On my lunch break today I stopped by Manchester Central Library to look at the design plans for the St Michael’s development, essentially a pair of enormous skyscrapers whose proposed construction is being led by Manchester City Council in partnership with ex-footballer Gary Neville. Although the designs and copious amounts of accompanying blurb present the project as a pinnacle of a daring dreamland vision of Manchester's future, looking at the little plastic model I couldn’t help but think of the whole thing as yet another example – perhaps the perfect example – of the mode of thinking which seems to be prevalent within Manchester’s upper echelons these days, thinking which runs simply thus: let’s build something enormous.

St Michael’s is controversial because, as well as its unparalleled size, its construction requires the demolition of a number of buildings, including the Sir Ralph Abercromby, a decent if not entirely salubrious backstreet pub which also happens to be the sole surviving structure from the site of the Peterloo Massacre.

​In August 1819 around 70,000 people congregated in St Peter's Field, now the site of St Peter’s Square, to demand economic and parliamentary reform. The army was called in and charged on those gathered, killing 15 people and injuring over 500 as they dispersed in panic, pouring around the Abercromby, some seeking refuge inside (some dubious accounts claim that one victim died in the pub). The subsequent public outcry led to further demonstrations and riots across the north, the protestors becoming increasingly organised in the face of government opposition. This in turn led directly to the creation of the Chartist movement, the establishment of trade unions, the founding of The Guardian and eventually to the passing of the Great Reform Act of 1832, commonly seen as the cornerstone of our modern democracy. Although its interior has been periodically refurbished, the fact remains that the walls of the Abercromby (or two of them, the other two were destroyed in WWII) are the last surviving fragments of the backdrop to this most defining of moments in both the city’s and the country’s history.

But sadly – the local government here in Manchester is never one to shy away from an opportunity for crushingly heavy symbolism – in a couple of years’ time Manchester will most likely be celebrating the bicentennial this key moment of its past by demolishing its one remaining structure to make way for another block of flats. And, like I say, this all feels very emblematic. As I left the library, itself built on the site of the massacre, it was difficult to avoid the invisible presence of Peterloo and all it represents. I passed a beggar outside and was reminded that a large homeless camp had sprung up outside the building after its renovation a couple of years ago, before the ‘protestors’, as they were branded, had been evicted to make way the surrounding area to be ‘futureproofed’ (the council’s word for endless roadworks), something which involved dismantling and moving the city’s war memorial and building a tram stop in the centre of the square. The hundred or so homeless moved on to St Anne’s Square, their new camp in the shadow of St Anne’s Church, which forms something of the city’s heart being as it is the absolute central point of Manchester. Again they were moved on, by which point the council had seen to it that any kind of rough-sleeping within the perimeters of the city had been officially criminalised. Near Victoria railway station, originally the site of St. Michael's Flags, one of Manchester’s most notorious slum, some of this ‘futureproofing’ resulted in the unearthing a mass paupers’ grave. The bodies were disinterred and shipped out, their original resting place taken up with another tram stop. While all this played out the council, in an ugly act of symmetry, simultaneously pledged £32m towards the construction of The Factory, a residential development which promises ‘public and semi-public pocket parks for impromptu community happenings, relaxing, ping pong, chess and horticulture’ but zero provision for social housing.

Crossing St. Peter's Square towards Piccadilly I thought about the massacre. Had the victims been trampled and attacked here, where the maintenance work is still ongoing? Or had they died here, outside where the the town hall now stands? Or here? Was a life ended abruptly here? Or here? How about here?

But such thoughts become difficult to entertain when faced with such a changed, benign landscape. Carnage seems so improbable in such proximity to a San Carlo outlet, a branch of Sainsbury's and groups of international students congregating around benches, chattering away happily to one another. I wondered what other individuals had made this walk in the past, from point A to point B, this particular trajectory. Had they looked around, thinking or trying to think similar thoughts?

The German writer W.G. Sebald relocated to Manchester in the mid 1960’s to work at the University and live, as he put it, ‘among the previous century’s ruins’. In The Emigrants, the first of his books to be translated into English, he provided a description of his early impressions of the smog-marked city, the one time core of global industry: ‘I never ceased to be amazed by the completeness with which anthracite-coloured Manchester, the city from which industrialization had spread across the entire world, displayed the clearly chronic process of its impoverishment and degradation to anyone who cared to see… Even the grandest of the buildings, which had been built only a few years before, seemed so empty and abandoned that one might have supposed oneself surrounded by mysterious facades or theatrical backdrops.’ Well indeed. Perhaps this is overstating things, but for the young, gloomy Sebald, as for most of those who inhabited the city prior to the extensive regeneration it went through in the 90’s, Manchester was a kind of living museum of its own past, one whose theme was collapse – collapse of progress, of prosperity, of the grand promise they once held – something which held an added symbolism for someone like Sebald, born as he was into a country in the thrall of ideals which promised much but brought only destruction.

Now, walking around central Manchester, in its permanent state of upgrade and its jostling newbuild skyscrapers, it once again often feels as though one is wandering a museum. The collection – opulent flats, lavish hotels, immaculate offices, imposing and implacably crafted stelae of glinting steel and glass all – once again stands proudly for prosperity, progress and promise. But, for those with little and those with nothing, the theme, as ever, is one of absence, erasure and amnesia.

Terry Jones has dementia. More specifically, he has primary progressive aphasia, a condition which intrudes onto the brain’s semantics, fraying the connecting thread between language and its meaning. Words remain banked in the brain yet what they signify grows adrift. The world retains its familiarity, customs their habit, objects their function – those with aphasia are quite capable of, say, dressing themselves – but the correct names for their items of clothing are lost. In primary progressive aphasia all of this is gradual, the lexicon becoming steadily depleted, the words dwindling, the alphabet crumbling. It’s a little like becoming foreign: the world is recognisable yet its language, and all that language hinges on, grows inaccessible. Eventually, that connecting linguistic thread is severed, leading to memory loss, identity loss and a marked incomprehension.

All in all, a sad thing to know that this is something a personal hero, and his young family, is going through.

Like most people in their 30’s I have no specific memory of first experiencing Monty Python. At times there were Python sketches or movies on television or a feature in the Radio Times. And, when growing up my dad, like countless other dads, would punctuate our conversations with talk of ex-parrots, the People’s Front of Judea and how no-one expects the Spanish Inquisition. I had no idea what he was on about but, then again, when you’re a child that’s true of a good deal of adult talk. Monty Python was simply there, lurking in the cultural background in much the same way as the Beatles, the Kennedy assassination or the moon landing, totemic components of the ruling boomer generation’s own personal lore.

But I do remember when, as a teenager who hitherto took himself incredibly seriously, I bought the complete Monty Python TV series boxset on VHS and spent a lonely summer in my bedroom enthralled by its mixture of showy intelligence, stream-of-consciousness structure and baroque silliness. Terry Jones was the most sensible and scholarly of the group, rarely anyone’s favourite, especially when his softness and vulnerability is seen alongside John Cleese and Graham Chapman whose berserk pyrotechnics are much more appealing to an adolescent’s anarchic streak. But Jones was always my favourite. Later I would learn that in many ways he was the mother of the group, its chief architect – ‘the bowels of Python’ is how Eric Idle phrased it. And of all the Pythons Jones was also the one who arguably had the most productive post-Python life, directing films, presenting documentaries and writing a copious amount of books.

It's this last specialism in particular which makes it so sad that Jones is suffering from a form of dementia defined by its power to obliterate language. I have a fondness for his children’s books, particularly one titled Nicobobinus, a note perfect fantasy yarn of pirates, dragons and magic which I have memories of being read to me at bedtime by my dad, memories so vivid in part because my dad had trouble pronouncing the title character’s name and eventually rechristened him as simply Nick, but also because I can still recall the feelings of adventure and peril Nicobobinus provoked.

Aphasia is a condition which I've recently come to know about also because of my dad. Recently he had a stroke which left him with severe aphasia. Initially, he had trouble communicating at all. After a few days he could understand a good deal of what was being said to him, a few days after that could read pages of text at a time fluently (without necessarily being able to interpret what it is he was reading) and within a fortnight could set out to begin saying basic sentences without too many problems. But, for the most part, there was and still is a murky divide between words and what they mean. When shown a picture and asked to name it – I bought a pack of children's flash cards and spent long afternoons in hospital testing him on them – he was usually unable to do so. In most instances, when the correct word was then revealed it suddenly seemed obvious to him: 'Banana! It's a banana! Of course!' In other cases he would find the correct word baffling: 'Shed? Is that right? You sure? Shed, shed...' He would trail off, shaking his head. 'No, I don't think so... that's so silly.'

Silly is the word. There’s something distinctively cruel about an illness which causes you to speak gibberish. To begin with his sentences would very quickly veer off into nonsense - dropping words or picking a string of incorrect ones before giving up. He has since made good progress and this behaviour has slowly become less extreme, but it is still there. ‘I’m sorry the house is so chunky,’ he said when I last visited him at home. He meant untidy of course but chunky had come out. Similarly, during a flashcard test shortly before he left hospital he developed a temporary inability to say the word cow due to some some mental insistence that the word was bicep.

‘It’s a cow,’ I said holding up the picture of a cow. ‘Say it after me: cow.’

‘Bicep.’

‘No, cow.’

‘Bicep.’

‘Cow. Cow. Cow.’

Nodding his head, concentrating, trying to get into the rhythm of the word: ‘Bicep… d'oh... Bicep… Right, I’ve got it… this time… Bicep.’

Fortunately, my dad is a man who has always valued and enjoyed silliness – I can’t honestly think of anything sillier than thinking a cow is called a bicep – and would have struggled to take the steps he's managed towards recovery without a dark appreciation for the sheer ridiculousness of his situation.

I imagine Terry Jones is having similar interactions to these, but sadly with less optimism about his future prospects. Still, I hope he’s able to maintain that sense of the absurd. After all, he was the one who taught me how important this can be.

Yesterday was the 241st birthday of William Henry Ireland, someone who I’ve always found fascinating.

Ireland was considered by most – including his father, a frosty publisher and antiquarian collector – to be something of a disappointment. Although from a fairly well-to-do family he performed poorly at school, preferring to spend his time alone dreaming of becoming a great actor and reading his favourite poets. At the age of 19 he found himself working in a mindless job as a solicitor’s apprentice in East London. It was there that an anonymous client approached him with something astonishing which he promptly showed to his father: a property deed signed by none other than William Shakespeare.

Or so he claimed. In actual fact Ireland had taken it upon himself to create a modest yet credible forgery, one produced while working unsupervised in an office surrounded by Elizabethan mortgage documents, long-forgotten deeds and court orders written on velum and sealed with wax.

His father was delighted, so much so that in the following months further documents of Shakespeare’s came to light: contracts, legal letters, love letters, a proclamation of faith, annotated books, early drafts of plays, even a lock of the great poet’s hair. The Ireland family home became a museum to these items, with many of the great and good of the day – including Boswell and Henry James Pye, the then Poet Laureate – stopping by to handle them. Such were the numbers and rate of these callers that Ireland senior had to instigate a system of opening times: visitors were allowed entry to the house on Norfolk Street on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, where they were permitted to commune with the magical presence of the newly discovered artefacts between midday and three. Those who visited confirmed, either by their presence or by pronouncement, the unimpeachable authenticity of what they handled.

For Ireland, although risky, these documents had succeeded in finally making his father proud of him. But the steady flow with which they appeared, each item’s importance superseding the previous, also had the cumulative effect of implanting a nagging conviction in Ireland’s father’s mind that there were other, more valuable items at hand which were going undiscovered. He was keen to publish a manuscript of his trove Shakespearean discoveries, and although they had all been brought to him by Ireland his father berated him for ‘being an absolute idiot’ in not simply acquiring all of his anonymous benefactor’s documents in one go. Spurred on by this combination of a long-sought approval and a rebuking irascibility, Ireland took the next logical step and unearthed the complete manuscript of a lost play written by Shakespeare.

Vortigern and Rowena, as it was titled, focused in part on the knotty relationship between a king and his loving yet overlooked son. Suspicions were quickly aroused: the play’s mix of clumsy simplicity and exhaustive longueurs made it seem a juvenile effort rather than Shakespeare’s crowning masterpiece as the Bard claimed in an accompanying letter also miraculously discovered alongside the manuscript. Nonetheless, Richard Sheridan, the celebrated playwright and owner of the Drury Lane Theatre, saw the potential for a big hit and forked out a huge sum for the rights to Vortigern. It opened in April 1796, over a year since Ireland embarked on a career as a Shakespearian forger, to a sell-put crowd.

The ridicule was intense and immediate, with members of both cast and the audience busting into fits of infectious laughter at the frequently appalling dialogue; fights broke out among those who felt the words of their beloved national poet was being mocked and those for whom it was an obvious hoax; the performance ended with an announcement that this would be the play’s final performance; the ensuing press was brutal in its scorn.

Within days Ireland came clean: he had fabricated the whole thing - the documents, the story behind them, the play. His father, thinking all this far too advanced a deception for his dim-witted son to pull off, went to his grave four years later still adamant that both Vortigern and all the other precious documents were genuine.

Ireland himself went on to become a poet, historian and relatively successful gothic novelist, although his works are now largely forgotten. Which is a bit of a shame because, although by turns stodgy and bombastic, there’s something pleasingly meta about his fiction. One of his novels, Gondez the Monk, a roaring tale of the sex, torture and the occult, opens with a pair of epigrams from Shakespeare – one genuine, the other not – and contains a plot which hinges on the discovery of a manuscript, The Legend of the Little Red Woman, whose authorship and uncanny power over the material world have a familiar ring.

I suppose the story of William Ireland retains a fascination for me for two reasons, both to do with emotions. Firstly, the overlapping folly of fatherhood and the English language feels rather touching to me (my own father had a stroke very recently, which has left him with aphasia, a language-erasing neurological condition requiring him to effectively re-learn how to speak and read). But also Ireland's year spent pretending to be William Shakespeare serves as a neat example of collective delusion, albeit on a charming and relatively harmless pop-up scale, one which demonstrates how formidable an impact the imagination can have on the world - not simply in one man's creation of a series of silly yet believable forgeries, but also in the act of belief engaged in by others: that legion of intelligent, educated men who came into contact with and breathed life into Ireland's hoax, overlooking its glaring inconsistencies and imperfections, seeing instead vivid, life-affirming qualities which were simply not there, but which they wished dearly were.

It was precisely two hundred years ago tonight that a very particular nightmare first appeared.

In the early hours of 16 June 1816 – around 2:30am if a recent headline-grabbing astronomical study is to believed – Mary Shelley, in the midst of a bout of insomnia whilst staying at Villa Diodati, Lord Byron’s home in Switzerland, was struck by a singular vision. What appeared to her in that moment has lasted, retaining its potency in the way few other nightmares have been able to match. Even now, at two centuries’ distance, and all the mayhem and bloodshed they stand for, its shadow looms heavy and dark across both our culture and our consciousness. Here was a boogeyman for the scientific era whose singular name in itself, for all its rampant and frequently camp overuse, remains disquietingly evocative: Frankenstein. By 1818 Shelley’s nightmare would become a novel.

A revised edition of Frankenstein was published in 1831, containing a new preface by Shelley in which she described what she claimed to have witnessed. “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts,” she wrote, “kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.”

As I lie here in my own bed in the dead of night, wide awake, writing this on my phone, it occurs to me that it’s no surprise that I and other night-time souls like myself have always been drawn to Frankenstein. It’s easy to forget that the novel is effectively set entirely in the dark, with Victor Frankenstein relaying all he has to tell to the story’s narrator from a schooner stranded in the wastelands of the Canadian Arctic under a polar night sky. But there’s also an elemental simplicity to the story – essentially that of an artist, as Shelley refers to Frankenstein, fearful of what it is he creates – which feels murkily profound, particularly when it’s night and the rest of the world is safely asleep. At times such as these it often seems as though dreaming is mandatory, a nocturnal prerequisite regardless of whether one is sleeping or awake: something in the imaginations of those left behind comes to life and begins to roam, shading in the blankness of the surrounding night, picking out horrors. Just ask Mary Shelley.

And so I find myself thinking, as I often do: where did it come from? It’s uncannily apt that the story of Frankenstein itself took on such a wayward life of its own: a nightmare which spilled from wherever it is such things originate and out into the real world, into a book, a successful one at that, a lasting, culturally dominating one. But where on earth does one begin when setting out to tell for the first time a story like Frankenstein?

In a sense one could say that the nightmare which emerged there and then, on Lake Geneva in 1816, begins in the previous year, in 1815, and nine thousand miles away.

Early in April of that year – whilst Mary Godwin, as she was still then known, was in London, grieving over the recent death of her and Percy Shelley’s premature daughter and worrying about their dire financial situation – a violent and prolonged eruption occurred somewhere else entirely. Mount Tambora, a long dormant volcano set amid the south-easterly islands of Indonesia, had exploded.

 The immediate effects were annihilation: molten rock, over a billion tons of it in total, ploughed down all sides of the volcano, obliterating the nearby villages and their 12,000 inhabitants, and then flowed steadily into the bubbling sea; a number of tsunamis struck neighbouring islands; over two billion litres of ash and rock were pumped out into the atmosphere, forming a cloud of debris which infested the air, one so dense and extensive that 24 hours after the final eruption had subsided it had expanded to the size of Australia. Within a three-mile radius all visibility was eclipsed for days by absolute pitch darkness.

Arriving to investigate the scene, a British reconnaissance ship found the coastline unrecognisable, the once-bustling marina now a barren mess of smouldering pumice, blackened trees and wrecked vessels. The surrounding villages were likewise in ruins, most abandoned, some entirely razed, one submerged beneath a new strait of water. Dead fish floated in ponds, felled birds littered the ground, and the streets were lined with the dead – some buried, some not. Starvation and disease was already widespread among those who had survived, all vegetation which had been spared by the lava having been choked with ash and all drinking water now lethally infected. In the coming weeks and months many of those within range of Tambora who had managed to avoid these initial stages of its devastation would go on to develop fatal lung infections. Tens of thousands died from sulphur poisoning.

But the consequences of the volcano were far from over. Although the ash which clogged the air in the vicinity had cleared within a matter of weeks, the magnitude of the eruption had been so extreme that much had also been expelled upwards, out into the stratosphere. And there it remained, drifting not down to earth but across in all directions, carried by currents, until it spread to cover the globe.
The weather duly convulsed. Across Europe nightfall took on a luminescent, fluorescent hue, at times yellow – one thinks of JMW Turner’s sunset paintings – at others red. In September red cloud were also spotted: storm clouds which, if eyewitness accounts are to be believed, glowed ominously in the gathering darkness. In December Italy was hit by the heaviest blizzard in living memory, with some towns reporting the snow to have a yellow-red colouring. Anxiety among local religious communities set in, prompting a series of processions where they publicly repented amid the snowstorms which betokened, surely, the end of days. A few weeks later even heavier snow seethed over north Hungary. It obliterated farmlands and massacred livestock in unprecedented numbers, but what garnered most attention were reports that the blizzard was of a pale brown colour, much like human flesh. Within days red snow – now a lurid brick red – was once again sweeping through Italy. In Britain there were reports of a storm with “the appearance of the waves of the sea” which rolled over a number of towns in Lancashire, raining down giant hailstones which “shattered the windows of the houses, tore up the turf and beat down the vegetable products of the earth.” A portion of the west coast of Scotland was plunged unaccountably into total darkness during the day. In the United States, a fog crept in across the north east of the country, a dry, red miasma which hung in the air regardless of the heavy rain it brought with it. As the summer months pressed on this rain turned first into frost and then sporadic snowfall. With each of these incidents came religious panic: people dropped to their knees where the storms caught them and prayed.

All this might sound rather magical, but these were troubling signs, not curious wonders. The climate system had been severely deformed, and still more brutal consequences of this deformity were on their way, this time falling as they so often do, on the world’s poor.

Food shortages rapidly became rife in much of the colonised world. Governing infrastructures in India, Ecuador, Brazil and others found themselves rudely shunted from administering largely benign and resources-rich territories to struggling to contain a burgeoning appetite among their indigenous wards for piracy, disorder and political rebellion. In the coming years crops successively failed too throughout China, resulting in a widespread famine and social unrest – many farmers found a way to muddle through by turning their attention to a more reliable crop, birthing what would in little more than a decade become the global opium industry. Harsh weather along the east coast of the United States forced New England settlers to relocate en masse westwards (including the family of Joseph Smith who would go on to found the Church of Latter Day Saints), spreading with them a firebrand philosophy of liberalism, abolitionism and independence, redrawing the country’s physical and political geography.

Most seriously of all, the Indian monsoon, perhaps the world’s most important weather phenomenon, was knocked out of kilter. Its cycle slowed and became unpredictable: harvests were blighted, homes were flooded and people began to starve. The calamity grew more profound still as this combination of wonky climate and enfeebled population now set the stage for a lethal strain of cholera to take hold. And take hold it did, rampaging first through Bengal, then Asia, then the rest of the world. Cholera would go on to become the disease which would define the nineteenth century: it would lead to the Victorian zeal for sanitation and the emergence of the idea that a state, rather than simply acting as a custodian for an economy, should also guard its citizens from the world’s privations, gradually leading to the implementation of what we now think of as a public health service. Landmark social advancements, but ones only reached at the expense of millions upon tens of millions of lives.

Seismic events borne on a sea of natural carnage, and yet somewhere amid this tumult we find Mary Shelley, a young woman unable to sleep.

I often find myself thinking about Mary Shelley when I’m unable to sleep myself. As I lie here, for example, in an obscure suburb in South Manchester, I imagine, with that curious logic that thrives during the dead hours, that the darkness which surrounds me is in some sense the same as that polluted, biblical darkness which surrounds Mary Shelley as she lies awake also, as though the two hundred years which divide us are much the same as the nine hundred miles which separate me from the small portion of space she occupies in Villa Dodogna.

As even the most casual reader probably knows, the life into which Mary was born was one of high intellectualism – her parents were William Godwin, a novelist and influential political philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, activist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – but it was equally a life of tragedy and scandal. Wollstonecraft had already had a child from a brief relationship with an American business mogul – something which, although the Victorian age of moral prurience was yet to come, was still deeply shocking. And, although both she and Godwin had renounced the institution of marriage in their writings, it was an institution in which they nonetheless enlisted themselves after discovering – an outrage too far – that Wollstonecraft was once again expecting. Mary was born healthy but her mother developed complications during labour. Wollstonecraft’s subsequent death, a days-long torture at the hands of septicaemia, is relayed at length in an unflinching autobiographical account Godwin published a few months later.

It was left to her father to raise her, or at least to oversee her raising (lengthy stints in boarding schools and faraway parishes featured heavily) and he ensured Mary’s education was both intellectual and radical. Scandal, however, soon played its hand. In early 1814 Mary met Percy Shelley for the first time. A young liberal idealist and an admirer of her father’s work, Shelley had made something of a name for himself both as a poet and as a high-minded controversialist, having been expelled from Oxford for promoting atheism. Nonetheless, he was by all accounts a thoughtful soul, quiet and decent, with a young daughter and a pregnant wife. A little over two months later the two of them slipped out of the country. They had fallen wildly in love, pledged themselves to one another (in a graveyard no less) and eloped, much to the horror of Shelley’s respectable father. Much to the horror of Mary’s, they loosely based the route they took on Fleetwood, one of Godwin’s novels, travelling by carriage, by donkey and eventually on foot from Calais to Paris and then on to Switzerland and the Netherlands. Whilst away Mary turned 17.

On returning to London, she gave birth to Clara, their premature daughter who died a few weeks later. The grief seen in her journals – ordinarily threadbare descriptions of her daily goings-on and reading habits – is palpable.

Sunday, March 19. – Dreamt that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day. Not in good spirits.

As well as dimly prefiguring the basic story of Frankenstein here, the death of baby Clara set something of a trend. Before 1816 was out, Harriet, Percy’s first wife, committed suicide, as did Mary’s sister Fanny. In the coming years she would give birth to two more children who would also die before reaching adolescence, lose a much-loved niece, and see both her brother and her father pass away. Most indelibly of all of course would be the disastrous tour of northern Italy in 1822 in which Percy Shelley, during one of his beloved boating trips, was hit by a sudden storm and drowned. At 24 Mary Shelley was a widow.

In June 1816, however, there was a brief period of unqualified happiness. Percy had come into an inheritance and, unexpectedly, he and Mary found themselves rather well-off. Persuaded by Mary’s sister Clara they set sail once again for another grandiose trip to Europe. Clara, who accompanied them, was a gregarious teenager with an intrepid taste for adventure. Earlier in the year she had sought out Lord Byron, on the pretext of gaining some experience as an actress (he was briefly a director at the Drury Lane Theatre) and had ended up having a short-lived affair with him before being discarded like so many other women. Accompanied by his young personal physician, Dr Polidori, Byron had now left Britain for good, in large part due to his own extreme fondness for scandal, and was headed for Switzerland. Clara nursed passionate hopes for a romantic reunion having discovered she was pregnant with his child.

Shortly after they arrived, Percy met Byron for the first time at the hotel where they both were staying. Despite their contrasting temperaments and outlooks they found they got on well. So well in fact that a few days later they moved out of the hotel and rented a pair of neighbouring villas on Lake Geneva: Shelley a cottage called Montalègre, Byron the nearby Diodati.

Both men were keen sailors but they found rowing all but impossible. “We watch them as they approach from the opposite side of the lake,” wrote Mary of the colossal storms which would descend over the mountains, “observing the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heavens, and dart in jagged figures upon the piny heights of Jura, dark with the shadow and the overhanging clouds.” Walking trips too were infrequent and touched with something of the faintly apocalyptic mindset then growing common across the continent. “What a thing it would be,” Percy told Byron as they surveyed the Alps, “if all were involved in darkness at this moment, the sun and stars to go out. What a terrible idea.”

And so the group instead holed up in Byron’s lavish lodgings. To pass the time they talked, flirted (Clara with Byron, Polidori with Mary, neither with much success) and read aloud to one another. The conversation, as one might expect, covered poetry, art and philosophy but also science (Polidori, a man of science who fancied himself a writer, was ubiquitously in attendance), in particular the then modish theory of galvanism, wherein electricity, it was said, could be used to animate the dead.

Their literary distractions were filled with similarly morbid fantasy with readings from Arabian Nights, Goethe’s Faustus and the lake poets. For a few days they were joined by Matthew Lewis, author of The Monk (at the time Switzerland was incredibly popular with British travellers) who regaled his audience with a number of supposedly true life ghost stories and details of the horrors he’d witnessed meted out to slaves on a West Indian plantation he’d recently come into ownership of. One evening Byron read from Christabel, Coleridge’s poem of sexual and religious possession. He was interrupted when Percy suddenly stood up and bolted shrieking from the room. Polidori later wrote: “He was looking at Mrs. S, and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which taking hold of his mind, horrified him.”

They also took turns to read from Fantasmagoriana, an anthology of German supernatural folk tales translated into French. It was this, presumably, which gave Byron a now famous idea for how to pass the time: “We will each write a ghost story,” he told them.

Each of the writers quickly got to work. Percy wrote a short autobiographical piece, later to become a brief poem; Polidori a story of a woman with a skull for a head which left his audience slightly puzzled; Byron a tale based on a creature he’d heard of in Greek and Turkish folklore called a vampire (Polidori would later borrow Byron’s story, much to his irritation, for his novel The Vampyre – Byron would have his vengeance when the book became a success in a pirated edition citing him as its author).

But it was a task Mary struggled with. “I busied myself to think of a story,” she wrote, “one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered – vainly… “Have you thought of a story?” I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.” And so, on the night of 15 June – 200 years ago precisely – she retired to her bed without having come up with a satisfactory story.

Then the nightmare appeared.

“On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, “It was on a dreary night of November,” making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.”
Frankenstein, story and monster both, were alive.

I suppose Frankenstein and its beguiling origin story continue to exert a rather totemic appeal not only because of their shared gothic credentials but also because they give an impression that the period in which these events took place was not wholly dissimilar to our own: men and women mix freely, often sexually, without necessarily being married; they take regular holidays together, share their thoughts, write and publish their books as though social equals; even the language they use feels more akin to our own than the Victorian taste for stiffness and verbosity that was to come after.

The surrounding environmental circumstances of 1816 – Tambora and its destructive domino effects – carry with them similar echoes. As I write this, in mid-June, a spell of torrential rain is now in its fourth day in northern England where extensive floodings of towns have grown so commonplace as to barely register in the news.

But, similarly, this is no local novelty. Globally, last year was the warmest there’s ever been: heatwaves, floods, droughts, storms. Some predictions indicate that the Arctic, that wild and indomitably vast wasteland where Victor Frankenstein confronts his creation, could effectively cease to exist within a decade, with the area becoming entirely ice-free during the summer months.

Elsewhere, an unprecedented drought has laid waste to the once fertile agricultural regions in northern Syria. Since 2006 thousands of families have moved to cities in south, compounding the country’s economic crisis. The civil war which came to devour the country in the wake of the failed Arab Spring has so far claimed almost half a million lives. Six and a half million have found themselves internally displaced within Syria and over three million have fled the country. As I write, hundreds are doubtless planning or quite possibly even embarking on the perilous sea crossing, this time quite literally beneath the same night sky which surrounds me. Perhaps in the morning their bodies will be found scattered in the blue Mediterranean, yet more souls lost in the grand ebb and flow of history.

Well might we wonder what monsters the world leads us to dream up.

'I counted that I had read seven hundred and forty-nine ghost stories,’ wrote Roald Dahl, summing up his brief experiences as an editor in the early 1980’s: ‘I was completely dazed by reading so much rubbish.’
 
It's perhaps a little sweeping, that rubbish, but anyone who reads a large number of ghost stories will be hard put to disagree with Dahl entirely. When it comes to ghost stories it's a sub-genre tend whose most well-known examples tend to come from a rarified group of tales, their presence in anthologies ubiquitous, their mien steadfastly traditional. There are of course stories which have been very unfairly consigned to history, and those readers willing to venture into the territory of the lesser known ghost story will find rich rewards, but to do so one is first required to first sift their way through countless tales which were perhaps best left forgotten. There is, in short, no greater test for a lover of ghost stories than to read widely in the field.
 
The ghost story’s golden age ran from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, a period defined by revolutionary scientific progress, but also by the conservative reaction against it. Whereas the concurrent rise of detective fiction was borne out of the era’s principle of methodical rationalism, the heyday of the ghost story reflected the reverse: beware inquiry is invariably the message of the Victorian-Edwardian spectre. The protagonists in both Dickens’ ‘The Signal-Man’ and M.R. James’ ‘Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad' (to pick two stories from the grand canon at random) encounter spirits powered by a forbidding, inscrutable knowledge and are sent away humbled and cowed, life lessons learnt.
 
The interwar period effectively saw off the genre as we know it. As well as the advent of electricity illuminating hitherto darkened corners, the First World War had brought home the very real suffering and slaughter humans can endure. In the face of industrial carnage, tales of titillating terror began to seem inconsequential, even tasteless.
 
Or so it would seem. In fact, one could argue, not only has the ghost story survived but also – with an aptly invisible stealth – it has triumphed.
 
Firstly, writers continue to be drawn to the form. No bad thing that, but also not without its problems. The popular view of the ghost story as intrinsically Victorian has compelled many to recreate the starchy bygone tone and revisit extinct concerns. Understandably, this yields mixed results, something embodied by the supernatural novellas of Susan Hill.

Hill, still perhaps best known for 1983’s The Woman in Black, a note perfect piece of Victoriana, began revisiting the supernatural in 2007 with a series of similar-length works, each published as small and elegantly designed souvenir books. These stories – 2007’s The Man in the Picture, 2010’s The Small Hand, 2012’s Dolly and 2014’s Printer’s Devil Court – were republished recently alongside Woman as an omnibus edition (1992’s The Mist in the Mirror is omitted both from the collection and its list of the author’s other works). Taken as a whole, they serve as a handbook for the ways in which an ersatz nineteenth century performance can succeed or fail. While The Woman in Black retains its power (the book routinely pops up on the school curriculum in the UK), a reading of her subsequent efforts brings the formula which shapes them into increasingly sharp relief: the prim writing style grows increasingly perfunctory, the period details begin to look like off-the-peg gothic trappings, the circuitous someone-told-me-this second hand narrative so much padding.
 
But can one fault Hill? As Roald Dahl discovered, on the whole ghost stories simply aren’t any very good, and it often feels unfair to hold their authors responsible. A brief summary of what goes on in even the most successful examples – possessed paintings, sentient trees, magical monkey paws – makes clear what a tenuous, risky job it is to write seriously about the unbelievable. The reality is they either end up working or they don’t: I can think of very few okay ghost stories, which inclines me to conclude that success is as much down to serendipity as it is to craft. As a handful otherwise eminently capable authors have testified in their recent collections – Hill’s The Woman in Black and Other Ghost Stories (2015), Kate Mosse’s The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales (2013), Sophie Hannah’s The Visitor’s Book and Other Ghost Stories (2015), John Connolly’s loopy Night Music: Nocturnes Volume Two (2015) – finding one has written a decent ghost story does not necessarily mean another will follow.
 
While successful single-author collections remain relatively scarce, the popularity of the ghost story anthology endures. It’s rare, at least in the UK, to encounter a bookshop which doesn’t stock at least one olde-worlde hardback. In part this is because many of the most loved tales, now long out of copyright, make for a cost-effective publishing venture when gathered together. But also the simple truth is that, for all its seeming antiquated obscurity, this is a form of fiction which continues to exert a surprising hold on the reading public. Not everyone is drawn to horror, to short stories or to nineteenth-century fiction, but few can resist the rich promise of a good ghost story.

I have to confess I’ve never really got on with Audrey Niffenegger’s fiction, and with her graphic novels only rarely, but Ghostly (2015), edited and illustrated by Niffenegger, has an agreeably atypical quality, breaking with anthology conventions in its pairing of reliable standards from the likes of Poe, Kipling and M.R. James with tales of sci-fi and humour and, most importantly, some first-rate contemporary stories (Amy Giacalone’s ‘Tiny Ghosts’ is published here for the first time). But there’s one story in particular, Oliver Onions’ ‘The Beckoning Fair One’, first published in 1911, which dominates the collection, due to both its domineering 25,000-plus word-count but also its subtle, gnomic impact. Although written well before the First World War, Onions’ story bristles with a queasy modernity (indeed almost modernism), equal parts trad. arr. ghost story and delineation of mental disintegration. The protagonist – a writer who moves into a new house whose previous occupant seems to have not quite left – gradually sheds his friends, his work and his life, becoming steadily immersed in a recondite, quasi-sexual malaise. But why? Is he compelled down this path by the story’s barely detectable female presence or is he simply experiencing a psychotic break? It’s a story whose aversion of cosy certainties and insistence on destructive pathology exemplify the gravity that this type of fiction can wield, uncannily prefiguring (much like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper) the Freudian inwardness and dissociative brutality which would come to dominate the coming century. Indeed, there are breezy echoes in Rebecca Curtis’ 2014 ‘The Pink House’, Ghostly’s other stand-out story, in which a possible act of possession appears to compel a pair of unsuited MFA students into a miserable, doomed and inexplicable relationship.

Beginning in 113 AD with Pliny the Younger’s rumours of a remote house plagued by the sounds of clanking chains and concluding with a sharp and abstruse piece of flash fiction from 2014, Ghost: 100 Stories to Read with the Light On (2015), an omnivorous 800-page brick of a collection curated by thriller novelist Louise Welsh, flouts anthology norms even more brazenly. The golden age is healthily represented, but Welsh’s collection is informed by a freewheeling liberality when it comes to assessing what it is that constitutes ‘a ghost story’: stories proper sit alongside extracts from novels, poetry, non-fiction and screenplays. Glancing down the contents page, a reader may be surprised to learn that Richard Brautigan has written a ghost story, as have J.G. Ballard, Yukio Mishima and Lydia Davis. Except perhaps they haven’t, at least not in any conventional sense. Although old school yarns of dilapidated mansions and wailing phantoms abound, Ghost is at its most engaging with those more oblique stories like Jerome K. Jerome’s ‘The Dancing Partner’, in which an inventor creates a mechanical man for his daughter and her friends to dance with. No obvious ghost intrudes on the narrative and it is impossible to put one’s finger on any otherworldly force which governs the story’s events and imparts such disquiet on the reader. And yet it is there.

​The inclusion of Mishima in Ghost, as well as Ben Okri and Haruki Murakami, is particularly welcome. Although the canon has, rather surprisingly, been hospitable to stories written by women – Elizabeth Gaskell’s 'The Old Nurse’s Story’, Edith Wharton’s ‘Afterward’ and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s ‘Three Miles Up’ all sit among the elect – there remains a deep Anglo-Saxon conservatism to the ghost story which, for those who read a large number of these sorts of books, can be very claustrophobic. It’s almost a cliché to say so but all cultures have their own ghoulish modes of storytelling: Japanese kwaidan stories remain hugely popular; China owes its existence to the Ming dynasty, the supernatural looming large in both the period’s classical novels and its folklore; Bengali literature has as rich a tradition of ghostly fiction as one could hope to encounter. On the whole, however, tales of djinn, kunti, bhoots and the like remain absent from the great ghost story songbook, viewed as anthropological curios rather than quality fiction worthy of addition to the grand canon. 

And yet triumphed was the word I ventured earlier to describe the ghost story. A baffling claim perhaps, certainly a grand one, but one which I promise makes sense to anyone making their way through Ghost in the chronological order in which the stories are presented. In doing so, one begins to suspect that the ghost story, as we have come to know it, is simply the most easily categorisable iteration of a seam of writing which probes the stratum of the dark, murky unknown which generations of men and women have always suspected operates beneath their lives. The most successful modern ghost stories are rarely those which replicate the formal gothic quality of the golden age but those which retain its fascination with the inexplicable and the unreliable, which are at ease with the aberrant and the unheimlich, and which accommodate ellipses and are alert to the power of apparent non-sequiturs. All of which, it could be said, are intrinsic components on which the craft of many of our most celebrated modern authors who write non-ghostly short stories – Raymond Carver, Mary Gaitskill, Kevin Williams, Deborah Levy, to name a semi-random transatlantic few – have come to rely.