Percy Shelley wrote Alastor in the fall and early winter of 1815 while he and Mary Godwin were living quietly in a cottage at Bishopsgate, one of the eastern entrances to the Great Park of Windsor, in the Thames Valley west of London. He arranged for the printer Samuel Hamilton to produce 250 copies of a[…]
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was a British mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by[…]
I must here acknowledge a close, though unintentional, resemblance in these twelve lines to a passage in an unpublished poem of Mr Coleridge, called “Christabel.” It was not till after these lines were written that I heard that wild and singularly original and beautiful poem recited: and the MS. of that production I never saw[…]
In the autumn following the much-discussed “Year Without of Summer” of 1816 in which a ghost story pact spawned the writing of Frankenstein, tragedy struck the Shelleys: Fanny Imlay, half-sister to Mary, committed suicide.
