1816
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Fantasmagoriana has a significant place in the history of English literature. In the summer of 1816 Lord Byron and John William Polidori were staying at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva and were visited by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont. Kept indoors by the "incessant rain" of that "wet, ungenial summer", over three days in June the five turned to reading fantastical stories, including Fantasmagoriana (in the French edition), and then devising their own tales. Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and Polidori was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron's to produce The Vampyre, the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre. Some parts of Frankenstein are surprisingly similar to those found in Fantasmagoriana and suggest a direct influence upon Mary Shelley's writing."--Sholem Stein |
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1816 was the 816th year of the 2nd millennium, the 16th year of the 19th century, and the 7th year of the 1810s decade. This year was known as the 'Year Without a Summer' because of low temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, the result of the Mount Tambora volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1815. The Sulfur from this eruption reflected the sun's rays and caused global cooling.
Art and culture
- The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffmann
- A trip to Florence and Rome (1816-17) gave Théodore Géricault a fascination with both Michelangelo and Baroque art
- "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge was first published
- Beau Brummell fled England in 1816 as the result of gambling debts.
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