The Wet Ungenial Summer of 1816

It isn't an auspicious title for a story. And Lord Byron can't have been in a particularly good mood, having previously had to leave England under a cloud. His marriage had collapsed, due to his affair with his half-sister Augusta and because of his more under-the-radar penchant for adolescent boys. Finding himself exiled in Geneva, Byron could have been at quite a loss, yet the arrival of Shelley and his future wife Mary Godwin changed the mood. The meeting had been engineered by Godwin's stepsister Claire Clairmont, with whom Byron had previously had a fling. The four of them and Byron's handsome friend, the physician, John William Polidori decided to spend the summer together.

Although Byron was wont to complain about the ‘incessant rain’ of the ‘wet, ungenial summer’ of 1816, it proved a particularly productive period. Reading fantastical stories to each other, much like the later M.R. James and his crew, the five soon set about devising their own. Mary Shelley produced the initial sketches for what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, Polidori was inspired by Byron’s ‘Fragment of a Novel’, eventually producing The Vampyre and, a few months later, Byron himself set to work on the Faustian Manfred, his ‘Dramatic Poem’ that was in part an attempt to atone for the events of the previous year. At Symphony Hall in Birmingham tomorrow evening and on Friday lunchtime I'll be speaking about Tchaikovsky's atonement and hopes for redemption told through his 'Manfred' Symphony of 1885, ahead of performances by the CBSO and Andris Nelsons.

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