#I did grow up with a computer analytics father tho

[glassballdinosaurs]

Anyone else watch tadc and thought C&A stood for computing and analytics? No? Just me? I’ll see myself out

[illfoandillfie]

@brian-maybe-not you’re gonna regret getting me started on this but here’s some facts (some fun, some less so) about the teh romantics. i know comparatively little about byron and keats than the shelleys but i tried to put in a mix of stuff.

when he was at school percy was known for having a bit of a temper and one time stabbed another boy's hand with a fork. 

he and his friend Thomas Hogg (who he later encouraged mary to sleep with) got in BIG trouble at Eton for writing and printing pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism. 

percy was a big john keats stan and got super excited when they met but keats thought he was knob.

speaking of shelley loving keats, when keats died shelley wrote a 495 line poem as a tribute and when shelley drowned he was basically only identified because of volume of keats' poems he carried on him. 

after his death they burned shelley’s body (because they weren’t allowed to carry it home) but his heart (or maybe his liver or something but they thought it was his heart) was calcified and didn’t burn. One of their friends wanted to keep it but byron convinced him to give it to mary. Mary kept it with locks of hair from her deceased children wrapped up in a page of the poem he wrote for keats. 

the reason mary and percy got married, despite both of them being opposed to the whole concept, was that percy’s first wife committed suicide and he wanted custody of their kids. His lawyer told him it’d make a better case if he could show he was in a traditional sort of relationship (to combat the stories of his free love atheistic ideals). it didn’t work and the kids ended up elsewhere.

(he’d actually eloped with his first wife when he was 19 and she was 16... similar to what he did with mary)

one time while they were travelling, percy and mary stayed overnight in a hotel. They had to sign in and shelley listed their destination as “Hell” and his occupation as “ I am a lover of humanity, a democrat and an atheist.”

 Byron signed into a hotel and put down his age as 100 years old (he was actually in his early 20s)

i have previously mentioned that byron was a bitch to polidori but occasionally polidori would get the last word. One day when the whole group was out on the lake polidori accidentally struck byron in the knee with his oar. as mary tells it: Byron “without speaking, turned his face away to hide the pain. After a moment he said, ‘Be so kind, Polidori, another time, to take more care, for you hurt me very much.‘—'I am glad of it,’ answered the other; ‘I am glad to see you can suffer pain.’”

There were so many rumours about what the gang were getting up to at Villa Diodati that a hotel nearby set up a telescope and let people pay to watch them for a while.

frankenstein wasn’t the only book mary wrote. She published quite a few novels and short stories. one novel was called The Last Man and is sometimes credited as being the first apocalypse novel

The Last Man is really interesting - it was written after byron died. byron and mary were fairly close, especially after shelley’s death. mary helped byron transcribe his poems and she stayed with him for a while. So in The Last Man theres three key characters. One is clearly inspired by percy, one by byron and the main one could be read as a stand in for mary. The mary-esque character is the titular last man, surviving the apocalypse alone and god it’s so clearly about how alone mary felt after her best friends had all gone off and died stupidly young. 

There’s a quote from her diary. “At the age of twenty-six, I am in the condition of an aged person. All my old friends are gone. I have no wish to form new.” which is so fucking heartbreaking.

Frankenstein was dedicated to mary’s father and he was a big influence on her writing - Frankenstein is all about creatures created by man/an absence of mothers which was obviously something mary thought a lot about growing up since her mother died just after giving birth to mary (an infection because doctors didn’t know they had to was their hands) also one of her other books, Mathilda, is all about a father/daughter relationship although it also deals with incest stuff 

mary and percy shared journals while they were together, both writing accounts of their travels and day to day lives in the same book, all of which mary kept right up until she died when she was around 60.

mary is actually teh reason percy is so well known today. He didn’t have much success as a poet while he was alive. after his death mary wanted to publish a biography about him but his father, who disagreed with his whole life essentially, wouldn’t let her. Instead she got permission to publish an anthology of his work. She put it together herself, every poem he’d written, and then added such extensive footnotes explaining when and where and why he’d been inspired to write what he wrote that it was essentially a biography anyway. 

one time byron practically disappeared, neither shelley nor keats nor anyone else had heard from him i ages so shelley was worried and set out to look for him. he found him in paris having so much sex he was nearly dead from dehydration

byron also had a daughter! Ada Lovelace who was incredibly smart and into mathematics (her mother hated poets for some reason lmao and wouldn’t let her get into writing). Ada is known for her work with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine and often cited as being one of the first computer programmers 

after percy left his wife, harriet, for mary he sent her a letter that was basically like “we’re still friends tho yeah?” and invited her to join his utopian society that he was trying to create. Harriet did not reply.

claire went on to live in russia, working as a governess

OH! and just so this doesn’t seem completely off this blog’s topic: lord byron was described by Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad bad and dangerous to know” which is also the titled of The Cross’ second album.

(actually, it’s funny that i love queen and the romantics so much because both groups are tied to the same area around Lake Geneva - queen in  montreux, and the romantics to villa diodati in cologny which is a little further round the lake. man i’d love to go there.)