Frightening coincidences

One of the benefits of having many books going at the same time, as I usually do, is that you occassionally come across coincidences of material that shed light upon one another.

Yesterday morning I read this tale from Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes regarding Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein .

During the summer of 1816 Byron and Shelley were neighbors on the shores of the lake of Geneva. The two poets, together with Byron's friend Dr. John Polidori and Shelley's companions, Mary Godwin and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, spent many an evening conversing. One night Byron initated a discussion of ghosts and the supernatural. . . . Byron suggested that all of them write their own ghost stories. From this evening emerged an effort begun by Byron about the ruins of Ephesus, never completed; a tale by Polidori eventually published as The Vampyre; and, by the seventeen year-old Mary, the tale of Frankenstein - a story that probably has frightened more people and led to more spin-offs than any other ghost story in the world.

Yesterday afternoon I dipped into Charles Pellegrino's Ghosts of Vesuvius and came across this information about that summer.

Throughout the world, the "years without a summer" that followed the eruption of Tambora in 1815 are legendary after nearly two generations. Indonesia's Tambora explosion (which deposited ash layers in the ice of the North and South Poles) had visited July frosts and snow flurries upon New England. . . . From California to Italy to China, the volcanic winter was felt and recorded. In Europe, the false winter ruined the honeymoon of a young poet and his eighteen-year-old bride, driving them indoors from the shores of Lake Geneva. Between hours of marital bliss, while "confined for days," the bride wrote of "the uncongenial summer," during which she took up a challenge "to make-up a ghost story." The bride's name was Mary Shelley, and the story she wrote was titled Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus .