How opium-fuelled orgies and lightning gave birth to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Mary dreamt up her creature while a teen caught up in the tangled limbs of debauched duo Percy Shelley and Lord Byron
WITH a body stitched together from dead men, Frankenstein’s monster is a hellish nightmare that has echoed down the years.
Yet few know that English author Mary Shelley dreamt up her creature while a teenager caught up in tangled limbs of a different kind — among opium-fuelled orgies.
The then Mary Godwin was an aspiring 19-year-old writer when she stayed in a rambling Swiss villa in the summer of 1816 with a gang of raunchy revellers including two of England’s foremost romantic poets.
This debauched duo were Mary’s lover and soon-to-be husband Percy Shelley — five years her elder — and his sex-maniac pal Lord Byron.
Also along for the mayhem were Byron’s personal doctor John Polidori and Mary’s pregnant stepsister Claire Clairmont. Claire was pregnant by Byron and had slept with Percy while he courted Mary — and she in turn was an obsession of the lusty Dr Polidori. So a proper love tangle.
But this was a European summer like no other in another way too — the sun was hidden by an ashen sulphur fog from the mightiest volcanic blast in history a year earlier, thousands of miles away on Indonesia’s Mount Tambora.
I saw the hideous phantasm of a man
It caused relentless downpours, thunder and lightning and Mary and her gang, staying next to Lake Geneva in the shadow of the Swiss Alps during that Year Without Summer, were forced to hunker down indoors.
So what to do but craze themselves in a haze of opium, wine and partner-swapping legovers.
While taking a breather from the headlong hedonism, Byron challenged the others to come up with a ghost story — and Mary impressed older sophisticates Byron and Percy with her utterly terrifying tale.
As bolts of lightning ripped through the inky blackness outside, she described the character that was to inspire her earth-shattering gothic novel Frankenstein two years later.
Mid-story, Percy dropped his drugs in terror and “leapt up and ran shrieking from the room” — having hallucinated that demonic eyes had replaced Mary’s nipples.
Now a film titled Mary Shelley has been made, starring Elle Fanning as the young writer and British actor Douglas Booth as her Percy.
Opening on July 6, the bodice-ripping tale will see both Byron and Percy trying to seduce Mary.
In the new trailer, Fanning’s Mary says: “I no longer see the world and its works as it before appeared to me — and men appear to me as monsters.” Certainly, that is an apt description of the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” Byron and “whoremonger” Percy.
When 21-year-old Etonian Percy met the then 16-year-old Mary at the London bookshop of her famous political philosopher dad William in 1814 he was already wed and a dad — with a second child on the way.
Never mind that he had already got one 16-year-old to elope with him and become his bride — now he was up to the same trick again.
His wedding band did not stop him taking Mary’s virginity — and they chose to do the deed lying down before the grave of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, the firebrand pioneer of women’s rights.
Mary’s old man William warned her off falling for Percy’s charms, only for him to turn up at her house with a gun vowing to kill himself.
While frozen out by Mary, he then seduced her stepsister Claire.
Yet the young man, who had been kicked out of Oxford University for writing a pamphlet questioning the existence of God, was a perfect fit for the punchy, free-spirited Mary who had been brought up by an anarchist dad and a mum with revolutionary ideas of her own about the position of women in society.
It was her parents’ love of rebellion that tempted Mary to go with Percy and Claire to visit the famous Lord Byron in Switzerland, where he was in self-imposed exile after abandoning his wife and daughter.
Claire was pregnant with Byron’s daughter and desperate to keep their relationship alive, although he was already bored of her.
Rumoured to have slept with hundreds of both men and women, including his married half-sister Augusta Leigh, the sixth Baron Byron was already legendary for his aristocratic excess and depraved lusts. But at age 28, he was the eldest and most successful writer of the group at the time of their meeting.
With the weather too wet and cold to venture out in, the mood in the villa was at turns amorous and fractious — the tension grew when Polidori, whose attentions were shunned by Mary, challenged Percy and Byron to a duel.
Perhaps that’s why she once said that “invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos.”
She also revealed in the preface to a later book that being in the villa had given her nightmares and the spark of her monster. She wrote: “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.” When Byron set his story challenge he never expected Mary to weave such a brilliant response as Frankenstein.
In the trailer we see him dismissing the young woman’s intellect — and she first published the book anonymously in 1818 because as a woman in the 19th Century it was much harder to win respect as a writer.
But once the second edition came out, in 1923, it bore Mary’s name.
Her mum had died in 1797 just ten days after Mary was born — from infection leading to fatal blood poisoning — but would surely have approved of the way her daughter proved the men wrong.
Many people thought Percy was the true author of Frankenstein, but Mary insisted: “I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband — and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world.”
Its success was a rare chink of light in Mary’s story. For like the Year Without Summer, her life was bruised with darkness.
The reason for she and Percy finally being able to marry in December 1816 was in itself tragic. His wife had taken her own life by drowning in the Serpentine lake in London’s Hyde Park.
Writing poetry and being a baron did not provide her husband with the money he needed to follow his dream of buying copious amounts of opium and gallivanting around Europe. He was often chased by creditors and the couple spent part of their marriage in small, damp digs.
Two of their four children died in Italy, where they went to help Percy’s health and flee debt. Mary blamed her husband for taking them to a place where one child got malaria. Only one of their brood, a boy, survived into adulthood.
With Mary then bedridden and depressed following a miscarriage, her husband switched his attentions to other women. But their turbulent relationship came to an end when Percy’s boat sank off the Italian coast in 1822. He was 29.
Many friends believed he deliberately holed the boat. Even though their marriage had been struggling, Mary kept some of his ashes in a silk purse for years — and his heart which did not burn well at cremation and was snatched from the pyre by a friend. The other two men from the Geneva party, Byron and Polidori, also died early.
Facing huge gambling debts, Polidori took his life by drinking acid in 1821, aged 26, while Byron died of a fever at 36 after fighting in the Greek War of Independence in 1824.
Widowed Mary went on to write several other novels, including The Last Man, after returning to England.
Despite attentions of other suitors she did not remarry, and died aged 51 from a suspected brain tumour.
But before she died in 1851, one of her last requests was to be buried in Bournemouth because of its “warmer climes” — even though she had never lived in the town.
Her dead parents were also exhumed from their graves and she lies alongside them — still holding the remains of her husband’s heart.
most read in tv and showbiz
NUTS 'n' BOLTS, by NATASHA HARDING, Sun Books Editor
BULGING EYES, green, sallow skin and neck bolts.
It can only be Frankenstein.
Or rather, his monster.
Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a scientist obsessed with mortality following his mum’s death in childbirth, who creates a nameless being of parts from different corpses.
But the boffin is aghast at his ugly 8ft creation and abandons him, sure he will die without help. Yet he learns to talk and survive. A sensitive being, he tries to join society but is shunned – and sets out to find the doctor and kill everyone he loves along the way.
The book, considered the first sci-fi novel, has inspired films such as Blade Runner, Edward Scissorhands, Avengers: Age of Ultron and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The monster makes regular appearances in telly sitcom The Simpsons – and Lurch, the ultra-tall butler in The Addams Family on film and TV, could be his twin.
In 1931 English actor Boris Karloff played the monster in the self-titled Hollywood blockbuster and stunned fans with his sad grace. He then starred in three sequels to arguably the most iconic horror film of all time.
Nearly 100 years on, the novel still has people talking about whether the monster is bad or good, and a victim of “upbringing”.
Although written with the intent to “curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart” it is more than just a horror story, blending sci-fi, mystery and drama.