"It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man completed ..." The summer of 1816 was by all accounts a cold and wet one. After the April 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, part of what is now Indonesia, global temperatures dropped and a rainy, monsoon-like drizzle settled in over Northern Europe. In a holiday villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, a young English poet and his lover, the guests of another poet,...