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Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how

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Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. You've heard the rumors before, perhaps

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Speaker 1: and whispers written between the lines of the textbooks. Conspiracies,

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Speaker 1: paranormal events, all those things that disappear from the official explanations.

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Speaker 1: Tune in and learn more of this stuff they don't

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Speaker 1: want you to know in this video podcast from how

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Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and I'm fair Dowdy. And as you

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Speaker 1: know if you've listened to our past podcast, Sarah and

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Speaker 1: I could talk about costumes for probably an entire podcast

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Speaker 1: of its own. Don't worry, that's not what we have planned.

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Speaker 1: But we do want to talk a little bit about

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Speaker 1: some of our favorite Halloween costumes because we love Halloween

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Speaker 1: so very much and it's coming up, even if I

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Speaker 1: will be enjoyed to Florida and not participating, but my

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Speaker 1: favorite I did two years ago with the help of

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Speaker 1: Sarah's stage makeup expertise, when I was a sloth, and

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Speaker 1: perhaps unsurprisingly, most people had no idea what I was,

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Speaker 1: and sometimes even when I explained I was a sloth,

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Speaker 1: still didn't know that that was an animal, which I

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Speaker 1: find somewhat worries. It was obviously it looked like you

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Speaker 1: had skinned a flow and you were wearing it. I

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Speaker 1: was even dancing slowly. I think it was very clever.

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Speaker 1: And my favorite Halloween costume is probably an effer tit

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Speaker 1: when I was at the height of my Egyptian Mania

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Speaker 1: phase and about fourth grade or so. But when I

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Speaker 1: was thinking it over, I've never been anything really scary,

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Speaker 1: maybe with the exception of a witch at about age

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Speaker 1: seven when my baby teeth are out creepy child. But

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Speaker 1: I have helped one of my friends put on a

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Speaker 1: pretty scary costume. He was Frankenstein one year, and I

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Speaker 1: made some bolts out of tinfoil and had a big

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Speaker 1: wax scar. It was pretty It's pretty scary. I'm glad

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Speaker 1: you brought up Frankenstein because that is the topic of

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Speaker 1: today's podcast, the birth of Frankenstein and the Vampire, and

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Speaker 1: that is Vampire with why we'd like to add old

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Speaker 1: school style. So it all began on a rainy summer

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Speaker 1: night in Switzerland, and most rainy days are not this protective,

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Speaker 1: at least not for me or for Sarah. As we're

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Speaker 1: dealing with Sea Atlanta lately and our delusual weeks. But

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Speaker 1: this is Switzerland in the summer of eighteen sixteen, and

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Speaker 1: we have a very prestigious group of writers who come

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Speaker 1: together White and their companions, and there are a few

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Speaker 1: different accounts of what happened this particular rainy summer. So

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Speaker 1: we're going to start with Mary Shelley's. And Mary Shelley,

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Speaker 1: as you probably know, was the author of Frankenstein. Where

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Speaker 1: we're headed with this, and I think most people already

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Speaker 1: know that Mary Shelley starts her tale by setting the sea.

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Speaker 1: It's the summer of eighteen sixteen. They're in Switzerland, and

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Speaker 1: it's her her sort of husband, Percy Bush, Shelley, Lord Byron,

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Speaker 1: and Byron's physician John Paula Dory. And she says that

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Speaker 1: the summer started off really nice at first, and they

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Speaker 1: were spending time on the lake and on the shore.

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Speaker 1: Byron was working on the third Cante of Child Harold,

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Speaker 1: and he was the only one who was writing. But

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Speaker 1: then Rain said in an outcome the ghost Stories, they

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Speaker 1: have a volume that was translated from German to French,

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Speaker 1: and she later wrote in her introduction, I've not seen

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Speaker 1: these stories since then, but their incidents are as fresh

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Speaker 1: in my mind as if I had read them yesterday.

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Speaker 1: So you can imagine this little party of romantic poets

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Speaker 1: and their friends have a grand old time, but the

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Speaker 1: fire reading ghost stories, and out of it comes a challenge.

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Speaker 1: And she goes on to say, in this introduction, we

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Speaker 1: will each write a ghost story, said Lord Byron, and

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Speaker 1: his proposition was a seated too. Byron begins a fragment.

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Speaker 1: Shelley starts writing something about his early life, and this

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Speaker 1: was Sarah's. In my favorite line, poor Paula Dorri had

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Speaker 1: some terrible idea about a skull headed lady and talks

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Speaker 1: about it very dismissively. And then she goes on to

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Speaker 1: say that the illustrious poets, also annoyed by the platitude

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Speaker 1: of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task. But she still

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Speaker 1: hasn't come up with anything. She's still trying to think

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Speaker 1: of a story, so she writes, I busied myself to

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Speaker 1: think of a story, a story to arrival those which

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Speaker 1: had excited us to this task, One which would speak

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Speaker 1: to the mysterious fears of our nature in waken thrilling horror,

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Speaker 1: one to make the reader dread to look around to

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Speaker 1: curdle the blood and to quicken the beatings of the heart.

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Speaker 1: So she wants to write a really killer ghost story,

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Speaker 1: but she cannot think of anything. And you can imagine

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Speaker 1: how frustrating it would be if all of your ghost

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Speaker 1: story challenged companions who happened to be famous writers. To

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Speaker 1: interpain Arns too, are also famous writers. Her mother was

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Speaker 1: Mary Walston Craft, and so everybody's scribbling away their ghost stories,

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Speaker 1: even poor poly Doory with his lame skullhead Lily. And

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Speaker 1: you can't think of anything. And to make it worse,

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Speaker 1: every morning they ask her, have you thought of a story?

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Speaker 1: Have you thought of a story? So she's under a

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Speaker 1: lot of pressure to think of something good here, but

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Speaker 1: inspiration comes slowly. She starts listening to conversations that Byron

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Speaker 1: and Shelley are having, and she says they talked of

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Speaker 1: the experiments of Dr Darwin, who preserved a piece of

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Speaker 1: Vermicelli in a glass case. Told by some extraordinary means,

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Speaker 1: it began to move with voluntary motion, which had serenade

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Speaker 1: Giggles this entire afternoon, because Katie was like, wait a minute,

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Speaker 1: chili is a noodle, right, That's like I think, so

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Speaker 1: I'm still m chair were interpreting that correctly, but we

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Speaker 1: get that anybody who's read or seen Frankenstein can see

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Speaker 1: the little seed planting here in this wiggling Vermicelli of

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Speaker 1: where science enters the ghost writing. So that night Mary

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Speaker 1: Shelley has what she calls a dream vision. She says,

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Speaker 1: I saw with shut eyes but acute mental vision. I

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Speaker 1: saw the pale student of unhallowed arts, kneeling beside the

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Speaker 1: thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm

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Speaker 1: of a man stretched out, and then on the working

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Speaker 1: of some powerful engine shows signs of life and still

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Speaker 1: with an uneasy half of vital motion. Frightful must it be?

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Speaker 1: For supremely frightful would be the effect of any human

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Speaker 1: endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of

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Speaker 1: the world. And then at the end of her vision,

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Speaker 1: she ends with a deep look into the creatures yellow

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Speaker 1: watery but speculative eyes, which is so creepy. And she

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Speaker 1: wakes up from this dream vision doubt. Yeah, trying to

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Speaker 1: You know what anybody does if they have a nightmare,

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Speaker 1: Try to just tell yourself it's not real and look

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Speaker 1: around and turn a light. One get a place of

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Speaker 1: your actual surroundings. But then she starts to think about

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Speaker 1: it a little bit, and she initially thinks, if only

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Speaker 1: I can cook up something that would be as scary

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Speaker 1: as my dream vision from my story, before it clicks

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Speaker 1: and she realizes, well, yeah, she just dreamed her story.

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Speaker 1: Here it is. So she writes a little bit, and

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Speaker 1: then Percy Shelley tells her she should develop it into

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Speaker 1: something much longer than just the short story, that she

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Speaker 1: could actually write a book and write it she does so.

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Speaker 1: Out of Mary Shelley's account of the competition or the

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Speaker 1: Byron Lord Byron's challenge in Switzerland, we come up with

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Speaker 1: the great novel Frankenstein, a lame skully Head story, poor

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Speaker 1: vollly Door, and the fragment published by Byron. That sounds

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Speaker 1: pretty good for a whimsical challenge at the at the

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Speaker 1: lake shore and on a rainy evening, you know, a

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Speaker 1: successful novel. Great, But we actually are fortunate to have

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Speaker 1: a little more than that that comes out of it.

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Speaker 1: Mary Shelley did not tell the whole tail. And the

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Speaker 1: other thing that came out of this competition was a

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Speaker 1: story called the Vampire, and the Vampire was actually written

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Speaker 1: by the guy who seems to have only cooked up

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Speaker 1: the skulls story, and the how this got left out

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Speaker 1: of the account is really puzzling and kind of a

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Speaker 1: great literary mystery. But before we talk about that, we'll

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Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about John Paula Dory, whose

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Speaker 1: name I dearly love. By the way, he was born

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Speaker 1: in His father was an Italian who lived in England,

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Speaker 1: a scholar and his translator, and his mother had been

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Speaker 1: a governess, and he would have been uncle to Dante

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Speaker 1: Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. They were born after he died.

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Speaker 1: But another famous literary connection here. Um. But he studied

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Speaker 1: to be a doctor at the University of and Borrow,

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Speaker 1: and he earned his degree at a really young age.

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Speaker 1: But the most interesting thing about it is he writes

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Speaker 1: a dissertation on sleepwalking, which for somebody who later writes

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Speaker 1: a book about vampires just seems so fitting. Um. But

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Speaker 1: he really wants to be a cool, romantic poet. I

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Speaker 1: think they're like the rock stars of the day. Oh Byron, mad,

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Speaker 1: bad and dangerous to know. Yeah, so he's working for Byron,

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Speaker 1: And I guess any physician he probably you see the

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Speaker 1: person for who they really are you know, so he

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Speaker 1: kind of idolized Byron in a way and wanted to

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Speaker 1: be like him, but also, you know, wasn't realized he

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Speaker 1: wasn't all he was cracked up to be. But he's

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Speaker 1: there for this ghostwriting challenge, and the real story is

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Speaker 1: a little bit different. During this challenge, Byron writes the

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Speaker 1: fragment which we had mentioned it's called Augustus Darbyl but

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Speaker 1: he he's really more concentrating on trying to finish up

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Speaker 1: Child Harold at this point, which was a good idea

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Speaker 1: because it helped make him famous what he's known for. Um,

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Speaker 1: he was probably also kind of bored writing a Gothic story.

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Speaker 1: It's Hill the Ghost not really a Byron's ali um.

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Speaker 1: Mary Shelley actually notes that the two poets just aren't

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Speaker 1: that into writing prose. Basically, there's no byronic passion with

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Speaker 1: Frankenstein's But Paula Dory ends up picking up Byron's fragment

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Speaker 1: and he changes it a little bit, but it ends

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Speaker 1: up detailing a protagonist who accompanies an eccentric nobleman called

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Speaker 1: Lord Ruthven on a European tour, which sounds really familiar,

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Speaker 1: doesn't It sounds a lot like it's a little bit

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Speaker 1: like Byron and some who accompanied him. Um. But after

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Speaker 1: he's dismissed from Byron's services, Paula Dory travels around Europe

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Speaker 1: for a little a while longer and leaves his manuscript

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Speaker 1: of the Vampire, his tale he's made from this fragment

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Speaker 1: with the Countess of Bruce, who gives it to another person,

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Speaker 1: who in turn gives it to Henry Colburn, who's the

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Speaker 1: editor of a struggling London magazine. And it shows up

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Speaker 1: on Colburn's desk with a packet of papers, and it's unsigned.

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Speaker 1: It's a very confessional tale and it looks like maybe

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Speaker 1: the kind of thing Byron would write. So if you

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Speaker 1: have a struggling magazine, what do you do? You publish

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Speaker 1: the confessional by the very controversial Lord Byron. Yeah, it's

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Speaker 1: actually published as a tale told by Lord Byron. So

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Speaker 1: he's not just like using hnds. He's coming right out there.

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Speaker 1: Byron wrote this by it so, needless to say, it's

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Speaker 1: incredibly popular and the magazine actually ends up getting a

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Speaker 1: reputation for these kind of maccab tales. And this he

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Speaker 1: ticks Byron off. He says he didn't write it he

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Speaker 1: publishes what he did write, Augustus Starvill, to show that

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Speaker 1: these are two different things, and then he writes a

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Speaker 1: disclaimer to the editor of another magazine with this skeething quote.

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Speaker 1: He says, if the book is clever, it would be

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Speaker 1: based to deprive the real writer, whoever he may be,

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Speaker 1: of his honors, and if stupid, I desire the responsibility

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Speaker 1: of nobody's dulness. But my own I have, besides a

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Speaker 1: personal disliked vampires, and the little acquaintance I have with

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Speaker 1: them would by no means induced me to divulge their secrets.

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Speaker 1: So that's pretty pretty low Byron. But I guess he

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Speaker 1: really doesn't want anything to be associated with his name

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Speaker 1: that is not his own creation. Um So Paula Dory. However,

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Speaker 1: you know he did write this, and he comes out

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Speaker 1: saying saying it, and he follows it by a few

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Speaker 1: other tales and nurses berk told or the modern Oedipus,

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Speaker 1: which sounds like really unfortunate titling. It's actually reviewed pretty well,

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Speaker 1: but it doesn't sell well at all. Think and he

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Speaker 1: writes one other thing, and his medical practice isn't doing

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Speaker 1: very well, and his literary aspirations are falling kind of flat,

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Speaker 1: and he's depressed and in debt, and he commits suicide

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Speaker 1: by drinking hydrogen cyanide in August of eighteen twenty one.

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Speaker 1: Although I think they wrote on his death certificate that

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Speaker 1: it wasn't but but it was. It's not the kind

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Speaker 1: of thing usually accidentally and just that was a charitable

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Speaker 1: thing for whoever that doctor was to do. But Paula

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Speaker 1: Dory leaves us with a pretty important reputation because he's

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Speaker 1: introduced the vampire to the British, which has far arranging consequences. Eventually,

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Speaker 1: Irish author Bram Stoker writes Dracula in which is one

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Speaker 1: of my favorite books of all time, And if you

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Speaker 1: want to creepy movie, please rent bram Stoker's Dracula, just

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Speaker 1: to hear the lead actors saying over and over again,

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Speaker 1: because I really love it. And that shoots the vampire. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: we get our monster movies of the nineteen thirty everything

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Speaker 1: from vampires today. So we don't do Twilight. For the record,

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Speaker 1: we're not twinhearts. Don't send us mean emails. So but

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Speaker 1: so out of this we have Frankenstein and the Vampire.

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Speaker 1: But it's still a little weird. Right, because why was

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Speaker 1: Mary Shelley introduction is at You know, when you first

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Speaker 1: read it, you're like, well, here I go, you know,

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Speaker 1: this is the whole story, and then you start looking

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Speaker 1: around a little bit. And she made a lot of

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Speaker 1: mistakes and some I could shock up to it being

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Speaker 1: written long after the fact. A lot has happened to her.

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Speaker 1: Um Percy Shelley died a very tragic death, and she's

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Speaker 1: had a lot in the intervening years to forget big details.

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Speaker 1: But some of the things are just you wouldn't forget them. Well,

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Speaker 1: the biggest one for me is she completely erases her stepsister,

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Speaker 1: Claire Claremont and say she wasn't even there. She said

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Speaker 1: there were only four of them, but there were definitely five.

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Speaker 1: And at the time, Percy Shelly was married and he

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Speaker 1: was estranged from his wife. But she was pregnant and

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Speaker 1: Mary Shelly was either pregnant, she wasn't actually Mary Shelley,

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Speaker 1: she was married Godwin. She was either pregnant with Percy's

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Speaker 1: child or they just had a child. I can't quite remember.

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Speaker 1: I'm sorry. They had several children and only one one

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Speaker 1: survived of the four, and Claire Claremont had a little

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Speaker 1: thing going with Lord Byron. So she's run off with

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Speaker 1: with her sister and her sister's so my husband and

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Speaker 1: Claire may also have had something with Percy Shelley. No

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Speaker 1: one's quite sure, but she gets pregnant from Lord Byron

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Speaker 1: and later they has a very sad story. Yeah, well

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Speaker 1: we'll cover that in a Lord Byron. Cat been itching

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Speaker 1: to do a Lord Byron podcast, but um, so yeah,

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Speaker 1: Claire Claremont has just gone from Candles. I guess she

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Speaker 1: didn't write a very good ghost story, or maybe she

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Speaker 1: would have been lucky enough to be included in the intro.

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Speaker 1: But um, there are a few other issues with that.

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Speaker 1: The stories that she quotes is remembering as if she

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Speaker 1: had read them yesterday are kind of off in their particulars,

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Speaker 1: But the real issue comes with the timeline of the

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Speaker 1: whole thing. And we should mention that during this poly

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Speaker 1: DOORI was keeping a diary that Lord Byron's publisher actually

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Speaker 1: asked him to keep, kind of like travels with Byron

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Speaker 1: across Europe. And this diary, which was edited by Paula

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Speaker 1: Dory's sister, she might have taken out of stuff, but

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Speaker 1: it was eventually published in nineteen eleven, so we have

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Speaker 1: a pretty firm dateline from poly Dory, and he records

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Speaker 1: that on June sevent eighteen sixteen, the ghost stories are

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Speaker 1: begun by all but me, which that's kind of weird

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Speaker 1: to start with, since we hear Mary Shelley saying they'd

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Speaker 1: all started together except her, and going off of this,

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Speaker 1: we can kind of assume that because the interest in

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Speaker 1: this contest wane so quickly, and the dates of the

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Speaker 1: arrival of the whole party in the weather, the bad

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Speaker 1: weather coming in, we can kind of assume that Byron

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Speaker 1: suggested the challenge the day before that. So June sixteen,

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Speaker 1: it's just a hypothesis a few people have thrown out there,

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Speaker 1: but it sounds pretty good to me. It does, and

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Speaker 1: that means that, as you said, Mary was already writing

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Speaker 1: when she was trying to make it sound like she'd

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Speaker 1: had sleepless nights of trying to dream up this wonderful vision. Yeah. Well,

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Speaker 1: and it gets even weirder because on June, so the

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Speaker 1: night before we assumed Byron made the challenge. Paul A

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Speaker 1: Doory notes that he had a scientific conversation about principles,

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Speaker 1: whether man was to be thought merely an instrument and

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Speaker 1: a Vermicelli, Rmidali waiting to come to life, Noodle no

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Speaker 1: more um. And so this is probably the conversation that

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Speaker 1: Mary Shelley remembers having taken place between Byron and Darwin,

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Speaker 1: when really it would possibly make more sense that it

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Speaker 1: happened between Polydori and Shelley because Shelly was an amateur chemist,

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Speaker 1: a pretty talented one, and Polydori is a doctor. He's

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Speaker 1: done all this research into sleepwalking and other sort of

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Speaker 1: borderline supernatural I don't you know, sort of frankenstein Esque topics.

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Speaker 1: So he's a likely conversation partner in that Darwin thing

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Speaker 1: that spurs Mary Shelley's dream. And this was supposedly the

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Speaker 1: conversation that sparked that whole vision, but that would have

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Speaker 1: taken place before the challenge even how But so again,

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Speaker 1: is she misremembering it or is she doing it on

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Speaker 1: purpose to make it a more suspenseful, interesting story. So

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Speaker 1: Katie and I were saying, it would be really weird

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Speaker 1: if somebody was asking you, like, twelve years ago, was

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Speaker 1: it raining that night? You know, like we're trying to

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Speaker 1: think of it, and well, if it were the fall

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Speaker 1: of two thousand nine, we'd say rain every day. It

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Speaker 1: was m but it's it's interesting. We're probably never gonna

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Speaker 1: get this timeline completely sorted out, but um, I just

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Speaker 1: wonder where why some of her airs occurred as they did,

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Speaker 1: regardless of exactly how it happened. This little contest gave

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Speaker 1: us both Frankenstein and the Vampire, which are both cultural icons,

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Speaker 1: and as English majors were really impressed by this. We

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Speaker 1: love the literary stuff, but again, we also love costumes,

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Speaker 1: so we wanted to challenge you to send us your

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Speaker 1: best costume ideas that History podcast at how stuff works

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Speaker 1: dot com and if you were something really super, we're

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Speaker 1: cool send us a picture because we want to see.

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Speaker 1: And if you want to learn more about where the

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Speaker 1: Vampire went from Poor poly Dorry, check out how Vampires

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Speaker 1: Work at how stuff works dot com. For more on

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Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works

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Speaker 1: dot com. Let us know what you think, Send an

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Speaker 1: email to podcast at how stuff works dot com and

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Speaker 1: be sure to check out the stuff you missed in

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