A tale for Halloween
On a dark and stormy night in a Swiss lakeside villa in 1816 four young friends were about to start a new genre of fiction, and launch onto the world two monsters that would haunt our imaginations for over two hundred years. What connects these young writers to the overthrow of tyrannies, the birth of modern feminism, countless Hollywood films and a mountain in Indonesia?
This is the story of the birth of Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula’s inspiration, and it is more intriguing in fact than most fictional stories that have used those two creations to describe our changing anxieties about the nature of existence and the world we are creating.
Two hundred years ago the twenty one year old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelly published Frankenstein, and a young Anglo Italian Doctor called John Polidori finished the Vampyre some months later. Both were the results of that dark and stormy night two years previously where two of the rock stars of the Romantic Movement dared the company to produce the most scary horror story they could imagine.
Come and hear the story of how this group of friends came to be there, their extraordinary lives and lifestyles, why it was a dark and stormy night, falling empires and how their creations have fared over two hundred years of re-telling. It’s a thriller.
John Robinson
John has lived in Uruguay since 2009, but before that he was for many years a consulting Naval Architect at the University of Southampton in England. He has given talks with Anglo Cultural on Shackleton’s 1914 Antarctic expedition, the true nature of the Titanic disaster, and the British involvement with Conchillas and the construction of the port of Buenos Aires, as well as a series of talks connected with the TV series Downton Abbey.