Frankenstein 1818 & Other Tales of the Dead

‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron…

 Thunder rolls across the Alps and lightening slices the darkness above the angry waves of Lake Geneva. Another storm is coming, and it’s a big one. In the Villa Diodati, the great house on the shore, lives the exiled Lord Byron, greatest living English poet, attended by his personal physician, the volatile John Polidori. Tonight, as on many nights, the neighbours are visiting. Percy Bysshe Shelley, rebel poet and atheist, animatedly discusses the principle of life with Polidori while his lover, Mary, the daughter of radical philosopher William Godwin and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, listens intently. Her half-sister, Claire, has eyes only for Byron, and is carrying his child, but already he is growing tired of her. It has been another miserable day of a miserable summer, and the rain lashing against the shutters has once more made them the inmates of an admittedly luxurious prison. To pass the time, they have been reading each other ghost stories. Challenged by Byron, each agrees to write their own supernatural tale.

That night in June 1816 became one of the most seismic moments in the history of gothic literature, inspiring both Frankenstein and ‘The Vampyre’, the forerunner of Dracula. Packed with fascinating extras, including Byron’s ‘Fragment of a Novel’, this collection brings together the original 1818 edition of Shelley’s masterpiece, Polidori’s prototype for the aristocratic vampire, and the original stories that inspired them: Fantasmagoriana, or Tales of the Dead.

Contents:

- The original 1818 edition of Frankenstein

- Fantasmagoriana

- The Vampyre'

- 'A Fragment' by Lord Byron

- Appendices including Mary Shelley’s Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein