Travel back in time to the terrible night the other Famous Five invented Frankenstein's monster and the modern vampire

In the long, candlelit drawing room of the Villa Diodati, five exiles from England listened to the rain thrashing against the tall balcony windows. Thunder rolled symphonically across the black waters of Lake Geneva and lightning crackled above the Jura Mountains, the yellow flashes sending shadows leaping through the darkness.

It was July 1816 in Switzerland. Far off in South-East Asia, a massive volcanic eruption in 1815 had sent up vast ash clouds that had called a halt on summer. The sky was dark, the air chilled, crops failed and famine loomed. Many took it as a sign of the end of days. The tempestuous weather mimicked the personal lives of the English quintet —George Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont and Dr John Polidori.

Lord Byron was fleeing a broken marriage and a raft of scandals that fully vindicated his former lover Lady Caroline Lamb’s assessment that he was ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’. Shelley, too, was on intimate terms with controversy. A vocal atheist, he’d narrowly avoided a severe prison sentence for sedition as a student, caused a minor scandal when he eloped with the 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook and a greater furore when he ditched her and their two children to escape to continental Europe with the teenage Godwin.

Godwin’s stepsister Clairmont was pregnant with Byron’s child, or so she said. His Lordship was not entirely convinced, believing that she had also slept with Shelley. Polidori was Byron’s travelling physician. Dark haired, vain and intelligent, he entertained romantic notions of a literary career, an aspiration his employer took a cruel delight in publicly mocking. Belittled and lampooned, the unhappy medico had conceived the notion that Byron was draining the life out of him. Had the tabloid press existed in Georgian England, we can assume the group would have filled front pages.

In the grand, porticoed house with its views of the glimmering lake and brooding mountains, a mood of febrile morbidity took hold. In the flickering light as the storm raged, the company spoke of somnambulism, re-animation, the harnessing of electricity and the German horror tales of the Fantasmagoriana. As midnight passed, Byron recited from Christabel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Gothic poem of witchcraft, in a voice that had been likened to that of the Devil tempting Eve. Shelley turned deathly pale, shrieked and ran from the room, later describing an apparition of a woman with eyes in her breasts that had sprung up before him.

These incidents and conversations, the dark skies and the anxious, claustrophobic atmosphere inside the mansion would foster the creation of two literary figures who would haunt the nightmares of future generations: Frankenstein’s monster and a sophisticated and seductive feaster on human blood, the vampire.

Confined beneath sombre skies, beset by rivalries, resentments and sexual intrigue, the quintet determined each to write a ghost story. Clairmont shared her stepsister’s love for the fantastical, but, overcome with worries about her future, seems not to have contributed. Byron made a desultory effort, but was distracted by thoughts of a new poem inspired by a recent visit to the dungeons of the nearby castle at Chillon (where, characteristically, he had carved his name on a stone pillar). Shelley’s tale was played out as a single dramatic recitation and is lost for ever. Godwin’s story was sparked by a nightmare in which she saw a ‘pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together’ and then, ‘on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life’.

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, would be published in 1818. Widely derided as nonsense by critics at the time, the novel’s reputation and influence would grow until its fame far outstripped that of the poetry of Shelley or Byron. Then there was poor Polidori. His tale, The Vampyre, was an act of revenge upon the man who mocked and bullied him, Byron.

The vampire of Eastern European legend is a soil-encrusted, red-eyed and semi-human fiend. Polidori transformed it into something more mesmeric, charming and amorally evil, a man whose voice chilled the listener even as it seduced them, whose ‘love was death’. His suave vampire, Lord Ruthven (so plainly modelled on his employer) would be the godfather of Count Dracula, Edward Cullen and others.

The Vampyre might have brought Polidori the literary fame he sought, but alas an unscrupulous publisher issued the story not with his name on the cover, but that of his nemesis, Byron. His Lordship was a celebrity before the word had meaning, so, naturally, it became an immediate sensation. Polidori fought to have his authorship acknowledged, but nobody listened. Thwarted and humiliated, he apparently took his own life with poison, haunted to the end by those cold dark days in that villa on the stormy shores of Lake Geneva.

This article first appeared in the October 21, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.