On the Very Scary Rise of the First Literary Vampire

The story of Count Dracula as many of us know it was created by Bram Stoker, an Irishman, in 1897. But most of the action takes place in England, from the moment the Transylvanian vampire arrives on a shipwrecked vessel in Whitby, North Yorkshire, with plans to make his lair in the spookily named Carfax estate, west of the river in London. But Dracula wasn’t the first vampire in English literature, let alone the first to stalk England. The vampire first made its way into English literature in John Polidori’s 1819 short story “The Vampyre”. Polidori’s vampire, Lord Ruthven, is inspired by a thinly disguised portrait of the predatory English poet, Lord Byron, in Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon (1816). So the first fictional vampire was actually a satanic English Lord.

Nick Groom concludes  in The Vampire : A New History that we should try to be a bit more like vampires.  Thankfully this doesn’t entail hanging shiftily around blood donor banks or having your cuspids filed to a point (that’s a thing apparently – although heaven knows where you’d find a dentist who’d oblige). Rather, Groom wants us to think about vampires as a way of re-enchanting the contemporary human condition.

On 17 June 1816, John William Polidori recorded in his diary that “The ghost stories are begun by all but me.” Polidori was Lord Byron’s physician and had accompanied the poet and hypochondriac to Switzerland, where Byron rented the Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva. They had been joined there by the poet Percy Shelley, his lover Mary Godwin (whom Percy married later that year) and her half-sister Claire Clairmont. The weather in Switzerland—indeed across the globe—was atrocious. The year 1816 was “The Year Without A Summer”: due to a gigantic volcanic eruption on the Indonesian island of Tambora the previous year, volcanic ash had been hurled into the stratosphere and remained there for years, blotting out sunlight and drastically altering weather patterns. Daytrips were out of the question for much of their stay, and so the previous evening, while watching storms thundering across the lake, Byron had suggested to the assembled company that they should each write a ghost story.

The next day, Polidori recorded “Began my ghost story after tea.” Mary Shelley later recalled:

‘’Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole—what to see I forget—something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her, and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted.’

This story—if it ever existed—has not survived, but Polidori may well have been distracted by what happened later that evening. At midnight, he noted, as Mary breastfed her four-month-old baby child, the group.

‘’really began to talk ghostly. L[ord] B[yron] repeated some verses of Coleridge’s “Christabel”, of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. Threw water in his face and gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs. S[helley], and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him.’’

The following day he again noted “began my ghost-story”—presumably a different story, and perhaps influenced by the Christabel fiasco the previous night. The new story became his unregarded novel Ernestus Berchtold; or, the Modern Oedipus, published in 1819.

Byron had abandoned his own story after a few pages, although nevertheless it was published (without his permission) in 1819 as “A Fragment.” “A Fragment” returns to the Turkish vampire figure of The Giaour, describing the mysterious Augustus Darvell, who is in the grip of some curious and undiagnosed wasting disease. Darvell and the unnamed narrator travel to Turkey, intending to visit the Greek ruins at Ephesus, and their journey takes them through a desolate landscape of Greek, Christian and Islamic ruins to a remote cemetery. Darvell disconcertingly murmurs, “I have also been here before” and states that he will soon die. He demands that the narrator conceal the news of his death, throw an Arabic ring he has into certain springs on the ninth day of the month at noon, and the following day wait at a ruined temple. A stork with a live snake writhing in its beak contemplates Darvell as he makes these plans, and Darvell asks to be buried where the bird is perched. The moment it flies away he dies and begins to turn black and decompose with unnatural rapidity; the narrator buries him as instructed, and there the text ends.

“A Fragment” is a curtailed vampire narrative. The metamorphosis of the flesh, the burial ground and the abnormal post-mortem state link it to the earlier 18th-century history of vampires, and doubtless Darvell would have risen from the dead. But Byron also introduces calculatedly exotic elements, notably the spell with the ring, and the stork and snake—a familiar enough pairing, but here suggesting a disturbing inversion of the ancient lore that storks deliver new babies. Although “A Fragment” hardly has a prominent place in the Byron canon, its mood was transfused into Polidori’s next story.

Polidori had studied medicine at Edinburgh and had written a treatise on somnambulism, and his professional interest was clearly piqued by the serious scientific interest afforded to vampires in the previous century. A shadow of vampirism lies upon his aborted story about the “skull-headed lady” who ends up, like Juliet, in the tomb of the Capulets—Juliet of course rises vampire-like from this tomb, before discovering that Romeo, believing her to be dead, has already killed himself. Polidori would have been familiar with the notes to Southey’s Thalaba and to Byron’s own Giaour (if only through Byron’s recollection of them) and Christabel presumably provoked talk of the seductive powers of the undead. So it was that Polidori discussed Byron’s aborted vampire narrative at the villa with the countess of Breuss, who urged him to write his own version. The results—Polidori’s third story undertaken at the villa—were to be far from forgettable.’

Polidori commenced work, but then his situation changed rapidly. As the Swiss trip drew to a close in early September, an exasperated Byron fired his cantankerous physician; Polidori consequently used his tale to revenge himself on his former employer. He aimed to expose the haughty lordling as a cruel seducer—Mary Shelley’s half-sister Claire Clairmont being pregnant at the time with Byron’s child, and hardly the first victim to fall for his diabolical charms. His portrait of Lord Ruthven was therefore of a sexual delinquent and predator, powerfully attracted to the virtuous and the virginal. He drew on anti-heroes such as the rapist Robert Lovelace from Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Clarissa (1747–48), the malevolent monk Schedoni of Ann Radcliffe’s novel of terror The Italian (1797), and the repugnant libertines who inhabit the Marquis de Sade’s repellent novel Juliette (1797–1801), such as the cannibal giant Minski (who has furniture made of human bones) and the obsessive necrophiliac and criminally depraved Cordelli. He also drew on Lady Caroline Lamb’s scandalous novel Glenarvon (1816). Byron had deserted Lamb in the midst of their passionate affair, and Lamb exacted her revenge by basing the novel’s pitiless anti-hero on her former lover; Lord Glenarvon’s name is Clarence de Ruthven.

Polidori’s portrait is not conventionally erotic: Ruthven has a “dead grey eye” that seems not to perceive character or humanity; he is cadaverous and the “deadly hue” of his face is never lit with vivacity; and he all but ignores women as an inferior species. Yet he has strong features and a compelling voice, and his apparent indifference to women carries a masochistic allure. He is also wealthy and perversely generous, sharing his wealth in the most decadent ways possible: by financing the dissolute in their pursuit of vice and leading them into disgrace—or to the gallows. He is a lone wolf, subverting morals. And then his dead eyes fall upon women, his tender prey.

Ruthven dies in Greece after being shot by robbers. He has already started rotting before his death, but has time to swear his companion, the protagonist Mr Aubrey, to keep silent about him for a year and a day. His body is placed on a summit to catch the first rays of the moon, whereupon it disappears. Aubrey then discovers through forensic deduction that Ruthven must have killed his Greek paramour Ianthe, who was found with blood on her neck and breast, “and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein.” As Aubrey sinks into delirium, Ruthven rises from the dead and seduces Aubrey’s innocent young sister, who is likewise found to have glutted his thirst for fresh blood. As if in ironic sympathy to the plight of both his lover and his sister, Aubrey dies from a hemorrhage. Lord Ruthven, meanwhile, escapes; he is, as is clear from the title of the story, “The Vampyre.”

Inspired by Gothic poetries, then, Polidori literally romanticizes the vampire into an enthralling outrage of sexual bloodlust. But that was not the end of it. Polidori’s tale was delivered to the countess of Breuss and nothing was heard of it for two-and-a-half years. Then, on 1 April 1819, it was published in the New Monthly Magazine as “A Tale by Lord Byron.” It had been sent to the publisher Henry Colburn with a note that certain tales had been written by Byron, Polidori and Mary Shelley; Colburn inferred that the story in question was by Byron and, in order to capitalize on his notorious reputation, published it as such.

Polidori was livid: Byron had apparently stolen his story. He immediately wrote to Colburn, insisting it is “not Lord Byron’s, but was written entirely by me at the request of a lady.” Polidori admitted that Byron’s “Fragment” had provided particular incidents—”his Lordship had said that it was his intention of writing a ghost story, depending for interest upon the circumstances of two friends leaving England, and one dying in Greece, the other finding him alive, upon his return, and making love to his sister”—although, of course, Byron’s “Fragment” never reached the point of the dead man rising and seducing the sister. Polidori accordingly requested a correction, proper attribution and compensation, and insisted that any further publication be suppressed. He himself supplied a statement correcting the claims made about the tale. Notwithstanding this, “The Vampyre” continued to be attributed to Byron throughout the century—and was celebrated across the continent as further proof of his wayward genius.

“The Vampyre” was not only attributed to Byron, though; it was also supplemented in the New Monthly Magazine and subsequent reprintings by prefatory material about Byron and the Villa Diodati retreat (including the episode regarding the effect of Christabel on Percy Shelley), together with an account of vampirism. This description of vampires locates them in Arabia and Greece (following Southey and Byron), as well as in Hungary, Poland, Austria and Lorraine (following Ossenfelder and Bürger). It gives details of blood-engorged corpses taken from the earlier medical reports, and the account of Paole given in Britain in The Craftsman (1732). The sexual content of the tales is underlined—they rise from their graves to “feed upon the blood of the young and beautiful”—and instructions for slaying vampires are provided: staking, decapitation and cremation. This self-proclaimed “monstrous rodomontade” concludes with a long quotation from The Giaour, and references to Thalaba, “the veracious Tournefort” and Calmet—again. It has to be said that the concise details given in this note concerning “this singularly horrible superstition” were to prove at least as influential as Polidori’s narrative.

Polidori, in presenting the vampire as a depraved and amoral English aristocrat, triggered a cultural sensation. Rather than being at the borders of Europe, the vampire was at the debauched edges of society, a Byronic anti-hero. But although he was careful not to over-stress the medical aspects of vampirism, Polidori’s vampire nevertheless helped to reignite interest in the scientific phenomenon of vampirism from a new perspective. In 1819, the Imperial Magazine published a feature on vampires that discussed Polidori’s tale, reprinted Polidori’s letter and the account of vampirism given by the New Monthly, and considered whether vampires were fictitious or not. The anonymous author argues that the leading idea of the literary vampire is that the vampire is a supernatural fiction, but a thread of fey doubt runs through the language:

‘’The Vampyre is represented as a mere creature of the imagination; to which have been ascribed fictitious powers, corresponding, in their application, with those which we attribute to sylphs, fairies, elves and genii . . . Under its imposing aspect, the mind of the reader is insensibly transported into a region of enchantment . . . Awakened from this poetic delirium, when we reach the conclusion of the tale, reason once more regains its dominion over fancy; but, unfortunately, instead of following that steady light, which is necessary to all just discrimination, we suddenly fall into an opposite snare, and hastily conclude that the Vampyre has no kind of existence, except in the dreams of poets, and the fables of romance.’’

The writer is aware that literature inoculates readers against vampires, but recognizes that despite this they maintain some sort of presence, a state of unbeing that carries a trace of reality. They are more than mere fictions.

On the Very Scary Rise of  the First Literary Vampire. By Nick Groom. LitHub , October 25, 2018

In other words, Groom wants to construct a rigorous genealogy of the vampire and, to this end, picks the early 18th century as his place to start. Before this there had been myriad tall tales about bloodsucking creatures popping up all over “the Levant”. In Serbia you could spot the undead by their ruddy complexions as a result of all that snacking on friends and family, while in Slavonic folklore a male vampire would make a point of returning for a conjugal visit, to be followed, nine months later, by the arrival of a baby without a skeleton. On Mykonos there was a creature called the Vrykolakas, who rose from the dead and ran around aggressively until stopped by some brave islander reaching into the decaying corpse and tearing out its heart.

What turned this motley crew of stinking, sexed-up roustabouts into vampires, Groom contends, is their run-in with Enlightenment thought. From the early 18th century the doctors, scientists and theologians of western Europe started not only to collect and codify these bloodthirsty folktales but also to try to come up with rational explanations. Perhaps the peasants had simply been drinking too much hoppy beer and imagined the whole thing. Or maybe they were so flummoxed by the shifting borders of the decaying Habsburg empire that this was their way of expressing panic about outsiders. The Protestants of northern Europe, meanwhile, thought it all nonsense peddled by the Orthodox Church.

The upshot of this cultural encounter was that vampires – both the possibility and the impossibility of them – became what Groom calls “the stuff of thought”, implicated in every aspect of medical, technological and even theological life. Inoculation against smallpox now became a source of terror: someone knew someone who knew a boy from Peckham who had received the usual prophylactic dose of cowpox and started chewing the cud. Grafting teeth from the dead to the living – a rudimentary form of dental implant dating from the days of Henry VIII – was now a perilous activity, in the course of which you were likely to end up with venereal disease from your donor. Even the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches found the vampire provided food for thought thanks to the way it echoed the rite of holy communion, during which the congregation lined up to drink Christ’s blood.

The Vampire: A New History by Nick Groom review – an undead family tree. By Kathryn Hughes. The Guardian , October 27 2018.

Two hundred years before vampires found their way into novels – most famously Dracula – they were featured in medical journals as a blood-sucking phenomena that rose from the dead to drain the blood of the living. Dr Nick Groom, Professor of English at the University of Exeter who has been dubbed the ‘Prof of Goth’, has found evidence that Bram Stoker and other early Gothic authors would have been aware of medical descriptions of vampire activity in Eastern Europe dating back to the 17th century.

In research to be published by Cambridge University Press as part of a new project on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Prof. Groom records how by the 18th century physicians were investigating reports of undead monsters who gorged themselves on blood. These incidents led to bodies being dug up, decapitated, staked through the heart, and cremated. He says that passages in Dracula – the late-19th-century Gothic horror novel about a Transylvanian vampire who comes to Britain in search of fresh blood - mirror medical descriptions of how ‘real-life’ vampires are recorded to have behaved. Dracula’s female vampire, for example, makes the same “churning” sound with her tongue as is described in academic medical treatises about the behaviour of the undead. Stoker, in turn, incorporated cutting-edge 19th-century medical research such as blood transfusion technology into his own novel. Sightings of vampires had been reported in journals and gazettes in Poland and Russia as early as the 1690s. The creatures were supposed to have sucked the blood of humans and animals, and, engorged, blood would flow from their eyeballs, pores, and other orifices. Once dug up, their coffins were said to have been swimming in gore. As a protection, local people advised making bread from this very blood against “contracting vampirism.”

Physicians in the 1730s recorded the physical symptoms of vampire attacks, from shivering and nausea to spasms, nightmares, and death. The vampirism epidemic led to 17 articles in 1732 in professional journals, followed by 22 learned treaties over the next three years published in European centres of learning. By that time the London press had reported that in Hungary there were “dead bodies sucking….the blood of the living, for the latter visibly dry up, while the former are fill’d with Blood.” Professor Groom, author of The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), is comprehensively mapping the vampire’s pre-history as part of a research project examining the emergence of Gothic literature from early medicine, theology, politics, and criminal law.

According to his research, Stoker and other literary figures who first wrote about vampires drew from medical reports. Indeed, the first vampire novel in English, The Vampyre, was written by the physician Dr John Polidori and was published in 1819. He believes Stoker, who published Dracula in 1897, would have been aware of much earlier accounts of vampirism as both a “genuine disease” and also a “mass delusion of peripheral and backward communities” in Eastern Europe. These reports include accounts of a rampant plague in Serbia where the dead were rising from their graves to prey on the living, who in turn became vampires. Medics writing from 1679 also wrote Latin treatises about “grave eating” where the undead were dug up to find they had been eating their own shrouds and even feasting on their own limbs and bowels.

By 1751 the vampire had “become mordantly fashionable”, according to Professor Groom, with the Earl of Sandwich naming a bay gelding racehorse “Vampire”. The image of the blood-sucker was also quickly adopted by political commentators: tax revenue was represented as a way to gratify the “fat gutted vampire” that was the government. Vampires were also a major topic of debate among philosophers and theologians, and even influenced legal thinking.  By the second half of the 18th century the vampire was appearing in English and German literature, subsequently inspiring poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats. Meanwhile, Mary Shelley alludes to the monster in her anatomical novel Frankenstein as “my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.” Since then it has become an abiding image of the vengeful dead. Professor Groom said: “For many years vampirism was a serious subject of research: on the one hand it was a terrifying medical disorder, on the other a mass delusion fostered by wretched social conditions. As its popularity rapidly spread across Europe, the image of the vampire changed the way that people thought about political power, theology and philosophy, and legal testimony – as well as supernatural literature.”

Dracula was based on medical reports of ‘real’ vampires. University of Exeter ,  October 31 ,  2016

It is nearly 200 years since this Romantic/Byronic archetype for a vampire emerged – but what do we know about English belief in vampires outside of fiction? New research at the University of Hertfordshire has uncovered and reappraised a number of vampire myths – and they are not all confined to the realms of fiction.

The Croglin Vampire reputedly first appeared in Cumberland to a Miss Fisher in the 1750s. Its story is retold by Dr Augustus Hare, a clergyman, in his Memorials of a Quiet Life in 1871. According to this legend, the vampire scratches at the window before disappearing into an ancient vault. The vault is later discovered to be full of coffins that have been broken open and their contents, horribly mangled and distorted, are scattered over the floor. One coffin only remains intact, but the lid has been loosened. There, shrivelled and mummified – but quite intact – lies the Croglin Vampire.

Elsewhere in Cumbria, the natives of Renwick, were once known as “bats” due to the monstrous creature that is said to have flown out of the foundations of a rebuilt church there in 1733. The existence of vampire bats, which sucked blood wouldn’t be confirmed until 1832, when Charles Darwin sketched one feeding off a horse on his voyage to South America in The Beagle. The creature in Renwick has been referred to as a “cockatrice” – a mythical creature with a serpent’s head and tail and the feet and wings of a cockerel – by Cumbrian County History. But it’s the myth of the vampire bat that has prevailed in the surrounding villages and is recorded in conversations in local archives and journals

What picture emerges then in this history of the English vampire? The Croglin Vampire has never been verified – but it has an afterlife in the 20th century, appearing as The British Vampire in 1977 in an anthology of horror by Daniel Farson, who turns out to be Stoker’s great-grandnephew.

But there is one case that has no connection to fiction, the little-known Buckinghamshire Vampire, recorded by William of Newburgh in the 12th century. Historical records show that St Hugh, the Bishop of Lincoln, was called upon to deal with the terrifying revenant and learned to his astonishment, after contacting other theologians, that similar attacks had happened elsewhere in England.

St Hugh was told that no peace would be had until the corpse was dug up and burned, but it was decided that an absolution – a declaration of forgiveness, by the church, absolving one from sin – would be a more seemly way to disable the vampire. When the tomb was opened the body was found to have not decomposed. The absolution was laid inside on the corpse’s chest by the Archdeacon and the vampire was never again seen wandering from his grave.

The Buckinghamshire revenant did not have a “vampire” burial – but such practices are evidence of a longstanding belief in vampires in Britain. Astonishingly, the medieval remains of the what are thought to be the first English vampires have been found in the Yorkshire village of Wharram Percy. The bones of over 100 “vampire” corpses have now been uncovered buried deep in village pits. The bones were excavated more than half a century ago and date back to before the 14th century. They were at first thought to be the result of cannibalism during a famine or a massacre in the village but on further inspection in 2017 the burned and broken skeletons were linked instead to deliberate mutilations perpetrated to prevent the dead returning to harm the living – beliefs common in folklore at the time.

The inhabitants of Wharram Percy showed widespread belief in the undead returning as revenants or reanimated corpses and so fought back against the risk of vampire attacks by deliberately mutilating their own dead, burning bones and dismembering corpses, including those of women, children and teenagers, in an attempt to stave off what they believed could be a plague of vampires. This once flourishing village was completely deserted in the aftermath.

Just recently at an ancient Roman site in Italy the severed skull of a ten-year-old child was discovered with a large rock inserted in the mouth to prevent biting and bloodsucking. Then skull belongs to a suspected 15th-century revenant which they are calling locally the “Vampire of Lugano”.

There has been a wealth of other stories from the UK and other parts of Western Europe – but, despite this, thanks to the Dracula legend, most people still assume such practises and beliefs belong to remote parts of Eastern Europe. But our research is continuing to examine “vampire burials” in the UK and is making connections to local myths and their legacy in English literature, many years before the Byronic fiend Count Dracula arrived in Yorkshire carrying his own supply of Transylvanian soil.

Older than Dracula: in search of the English vampire.  By Sam George. The Conversation , October 25 , 2018.