16 Jun 2023
On This Day
16 June 2023 Cheryl

16 June 1816: Lord Byron proposes a literary challenge

The Villa-Diodati

After Lord Byron’s death, the Villa Diodati soon became a place of pilgrimage for devotees of Byron, and of Romanticism. French writer Honoré de Balzac, who had become obsessed with the villa, had one of the characters in his 1836 novel Albert Savarus remark that the Villa Diodati is “now visited by everybody, just like Coppet and Ferney” (the homes of Madame de Staël and Voltaire respectively). [1]

On 16 June 1816, at the Villa Diodati, a mansion in the village of Cologny near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Lord Byron proposed a literary challenge to his four house guests – they should each write the scariest ghost story they could.

Lord Byron had come from England and rented the Villa Diodati to escape the scandals some of his love affairs had provoked back home. Assembled this wet summer were fellow poets and authors, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Polidori and Claire Clairmont (Mary Shelley’s stepsister who had a child with Byron). The Shelleys had rented a nearby house and were frequent visitors at the Villa Diodati. Because of very poor weather, the group spent three days together inside the villa. Bryon read ‘Fantasmagoriana’, an anthology of horror fiction to his guests and this inspired him to issue the challenge.

This challenge resulted in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, John Polidori’s The Vampyre, a tale which influenced Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, and Byron’s Darkness on the theme of an apocalyptic end of the world which was published as part of The Prisoner of Chillon collection.

The summer of 1816 was memorable for all the wrong reasons. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the previous year sent clouds of volcanic ash billowing into the upper atmosphere. The sun was obscured; levels of rainfall increased and temperatures fell. The summer of the following year was thus dismal and damp, with low temperatures and torrential rain causing disastrous crop failures throughout North America, Europe and Asia. For many living on the other side of the world to the eruption, the reason for the disturbances in the weather would have been a mystery, but one that lent a sinister and perhaps even a supernatural quality to the need to light candles at midday as darkness descended, and the sight of birds settling down to roost at noon. ‘The year without a summer’, as 1816 became known, provided the perfect backdrop to the telling of bleak, macabre and doom-laden Gothic tales.

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