Johann August Apel and Friedrich August Laun, editors
A certain dark and stormy night has become legendary in literary history: the evening in 1816 in the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva when Percy and Mary Shelley, Mary's stepsister Claire Clermont and their friend Lord Byron and his doctor William Polidori decided to vie with each other in writing a supernatural story. What is far less well-known is the book that they were themselves reading to one another as the storm raged over the lake. It was Das Gespensterbuch (The Book of Ghosts) by Johann August Apel and Friedrich Laun, first published in Leipzig in five volumes between 1811 and 1815; the first volume was immediately translated into French under the title Fantasmagoriana.
The Book of Ghosts stages several stories-within-stories, and this framing device inspired the English poets to take up the challenge that was to prove so astonishingly productive. The results were Polidori's pioneering vampire romance, The Vampyre, based on a fragment Byron contributed, and, unforgettably, Mary Shelley's masterpiece of visionary science fiction, Frankenstein. Shelley and his friends were reading the French edition, which includes only some of the tales from Apel and Laun, while the English translation, Tales of the Dead, by a Mrs Utterson (1813), selected even fewer - six stories (one of which she wrote herself). Since then the stories have remained elusive, editions and translations rare
The collection had its origin in Das Gespensterbuch ("The Ghost Book"), a five-volume anthology of German ghost stories. The original anthology was published in Leipzig between 1811 and 1815. The stories were compiled by Friedrich August Schulze (1770–1849), under the pen name Friedrich Laun, and Johann August Apel (1771–1816).
A selection of short stories from the first two volumes received a French language translation by Jean Baptiste Benoit Eyries (1767–1846) and was published in Paris during 1812. The French title was Fantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d'Histoires d'Apparitions de Spectres, Revenans, Fantomes, etc.; traduit de l'allemand, par un Amateur. The title is derived from Étienne-Gaspard Robert's Phantasmagoria.[1] The two volumes use as an epigraph "Falsis terroribus implet. — HORAT", meaning roughly "he fills [his breast] with imagined terrors".[2]
Five stories from the Fantasmagoriana were then translated into English by Sarah Elizabeth Utterson née Brown (c.1782–1851), wife of publisher Edward Vernon Utterson (1777–1856).[3] Three of the stories from the French she omitted as they "did not appear equally interesting" to her.[4] She also noted she had "considerably curtailed" her translation of "La Tête de Mort," "as it contained much matter relative to the loves of the hero and heroine, which in a compilation of this kind appeared rather misplaced." Utterson also added a story of her own, "The Storm." The six tales formed the 1813 book Tales of the Dead. Utterson used lines from The Tempest by Shakespeare for an epigraph, "Graves at my command/Have wak'd their sleepers; oped, and let 'em forth/By my so potent art."
Fantasmagoriana has a significant place in the history of English literature. In the summer of 1816 Lord Byron and John William Polidori were staying at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva and were visited by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Claire Clairmont. Kept indoors by the "incessant rain" of that "wet, ungenial summer", over three days in June the five turned to reading fantastical stories, including Fantasmagoriana (in the French edition), and then devising their own tales. Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and Polidori was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron's to produce The Vampyre, the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre. Some parts of Frankenstein are surprisingly similar to those found in Fantasmagoriana and suggest a direct influence upon Mary Shelley's writing.
