22/06/2026
PROLOGUE: DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES
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.
One of the tales that inspired the group was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished Gothic ballad ‘Christabel’.
The ballad tells the story of Christabel, a Baron’s daughter, who finds Geraldine, a lady in distress, deep in a dark moonlit forest. She takes Geraldine home to her father’s castle, but slowly and terrifyingly comes to realise that Geraldine is a malign supernatural creature. Geraldine uses her powers to prevent Christabel from revealing her true nature to others in the household…
‘Ghost Story! Into the Gothic Imagination’ opens on 7 July. Within the exhibition you will find the earliest surviving manuscript of ‘Christabel’, a fair copy transcribed between 1800 and November 1801 by Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Hutchinson. ‘Christabel’ was originally intended to be printed in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads but was ultimately not included. It was finally published by Coleridge in 1816 in a pamphlet of his own works.
Image: ‘Christabel’ artwork from an illustrated edition of The Poems of Coleridge by Gerald Metcalfe, 1907
