Tales of the Dead
Tales of the Dead was a book which Lord Byron read to Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori at Villa Diodati in June 1816. (TV: The Haunting of Villa Diodati)
At midnight, we took a torch to the chapel. With pallid countenance and trembling limbs, we descended to the vault. Hildegarde's leaden coffin loomed before us. The Count was seized with the sensations of terror. He opened the coffin with a stifled cry of dread and inside we saw...
Behind the scenes[[edit] | [edit source]]
Tales of the Dead was an English anthology of horror fiction published in 1813 and consisting of six short stories. Though mentioned, but not made explicit during The Haunting of Villa Diodati, the story which Lord Byron reads is called The Death-Bride. The horror story was written by Friedrich August Schulze, a German novelist who wrote under the pen name Friedrich Laun.
Tales of the Dead was based on Fantasmagoriana, a French anthology of German ghost stories published in 1812. In an 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley states that when she and Percy Shelley spent time with Lord Byron in Switzerland in the summer of 1816, they were often forced to stay indoors for days at a time due to heavy rain and they amused themselves by reading "some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French".[1] These ghost stories were Fantasmagoriana.[2] Shelley specifically mentions "The Death Bride" in the 1831 preface,[2] saying "There was the History of the Inconstant Lover, who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted."[1] Though the excerpt of "The Death-Bride" read by Lord Byron is based on the actual story, it is not the same as the real-life version.
Footnotes[[edit] | [edit source]]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 TEXTS : 1831 EDITION : VOL. I. Romantic circles. Retrieved on May 25, 2021. “In the summer of 1816, we visited Switzerland, and became the neighbours of Lord Byron. (...) But it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands. There was the History of the Inconstant Lover, who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted.”
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Fantasmagoriana: the German book of ghost stories that inspired Frankenstein. The Conversation. “The book the Shelleys, Byron, and Polidori were reading during their trip was called Fantasmagoriana. It was an anthology of eight stories of the supernatural published in Paris in 1812 but translated from the German. (...) It's worth looking into the influence of such stories on Frankenstein. At some point in Shelley's novel, Victor Frankenstein dreams to hold in his arms the "pale ghost" of his bride to be, which may remind us of the story Shelley referred to as History of the Inconstant Lover (in truth, La Morte Fiancée or The Corpse Bride, by Friedrich August Schulze.)”
