It is a well-documented literary legend that any fan of zombie literature will savour: the character of Frankenstein came to his creator, Mary Shelley, in a dream. It's impossible to read World War Z, our current Sunday Arts Section (SAS) Book Club novel, and not be familiar with the history of zombie literature, and that includes Frankenstein.
Bibliophiles have long argued over whether Frankenstein is a zombie or a monster. The scales seem tilted towards him being a monster. Still, there's no doubt that zombie literature owes a great deal to the story of Frankenstein. Vampires are equally indebted to him.
The whole bizarre story of the writing of Frankenstein goes like this: in 1816, George Gordon, Lord Byron, the great English Romantic poet, decided to travel to Switzerland, where he planned to meet his friends, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley's wife Mary. Like most upper-class Europeans, Lord Byron travelled with his doctor.
Accounts of the trip tell us that Byron chose John Polidori as his doctor because he was an interesting conversationalist. That did not mean Byron and Dr Polidori got along. They often quarrelled. Polidori didn't like Byron from the moment he laid eyes on him.
As fate would have it, the four travellers–the Shelleys, Polidori and Byron–were kept indoors by rain from June 15-17. To entertain themselves, they gathered around the fire at the Villa Diodato on the cold, windy shores of Lake Geneva and passed the time reading ghost stories that had just been translated from German to French.
Byron challenged everyone to write a ghost story. Mary Shelley went to bed and dreamed the story of Frankenstein, which she published two years later. Her husband wasn't interested in the project. Mary Shelley reported that Byron had sketched out a fragment of a story in his notebook and "...poor Polidori had a terrible idea about a skull-headed lady."
The tension between Polidori and Byron escalated and Polidori challenged Shelley to a duel before Byron finally dismissed him from his service. In April 1819, Polidori's short story The Vampyre appeared in the New Monthly Magazine–but was attributed to Byron. Polidori claimed it, though he admitted it was based on a story that Byron had begun but abandoned in Switzerland. Byron even released his own Fragment of a Novel in an attempt to clear up the mess, but, for better or worse, The Vampyre continued to be attributed to him.
Ruthven and the story of The Vampyre became the first vampire story in the English language. It would influence all vampire stories to come, including James Malcolm Rymer's Varney the Vampyre, published in 1845.
And so it was that three authors and a doctor launched the craze for monsters, zombies and vampires.
Check our SAS Book Club on Facebook and tell us your thoughts on zombie and vampire literature. Next week we'll look at the best vampire books.
Is Frankenstein really the first zombie in fiction? Read the arguments at zombieclass.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/is-frankensteins-monster-a-zombie/
