Time for a bump.
I had been somewhat aware of the story surrounding the creation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, that it had been written during a stay in Geneva in 1816 with superstar poets Lord Byron and her yet-to-be husband Percy Byshhe Shelley. I didn't learn until recently that the modern tradition of vampire fiction was created at that time too. Byron and his physician and friend John Polidori were staying in Geneva when the Shelley's and Mary's step-sister came to stay. One evening whilst reading ghost stories, they challenged each other to write their own stories. Shelley (then Mary Godwin) came up with her famous creation. Byron came up with an idea of a noble vampire. Polidori later took that idea and published the short story The Vampyre in 1819. There had been fleeting references to vampires in the English literature of that time, but this was the first time a sustained fictional treatment was written in English, and the first time vampirism had been taken from eastern European village tales and introduced into not just an urban setting, but a high society, aristocratic setting. The story of Lord Ruthven was hugely popular spawning many translations, plays and operas and laid the groundwork for later vampire stories Varney the Vampire (1847), Carmilla (1872) and of course Dracula (1897).
Crazy interesting that two of the most famous cultural creations of modern times both sprang from the same occasion.
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