The Year Without Summer (14 page)

Swiss almanacs predicted a wet, stormy summer, and to Mary Godwin’s dismay, they were
right. By the middle of June, Mary and Percy Shelley had settled into their château,
the Maison Chapuis, in Cologny, on the southern edge of Lake Geneva. Her infrequent
forays into Geneva left her in a sullen mood. There was nothing in that city, Mary
wrote to a friend, “that can repay you for the trouble of walking over its rough stones.
The houses are high, the streets narrow, many of them on the ascent, and no public
building of any beauty to attract your eye, or any architecture to gratify your taste.”
A high wall with three gates surrounded the town, she added, and each evening promptly
at ten o’clock the town authorities locked the gates. Shelley seemed equally unimpressed.
“Geneva is far from interesting, & is a place, which for the sake of scenery I should
never have made my habitation,” he decided.

Mary preferred to spend hours sailing with Shelley on the lake (Chapuis had its own
private harbor) when the weather permitted, particularly in the evenings. As the days
passed, however, she found herself spending less time with her lover. Percy had met
Lord Byron, and the two men at once struck up an intimate friendship.

George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron, was undoubtedly the most famous and controversial
celebrity in Britain in 1816. Having grown up in modest circumstances in Aberdeen,
Scotland, he inherited at the age of ten the estates and title of his great uncle.
The family fortune enabled him to attend Harrow and Cambridge, where he commenced
the dissolute lifestyle that earned him as much notoriety as his poetry. Byron published
his first poems in 1807, at the age of nineteen, and cemented his literary reputation
with the publication of the semiautobiographical “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” five
years later. By that time he had completed a series of romantic affairs with older
married women (including Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford) and the occasional distant
relative. Meanwhile, his bank funds steadily diminished, despite the fact that even
his less inspired works sold thousands of copies as soon as they were published.

Partly to restore his finances, Byron proposed in 1812 to Annabella Milbanke, the
twenty-year-old daughter of a wealthy landowner. Self-absorbed, chilly, and entirely
devoid of any sense of humor, Milbanke initially rejected Byron. Two years later,
she accepted his renewed offer, despite the fact that he proposed by letter rather
than in person. By then Byron was drinking heavily, working only desultorily (and
often in the early hours of morning), and sinking more deeply into debt. And he had
begun to spend a great deal of time with his half sister, Augusta Leigh. The daughter
of Byron’s father by a previous marriage, Augusta was wed to a cousin who preferred
to spend his time at the racetrack. She and Byron found themselves quite compatible—Augusta,
too, preferred pleasure to the dictates of conventional morality—and almost surely
became lovers.

Despite this increasingly close relationship—or perhaps because of it, given Byron’s
highly developed sense of guilt and the fact that he always referred to Augusta as
his sister—Byron and Annabella married on January 2, 1815. Their honeymoon was a nightmare.
Annabella later claimed that as they drove away from the church, Byron confessed that
the sound of wedding bells horrified him; that evening, she recalled, “he asked me
with an appearance of aversion, if I meant to sleep in the same bed with him—said
that he hated sleeping with any woman, but I might do as I chose. He told me insultingly
that ‘one animal of the kind was as good to him as another’ provided she was young—and
that with men, this was not any proof of attachment.” Unable to sleep, Byron allegedly
spent the evening pacing up and down the corridors outside their hotel room, carrying
loaded pistols in his hands.

Annabella hoped that she could “save” Byron, but he grew increasingly bored and depressed,
and irritated with his wife. Five weeks after their daughter, Augusta, was born on
December 10, 1815, Annabella left Byron to return to her parents. In February 1816,
she informed her husband that she wanted a divorce. Her petition for a legal separation
cited both Byron’s alleged incest, which was not a crime in Britain at the time, and
sodomy, which was. (Byron likely had engaged in homosexual behavior on a few occasions,
although more out of curiosity than conviction.) Unable to write, taking laudanum
to alleviate the pain of a liver ailment, contemptuous of Lord Liverpool’s Tory ministry
(they reciprocated his enmity), unable to repay his creditors—bailiffs frequently
camped outside his house at Piccadilly Terrace—and harassed by the British public
who, as J. B. Priestly noted, “never really knew what it was all about but was ready
to hiss that villainous Byron in the streets or the theatre,” Byron decided to make
a fresh start. On April 25, 1816, Byron left England, never to return. He was twenty-eight
years old at the time.

Traveling in a carriage modeled upon Napoléon’s (one of his idols), Byron made a brief
stop at Waterloo to inspect the battlefield before arriving in Geneva on May 25. He
was accompanied by an Italian physician and aspiring writer named Dr. John W. Polidori.
Twenty-one years old in the spring of 1816, Polidori had obtained a sizable advance
from Byron’s publisher to keep a journal of their travels in Europe, but his task
was complicated by the constant browbeating he suffered from the poet. Byron sneered
at Polidori’s literary ambitions, and dismissed him as “exactly the kind of person
to whom, if he fell overboard, one would hold out a straw to know if the adage be
true that drowning men catch at straws.”

Shelley, however, earned Byron’s respect for his poetry, his wit, and his iconoclastic
attitudes. Even though Shelley’s poems were little known among the general English
public, Byron knew “Queen Mab” (which Shelley had sent to him), and thought it quite
good. The two men found common ground both in their art and their disdain for bourgeois
society. And in the summer of 1816, few places in Europe seemed more conventional
than Geneva, partly because of the vestigial Calvinism that lingered in the city (it
had a well-deserved reputation as the most morally conservative city on the continent),
but also because it was overrun with wealthy English tourists, whom one observer claimed
had “turned Geneva into an English watering-place.”

Most of his fellow countrymen received Byron quite coldly. “The English in general
are very harsh towards him,” noted one of Byron’s few admirers in Geneva. “They are
thrilled to have an excuse to treat with an air of superiority a man who so clearly
towers above them all.” For his part, Byron returned the contempt of his Swiss hosts
and their English guests. “Switzerland is a curst, selfish, swinish country of brutes,
placed in the most romantic region of the world,” he wrote. “I never could bear the
inhabitants, and still less their English visitors.… I know of no other situation
except Hell which I should feel inclined to participate with them.”

Mary Godwin had met Byron earlier that spring, in England, and the two appear to have
hit it off well. Certainly Byron admired Mary’s father for his radical writings. But
Shelley’s obvious preference for Byron’s company rather than her own caused Mary considerable
dismay, particularly since she was perfectly capable of holding her own in their literary
conversations. The situation was complicated by Polidori’s jealousy of Shelley, who
was monopolizing the attentions of his idol, Lord Byron, and the presence of Claire
Clairmont, who was pregnant with Byron’s child (she had thrown herself at Byron shortly
before he left England) and desperate to rekindle the sexual spark between them.

Tensions rose; so did the frequency of the storms that swept across Lake Geneva. “We
watch them as they approach from the opposite side of the lake,” wrote Mary, “observing
the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heavens, and dart in jagged
figures upon the piny heights of Jura, dark with the shadow of the overhanging clouds.”
Forced to abandon their excursions on the lake, the group gathered at Byron’s rented
villa. Often they discussed “the nature of the principle of life,” as Mary explained,
“and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated.”
Galvanism—the use of electrical shocks to jolt an inanimate being into life—was a
popular topic in Europe and the United States at the time, as was the topic of atmospheric
electricity, including lightning and the interplay of electrical currents between
earth and sky. Certainly Polidori, Shelley, and Mary were well acquainted with recent
scientific experiments in the field of galvanism. Perhaps, thought Mary, a corpse
could be reanimated, or “the component parts of a creature might be manufactured,
brought together, and endued with vital warmth.”

On other occasions the conversations were less intellectual. “The season was cold
and rainy,” Mary later recalled, “and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing
wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which
happened to fall into our hands.” On the evening of June 16, Byron decided to regale
his friends with several stories from a collection of German horror stories entitled
Phantasmagoriana, or Collection of the Histories of Apparitions, Spectres, Ghosts,
etc.
One of these concerned “the story of a husband who kisses his new bride on their
wedding night, only to find, to his horror, that she has been transformed into the
corpse of the woman he once loved.” An interesting choice, considering Byron’s reticence
on his own wedding night.

“These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation,” noted Shelley, and so he,
Byron, and Mary agreed to each write a story “founded on some supernatural occurrence.”
When the group gathered again on the evening of June 18, they resumed their talk of
ghosts and horror, each trying to outdo the other. Shortly after midnight, Byron read
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “Christabel,” with its lines about a mysterious stranger
(perhaps a witch) who had been abducted in her youth:

Then drawing in her breath aloud,

Like one that shudder’d, she unbound

The cincture from beneath her breast:

Her silken robe, and inner vest,

Dropt to her feet, and full in view,

Behold! her bosom and half her side—

A sight to dream of, not to tell!

O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!

For a moment everyone remained silent. Then Shelley suddenly shrieked, put his hands
to his head, and ran out of the room. Polidori followed and threw cold water in Shelley’s
face, then administered a dose of ether. Staring at Mary, Shelley said that he had
“suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which,
when taking hold of his mind, horrified him.”

That evening, in her bedroom with its dark parquet floors, and moonlight struggling
to penetrate the closed shutters, Mary thought of a creature, “manufactured, brought
together, and endued with vital warmth.” Gradually, over the remaining months of 1816,
Mary Godwin’s creature would emerge in a form far more famous than any character created
by either Shelley or Byron.

5.

DAY AFTER DAY

“This end of the World Weather is sadly against me…”

A
T THE
I
NDEPENDENCE
Day celebration in Boston, John Adams glanced around at the assembly of four hundred
guests in the main hall of the State House, and discovered that he was the only signer
of the Declaration of Independence present. For that matter, few members of the Revolutionary
generation remained alive in New England. “Death is sweeping his scythe all around
us,” the eighty-one-year-old Adams wrote that summer, “cutting down our old friends
and brandishing it over us.”

Adams spent much of his time reading, especially history. He recently had finished
(for the second time) Mary Wollstonecraft’s sympathetic chronicle of the French Revolution,
scribbling his dissenting opinions—often at voluminous length—in the margins of his
book. It would be all very well, he argued at one point, if the “empire of superstition
and hypocrisy should be overthrown; but if all religion and all morality should be
over-thrown with it, what advantage will be gained?” Clearly optimistic about his
own future—a reporter on July 4 noted that the former president “still retains the
appearance of health and cheerfulness”—Adams embarked upon a new reading project:
a sixteen-volume history of France.

Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was feeling the effects of time. “Here a pivot,
there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring will give way,” Jefferson grumbled in a
note to Adams. He could no longer walk very far, although he tried to ride two or
three hours a day. He needed glasses to read at night (and during the day for small
print) and, Jefferson admitted, “my hearing is not quite so sensible as it used to
be.” Having recently sold his personal library to Congress to replace the books burned
or purloined by British troops when they sacked Washington in 1814, Jefferson was
trying to rebuild his literary collection at Monticello, just outside Charlottesville.
In the meantime, he had his hands full supervising the care of his gardens. Although
his plants had survived the June cold wave, the persistent drought threatened to destroy
everything. “In June, instead of 33⁄4 inches, our average of rain for that month,”
Jefferson informed a friend, “we only had 1⁄3 of an inch.”

Thirty miles away, President Madison hosted an Independence Day banquet for ninety
guests at Montpelier, with dishes spread out along a long table on the lawn under
an arbor. It was a nearly all-male affair; Dolley and the president’s mother, sister,
and niece were the only women present. Dressed in his customary black coat, black
breeches with buckles at the knees, and black silk stockings, Madison was determined
to enjoy the last few months of his presidency. (In fact, his four-month stay at Montpelier
in 1816 remains the longest continuous absence of any president from Washington.)
Madison’s reputation as a gracious host was based partly upon his generosity with
his collection of fine wines (especially Madeira, which he imported by the case and
stored in the hollow pediment of his front portico), partly upon the vivacious personality
of his wife, and partly upon the excellent fare served up by his French cook. “One
could not be in a company more amiable, better versed in good manners, and possessing
to a higher degree the precious and very rare art of leaving to the persons who pay
them a visit, the comfort and freedom they enjoy in their own home,” claimed Attorney
General Richard Rush.