirmed that we were leading a life of the most unblushing profligacy. They said that we had made a compact together for outraging all held most sacred in human society . . . I will only say that incest, atheism, and many other things equally ridiculous or horrible were imputed on us. The English newspapers were not slow in propagating the scandal, and the notion lent entire faith. Hardly any mode of annoying us was neglected. Persons living on the borders of the lake opposite Lord Byron’s house made use of telescopes to spy out all his movements. An English lady fainted, or pretended to faint, with horror on seeing him enter a saloon. The most outrageous caricatures of him and his friends were circulated; and all this took place in the short period of three months.
During the warmer parts of the days that summer, they boarded sailboats on the lake and tracked the various paths that lined the area, or they took excursions to the neighboring villages. But as the afternoons grew dark and the evenings even darker, the temperatures dipped, the thunderstorms plaguing the Continent due to the volcanic eruption still made themselves heard beyond the mountain ranges, and the yellow streaks of lightning sliced through the inky-black night.
That was when they convened at Villa Diodati around a blazing fire, its pleasing warmth inflaming their own imaginations. The whining of the wind made its way through the forest and the stormy weather pummeled the windowpanes, perpetuating a sense of mystery that directed the topics of their conversations.
“The thunders that visit us are grander and more terrific than I have ever seen before,” Mary wrote to Fanny. “We watch them as they approach from the opposite side of the lake, observing the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heavens, and dart in jagged figures upon the piney heights of Jura . . . One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld. The lake was lit up—the pines of Jura made visible, and all the same illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful over our heads amid the darkness.”
Thunder and lightning were already a part of their lives. Mary had been born during a thunderstorm, and Shelley was already familiar with the attributes of such atmospheric phenomena. Sitting in the shadow of Lake Geneva, they were all aware of Benjamin Franklin’s, Humphry Davy’s, and Luigi Galvani’s works, the scientists’ notions of the spark of life. Viewing and hearing the natural spectacle outside their windows, they could not help but converse about such possibilities, about the notion of reanimating the dead.
In the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, M
ary Shelley wrote in her introduction: “Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of those, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated . . . Perhaps a corpse could be re-animated; galvanism had given token to such things; perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and imbued with vital warmth.”
These words made it appear as if the conversations took place over an extended period of time and only between the two poets. That meant the rest of the group just stood by and listened. Polidori’s diary recounted something different.
In an entry dated June 15, Polidori noted, among other details, “Shelley, etc. came in the evening; talked of my play etc., which all agreed was worth nothing. Afterwards Shelley and I had a conversation about principles—whether man was thought merely an instrument.”
After so many years, is it possible that Mary had simply forgotten about the other two people, Polidori and Claire, involved in the conversation on galvanism and the restoration of the dead, which in turn gave rise to her story? Whether or not the discrepancy occurred unintentionally, it was more likely that Dr. John William Polidori had been the one debating with Percy Shelley, not Lord Byron.
Shelley’s knowledge about science, the occult, and medicine had been gained by reading various texts famously published at the time, but also from personal experience. Following his expulsion from Oxford University, he had spent some months with his cousin Charles Grove attending Joseph Abernathey’s anatomical lectures in London. He had even debated becoming a surgeon. Polidori’s experience with these matters was real and tangible. He had graduated at the top of his class from one of the most distinguished medical schools in Europe: the University of Edinburgh Medical School, where his classes had included “Anatomy, Surgery, The Theory and Practice of Medicine, Chemistry, Botany, Pharmacy, and the related discipline of Materia Medica.”
The Lady and Her Monsters Page 14