The grandfather of all modern horror stories was written 200 years ago in Geneva, and the city is host to a commemorative exhibit, “Frankenstein, Creator of Darkness.” Included in the exhibit are several pages of Mary Shelley’s original manuscript.
Shelley and her future husband Percy were among visitors to Lord Byron at a summer villa he rented above Geneva. The house, Villa Diodati, and its lush gardens will be open for guided tours during the nearby exhibit, which runs to Oct. 31. The Martin Bodmer Foundation organized the exhibit.
It was an especially cool and dark summer, due in part to a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, and Byron supposedly challenged his guests to a literary contest to pass the indoor time. Mary Shelley’s work is the best-known from the group, which also included The Vampyre, by John Polidori, considered the ancestor of the “romantic vampire” genre.
Shelley’s work is actually a romantic tragedy, and focuses on man’s loss of control over his world and creation in the growing Industrial Revolution, rather than on any actual horror, but the horror story is what has come to us in so many forms.
Illustration: Frontispiece of the 1831 edition of Frankenstein
