At a moment when Gothic stories continue to captivate audiences across film, television and literature – including recent adaptations of Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein – Wordsworth Grasmere presents a major new exhibition exploring the origins of the Gothic imagination.
Bringing together rare books, manuscripts and treasures from Wordsworth Grasmere’s internationally significant collection, including a first edition of Frankenstein, Ghost Story! Into the Gothic Imagination explores the beginnings of the haunting stories and fantastical ideas that laid the foundations for modern horror and fantasy fiction.
Opening on 7 July, the exhibition invites visitors to step into the Gothic imagination through immersive installations, tales of terror and wonder, and the ideas and anxieties that continue to enthral audiences and shape popular culture.
The exhibition begins at the heart of the story: a fateful moment when imagination and circumstance fused to inspire one of the world’s greatest gothic tales.
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.
That night changed literary history. Mary, unable to sleep, was thrilled by a terrifying vision that would become Frankenstein, now one of the most influential novels in the English language. The same contest also inspired Byron’s ‘A Fragment’, an unfinished vampire tale, and John Polidori’s 1819 novel The Vampyre, two works that established the seductive aristocratic vampire in popular culture and paved the way for Dracula.
Beginning in the reimagined bedroom of Mary Shelley at the Villa Diodati, visitors are drawn into an immersive Gothic landscape of moonlit forests, crumbling ruins and haunting seas, exploring how writers and poets, including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped shape the Gothic imagination.
Among the exhibition highlights, rarely seen on display, are:
- A first edition of Frankenstein, published in 1818, featuring the immortal words ‘I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open’ for the first time.
- A first edition of John Polidori’s The Vampyre, 1819: a novella inspired by Byron’s unfinished vampire tale ‘A Fragment’ and very likely by Byron himself. With this work, Polidori helped introduce the seductive, aristocratic vampire to the world.
- Never before displayed here in Grasmere: Lord Byron’s personal snuff box, later owned by actor Henry Irving, whose striking appearance is believed to have inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
- The earliest surviving manuscript of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Gothic poem ‘Christabel’, copied at Dove Cottage by Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Hutchinson. Its mysterious antagonist Geraldine shaped later Gothic depictions of female vampires.
- Rare illustrations of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, including Mervyn Peake’s haunting depiction of the ‘Nightmare-Life-in-Death’, originally removed from the 1943 edition because the publisher deemed it too frightening.
The exhibition is designed as an immersive in-person experience, inviting visitors to encounter the wonder of the gothic imagination for themselves. Alongside the treasures of Wordsworth Grasmere’s collection, visitors will discover atmospheric installations and opportunities to explore the fears, fantasies and creative sparks behind Gothic fiction.
Designed by Cumbria/London based production designer May Davies, whose recent credits include Black Mirror and BAFTA-winning drama Landscapers, the gallery will be transformed into an immersive space of shadows, uncanny landscapes and gothic atmosphere.
Gothic literature remains key in school and university study, with this exhibition offering young audiences the unmissable opportunity to see and learn more about some of English literature’s influential stories firsthand.
A wide-ranging programme of events will complement the exhibition, including a costumed recreation of the ghost story competition. Evening storytelling events will run throughout the entire year, exploring different Gothic tales and themes, alongside creative workshops, museum lates, and opportunities to see some of the hidden treasures of Wordsworth Grasmere’s library and archive.
Ghost Story! Into the Gothic Imagination opens on 7 July 2026 and runs until 19 June 2027.
Tickets to Wordsworth Grasmere, valid for 12 months, cost £8 for children and £16 for adults with other concessions available and can be booked via their website.
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