On this date... 15 June 1816
John Polidori hurts his ankle
It rained in Geneva. It had rained nearly every day that summer, in fact.
On 10 April 1815, Mount Tambora (present-day Indonesia, then part of the Dutch East Indies) had erupted an amount of sulfur into the air unseen since Pompeii, making it the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history. Tambora filled the air with ash, causing a volcanic winter that dropped temperatures by nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit worldwide and caused drastic shifts in the climate for over a year.
Such a natural disaster and cool weather was the perfect tone-setter for the tenants of a house near Lake Geneva, Switzerland, a young group of proto-goths in varying stages of their writing careers. In the lakehouse known as the Villa Diodati, one of the most aspiring writers – the youngest in his art but oldest by disposition – was Doctor John Polidori.
The young physician had begun that summer vacation traveling with his long-time patient and part-time friend, Lord George Byron, who had been forced to flee his native England after numerous scandals (including a separation from his wife and rumors of an affair with his half-sister). Byron’s publisher, John Murray, had commissioned Polidori to keep a detailed diary of Byron's travels for a sum of £500 (roughly $50,000 in today’s dollars), thinking the travels and diary might amount to something worth publishing. Looking at the resulting document, Murray couldn’t have been much pleased with the doctor’s work.
Early in their trip, Byron and Polidori came upon another poetic pair who happened to be staying in a vacation villa just down the path – Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her soon-to-be husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. Also staying at that villa was Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, the actual person Byron had been having an affair with in London and who later gave birth to their daughter Allegra.
Trapped indoors through the many rainy days in what Mary described as a “wet, ungenial summer,” the group gathered in the Villa Diodati to exchange stories, play games, and to write. All while, it must be noted, getting absolutely shit-faced drunk.
Friendships arose and were strengthened during these outings, especially amongst young Mary and Polidori. On this date, 15 June 1816, Byron and Polidori happened to be standing on the balcony of the Villa Diodati, when who should be wandering down the path after a summer shower but young Mary Godwin. “Now you who wish to be gallant ought to jump down this small height, and offer your arm,” Byron insisted to his companion. Polidori did so with haste, a chivalrous glimmer in his eye. The plan immediately backfired as Polidori, not much of an athlete, and the ground being wet, slipped when he landed and sprained his ankle.
Mary Godwin, thinking of Polidori much like a brother, took care of him for the next few weeks. In the days following, John was blissfully ignorant of the seminal work he was about to pen – The Vampyre, considered the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre. Nor was he aware of the grand historical figures he was playing games with each night, such as the woman who would become known the world over as Mary Shelley, the writer of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, which created the Gothic horror genre and who was but a young woman of 18 that fateful summer.
Instead, Polidori was entirely consumed with one phrase that would open all of his diary entries for the weeks to follow: “Foot hurts.”