Frankenstein's "Volcanic" Origins...

As it turns out, it may be that one of Halloween's most recognizable characters was born as an indirect result of volcanic activity thousands of miles away. In April of 1815, an Indonesian volcano blew up, spewing dust and ash into the air, blocking sunlight and interfering with the seasons. A volcanic winter settled in over much of Europe and America the following summer.

One can almost imagine what effect the dark and cold summer days of 1816 had upon a young Mary Shelley, with it's food shortages, flooding, summer ice, and almost constant rainfall. Nothing cheery here. And somehow it explains her choice of the icy waters of the Artic Circle for the opening scene. It seems a perfect birth place for a story of a creation gone wrong. Seems that monsters and vampires were both developed during those cold and dreary days...

Here's what Wikipedia has to say:

During the snowy summer of 1816, the "Year Without A Summer ," the world waslocked in a long cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Tambora in 1815. In this terrible year, the then Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, age 19, and her husband-to-be Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

After reading Fantasmagoriana, an anthology of German ghost stories, Byron challenged the Shelleys and his personal physician John William Polidori each to compose a story of their own.

Mary conceived an idea after she fell into a waking dream or nightmare during which she saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together." This was the germ of Frankenstein.

Byron managed to write just a fragment based on the vampire legends he heard while travelling the Balkans, and from this Polidori created The Vampyre (1819), the progenitor of the romantic vampire literary genre. Thus, the Frankenstein and vampire themes were created from that single circumstance.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Vim