A Beast of A Woman

Referring to Anne Lister as a force of nature is accurate, but it’s also just a starting point.

Nature was certainly one of her passions: The 19th-century Englishwoman dressed in stylish black clothes that resembled men’s wear and spent hours walking through the countryside, visiting friends and supervising workers at Shibden Hall, the Halifax, West Yorkshire estate she inherited. Her forceful personality was also evident in the business world; some of her acres were rich in coal, and she relished scrapping with the coal titans of the 1830s as she tried to improve the estate’s fortunes.

But her boldness was most evident in matters of love. Many of the 5 million-plus words in Lister’s voluminous diaries, some of which were in code, chronicled her relationships with a string of women she wooed, loved and bedded.

Lister’s complicated courtship with the wealthy Ann Walker sits at the heart of “Gentleman Jack,” a historical drama series premiering Monday on HBO (in a coproduction with the BBC) that was shot on location at Shibden Hall. As a child, the show’s creator and writer Sally Wainwright visited the historical site with her family — the house and its grounds are now a public park — but she didn’t have a full picture of Lister’s life for years. “People didn’t like talking about her,” Wainwright said.

She became more deeply acquainted with Lister after coming across “Female Fortune,” a 1998 book on Lister by Jill Liddington, and has spent many hours reading and decoding pages of Lister’s daily musings. “It’s not typed script, it’s handwriting,” Wainwright said. “So few eyes may have actually been across any particular piece of writing. To know that you might be the first person who’s read [a section] — it’s very intimate.”

Wainwright funded the restoration and digitization of the diary and said the West Yorkshire Archive Service is working on a site that should make it accessible to the public later this spring. The BAFTA-winner, best known to U.S. viewers for the Netflix cop drama “Happy Valley,” has also penned the foreword to “Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister” by Anne Choma, a biographical portrait with extensive diary excerpts that will be released April 30.

In a phone interview last month, Wainwright — who also directed half of the eight episodes of “Gentleman Jack” — discussed “Happy Valley,” Lister’s ambitions and finding the perfect actress to play the “buccaneering” diarist. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

MR : You’ve done a number of projects — “Happy Valley” in particular — focused on crime or police officers. Was “Gentleman Jack” an intentional break from that?

SW : You can easily get pigeonholed as somebody who writes police dramas, and as much as I love the police dramas I’ve done, I wouldn’t want to get pigeonholed as specifically doing that. I’m quite lucky in all the dramas I’ve done, they’ve been quite different, from “Last Tango in Halifax” and “Happy Valley” and “To Walk Invisible,” my film about the Brontë sisters.

MR :  It strikes me that Catherine Cawood from “Happy Valley” and Anne Lister were both Yorkshire women who cared about their communities.

SW : With Anne Lister it was slightly different, in that it was her estate and she had about 25 tenants. So it was her world and she did refer to them as “my people,” and she was very good to them. She could be hard on people — if they weren’t pulling their weight she wouldn’t think twice about evicting them. But there were people that did work hard and she looked after them. She often [paid for] people’s kids to be educated. That’s different from Catherine, who had a beat overseeing a massive landscape and was paid to do it. But she did care at quite a deep level. It’s an interesting thought, that parallel.

MR :  One thing that sets “Gentleman Jack” apart from your earlier work is that, as Anne, the actress Suranne Jones occasionally looks into the camera and addresses the viewer. Is that your way of re-creating the intimacy of the diary?

SW :  Absolutely. I thought long and hard about [whether] we wanted her to address the camera, because it’s something that a lot of people do now, with varying degrees of success. So I was quite nervous about whether to do it or not, and indeed, how to do it. We did it very sparingly, and we only did it when we felt absolutely justified. But the thinking behind it was definitely that [feeling] of intimacy with her audience. When you’re reading her most intimate thoughts in the journal, it does feel like you’ve got a direct line to her.

MR : Why do you think she kept the diary?

SW :  She didn’t want to forget things, particularly in business. If she’d done a deal with someone, she would make a record of everything down to the last halfpenny. But I also think she was a compulsive writer. She took great pleasure in actually putting it down in black and white and in recording her relationships with other women, because then she could relive them.

MR :  She’s often direct and no-nonsense in daily life, but at certain moments, she can be quite vulnerable and romantic.

SW : She’s a mass of contradictions. She was very tough, but she also wore her heart on her sleeve in the journal. You get a picture of a sensitive human being, someone who’s vulnerable to the vagaries of love and passion, but who is able to take on the world and who would not shy away from being quite conspicuous about who she was. And yet it’s clear that she did feel things deeply when people offended her.

MR :  She’s also willing to get down into the dirt with her workers, but at the same time, she believed in the class system.

SW :  Absolutely. If she was a man, none of these contradictions would be contradictions. She identified herself, really, with men, and with a sort of masculine persona. So the idea of pursuing Ann Walker [Sophie Rundle] for her money — that’s what landed men did then. They tried to improve their lot by marrying well. At the same time, I don’t think she wanted to be a man. I think she liked being a lesbian. I think she liked being a woman, because it allowed her to be in intimate situations with women in a way that a man in those days wouldn’t be allowed.

MR : She reminds me of those 18th century Hogarth paintings — “A Rake’s Progress.” She’s a Regency rake and flirt at times, isn’t she?

SW : That’s really true. Some of the press already is describing her as Victorian, but she wasn’t. She died three years after Victoria ascended the throne, so she’s very Regency. She was a real player. She was very good at sex. It was high on her agenda of what was important, and she was good at it.

MR : Did you have an idea of who you wanted to play Anne for a long time?

SW :  I didn’t, to be honest. I couldn’t picture who could be Anne Lister. There aren’t that many portraits of her, and all that exist are a little bit cartoony. So I’ve never had a strong image of what she was like, and I needed someone to come and show me what she was like, and Suranne did that. Right from the word go, she really got it. Like Anne, she’s got a huge physical energy, she’s got this mental energy, and she’s bold and robust in her thinking. She will push things to the limit, and be willing to go into quite deep, dark places. But she also got how Anne was very swashbuckling and buccaneering and magnificent, really.

MR : You can see why people are drawn to her. Every time Anne comes into a room, she’s so commanding.

SW :  She was very charismatic in real life. It’s clear from the journal that people liked being with her and that she always had plenty to say. Women probably did like her hugely because she gave them a sense of their own worth somehow — that women could be like this. They didn’t have to be these little bits of decoration. At the time, it was considered unladylike to be clever or to show you were too clever. So I think women must have found her extremely stimulating.

In ‘Gentleman Jack,’ Sally Wainwright Brings a Fascinating Life From Diary to Screen. By Maureen Ryan. New York Times , April 18, 2019

When Halifax historian Helena Whitbread was working on the diaries of Anne Lister, a 19th-century local landowner, in the 1980s she was surprised to discover that some sections of the diaries were written in code.

It turned out that once decoded, these sections provided an astonishing source. They documented in detail, Lister’s explicit sexual activities with a number of women, which culminated in her “marriage” to Ann Walker in 1834 at Holy Trinity Church in York. Lister’s life and exploits are currently being celebrated in an HBO/BBC drama starring Suranne Jones in the title role.

While it is extraordinary to find material which shatters traditional ideas and beliefs about 19th-century women and their sexuality, there is more to Lister than her lesbianism. She was an astute landowner, developer, mountaineer and politician. Her refusal to bow to public conventions regarding her sexuality (she dressed in a “masculine” fashion, celebrated her liaisons publicly, and was known locally as “Gentleman Jack”) were equally relevant to other areas of her life, in particular her politics.

From an early age Lister had shown a lively interest in current affairs, and she remained an active and committed Tory all her life. But it was her succession to the Shibden Hall estate in Halifax in 1826 that meant she had the money, power and influence to indulge her passion for politics. The 1832 Reform Act provided the borough of Halifax with two seats and from the outset was dominated by the local Liberal interest, with radicals also having a foothold. Charles Wood, later Viscount Halifax, first became MP in 1832 and remained the sitting member until 1865, first as a Whig but later as a Liberal. For the Tory party, this was not fertile ground.

The scale of the task did not discourage Lister and she set about building up a Conservative electorate in the town, primarily by letting tenancies on her estate and that of Walker, to Tory voters. Her diary explains her efforts in detail, relating conversations with her tenants. For example:

   “Told AG I did not want anyone to change his vote against his conscience for me, but I had made up my mind to take none but blue tenants so long as there remained people of this way of thinking; and when there were none I must try to change myself.”

As properties from the Shibden estate came to the end of their leases, Lister began to fill them with tenants who supported her political persuasion. One example was the mortgaging and subsequent letting of the Northgate Hotel in Halifax in 1835. This was an opportune moment to increase the number of Tory votes she could control, and that factor was clearly more important than the level of rental income that she would receive.

In an interview with a prospective tenant, she reduced the annual rent in return for the creation of seven Tory votes from the tenant’s staff. She canvassed her tenants directly, touring her estate during the run up to the elections, which ensured that they voted in support of the Tory candidate who throughout the 1830s was James Stuart-Wortley, youngest son of Baron Wharncliffe.

Lister was also involved in the more disreputable side of electioneering and appeared to have no qualms about threatening and carrying out evictions of tenants who refused to vote in accordance with her wishes. Although she employed a steward, she undertook the “persuasion” of her tenants herself.

She and her partner, Walker, refused to renew the tenancies of a number of voters who refused to cooperate with their political ambitions. Her diary for 1835, for example, related an encounter with one of Walker’s tenants who refused to change his vote:

 “We came away, she determined to quit the people and I quite agreeing she was right.”

Her efforts were rewarded in 1835, when the unthinkable happened and James Stuart-Wortley took one of the Halifax seats by just one vote. Her energy and commitment to the creation of votes and lobbying of tenants had turned a solidly Liberal borough into one where the Tories had the potential to succeed.

The resulting wave of disappointment in the town, especially among those with no vote, led to a riot resulting in thousands of pounds worth of damage and several serious injuries. The following day, Lister walked down into Halifax and was confronted by a mob of women and boys:

   “They asked if I was yellow … they looked capable of pelting me. ‘Nay!’ said I, ‘I’m black - I’m in mourning for the all the damage they have done’ - that seemed to amuse them and I walked quietly and quickly past.”

Her bravery, then, was not merely in her open acknowledgement of her sexuality but also in her determination to establish a political interest which could include facing down a mob. Such ambition may appear unremarkable for men of the period, but the accepted narrative of the politics of 19th-century women, is to consider they had no influence at all. The activities of Gentleman Jack demonstrate the need to rewrite and reassess that perspective.

Gentleman Jack: a gripping 19th-century tale of one woman’s bravery in sex and politics. By Sarah Richardson. The Conversation, May 13, 2019.

In July 2018 the first blue plaque to be encircled by the LGBT+ rainbow was unveiled at Holy Trinity church, Goodramgate, York. The plaque celebrates the life of Anne Lister (1791-1840), a “gender-nonconforming entrepreneur”, and commemorates the “marital commitment without legal recognition” that took place between her and her lover Ann Walker in the church in 1834. Controversially, the word “lesbian” was not used on the plaque.

Lister, from a wealthy family, inherited Shibden Hall, a Tudor mansion, near Halifax. She was closely involved in running her estate, well-read, well-travelled, and the only female co-founder of the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society. She dressed always in black and spoke openly in her deep voice of her interest in other women. Locally she was mocked as “Gentleman Jack”. “Does your cock stand?” someone in the street once jeered, and anonymous hate mail started arriving at Shibden Hall. Angela Steidele, translated from German by Katy Derbyshire, notes that, even when physically threatened, Lister remained calmly committed to her lifestyle, and confident that “God was on her side, as she was His creature too”.

Steidele’s main source is Lister’s diary, discovered at the hall after her death. The 24 volumes, beginning in 1816 when she was 25, cover everything “from Prussia’s political standing in Europe to the care of her toenails”. Lister provides precise daily notes on the weather, public health, industry, conditions on a slave ship, new publications etc. Extracts from her diaries were posthumously published at the end of the 19th century in the Halifax Guardian, under the staid title “Social and Political Life in Halifax Fifty Years Ago”. What remained unpublished was the sixth of the diary that is encrypted in a combination of ancient Greek letters and algebra. Extracts from these sections, which contain graphic descriptions of Lister’s sex life, first appeared in the 1980s, but today there are still passages of the diary that have never been deciphered or transcribed. Steidele makes grateful use of the work of five generations of scholars, not attempting further decoding but drawing together what has already been revealed to tell the story of Lister’s “insubordinate life and loves in a single volume”.

The first chapter begins with Lister falling in love with a classmate aged 14 or 15. Eliza Raine had been born in Madras, one of two daughters of an English surgeon and an Indian, Tamil-speaking woman. After their father’s early death, Eliza and her sister were adopted and brought to York. Eliza’s dark skin and beauty would haunt Lister, but the liaison ended badly. Lister moved on quickly to other lovers, while Eliza, after falling out with her adoptive father, was committed to a mental asylum for the rest of her life. Steidele says that Lister may have “had a personal interest in having her declared insane. Coming from a madwoman, any confession about their former relationship would have borne less weight.” She speculates that Eliza may have been the model for Mrs Rochester, since Charlotte Brontë, living and writing not far away in Haworth, knew the Clifton asylum where Eliza was held.

Another of Lister’s early loves was Mariana Belcombe, also a doctor’s daughter. Mariana tactfully ignored Lister’s menstruation and avoided “anything that reminded me of my petticoats”. With Mariana, Steidele argues, Lister could be “the gentleman she felt herself to be”. But Mariana could not resist the material gains of marriage to a wealthy male suitor, 19 years older. She told Lister she hoped to be widowed soon (her new husband was 44) and that they would then live comfortably together. It was after Mariana’s husband intercepted one of Lister’s letters that she invented the special code for recording her sex life. Meanwhile, he pursued his own extramarital affairs and passed a venereal disease to Mariana, who infected Lister. Steidele reasons that this must have been trichomoniasis, which could be easily treated with a course of antibiotics today, but in Lister’s time resulted in heavy discharge and itching , and led her to seek a mercury cure in Paris.

After more love affairs and years of travel, Lister came back to Shibden Hall in 1832, determined to make a materially advantageous marriage of her own, even though a union between two women could not be legally recognised. Her prime prospect was Ann Walker, 12 years younger, the heiress to “new money” derived from steam-powered weaving mills. Lister calculated: “The object of my choice has perhaps three thousand a year or near it, probably two-thirds at her own disposal.” Steidele crisply summarises the situation: “Anne was interested in Ann’s money; Ann wanted sex.”

By the time they informally celebrated their wedding in Holy Trinity in 1834, their sexual relationship was faltering beneath the exchange of rings and vows. As their private life disintegrated, they rented a pew and went to church together to display their coupledom in public. Finally, to distract themselves from one another, they set off together on ever more ambitious travels, to the Pyrenees, Russia and Azerbaijan. In the wilderness, this unconventional couple mimicked conventional etiquette: “Being a gentleman, Anne always insisted on giving Ann the better place to sleep – ‘1 divan (carpeted) for Ann and a long low table for me’ – and gave her the best pickings of their meals.”

Lister died in 1840, probably from typhus, and Ann died in 1860 in the same asylum as Lister’s first lover. Steidele’s steely account of the lives behind the first rainbowed plaque is a triumph of truth over fantasy. Lister’s extraordinary pioneering life deserves to be remembered, even if, in Steidele’s words, she was “a beast of a woman”.

Gentleman Jack by Angela Steidele review – seductions of a secret diarist. By Ruth Scurr. The Guardian , November 9, 2018.

If Anne Lister had her way, no one would have known of her lesbian affairs.

But thanks to the efforts of a fellow Yorkshire woman, the world discovered her diaries and her passions, winning her the title of Britain’s first modern lesbian.

  Born in 1791, Lister was a contemporary of some of British literature’s most famed authors, including Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Lord Byron, but her work only became known to the world in the late 1980s, when Helena Whitbread, who grew up in Halifax like Lister, discovered, deciphered and published her diaries.

Now the subject of documentaries, theatre plays and an upcoming BBC series, Lister had taken great care to ensure no one would ever be able to read the most personal parts of her 6,600-page diaries.

“Anne was a lover of the classics and the code she made was a mix of Greek letters and some symbols she devised on her own,” Whitbread tells PinkNews. “She was quite confident that no one would ever be able to crack the code.”

But Whitbread was not even the first to crack the code—she simply used the key left behind by one of Lister’s descendent, John Lister, who found the diaries in the family estate Shibden Hall and worked together with his friend Arthur Burrell to decode them.

“Anne Lister had written, ‘In God is my’ and then she wrote four symbols, and it could have only been ‘hope,'” Whitbread explains, “They worked all day and all night and they finally uncovered the secrets, and they were horrified by it.”

John, himself gay, was worried the diaries may attract attention upon his own sexuality—in 1890s Britain, homosexual acts were illegal.

Burrell wanted to burn the diaries—but John ended up hiding them instead. The diaries were found in 1933, after John died and Shibden Hall became property of the local council, but even then they were mostly concealed from public view in the town’s library.

“No one was allowed to read the code and there was a great deal of secrecy about it, and that went on until I found them in 1983,” Whitbread remembers.

Upon her discovery, Whitbread began the lengthy process of decoding and editing the diaries for publication. The first volume, I Know My Own Heart, would come out in 1988 and cause a stir within the academic community.

“It was the first written account of a lesbian having affairs with women, and actually explaining and be very explicit about her sexual encounters with them,” Whitbread says. “As far as we know, there is no other document in the world that has written so explicitly about lesbian love affairs.”

Her diaries, in which Lister famously uses “X,” not to mean kiss, but to stand for an orgasm, also revealed what Lister felt like about her sexuality and the role she was expected to play in Regency England.

“She genuinely thought there was no one else like her,” Whitbread says. “She said: ‘I am an enigma onto myself and I do excite my own curiosity.’ And another quote, ‘Alas, I am neither man nor woman in society, how shall i manage?’ She really thought she was the only woman with that sexuality.”

Lister had her first lesbian relationship at 14 with one of her classmates, Eliza Raine, but she nonetheless felt lonely, rejecting marriage and wanted instead to find a woman to love freely. “There is a thread of loneliness throughout her journals, she wanted to find the right woman with whom she could live, and live happily,” Whitbread says.

Since Whitbread published her diaries, Lister’s work has influenced and inspired its readers. Room writer Emma Donoghue, who is a lesbian, described Lister as her “hero” in a piece for The Guardian in 2010.

“She also had the sexual ethics of a bonobo, lying to every lover as a matter of policy. Why is Lister my hero, then? Because she looked into her heart and wrote about what she found there with unflinching precision,” Donoghue wrote.

Lister’s contribution to British history was officially recognised last year, when a plaque was unveiled outside Holy Trinity Church, commemorating her unofficial marriage to the last love of her life, Ann Walker.

The plaque was marred by controversy as it originally only defined Lister as “gender non-conforming,” which prompted accusations of lesbian erasure and a petition signed by more than 2,500 people.

York Civic Trust, York LGBT Forum, York LGBT History Month and the Churches Conservation Trust then jointly announced that they would change the sign’s wording. The new plaque, due to be unveiled on February 28 to mark the end of LGBT History Month, will read: “Lesbian and Diarist; took sacrament here to seal her union with Ann Walker.”

Whitbread is not sure whether Lister would be pleased with the public attention her relationships with women have received.

“I doubt she will be happy with those very intimate revelations, if she’d still be looking at it with her early 19th century mentality,” she says.

“She did say to her aunt, ‘I have a desire to make a name for myself in the world.’ Well, she’s certainly got her name in the world now, but I’m not quite sure she’d like the way her life has been depicted in all its sexual detail—but you never know.”

The controversy over the plaque once again brought the diarist into the spotlight, allowing more people, like playwright and theatre director Ross McGregor, to discover her work.

“I was instantly intrigued by this amazing woman that I had been ashamedly ignorant of up until this point,” McGregor tells PinkNews.

He explains: “I loved that she decided quite early on to wear only black to ‘escape the tyranny of fashion,’ that she regularly practised firing a pistol for her own pleasure, and was determined to better herself by masterminding her own classic education far beyond what was usually offered to ladies of her station, and that she used church on a Sunday to scout for potential new conquests, scanning the pews with her eyeglasses for romantic prey.

“And of course, there is her iconic phrase ‘the intellect has no gender,’ which in essence sums Anne Lister’s mindset up precisely.”

McGregor devoured Lister’s work and wrote the play Gentleman Jack—as she was known to the locals in Halifax during her lifetime—which hit the stage in London in January. A BBC drama of the same name, starring Suranne Jones, will screen this year, but has no relation to the play.

Lister’s defiance of gender norms brought her difficulties in life, but in death is what ultimately defines her as Britain’s first modern lesbian.

“Lesbian identity, perhaps to Anne’s advantage, was never taken seriously enough to be hated or prohibited. This ignorance and irrelevance ironically gave Anne the sexual freedom to pursue her desires almost entirely unimpeded. It was only when she sought to legitimise her lifestyle that she encountered issues,” McGregor notes.

“What is refreshing about Anne’s point of view is that she bears no shame, no self-hatred, she never seeks to change or hide what she is, or what she does.

“She considers herself to be ‘one of God’s creatures’ and that she is made exactly how he intended, so why bother changing it?” McGregor adds, touching on Lister’s resonance with contemporary audiences two centuries since she wrote the diaries.

Anne Lister, Britain’s first modern lesbian, didn’t want you to know about her sex life. By

Sofia Lotto Persio. Pink News ,  February 16,  2019

see also :  Anne Lister :  The First Modern Lesbian. By Rico Morton. Rico Morton, 2008

Website on Anne Lister

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.