200 Year Anniversary in Geneva

Ever since the publishing of the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley’s masterwork “Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus”, Geneva, Switzerland has been the touchstone of lore surround the creation of the most famous work of Gothic literature, with the story of the competition between the romantics gathered on a dark and stormy night when Mary Shelley had a nightmare, waking dream, where she got the idea for a creature brought to life by a student of science.

While a number of myths and suppositions about the summer of 1816 have arisen in the 200 years since that time, an exhibit at the Martin Bodmer Foundation Library, just a short walk from the Villa Diodati, rented by Lord Gordon Byron for that summer and the nearby house rented by the Shelleys on the shores of Lake Geneva, has opened to celebrate the creation of the monster of id, of Shelley’s novel.

In the lower exhibit floor of foundation library, a row of glass cases hold 15 hand-written note pages of the first from draft version of the classic story beginning “I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created; he held up the curtain, and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me.”

The Villa Diodati is now converted to private residence apartments, the gardens of the villa over-looking the lake where then Mary Godwin (she wouldn’t marry Shelley until that December) and the pregnant Claire Clairmont might have strolled while Byron and Shelley were out exploring the lake, will be open for guided tours to the public during the length of the exhibit until October 9.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel was first published anonymously in 1818, and one of the editions found in the exhibit is inscribed to “To Lord Byron from the Author”.

Mary also wrote of the gloominess of the weather that summer and the exhibit features a weather report for June remarking on the late leafing of the trees. The weather has since been attributed to a volcanic eruption Mt. Tambora in Indonesia which created havoc with the climate across the globe that year.

While in Geneva other Shelley sites that can be visited including the statue of the “creature” named “Frankie” on the Plainpalais where the murder of the Frankenstein’s son took place in the novel, the Hotel d’Angleterre (not the actual one the Shelleys stayed at but a block from the spot, the birth house of Jean Jacques Rousseau whose writing ignited the romantic literature movement and drew the English romantics to Switzerland, and spots around the lake visited by Bryon and Shelley, from the Chateau Chillon  castle which inspired the Prisoner of Chillon for Byron, and the Hotel de l’Ancre in Lausanne where he began to write the work for which he abandoned his original idea of a vampire from legends he had heard in Turkey that he turned over to Polidori.

Creation of Darkness May 14-Oct 9 Martin Bodmer Foundation