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Savage Messiah: Ken Russell => Savage Messiah: Ken Russell => Topic started by: Iain Fisher on April 17, 2013, 11:55:33 PM

Title: Gothic and the stories
Post by: Iain Fisher on April 17, 2013, 11:55:33 PM
Gothic is set in the Villa Diodati beside Lake Geneva.  It was here that poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, plus Shelley's future wife Mary Wollstonecraft,  Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont and Byron's doctor/ assistant John Polidori met in 1816.  Byron challenged everyone to come up with a horror story.  Percy Shelley and Claire didn't compete, but three pieces from the others emerged.

Byron came up with a six page fragment, Augustus Davell, OK but not too interesting.  Mary Wollstonecraft (who on marriage became Mary Shelley) wrote a story that became the classic novel Frankenstein, and Polidori wrote The Vampyre, which moved the vampire myth on, and Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (published 1897, 80 years later) owed a lot to Polidori's work.

And as well as Gothic, which covers the meeting, Ken also did a script for Dracula, and filmed another Bram Stoker novel, The Lair of the White Worm (1911).

Other links- Lisztomania and the Frankenstein character.  I am sure there are more.

Iain
Title: Re: Gothic and the stories
Post by: Iain Fisher on April 18, 2013, 01:21:17 PM
After the meeting of Byron, the Shelleys, Polidori and Claire Clairmont in 1816, things went wrong.

Polidori committed suicide in 1821 aged 25.  Percy Shelley drowned in 1822 aged 29.  Byron died of fever in 1824 aged 36.

Claire had a child by Byron in 1817.  Byron kept the child but refused to allow Claire to see him or the child.  The child died aged five.  Claire lived to 80 years.