John William Polidori (1795-1821), physician and writer, became Lord Byron's physician and accompanied the poet on his tour of the Continent in 1816. Byron rented Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva from May 1816 and was visited by Percy and Mary Shelley who were staying nearby. Polidori was party to the storytelling competition that occurred on 19 July 1816, which proved to be the genesis for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as well as his own influential composition The Vampyre, which was eventually published in 1819. Polidori accompanied Byron to Chamonix but was dismissed in September 1816. He returned to England in 1817 where he briefly set up practice as a physician in Norwich before moving to London in early 1819 to pursue a literary career. He died in London in August 1821 aged 25.

For a full biography of John William Polidori (1795-1821) see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Edmund Rolfe Finch (1789-1831), a Norwich brewer, was made president of the Norfolk and Norwich Literary Institution in 1826.