Mary Shelley Brings Frankenstein to Life

HISTORY This Week

The HISTORY® Channel

History, Education, Society & Culture

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2023

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

June 10, 1816. A storm settles over Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Stuck inside a romantic villa, five writers grow restless. Then one of them issues a challenge: Who among us can write the most terrifying ghost story? The group includes two of the most accomplished poets of the day – Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. But it’s Percy's lover, Mary, who creates an enduring masterpiece: the novel Frankenstein. How did Mary Shelley draw from her life to write this harrowing story? And why have we been talking about it for more than two hundred years?

Special thanks to our guest, Charlotte Gordon, author of Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The History Channel, Original Podcast.
0:04.4	History this week, June 10, 1816.
0:13.4	I'm Sally Helm.
0:18.4	Lightning above the lake.
0:22.8	A group of famous friends is gathered at a villa in Switzerland.
0:27.3	The poet Lord Byron has rented the place.
0:30.0	He just moved in today.
0:31.6	His guests include his lover, Claire Godwin, his doctor, John Polidori,
0:37.2	and also the poet Percy Bisch Shelley, and Mary Godwin, who is Shelley's lover.
0:44.8	It's a summer alpine vacation, but there is no sun sparkling on the lake.
0:51.3	1816 has been unusually dark and dreary.
0:56.2	Some are actually calling it the year without summer.
1:00.3	A volcanic eruption in Indonesia has spewed so much ash and lava and sulfur into the air
1:07.5	that a massive cloud is drifting across the globe and distorting the weather.
1:13.9	There's frost when it should be warm.
1:16.8	Dark clouds when the day would normally be bright.
1:20.6	And so, these pleasure-seeking poets are stuck inside, trying to pass the time.
1:30.0	They've gotten their hands on a book of ghost stories, which feels right for the gloomy setting.
1:36.2	And after a couple of days of rain, Lord Byron comes up with an idea.
1:42.0	A challenge.
1:43.6	He says, we will each write a ghost story.
1:50.7	At that moment, Lord Byron is the most famous writer in the English-speaking world.
	...

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