What Happened to the Five Writers Who Spent the Cold Summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva

The five writers who spent the cold June and July of 1816 at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva had a combined age of 110. They were unusually young even by Romantic standards: Byron was 28, Percy Shelley 23, Polidori 20, Mary Godwin (not yet Shelley) 18, Claire Clairmont 18.

Within six years two were dead by poisoning. One had drowned. Byron had four more years to live. Two of them — Mary and Claire — would live on into substantial old age, the survivors of the experiment.

Polidori, 1821

John William Polidori had been Byron’s personal physician on the 1816 trip and had been substantially dismissed by Byron at the end of the summer for personality reasons. He wrote The Vampyre — the short story that would substantively invent the literary vampire — at the villa in July 1816; the work was published in 1819 over Polidori’s name but was widely attributed to Byron and substantively never gave Polidori the literary credit it would later earn. He failed at medical practice, returned to London, accumulated gambling debts, and died of prussic acid in his father’s London house in August 1821. He was 25. The death was almost certainly suicide; the coroner ruled it accidental to permit Christian burial.

Percy Shelley, 1822

Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a sudden squall in the Gulf of La Spezia off the Italian coast on 8 July 1822. He had been sailing his small schooner Don Juan back from Livorno after a visit to Byron when the storm caught him. The boat was found capsized; Shelley’s body washed ashore at Viareggio ten days later, partly decomposed but still identifiable from the volume of Keats poems in his jacket pocket. He was 29. The body was cremated on the beach by his friend Edward Trelawny in a substantially ceremonial event attended by Byron and Leigh Hunt. His ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, near the grave of his son William.

Byron, 1824

George Gordon, Lord Byron sailed for Greece in summer 1823 to support the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire. He spent approximately seven months at Missolonghi organising the Greek forces, helping finance the campaign, and substituting for the political-military leadership that the Greek factions could not provide internally. He developed a fever in February 1824 — probably malaria, possibly typhoid — and died at Missolonghi on 19 April 1824. He was 36. His Greek hosts kept his lungs (interred at Missolonghi as a substantive symbolic-political gift); his body was returned to England and substantively interred at the family vault at Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, after Westminster Abbey refused him on grounds of moral character.

Allegra Byron, 1822

The substantively first death of the post-Diodati period was that of Allegra Byron — the daughter Claire Clairmont had conceived with Byron during the Diodati summer of 1816. Allegra was born in January 1817 and was substantively given over to Byron at age fifteen months under the substantive understanding that Byron would raise her in his own household. He substantively did not. She was placed in a Capuchin convent at Bagnacavallo in 1821 (aged 4), against Claire’s protest, and died of typhus there in April 1822 (aged 5). Byron paid the funeral costs and arranged for her burial at Harrow School in England.

Mary Shelley, 1851

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley outlived her husband Percy by 29 years. She had early difficulty supporting herself and her surviving son Percy Florence after Percy’s 1822 drowning; she lived in straitened circumstances in Italy and then in London through the 1820s, supporting herself with literary journalism and the editing of Percy Shelley’s posthumous works. She published The Last Man in 1826 — a substantively underappreciated novel that drew on her Diodati experience. Her financial circumstances improved in the 1840s when Percy Florence inherited the Shelley baronetcy. She died of a brain tumour at her London house in February 1851, aged 53.

Claire Clairmont, 1879

Claire Clairmont outlived everyone else by a margin. She had taken Catholic orders in Italy in the 1820s, served as a impoverished governess in Russia and Austria through the 1830s and 1840s, returned to Florence in 1842 to live with relatives, and died there in March 1879 aged 80. She had spent the entirety of her subsequent life without significant financial security and substantively in continued unhappiness over her treatment by Byron and her loss of Allegra. The papers she had preserved from the Diodati summer were largely sold posthumously by her relatives and became the substantive primary source for the modern Shelley-Byron biographical tradition.

She was the substantively last surviving witness to the summer that produced Frankenstein and The Vampyre. She had been 18.