“Poor Polidori.” That’s how Mary Shelley referred to him, writing years later. It’s a strange afterlife to think you’ve landed a leading role, and then there you are, on stage, sure, and with big names too, but fixed to a mark far upstage and over to the left, near the wings, in the half-dark where the spotlight doesn’t quite reach. He’s a curio, Polly Dolly, most notable not for what he wrote but for being nearby when other people wrote things. If you have any interest in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or vampires or Romantic poets or, who knows, Swiss tourism, you’ve most likely read Polidori’s name. When they reached their hotel in Geneva, Byron listed his age in the hotel registry as “100.” They progressed this way through Belgium and then up the Rhine. The doctor kept breaking down too, with spells of dizziness and fainting, and the patient had to look after him. (One account has a peacock and a monkey making the trip too.) The carriage was so overloaded it kept breaking down. Byron was, even by the standards of the time, a chronic overpacker: china, books, clothing, bedding, pistols, a dog, the dog’s special mat, more books, a servant or two, and Polidori, buzzing like some excited insect, were all packed away. (He is one of the few people you can write something like that about and have it be true that is part of why he’s so satisfying.) He had a carriage made, modeled after Napoleon’s, this a measure of his own sense of emperor-like preeminence in the world. Byron was leaving England forever, a cloud of infamy hanging over him. In confirmation of how well things were going, a publisher offered him 500 pounds to keep a diary of his travels with the poet (500 pounds… in 1816). It must have felt like fate was tugging him along. Polidori had literary ambitions here was an amazingly famous poet asking him to join him on a tour of the Continent. Over the objections of his family, he accepted. He had graduated from medical school at 19 (as unusual then as now) and this offer came not a year later. Polidori was saturnine, caustic, ambitious, well-educated and handsome. In 1816, a young doctor named John Polidori was offered the position as traveling physician to George Gordon, Lord Byron. How To Be A Monster: Life Lessons From Lord Byron
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