a hotel. Little more than a week later,
Byron showed up with his handsome
20-year-old doctor, John Polidori, a
would-be poet who hero-worshipped
Byron. Attempting to escape the
English tourists he called “staring boo-
bies,” Byron rented the secluded Villa
Diodati overlooking the lake. “The view
from his house is very fine; beautiful
lake; at the bottom of the crescent is
Geneva,” Polidori wrote.
The weather wasn’t quite so pleas-
ant. Not long after they settled in, it
began to rain incessantly. Electrical
storms rolled down the mountains
and roiled the surface of the lake, mak-
ing sailing virtually impossible. (Few
people could swim in those days.) Thenear constant darkness caused birds
to drop dead in the street and forced
the friends to keep candles burning
indoors. It was, as Mary later wrote, “a
wet, ungenial summer.”
The bad weather was the result of
the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora on
Indonesia’s Sumbawa Island. Spewing
ash, pumice, and an estimated 60 mega-
tons of sulfur into the atmosphere, the
four-month-long eruption led to what
became known as the Year Without a
Summer. To this day, 1816 remains one
of the coldest recorded years in Western
Europe—and one of the wettest. “The
excessive abundance of rain has caused
disasters almost everywhere,” said an
article in London’s Morning Post.
In Byron’s villa, the friends stayed
up drinking wine around the fire
until three a.m., the poet’s customaryThe time Byron,
Mary, Shelley, and
Polidori spent at
Switzerland’s Lake
Geneva was, as
Mary later wrote,
“a wet, ungenial
summer.”1111DE
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