Frightful it must be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.” I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the workings of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. “I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,” she later wrote, “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. On this macabre note the company went to bed, and in the small hours Mary Shelley experienced a kind of half-dream which thrilled and terrified her. This led him to wonder whether a corpse could be reanimated, with the component parts of such a creature being manufactured, fitted together, and given what he called “vital warmth”.
Then one gloomy evening, with the wind lashing the rain at his villa, Byron told of an English doctor who could make inanimate objects move by the “extraordinary means” of voluntary motion. However, she had difficulty in inventing such a tale and morning after morning confessed to her competitors that she was still “without an idea”.
She sought a story that would “speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror – one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.” Inspired by his words, Mary Shelley went to bed that night in 1816 determined to do as well as her male rivals. The winner of the literary competition, he jokingly added, would doubtless achieve “fortune and lasting fame”. It should, he said, depict “the monstrous, the horrendous, the unusual”. Addressing his companions – his fellow poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 18-year-old Mrs Mary Shelley, and an Italian doctor named Polidori – he suggested that they should each write a “truly horrific” ghost story. It was the poet, Lord Byron, who had the most original idea. Bored by the constant rain which kept them indoors, the group of English people staying on the shores of Lake Geneva, in Switzerland, sought a way of entertaining themselves. The summer had been cold and wet and there was nothing for the holidaymakers to do at night. Mary Shelley and the Gothic imagination by C L Doughty
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