WATERLOO. Lord Byron and John William Polidori, his physician and secretary, set out on horseback in May 1816 in the fields near Waterloo. Not even a year had passed since the defeat of the French army by the Allied forces in this Belgian region, which marked the end of Napoleon and his empire.
The description of this journey is one of the best passages I’m traveling with ByronPolidori’s diarypublished in the translation of Javier Fernández Rubio by El Desvelo Ediciones & Malentendido. The text was first edited by William Michael Rossetti in 1911.
Byron and Polidori, always at greñoOn this journey they headed for Ginebra, from where they reached the immortal Villa Diodati at Cologne on the edge of Lake Geneva to pass by the porch.
In this house they reunited with their elders, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft, who is widely known, married a poet, like Mary Shelley. One dark cold day, rain and storms, Byron suggested that his friends write a ghost story.
Percy, ever altered, wrote nothing. Byron began a story that he did not finish and on which he served Vampire (1819) de Polidori, consider the first modern and romantic vampire story. And Mary Shelley, who was 18 years old, began to write Frankenstein or modern Prometheus (1818). Gonzalo Suárez has been sharing freely these days Rowing in the wind (1988), available on FlixOlé.
Polidori recalls in “Mi viaje con Byron” the days at the Villa Diodati at the time when “Frankenstein” and “The Vampire” appeared.
ROSSETTI. Unfortunately Polidori, en I’m traveling with Byronjust from the news about gestación de Vampire y de Frankenstein. Very detailed information comes to us thanks to the introduction and exhaustive endnotes of the aforementioned William Michael Rossetti, to the sober book Polidori and to the book of the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Family menu!
It is accurate to point this out reading from I’m traveling with Byron It’s not exactly comfortable. Polidori alternates descriptions and narrative fragments of literary value with many synoptic notes, with which he only wanted to realize what he is with and what he has every day.
no exact the book is ultimately beneficial for many reasons: the anecdotes and portraits which surround the insufferable Byron, Shelley, and other distinguished personages; the narrative of the long journey of the hasta Suiza passing through cities – to mention just a few – such as Ostend, Brujas, Amberes, Bruselas, Louvain, Aquisgrán, Cologne, Coblenz or Bern; your observations about these cities and their inhabitants, country villages and peasants and their customs; his insight into the museums, temples and theaters you visit; the good and bad vicissitudes of his travels – lapses, crimes, accidents, diversions, illnesses – and his estate at Villa Diodati and later, once sent by Byron, his foray into Italy – the origin of his stifling father – and especially his large property in Milan, before returning to Modena, Florence, Pisa…
SOMAMBULISM. Londoner John William Polidori (1795-1821) was 19 when he was an early doctor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh with a thesis on somnambulism, after studying at an exclusive Benedictine school, where he began to think about doing it as a woman. Medicine did not interest her enough and she wrote plays and essays without much luck. Byron made fun of him during his journeyI belittled him and despised his writing talent.
I enjoy wine anytime It was published with great success Vampirebut mistakenly attributed to Byron and signed for him for a long time. The poet said that the idea and arrangement were his own, but acknowledged that Polidori was the final author. I didn’t need them much. Desquiciado, for God’s sake, devoted himself compulsively to the game and against many gods. Depressed, he committed suicide by ingesting cyanide at his father’s house. He was 25 years old.
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