October 26, 2009 • 20 mins
With Halloween looming, Sarah and Katie travel back in time to explore the historic challenge that led to the creation of Frankenstein and the vampiric Lord Ruthven. Tune in to learn more about the birth of these intentionally horrific creatures.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how
stuff works dot com. You've heard the rumors before, perhaps
and whispers written between the lines of the textbooks. Conspiracies,
paranormal events, all those things that disappear from the official explanations.
(00:23):
Tune in and learn more of this stuff they don't
want you to know in this video podcast from how
stuff works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm fair Dowdy. And as you
know if you've listened to our past podcast, Sarah and
(00:45):
I could talk about costumes for probably an entire podcast
of its own. Don't worry, that's not what we have planned.
But we do want to talk a little bit about
some of our favorite Halloween costumes because we love Halloween
so very much and it's coming up, even if I
will be enjoyed to Florida and not participating, but my
favorite I did two years ago with the help of
Sarah's stage makeup expertise, when I was a sloth, and
(01:09):
perhaps unsurprisingly, most people had no idea what I was,
and sometimes even when I explained I was a sloth,
still didn't know that that was an animal, which I
find somewhat worries. It was obviously it looked like you
had skinned a flow and you were wearing it. I
was even dancing slowly. I think it was very clever.
And my favorite Halloween costume is probably an effer tit
(01:30):
when I was at the height of my Egyptian Mania
phase and about fourth grade or so. But when I
was thinking it over, I've never been anything really scary,
maybe with the exception of a witch at about age
seven when my baby teeth are out creepy child. But
I have helped one of my friends put on a
(01:50):
pretty scary costume. He was Frankenstein one year, and I
made some bolts out of tinfoil and had a big
wax scar. It was pretty It's pretty scary. I'm glad
you brought up Frankenstein because that is the topic of
today's podcast, the birth of Frankenstein and the Vampire, and
that is Vampire with why we'd like to add old
(02:12):
school style. So it all began on a rainy summer
night in Switzerland, and most rainy days are not this protective,
at least not for me or for Sarah. As we're
dealing with Sea Atlanta lately and our delusual weeks. But
this is Switzerland in the summer of eighteen sixteen, and
(02:33):
we have a very prestigious group of writers who come
together White and their companions, and there are a few
different accounts of what happened this particular rainy summer. So
we're going to start with Mary Shelley's. And Mary Shelley,
as you probably know, was the author of Frankenstein. Where
(02:54):
we're headed with this, and I think most people already
know that Mary Shelley starts her tale by setting the sea.
It's the summer of eighteen sixteen. They're in Switzerland, and
it's her her sort of husband, Percy Bush, Shelley, Lord Byron,
and Byron's physician John Paula Dory. And she says that
the summer started off really nice at first, and they
(03:15):
were spending time on the lake and on the shore.
Byron was working on the third Cante of Child Harold,
and he was the only one who was writing. But
then Rain said in an outcome the ghost Stories, they
have a volume that was translated from German to French,
and she later wrote in her introduction, I've not seen
these stories since then, but their incidents are as fresh
(03:37):
in my mind as if I had read them yesterday.
So you can imagine this little party of romantic poets
and their friends have a grand old time, but the
fire reading ghost stories, and out of it comes a challenge.
And she goes on to say, in this introduction, we
will each write a ghost story, said Lord Byron, and
(03:58):
his proposition was a seated too. Byron begins a fragment.
Shelley starts writing something about his early life, and this
was Sarah's. In my favorite line, poor Paula Dorri had
some terrible idea about a skull headed lady and talks
about it very dismissively. And then she goes on to
say that the illustrious poets, also annoyed by the platitude
(04:20):
of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task. But she still
hasn't come up with anything. She's still trying to think
of a story, so she writes, I busied myself to
think of a story, a story to arrival those which
had excited us to this task, One which would speak
to the mysterious fears of our nature in waken thrilling horror,
(04:41):
one to make the reader dread to look around to
curdle the blood and to quicken the beatings of the heart.
So she wants to write a really killer ghost story,
but she cannot think of anything. And you can imagine
how frustrating it would be if all of your ghost
story challenged companions who happened to be famous writers. To
interpain Arns too, are also famous writers. Her mother was
(05:02):
Mary Walston Craft, and so everybody's scribbling away their ghost stories,
even poor poly Doory with his lame skullhead Lily. And
you can't think of anything. And to make it worse,
every morning they ask her, have you thought of a story?
Have you thought of a story? So she's under a
lot of pressure to think of something good here, but
inspiration comes slowly. She starts listening to conversations that Byron
(05:28):
and Shelley are having, and she says they talked of
the experiments of Dr Darwin, who preserved a piece of
Vermicelli in a glass case. Told by some extraordinary means,
it began to move with voluntary motion, which had serenade
Giggles this entire afternoon, because Katie was like, wait a minute,
chili is a noodle, right, That's like I think, so
(05:50):
I'm still m chair were interpreting that correctly, but we
get that anybody who's read or seen Frankenstein can see
the little seed planting here in this wiggling Vermicelli of
where science enters the ghost writing. So that night Mary
Shelley has what she calls a dream vision. She says,
I saw with shut eyes but acute mental vision. I
(06:13):
saw the pale student of unhallowed arts, kneeling beside the
thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm
of a man stretched out, and then on the working
of some powerful engine shows signs of life and still
with an uneasy half of vital motion. Frightful must it be?
For supremely frightful would be the effect of any human
endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of
(06:36):
the world. And then at the end of her vision,
she ends with a deep look into the creatures yellow
watery but speculative eyes, which is so creepy. And she
wakes up from this dream vision doubt. Yeah, trying to
You know what anybody does if they have a nightmare,
Try to just tell yourself it's not real and look
(06:56):
around and turn a light. One get a place of
your actual surroundings. But then she starts to think about
it a little bit, and she initially thinks, if only
I can cook up something that would be as scary
as my dream vision from my story, before it clicks
and she realizes, well, yeah, she just dreamed her story.
(07:17):
Here it is. So she writes a little bit, and
then Percy Shelley tells her she should develop it into
something much longer than just the short story, that she
could actually write a book and write it she does so.
Out of Mary Shelley's account of the competition or the
Byron Lord Byron's challenge in Switzerland, we come up with
(07:37):
the great novel Frankenstein, a lame skully Head story, poor
vollly Door, and the fragment published by Byron. That sounds
pretty good for a whimsical challenge at the at the
lake shore and on a rainy evening, you know, a
(07:59):
successful novel. Great, But we actually are fortunate to have
a little more than that that comes out of it.
Mary Shelley did not tell the whole tail. And the
other thing that came out of this competition was a
story called the Vampire, and the Vampire was actually written
by the guy who seems to have only cooked up
(08:21):
the skulls story, and the how this got left out
of the account is really puzzling and kind of a
great literary mystery. But before we talk about that, we'll
talk a little bit more about John Paula Dory, whose
name I dearly love. By the way, he was born
in His father was an Italian who lived in England,
(08:41):
a scholar and his translator, and his mother had been
a governess, and he would have been uncle to Dante
Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. They were born after he died.
But another famous literary connection here. Um. But he studied
to be a doctor at the University of and Borrow,
and he earned his degree at a really young age.
(09:03):
But the most interesting thing about it is he writes
a dissertation on sleepwalking, which for somebody who later writes
a book about vampires just seems so fitting. Um. But
he really wants to be a cool, romantic poet. I
think they're like the rock stars of the day. Oh Byron, mad,
(09:24):
bad and dangerous to know. Yeah, so he's working for Byron,
And I guess any physician he probably you see the
person for who they really are you know, so he
kind of idolized Byron in a way and wanted to
be like him, but also, you know, wasn't realized he
wasn't all he was cracked up to be. But he's
(09:48):
there for this ghostwriting challenge, and the real story is
a little bit different. During this challenge, Byron writes the
fragment which we had mentioned it's called Augustus Darbyl but
he he's really more concentrating on trying to finish up
Child Harold at this point, which was a good idea
because it helped make him famous what he's known for. Um,
(10:10):
he was probably also kind of bored writing a Gothic story.
It's Hill the Ghost not really a Byron's ali um.
Mary Shelley actually notes that the two poets just aren't
that into writing prose. Basically, there's no byronic passion with
Frankenstein's But Paula Dory ends up picking up Byron's fragment
(10:34):
and he changes it a little bit, but it ends
up detailing a protagonist who accompanies an eccentric nobleman called
Lord Ruthven on a European tour, which sounds really familiar,
doesn't It sounds a lot like it's a little bit
like Byron and some who accompanied him. Um. But after
(10:55):
he's dismissed from Byron's services, Paula Dory travels around Europe
for a little a while longer and leaves his manuscript
of the Vampire, his tale he's made from this fragment
with the Countess of Bruce, who gives it to another person,
who in turn gives it to Henry Colburn, who's the
editor of a struggling London magazine. And it shows up
(11:18):
on Colburn's desk with a packet of papers, and it's unsigned.
It's a very confessional tale and it looks like maybe
the kind of thing Byron would write. So if you
have a struggling magazine, what do you do? You publish
the confessional by the very controversial Lord Byron. Yeah, it's
(11:40):
actually published as a tale told by Lord Byron. So
he's not just like using hnds. He's coming right out there.
Byron wrote this by it so, needless to say, it's
incredibly popular and the magazine actually ends up getting a
reputation for these kind of maccab tales. And this he
(12:00):
ticks Byron off. He says he didn't write it he
publishes what he did write, Augustus Starvill, to show that
these are two different things, and then he writes a
disclaimer to the editor of another magazine with this skeething quote.
He says, if the book is clever, it would be
based to deprive the real writer, whoever he may be,
of his honors, and if stupid, I desire the responsibility
(12:23):
of nobody's dulness. But my own I have, besides a
personal disliked vampires, and the little acquaintance I have with
them would by no means induced me to divulge their secrets.
So that's pretty pretty low Byron. But I guess he
really doesn't want anything to be associated with his name
that is not his own creation. Um So Paula Dory. However,
(12:44):
you know he did write this, and he comes out
saying saying it, and he follows it by a few
other tales and nurses berk told or the modern Oedipus,
which sounds like really unfortunate titling. It's actually reviewed pretty well,
but it doesn't sell well at all. Think and he
(13:08):
writes one other thing, and his medical practice isn't doing
very well, and his literary aspirations are falling kind of flat,
and he's depressed and in debt, and he commits suicide
by drinking hydrogen cyanide in August of eighteen twenty one.
Although I think they wrote on his death certificate that
(13:30):
it wasn't but but it was. It's not the kind
of thing usually accidentally and just that was a charitable
thing for whoever that doctor was to do. But Paula
Dory leaves us with a pretty important reputation because he's
introduced the vampire to the British, which has far arranging consequences. Eventually,
(13:52):
Irish author Bram Stoker writes Dracula in which is one
of my favorite books of all time, And if you
want to creepy movie, please rent bram Stoker's Dracula, just
to hear the lead actors saying over and over again,
because I really love it. And that shoots the vampire. Yeah,
we get our monster movies of the nineteen thirty everything
(14:14):
from vampires today. So we don't do Twilight. For the record,
we're not twinhearts. Don't send us mean emails. So but
so out of this we have Frankenstein and the Vampire.
But it's still a little weird. Right, because why was
Mary Shelley introduction is at You know, when you first
(14:36):
read it, you're like, well, here I go, you know,
this is the whole story, and then you start looking
around a little bit. And she made a lot of
mistakes and some I could shock up to it being
written long after the fact. A lot has happened to her.
Um Percy Shelley died a very tragic death, and she's
(14:56):
had a lot in the intervening years to forget big details.
But some of the things are just you wouldn't forget them. Well,
the biggest one for me is she completely erases her stepsister,
Claire Claremont and say she wasn't even there. She said
there were only four of them, but there were definitely five.
And at the time, Percy Shelly was married and he
(15:19):
was estranged from his wife. But she was pregnant and
Mary Shelly was either pregnant, she wasn't actually Mary Shelley,
she was married Godwin. She was either pregnant with Percy's
child or they just had a child. I can't quite remember.
I'm sorry. They had several children and only one one
survived of the four, and Claire Claremont had a little
thing going with Lord Byron. So she's run off with
(15:42):
with her sister and her sister's so my husband and
Claire may also have had something with Percy Shelley. No
one's quite sure, but she gets pregnant from Lord Byron
and later they has a very sad story. Yeah, well
we'll cover that in a Lord Byron. Cat been itching
to do a Lord Byron podcast, but um, so yeah,
Claire Claremont has just gone from Candles. I guess she
(16:06):
didn't write a very good ghost story, or maybe she
would have been lucky enough to be included in the intro.
But um, there are a few other issues with that.
The stories that she quotes is remembering as if she
had read them yesterday are kind of off in their particulars,
But the real issue comes with the timeline of the
whole thing. And we should mention that during this poly
(16:30):
DOORI was keeping a diary that Lord Byron's publisher actually
asked him to keep, kind of like travels with Byron
across Europe. And this diary, which was edited by Paula
Dory's sister, she might have taken out of stuff, but
it was eventually published in nineteen eleven, so we have
(16:52):
a pretty firm dateline from poly Dory, and he records
that on June sevent eighteen sixteen, the ghost stories are
begun by all but me, which that's kind of weird
to start with, since we hear Mary Shelley saying they'd
all started together except her, and going off of this,
(17:14):
we can kind of assume that because the interest in
this contest wane so quickly, and the dates of the
arrival of the whole party in the weather, the bad
weather coming in, we can kind of assume that Byron
suggested the challenge the day before that. So June sixteen,
(17:34):
it's just a hypothesis a few people have thrown out there,
but it sounds pretty good to me. It does, and
that means that, as you said, Mary was already writing
when she was trying to make it sound like she'd
had sleepless nights of trying to dream up this wonderful vision. Yeah. Well,
and it gets even weirder because on June, so the
(17:56):
night before we assumed Byron made the challenge. Paul A
Doory notes that he had a scientific conversation about principles,
whether man was to be thought merely an instrument and
a Vermicelli, Rmidali waiting to come to life, Noodle no
more um. And so this is probably the conversation that
(18:17):
Mary Shelley remembers having taken place between Byron and Darwin,
when really it would possibly make more sense that it
happened between Polydori and Shelley because Shelly was an amateur chemist,
a pretty talented one, and Polydori is a doctor. He's
done all this research into sleepwalking and other sort of
(18:40):
borderline supernatural I don't you know, sort of frankenstein Esque topics.
So he's a likely conversation partner in that Darwin thing
that spurs Mary Shelley's dream. And this was supposedly the
conversation that sparked that whole vision, but that would have
taken place before the challenge even how But so again,
(19:01):
is she misremembering it or is she doing it on
purpose to make it a more suspenseful, interesting story. So
Katie and I were saying, it would be really weird
if somebody was asking you, like, twelve years ago, was
it raining that night? You know, like we're trying to
think of it, and well, if it were the fall
of two thousand nine, we'd say rain every day. It
was m but it's it's interesting. We're probably never gonna
(19:24):
get this timeline completely sorted out, but um, I just
wonder where why some of her airs occurred as they did,
regardless of exactly how it happened. This little contest gave
us both Frankenstein and the Vampire, which are both cultural icons,
and as English majors were really impressed by this. We
(19:47):
love the literary stuff, but again, we also love costumes,
so we wanted to challenge you to send us your
best costume ideas that History podcast at how stuff works
dot com and if you were something really super, we're
cool send us a picture because we want to see.
And if you want to learn more about where the
Vampire went from Poor poly Dorry, check out how Vampires
(20:10):
Work at how stuff works dot com. For more on
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be sure to check out the stuff you missed in
History Glass blog on the how stuff works dot com
home page
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how
stuff works dot com. You've heard the rumors before, perhaps
and whispers written between the lines of the textbooks. Conspiracies,
paranormal events, all those things that disappear from the official explanations.
(00:23):
Tune in and learn more of this stuff they don't
want you to know in this video podcast from how
stuff works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm fair Dowdy. And as you
know if you've listened to our past podcast, Sarah and
(00:45):
I could talk about costumes for probably an entire podcast
of its own. Don't worry, that's not what we have planned.
But we do want to talk a little bit about
some of our favorite Halloween costumes because we love Halloween
so very much and it's coming up, even if I
will be enjoyed to Florida and not participating, but my
favorite I did two years ago with the help of
Sarah's stage makeup expertise, when I was a sloth, and
(01:09):
perhaps unsurprisingly, most people had no idea what I was,
and sometimes even when I explained I was a sloth,
still didn't know that that was an animal, which I
find somewhat worries. It was obviously it looked like you
had skinned a flow and you were wearing it. I
was even dancing slowly. I think it was very clever.
And my favorite Halloween costume is probably an effer tit
(01:30):
when I was at the height of my Egyptian Mania
phase and about fourth grade or so. But when I
was thinking it over, I've never been anything really scary,
maybe with the exception of a witch at about age
seven when my baby teeth are out creepy child. But
I have helped one of my friends put on a
(01:50):
pretty scary costume. He was Frankenstein one year, and I
made some bolts out of tinfoil and had a big
wax scar. It was pretty It's pretty scary. I'm glad
you brought up Frankenstein because that is the topic of
today's podcast, the birth of Frankenstein and the Vampire, and
that is Vampire with why we'd like to add old
(02:12):
school style. So it all began on a rainy summer
night in Switzerland, and most rainy days are not this protective,
at least not for me or for Sarah. As we're
dealing with Sea Atlanta lately and our delusual weeks. But
this is Switzerland in the summer of eighteen sixteen, and
(02:33):
we have a very prestigious group of writers who come
together White and their companions, and there are a few
different accounts of what happened this particular rainy summer. So
we're going to start with Mary Shelley's. And Mary Shelley,
as you probably know, was the author of Frankenstein. Where
(02:54):
we're headed with this, and I think most people already
know that Mary Shelley starts her tale by setting the sea.
It's the summer of eighteen sixteen. They're in Switzerland, and
it's her her sort of husband, Percy Bush, Shelley, Lord Byron,
and Byron's physician John Paula Dory. And she says that
the summer started off really nice at first, and they
(03:15):
were spending time on the lake and on the shore.
Byron was working on the third Cante of Child Harold,
and he was the only one who was writing. But
then Rain said in an outcome the ghost Stories, they
have a volume that was translated from German to French,
and she later wrote in her introduction, I've not seen
these stories since then, but their incidents are as fresh
(03:37):
in my mind as if I had read them yesterday.
So you can imagine this little party of romantic poets
and their friends have a grand old time, but the
fire reading ghost stories, and out of it comes a challenge.
And she goes on to say, in this introduction, we
will each write a ghost story, said Lord Byron, and
(03:58):
his proposition was a seated too. Byron begins a fragment.
Shelley starts writing something about his early life, and this
was Sarah's. In my favorite line, poor Paula Dorri had
some terrible idea about a skull headed lady and talks
about it very dismissively. And then she goes on to
say that the illustrious poets, also annoyed by the platitude
(04:20):
of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task. But she still
hasn't come up with anything. She's still trying to think
of a story, so she writes, I busied myself to
think of a story, a story to arrival those which
had excited us to this task, One which would speak
to the mysterious fears of our nature in waken thrilling horror,
(04:41):
one to make the reader dread to look around to
curdle the blood and to quicken the beatings of the heart.
So she wants to write a really killer ghost story,
but she cannot think of anything. And you can imagine
how frustrating it would be if all of your ghost
story challenged companions who happened to be famous writers. To
interpain Arns too, are also famous writers. Her mother was
(05:02):
Mary Walston Craft, and so everybody's scribbling away their ghost stories,
even poor poly Doory with his lame skullhead Lily. And
you can't think of anything. And to make it worse,
every morning they ask her, have you thought of a story?
Have you thought of a story? So she's under a
lot of pressure to think of something good here, but
inspiration comes slowly. She starts listening to conversations that Byron
(05:28):
and Shelley are having, and she says they talked of
the experiments of Dr Darwin, who preserved a piece of
Vermicelli in a glass case. Told by some extraordinary means,
it began to move with voluntary motion, which had serenade
Giggles this entire afternoon, because Katie was like, wait a minute,
chili is a noodle, right, That's like I think, so
(05:50):
I'm still m chair were interpreting that correctly, but we
get that anybody who's read or seen Frankenstein can see
the little seed planting here in this wiggling Vermicelli of
where science enters the ghost writing. So that night Mary
Shelley has what she calls a dream vision. She says,
I saw with shut eyes but acute mental vision. I
(06:13):
saw the pale student of unhallowed arts, kneeling beside the
thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm
of a man stretched out, and then on the working
of some powerful engine shows signs of life and still
with an uneasy half of vital motion. Frightful must it be?
For supremely frightful would be the effect of any human
endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of
(06:36):
the world. And then at the end of her vision,
she ends with a deep look into the creatures yellow
watery but speculative eyes, which is so creepy. And she
wakes up from this dream vision doubt. Yeah, trying to
You know what anybody does if they have a nightmare,
Try to just tell yourself it's not real and look
(06:56):
around and turn a light. One get a place of
your actual surroundings. But then she starts to think about
it a little bit, and she initially thinks, if only
I can cook up something that would be as scary
as my dream vision from my story, before it clicks
and she realizes, well, yeah, she just dreamed her story.
(07:17):
Here it is. So she writes a little bit, and
then Percy Shelley tells her she should develop it into
something much longer than just the short story, that she
could actually write a book and write it she does so.
Out of Mary Shelley's account of the competition or the
Byron Lord Byron's challenge in Switzerland, we come up with
(07:37):
the great novel Frankenstein, a lame skully Head story, poor
vollly Door, and the fragment published by Byron. That sounds
pretty good for a whimsical challenge at the at the
lake shore and on a rainy evening, you know, a
(07:59):
successful novel. Great, But we actually are fortunate to have
a little more than that that comes out of it.
Mary Shelley did not tell the whole tail. And the
other thing that came out of this competition was a
story called the Vampire, and the Vampire was actually written
by the guy who seems to have only cooked up
(08:21):
the skulls story, and the how this got left out
of the account is really puzzling and kind of a
great literary mystery. But before we talk about that, we'll
talk a little bit more about John Paula Dory, whose
name I dearly love. By the way, he was born
in His father was an Italian who lived in England,
(08:41):
a scholar and his translator, and his mother had been
a governess, and he would have been uncle to Dante
Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. They were born after he died.
But another famous literary connection here. Um. But he studied
to be a doctor at the University of and Borrow,
and he earned his degree at a really young age.
(09:03):
But the most interesting thing about it is he writes
a dissertation on sleepwalking, which for somebody who later writes
a book about vampires just seems so fitting. Um. But
he really wants to be a cool, romantic poet. I
think they're like the rock stars of the day. Oh Byron, mad,
(09:24):
bad and dangerous to know. Yeah, so he's working for Byron,
And I guess any physician he probably you see the
person for who they really are you know, so he
kind of idolized Byron in a way and wanted to
be like him, but also, you know, wasn't realized he
wasn't all he was cracked up to be. But he's
(09:48):
there for this ghostwriting challenge, and the real story is
a little bit different. During this challenge, Byron writes the
fragment which we had mentioned it's called Augustus Darbyl but
he he's really more concentrating on trying to finish up
Child Harold at this point, which was a good idea
because it helped make him famous what he's known for. Um,
(10:10):
he was probably also kind of bored writing a Gothic story.
It's Hill the Ghost not really a Byron's ali um.
Mary Shelley actually notes that the two poets just aren't
that into writing prose. Basically, there's no byronic passion with
Frankenstein's But Paula Dory ends up picking up Byron's fragment
(10:34):
and he changes it a little bit, but it ends
up detailing a protagonist who accompanies an eccentric nobleman called
Lord Ruthven on a European tour, which sounds really familiar,
doesn't It sounds a lot like it's a little bit
like Byron and some who accompanied him. Um. But after
(10:55):
he's dismissed from Byron's services, Paula Dory travels around Europe
for a little a while longer and leaves his manuscript
of the Vampire, his tale he's made from this fragment
with the Countess of Bruce, who gives it to another person,
who in turn gives it to Henry Colburn, who's the
editor of a struggling London magazine. And it shows up
(11:18):
on Colburn's desk with a packet of papers, and it's unsigned.
It's a very confessional tale and it looks like maybe
the kind of thing Byron would write. So if you
have a struggling magazine, what do you do? You publish
the confessional by the very controversial Lord Byron. Yeah, it's
(11:40):
actually published as a tale told by Lord Byron. So
he's not just like using hnds. He's coming right out there.
Byron wrote this by it so, needless to say, it's
incredibly popular and the magazine actually ends up getting a
reputation for these kind of maccab tales. And this he
(12:00):
ticks Byron off. He says he didn't write it he
publishes what he did write, Augustus Starvill, to show that
these are two different things, and then he writes a
disclaimer to the editor of another magazine with this skeething quote.
He says, if the book is clever, it would be
based to deprive the real writer, whoever he may be,
of his honors, and if stupid, I desire the responsibility
(12:23):
of nobody's dulness. But my own I have, besides a
personal disliked vampires, and the little acquaintance I have with
them would by no means induced me to divulge their secrets.
So that's pretty pretty low Byron. But I guess he
really doesn't want anything to be associated with his name
that is not his own creation. Um So Paula Dory. However,
(12:44):
you know he did write this, and he comes out
saying saying it, and he follows it by a few
other tales and nurses berk told or the modern Oedipus,
which sounds like really unfortunate titling. It's actually reviewed pretty well,
but it doesn't sell well at all. Think and he
(13:08):
writes one other thing, and his medical practice isn't doing
very well, and his literary aspirations are falling kind of flat,
and he's depressed and in debt, and he commits suicide
by drinking hydrogen cyanide in August of eighteen twenty one.
Although I think they wrote on his death certificate that
(13:30):
it wasn't but but it was. It's not the kind
of thing usually accidentally and just that was a charitable
thing for whoever that doctor was to do. But Paula
Dory leaves us with a pretty important reputation because he's
introduced the vampire to the British, which has far arranging consequences. Eventually,
(13:52):
Irish author Bram Stoker writes Dracula in which is one
of my favorite books of all time, And if you
want to creepy movie, please rent bram Stoker's Dracula, just
to hear the lead actors saying over and over again,
because I really love it. And that shoots the vampire. Yeah,
we get our monster movies of the nineteen thirty everything
(14:14):
from vampires today. So we don't do Twilight. For the record,
we're not twinhearts. Don't send us mean emails. So but
so out of this we have Frankenstein and the Vampire.
But it's still a little weird. Right, because why was
Mary Shelley introduction is at You know, when you first
(14:36):
read it, you're like, well, here I go, you know,
this is the whole story, and then you start looking
around a little bit. And she made a lot of
mistakes and some I could shock up to it being
written long after the fact. A lot has happened to her.
Um Percy Shelley died a very tragic death, and she's
(14:56):
had a lot in the intervening years to forget big details.
But some of the things are just you wouldn't forget them. Well,
the biggest one for me is she completely erases her stepsister,
Claire Claremont and say she wasn't even there. She said
there were only four of them, but there were definitely five.
And at the time, Percy Shelly was married and he
(15:19):
was estranged from his wife. But she was pregnant and
Mary Shelly was either pregnant, she wasn't actually Mary Shelley,
she was married Godwin. She was either pregnant with Percy's
child or they just had a child. I can't quite remember.
I'm sorry. They had several children and only one one
survived of the four, and Claire Claremont had a little
thing going with Lord Byron. So she's run off with
(15:42):
with her sister and her sister's so my husband and
Claire may also have had something with Percy Shelley. No
one's quite sure, but she gets pregnant from Lord Byron
and later they has a very sad story. Yeah, well
we'll cover that in a Lord Byron. Cat been itching
to do a Lord Byron podcast, but um, so yeah,
Claire Claremont has just gone from Candles. I guess she
(16:06):
didn't write a very good ghost story, or maybe she
would have been lucky enough to be included in the intro.
But um, there are a few other issues with that.
The stories that she quotes is remembering as if she
had read them yesterday are kind of off in their particulars,
But the real issue comes with the timeline of the
whole thing. And we should mention that during this poly
(16:30):
DOORI was keeping a diary that Lord Byron's publisher actually
asked him to keep, kind of like travels with Byron
across Europe. And this diary, which was edited by Paula
Dory's sister, she might have taken out of stuff, but
it was eventually published in nineteen eleven, so we have
(16:52):
a pretty firm dateline from poly Dory, and he records
that on June sevent eighteen sixteen, the ghost stories are
begun by all but me, which that's kind of weird
to start with, since we hear Mary Shelley saying they'd
all started together except her, and going off of this,
(17:14):
we can kind of assume that because the interest in
this contest wane so quickly, and the dates of the
arrival of the whole party in the weather, the bad
weather coming in, we can kind of assume that Byron
suggested the challenge the day before that. So June sixteen,
(17:34):
it's just a hypothesis a few people have thrown out there,
but it sounds pretty good to me. It does, and
that means that, as you said, Mary was already writing
when she was trying to make it sound like she'd
had sleepless nights of trying to dream up this wonderful vision. Yeah. Well,
and it gets even weirder because on June, so the
(17:56):
night before we assumed Byron made the challenge. Paul A
Doory notes that he had a scientific conversation about principles,
whether man was to be thought merely an instrument and
a Vermicelli, Rmidali waiting to come to life, Noodle no
more um. And so this is probably the conversation that
(18:17):
Mary Shelley remembers having taken place between Byron and Darwin,
when really it would possibly make more sense that it
happened between Polydori and Shelley because Shelly was an amateur chemist,
a pretty talented one, and Polydori is a doctor. He's
done all this research into sleepwalking and other sort of
(18:40):
borderline supernatural I don't you know, sort of frankenstein Esque topics.
So he's a likely conversation partner in that Darwin thing
that spurs Mary Shelley's dream. And this was supposedly the
conversation that sparked that whole vision, but that would have
taken place before the challenge even how But so again,
(19:01):
is she misremembering it or is she doing it on
purpose to make it a more suspenseful, interesting story. So
Katie and I were saying, it would be really weird
if somebody was asking you, like, twelve years ago, was
it raining that night? You know, like we're trying to
think of it, and well, if it were the fall
of two thousand nine, we'd say rain every day. It
was m but it's it's interesting. We're probably never gonna
(19:24):
get this timeline completely sorted out, but um, I just
wonder where why some of her airs occurred as they did,
regardless of exactly how it happened. This little contest gave
us both Frankenstein and the Vampire, which are both cultural icons,
and as English majors were really impressed by this. We
(19:47):
love the literary stuff, but again, we also love costumes,
so we wanted to challenge you to send us your
best costume ideas that History podcast at how stuff works
dot com and if you were something really super, we're
cool send us a picture because we want to see.
And if you want to learn more about where the
Vampire went from Poor poly Dorry, check out how Vampires
(20:10):
Work at how stuff works dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works
dot com. Let us know what you think, Send an
email to podcast at how stuff works dot com and
be sure to check out the stuff you missed in
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