The Museum Of Secret History

Twilight is Lord Byron's fault

Welcome to Room 4: How To Be So Annoying That You Cause The Existence Of A Literary Genre.

I was unsure whether I should recount that story chronologically or backwards (backwards is a little funnier), but since it is complicated nevertheless, I will do it in the right order.

So, to find out what Lord Byron actually did, let's take you back to 1816, a cold and gloomy year, and a mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva.

Here, the creme de la creme of British Romanticism has assembled for a short trip out of gloomy and dark England:

Mary Wollstonecraft-Shelley, a sweet young girl of 17, the penniless daughter of a feminist pioneer,
her husband-to-be, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who is a bit less penniless and much more dramatic,
Claire Clairmont, Mary's step-sister,
and the pretentious bastard himself, Lord George Gordon Noel Byron, 28, single, bi, horny on main (and yes, that really were his surnames. I was also surprised that it wasn't just 'Lord').
Also on bord is Byron's physician, the young John Polidori, whom Byron certainly did cast for his looks rather than for his abilities. This group is as iconic as it must have been insufferable, but still, I would give my left arm for being part of this particular week-end. Or just somebody's left arm.

So this flock of aspiring poets is trapped indoors because it is raining all the time, and sooner or later, they get bored. Like, really bored, and the wine bottles are empty and Percy has used all the laudanum again and another threesome would be boring and ehhh -

Byron suggested an orgy at some point, I guess.
Instead, on June 17, they choose to read aloud from a collection of fantasy horror tales, called the Fantasmagoriana, and once they have finished, Byron (again) comes up with an idea.

"We will each write a story" he says, and, because there is nothing else to do and that's the first good idea Byron had in, like, his life, so it is agreed on. Everybody will write a short thing about a 'supernatural occurrence'.

Percy Shelley, always the creative one, writes "A Fragment Of A Ghost Story" and some other "Ghost Stories".

Mary Shelley, because she is fascinated with death, and fed up with Byron, and generally badass, pens down "Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus". Like a boss.

Byron writes "A Fragment Of A Novel". Now, this is when the fun begins.

Byrons novel is basically a vampire story. That is special, since vampires weren't that well known in European literature around that time and merely existed in Greek or Eastern European folklore tales. Due to his travels, Byron knew those stories very well and often told his friends about it.

No, really, he could barely shut up about vampires. There a several letters to Percy wherein he's like "I MUST tell you about this cool shit the people are telling me about here, it's a guy that sucks blood and they call him weird names, it's so cool!" and also writes some poems mentioning vampires. But it is still an obscure figure no one used before.

Time to change that, Byron thinks, because vampires are really cool. So he starts writing a story about an unnamed narrator who travels with a wealthy English gentleman. Then, while they are in Turkey, the gentleman falls sick, urges the narrator to promise that he will not speak about him for a year and dies. After his body rapidly dissolves, he is buried.
And that's the point where Byron was like "Ugh, Boooooring!" and stopped writing, because here, the fragment ends. The original plan was that the gentleman comes back, alive, sucks a few people dry and such,but he never finished it.

Polidori, his handsome young physician, though, finds Byron's drafts and thinks "Hey, this is nice! Maybe I could participate in that contest!" and basically copies it.