The Vacation That Reshaped Pop Culture
This article first appeared in the July 2026 edition of our email newsletter.
The year: 1816. The night: dark and stormy. The players: Two illustrious poets, two wild young women with more raging emotions than they know what to do with, and a tortured physician along for the ride.
Most people have at least heard of Mary Shelley’s sci-fi-horror masterpiece Frankenstein. But not everyone knows that the story of its conception—along with that of John Polidori’s “The Vampire,” the spiritual predecessor to works like “Carmilla” and Dracula, is just as thrilling as any novel.
In the summer of 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, her married lover Percy Shelley, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont joined Claire’s lover Lord Byron and his physician John Polidori in a rented lake house in Switzerland. Despite being the least-canonized figure of this literary movement, Claire was the one the most responsible for this group outing; she wanted to rekindle her dying romance with Byron, who had, at their last meeting, left her pregnant.
Perhaps bringing her sister and her boyfriend along made the whole event feel like a casual gathering of friends. After all, a lady can’t appear too desperate.
The arrival of a group of young, beautiful people at a secluded lake house reads like the opening to a blood-soaked teenage slasher film. But these were no ordinary friends, and no ordinary summer. The recent volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on a remote Dutch island led to unusual weather patterns across Europe, and so instead of sunning themselves on the lakeside, the group found themselves trapped indoors by unseasonal cold, thunder, and rain.
After a brief rustle of masculine feathers, Percy Shelley and Byron developed a strong friendship. Along with the sisters, they spent the evening discussing art and science, drinking wine, and giving Gatsby et al. a run for their money. But what about Polidori?
John Polidori, younger than both men and brought along for his medical background, was a man of many secrets—including an illicit publishing deal and a deep, unrequited devotion.
The first has been proven and recorded: Polidori kept a hidden notebook which he used to document Lord Byron’s madcap misadventures, and allegedly accepted £500 to hand it over.
The second has been subject to books’ worth of speculation and conjecture. It was pretty clear Polidori was hopelessly in love with someone. But who? Scholars generally fall into three camps:
Mary Shelley, a beautiful and vivacious teenager who was completely unaware of the shy medic’s attentions.
Lord Byron, who was Polidori’s employer and secret lover.
Lord Byron, who was both extremely heterosexual and extremely sadistic, and who took a perverse pleasure from tormenting Polidori whenever possible.
In this writer’s opinion, #3 is the most likely theory. Polidori never married, and even considered a career at the altar before moving onto medicine. But whether Polidori was in love with Byron or simply fascinated by him, Byron’s mesmerising influence was undeniable. There was certainly a tangled love and hatred there, which emerged most famously in Polidori’s Gothic novelette “The Vampire.”
But wait! We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s rewind back to that fateful summer of 1816.
Unable to enjoy the pleasures of the great outdoors, Byron suggested a game: each of them would come up with a ghost story, and compete to see who could write the best one. They brainstormed ideas over the next few days. Hopes were highest, of course, for Byron and Shelley—both accomplished poets, well respected in their fields. Maybe it was that expectation that held them back. In the end, each discarded their half-finished ghost story.
Sixteen-year-old Mary, overflowing with complicated teenage feelings and dramas of the heart, wrote a sweet little story about a man and his creation. She called it Frankenstein.
Most people today know the name “Frankenstein”, even if they’ve never read the novel or seen any of the film adaptations. Hollywood’s visual archetype has become ubiquitous. It doesn’t really matter that the original figure from the novel wasn’t much of a monster at all—the story has grown, shifted, metamorphosed into something that, much like Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, has taken on a life of its own.
John Polidori’s late night horror story has done something similar—changed and adapted with the passage of time. The difference is that apart from scholars and the most die-hard horror fans, few people have even heard of Polidori or his work.
Driven by love, anger, revenge, or—probably—a combination of all three, Polidori transposed Lord Byron’s shady behavior onto the page in the guise of Lord Ruthven, a mysterious nobleman with a dark secret. Much like Byron, Ruthven had a distasteful habit of seducing and using up beautiful young women, leaving them hollow shells of their former selves (a character trait that likely would have resonated with one among the party in particular: the lovelorn Claire Clairmont).
Although Lord Ruthven is a familiar archetype, even a stock character, to today’s audiences, in Polidori’s time he was groundbreaking. The folkloric vampires known to eastern European rural communities weren’t suave, well-endowed bachelors. They were fresh corpses bloated with the blood of the innocent, more Creature From the Black Lagoon than Lestat. Polidori’s Ruthven gave birth to a figure scholars today call “the Byronic Vampire”: elegant, eloquent, tortured, emulating humanity while forever remaining outside of it.
While Polidori’s novelette was, at its heart, a piece of revenge fanfiction used to claw back some power in an unbalanced relationship, Mary Godwin’s story—which she later expanded into a novel and released under her married name, Shelley—was about a much bigger question: what is humanity capable of?
The “haunted summer” took place at the threshold of two eras: the Enlightenment and the Romantic era. Some historians extend the Enlightenment up to 1820, while others establish the Romantic era as early as 1789. This means that our group of literary heroes were coming of age at the very center of the Venn diagram where reason and romanticism overlap. Science was a source of both excitement and suspicion, its possibilities both thrilling and frightening. It’s from this dichotomy that Frankenstein was born.
The summer of 1816 truly changed the course of pop culture history. Only a seemingly impossible confluence of events brought us the horror genre we now know: a volcanic eruption, an unexpected pregnancy, and a simple challenge between great minds. Had even one of these elements not occurred, our literary landscape would look very different.
So why not invite your friends over for a storytelling challenge of your own? You just might go down in history.
