As part of Chris's Birthday Day Out we visited Dove Cottage in Grasmere. Wordsworth Grasmere is currently presenting a new exhibition exploring the origins of the Gothic imagination.
The exhibition brings together rare books, manuscripts and treasures from Wordsworth Grasmere’s internationally significant collection. The treasures on display include a first edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Ghost Story! Into the Gothic Imagination explores the beginnings of the haunting stories and fantastical ideas that laid the foundations for modern horror and fantasy fiction. The exhibition begins at the heart of the story: a fateful moment when imagination and circumstance fused to inspire one of the world’s greatest gothic tales.
In the summer of 1816, known as "the year without a summer", the young
writer Mary Shelley, just 18 years old, gathered with Percy Bysshe
Shelley, the notoriously "mad, bad and dangerous to know" poet Lord
Byron, physician John Polidori and Claire Clairmont at the "Villa
Diodati", a mansion on the alpine-fringed shore of Lake Geneva in
Switzerland. Confined by incessant rain, the group entertained
themselves with gothic tales until Byron eventually challenged each
guest to write a ghost story of their own.
That night changed
literary history. Mary, unable to sleep, was thrilled by a terrifying
vision that would become Frankenstein, now one of the most influential
novels in the English language. The same contest also inspired Byron’s
A Fragment, an unfinished vampire tale, and John Polidori’s 1819 novel
The Vampyre, two works that established the seductive aristocratic
vampire in popular culture and paved the way for Dracula.
The exhibition included immersive installations, books, paintings and ephemera. All telling tales of terror and wonder, and the ideas and anxieties of the Gothic imagination that continue to enthrall audiences and shape popular culture today.
