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- Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
June 18. Began my ghost story after tea. Twelve o' clock, really began to talk ghostly. [Lord Byron] 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. (from the Diary of Dr John William Polidori, 1816) So Polidori (1795-1821) records one of the most famous storytelling evenings in English literature, the stormy night at the Villa Diodati that was the source of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and his own tale The Vampyre, as well as his Gothic novel Ernestus Berchtold. Polidori's still-compelling works, included here in full, created figures of seductive evil that continue to exert a powerful hold over literature and popular culture. In addition, this collection makes available some of Polidori's fascinating lesser-known works such as his medical thesis on nightmares, his essay on the death penalty, his poetry and diary. Many of these have not been republished since the nineteenth century. Franklin Charles Bishop's introduction illuminates the context in which The Vampyre was written, This book, first published in 1993, collects Spark's essays on the Brontës, her selection of their letters and of Emily's poetry. Evident throughout are Spark's critical intelligence, dry wit, and refusal to sentimentalise - qualities that gave her own novels their particular appeal. At the same time, The Essence of the Brontës is Muriel Spark's tribute to the sisters whose talents placed them on a stage from where they could hypnotize their own generation and, even more, posterity.
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FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.
FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side
from ‘Thyrsis’
JOHN WILLIAM POLIDORI
‘The Vampyre’ and other writings
Edited with an introduction by FRANKLIN CHARLES BISHOP
Contents
Introduction
I
There was no colour upon her cheek, not even upon her lip; yet there was a stillness about her face that seemed almost as attaching as the life that once dwelt there: – upon her neck and breast were blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein –
from ‘The Vampyre: A Tale’ by John William Polidori, published 1819
On 1 April 1819 the New Monthly Magazine featured a short story entitled ‘The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron’, which started a literary sensation. The public had seen nothing like it before and rushed to buy copies: thus it inaugurated a whole new genre of popular vampire fiction that continues to fascinate generation after generation of readers.
The proprietor and editor of the magazine, Henry Colburn, was delighted with his literary coup and even more pleased with the huge increase in sales it brought to his ailing literary magazine, which was to become the leading publication of macabre stories during the 1820s and 1830s. Almost immediately he issued The Vampyre in book form as a novella to cash in further on its popularity, followed later by other publishers eager to satisfy the enormous public demand. Five English editions of The Vampyre appeared during 1819. On the continent it proved even more popular and was rapidly translated into three editions in French. 1820 saw a bastardised version expanded into a two-volume novel by French author Cyprien Bérard, entitled Ruthwen ou les vampires. In 1824 a critical essay by A. Pichot insisted The Vampyre had more to do with Byron’s popularity in France than all of his poetry. Even the celebrated German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) declared the work to be Byron’s masterpiece. By 1830 editions were available in German, Spanish, Italian and Swedish translations. Further editions even appeared in America. Stage productions of The Vampyre quickly followed in the early 1820s with theatres in Paris showing several dramatic adaptations by the notable playwrights Charles Nodier (1780–1844) and Eugène Scribe (1791–1861). James Robinson Planché translated Nodier’s Le Vampire into English and in 1820 successfully performed it at the English Opera House in London. William August Wohlbruck and Heinrich August Marschner produced an opera based upon Polidori’s tale entitled Der Vampyr in 1828 to much acclaim. Channel Four television produced a stunning version of Der Vampyr in 1993 in a contemporary London setting.
The publication of The Vampyre was, however, a literary deception and succès de scandale on a grand scale entirely perpetrated by Henry Colburn’s unprincipled business acumen. He acquired the original manuscript from an unnamed correspondent and then falsely attributed the work to the most famous living poet of the time, Lord Byron, which he shrewdly and correctly judged would guarantee great public interest and huge sales; but even Colburn could not have foreseen the extent to which it would create a publishing phenomenon. In 1819 readers were profoundly shocked and titillated by a story in which the vampire was believed to be an accurate self-portrait of Lord Byron.
Byron, when informed of his name being falsely assigned to The Vampyre, irately declared he was not the author of the work; he had, however, written an unfinished vampire story entitled A Fragment, which his publisher later printed as an appendix at the end of his poem Mazeppa (published in 1819). Byron’s vampire tale is a doleful piece of prose completely lacking the power of Polidori’s work. The public still continued to believe that The Vampyre was indeed a self-portrait of Byron, a sensational if illogical extension and projection of the tortured Romantic hero evident in poems such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Manfred (1817). To add further weight to this popular misconception Byron recently had been sharply caricatured by one of his spurned and angry ex-lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, in her novel Glenarvon (1816) as Clarence de Ruthven, Lord Glenarvon. In The Vampyre it is the villainous Lord Ruthven who is the vampire – understood by astonished readers as a clear reference to Lord Byron.
The real author of The Vampyre was John William Polidori, an Anglo-Italian physician. Polidori was effectively cheated by his devious publisher Henry Colburn; immediately upon seeing his own work in print under Byron’s name, he wrote to Colburn, demanding that his name appear as the rightful author of The Vampyre. The publisher prevaricated, protesting that it was he who had been compromised over the affair. He knew it was to his advantage to sustain the illusion of Byron as the author as long as possible, thereby maintaining its appeal, instead of admitting that it was the work of an unknown literary figure: consequently, he had done little to redress the matter, despite strong protestations from Polidori. The New Monthly Magazine’s sub-editor, Alaric Watts, resigned in protest at Colburn’s deception thereby confirming that Polidori was indeed the real author. Despite this, the name of Polidori only appears in Colburn’s second edition of the novella, described as The Vampyre; a tale related by Lord Byron to Dr Polidori. All other editions attribute it to Byron or simply omit an author’s name altogether. By this time it mattered little to readers, who preferred to believe that Byron was the author. Polidori lost out financially through fear of losing a threatened court case over the dispute: he accepted the paltry sum of £30 from Colburn in full settlement, when he should have received enough from the huge sales to have made him a rich man.
John William Polidori, M.D. (1795–1821) was the oldest son of a distinguished Italian scholar and translator.1 He had a classical education at the Catholic college of Ampleforth, near York, and later qualified as a Medical Doctor at the University of Edinburgh at the exceptionally young age of nineteen. Thomas Medwin,2 a contemporary, described Polidori as ‘a tall, handsome man, with a marked Italian cast of countenance, which bore the impress of profound melancholy; a good address and manners, more retiring than forward in society’. Polidori was a keen academic with interests in art, literature, architecture and history, who owned a collection of books in Latin, Greek, German, Italian, French and Spanish. His sister Frances married Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti in 1826, thus linking two highly cultured Anglo-Italian families. Frances became the mother of the celebrated Rossetti children; Gabriel3 who, along with his sister Christina,4 made substantial literary and artistic contributions to the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
In the April of 1816 Polidori (aged twenty) was appointed as Lord Byron’s private physician and travelling companion. The famous poet was about to leave England, a self-imposed European exile to escape debtors. His wife thought him mentally unbalanced, and society was rife with rumours of an incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Byron’s publisher commissioned Polidori to write a journal of his travels with the poet. Polidori travelled with Byron to Geneva where he met Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Shelley)5 and her step-sister Jane ‘Claire’ Clairmont6 (Byron’s eighteen-year-old besotted lover). It was in the Villa Diodati by Lake Léman (Geneva) that the famous ghost story sessions took place, resulting in the genesis of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Byron’s A Fragment (1819) and Polidori’s only published novel, Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus (1819). Polidori also produced his seminal The Vampyre: A Tale (1819) based upon Byron’s abandoned and unfinished piece.
Polidori was ill at ease with Byron and Shelley: after several petty rows and disagreements, they parted company late in the summer of 1816. He continued to travel through Italy, meeting Byron again in Milan and finally in Venice, before returning to England in the spring of 1817; he attempted to settle in Norwich, where he opened a dispensary treating the poor. He knew William Taylor (1765–1836), a well-known and philanthropic literary figure living in Norwich who was a close friend of the poet Robert Southey7 (1774–1843) and correspondent of Walter Scott (1771–1832). Taylor introduced Polidori into the literary and social circles of Norwich, where he met the physician Thomas Martineau and his family, including his niece, the young (then aged thirteen) and future famous author, Harriet Martineau (1802–76). He continued to pursue his literary career, but after he sustained cerebral damage in an accident at Costessey Hall near Norwich, his mental and physical health deteriorated over the next four years with increasing rapidity. By 1821 he had abandoned both his medical and his literary careers. An attempt to study at Lincoln’s Inn Fields for a career in Law was also discarded. He died in the family home in London in the August of 1821 after accidentally overdosing himself with a self-prescribed pharmacopoeia concoction. The Coroner memorably recorded ‘Death by the Visitation of God’.
The Vampyre is a pivotal and extraordinary influential work combining elements of both Gothic and Romantic sensibilities, in which Polidori radically transformed the vampire of Eastern European mythology from an animated, rotting corpse that periodically rose from the grave to feed restrictedly on living relatives in the locale, into a travelling, handsome, amoral, aristocratic lethal seducer perfectly at home in high society and the London salons. The work broke with the explained supernatural school of Gothic8 literature promulgated by Ann Radcliffe,9 littered with hysterical anti-Catholicism,10 and took it into the unexplained supernatural where the vampire exists intrinsically, without banal apology or theatrical illusion. Polidori secured for himself (though he was never to know it during his lifetime) a unique place in literary history with a tale he had originally written in 1816 whilst with Byron in Switzerland and dismissed as ‘a mere trifle’, never intending it for publication and indeed leaving his original manuscript with a lady friend near Geneva.
For an English readership generally lacking in knowledge about vampire mythology, Colburn had cleverly prefixed The Vampyre with a clarifying introduction and a fictitious ‘Letter from Geneva’. Interest in vampire literature was embedded in Northern Europe, particularly Germany, with Goethe’s The Bride of Corinth (1797) and Bürger’s Lenore (1774). The first brief and speculative attempts to introduce vampiric elements into English appeared in poetry – Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), John Herman Merivale’s The Dead Men of Pest (1802) and later in John Stagg’s The Vampire (1810), Byron’s poem The Giour (1813) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel (1816). Although these pre-date Polidori’s The Vampyre, they did not deviate from the standard vampire folklore of Arabia and Eastern Europe. Metaphorical vampiric aristocrats are found in Gothic fiction of the eighteenth century as family usurpers, usually taking the inheritances from the rightful owners rather than their blood. Vampirism was also utilised in a political context to define economic exploitation of the working class by politicians sucking the life out of them via punitive taxes and debts even after death by burdening their surviving relatives with their financial demands.
The Vampyre remains, along with Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, of all the prose of the Romantic period the most republished and enjoyed by successive generations. Polidori created a new anti-Romantic icon; his drastic redefinition and introduction of the vampire as a lethal aristocratic seducer into English literature has had a continuing influence upon writers since 1819. He originated the powerful consciousness of the vampire as a mobile, evil force, undetected and cunning, unscrupulous, a dangerous predator yet seductively attractive. It has through successive imitations and development established an iconic literary motif that continues to fascinate and horrify. The mobility of Polidori’s vampire added to its potency for exciting terror since, prior to his Lord Ruthven creation, the vampire of folklore had been a static monster trapped in its own foreign locale. Before the appearance of The Vampyre even English nineteenth-century readers would still have been in agreement with Voltaire’s earlier sentiments: ‘What? Vampires in an eighteenth century? Yes… in Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Austria and Lorraine – there was no talk of vampires in London…’11
Polidori’s archaic spelling of ‘vampyre’ alludes to the works of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656–1708) and Dom Augustin Calmet (1672–1757). It was Calmet, a leading authority on vampires in the eighteenth century, who published in 1746 a treatise detailing more than 500 cases of documented vampirism. French botanist Tournefort wrote an eyewitness account of the dissection of a Greek vrykolakas (vampire). Vampire mythology originated from the East, especially Arabia and Greece after the establishment of Christianity and the later division of the Latin and Greek churches. The idea that a Latin body would not corrupt if buried in their territory gained credence with lurid tales of the dead rising from their graves and feeding upon the blood of the young and beautiful (Polidori utilises this aspect in his tale by having the vampire seduce Aubrey’s sister). In parts of Greece (Polidori’s tale significantly also has scenes located in Greece), vampirism was considered as punishment after death for heinous crimes committed whilst alive: the vampire was condemned to prey upon those he had loved most in life. Vampire folklore spread with variations to Hungary, Poland, Austria and Lorraine. Lurid accounts of Arnold Paul – the most famous ‘vampire’ of the eighteenth century – appeared in the London Journal of March 1732, relating how he had been turned into a ‘vampire’ whilst in Turkish Servia. Sporadic forays into vampire folklore appeared in English literature with Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), which introduced the vampire to English readers in the female form of Oneiza, an Arabian maid, and Byron’s poem The Giaour was steeped in Oriental mythology but none of the authors broke with the conventional vampire folklore.
Many writers of the Romantic Movement12 in the early nineteenth century indulged in the rejuvenation of folklore and crude traditions by attempting imaginatively to reinvent and permeate them with perceptive and intellectual emotional responses. Other prominent literary works appearing in 1819 when Polidori’s The Vampyre was published included Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Byron’s Mazeppa and Don Juan Cantos I–II and, interestingly, a three-volume set entitled Anastasius; or, Memoirs of a Greek by Thomas Hope, which like Polidori’s The Vampyre was widely attributed to Byron on publication. Percy Shelley’s The Cenci: A Tragedy and William Wordsworth’s Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse were other notable publications.
Published in 1819, Polidori’s only full-length novel, Ernestus Berchtold; or, the Modern Oedipus – like Byron’s Manfred, Percy Shelley’s Laon and Cythna and M.G. Lewis’s The Monk – explores the then popular theme of incest. Polidori’s novel also contains an historical account of Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Switzerland, one of the significant moments in the political development of Romanticism. As the literary critic James Rieger puts it: ‘England lost a… novelist who, had he fulfilled the promise of Ernestus Berchtold, might now hold a place in the nineteenth-century hierarchy slightly above Charlotte Bronte…’13
Polidori’s collection of poetry and his only published dramatic tragedy were contained in a volume entitled Ximenes, The Wreath and Other Poetry, also in 1819; the sonnets were especially well received. Ximenes: the Modern Abraham is his only published dramatic tragedy.
The philosophical essay ‘Upon the Source of Positive Pleasure’, published in 1818, was the result of a near-death-experience, when Polidori was in extremis after suffering concussion from his accident at Costessey Hall. An essay entitled ‘Upon the Punishment of Death’ arguing forcibly and eloquently against the judicial use of the death penalty for petty offences was published in 1816 in The Pamphleteer, the editor commending it as ‘a very ingenious and valuable little tract’. In King George III’s reign there were over two hundred capital offences, many for petty crimes, although in practice the courts were often reluctant to implement the death penalty in most minor cases. Cesare Bonesana, Marchese Beccaria’s most famous work On Crimes and Punishment, published in 1764, which advocated penal reform in Europe, was a clear influence on Polidori’s treatise.
Polidori, in collaboration with the artist Richard Bridgens, wrote the text for Sketches Illustrative of the Manners and Costumes of France, Switzerland and Italy, published in 1821. An epic Miltonesque style poem entitled The Fall of The Angels; A Sacred Poem was Polidori’s final work; it appeared posthumously, also in 1821.
His other work includes the medical thesis, published in 1815, Disputatio Medica Inauguralis, Quaedam De Morbo, Oneirodynia Dicto,Complectens, on the subject of sleepwalking and its suggested treatment. The source of Polidori’s thesis was the Encyclopédie by Jean-Jacques Mènuret de Chambaud (1733–1815). Somnambulism had been defined by a treatise written by François Baissler du Sauvage de la Croix in 1768, which classified it with hallucinations of nightmares or night terrors and an accompanying inability to breathe; sufferers experienced weird creatures sitting on their chest – Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare14 captures the horror perfectly. Also published were various literary reviews and in 1911, ninety years after his death, The Journal of John Polidori, detailing his time with Lord Byron. A very short story entitled A Story of Miss Anne and Miss Emma with the Dog – Carlo was also published posthumously. Apart from these works, the collected letters of Polidori and his family have remained previously largely unpublished. Polidori offers an inimitable and previously unheard voice, enriching our understanding of the Romantic period from a unique standpoint of both an observer and intimate of the Romantic dramatis personae yet precluded from personal success by his literary failures, his non-aristocratic status and by the religious prejudice of his peers. Polidori’s professional rank as a physician with literary aspirations placed him in an uncomfortable position of peer rivalry against the aristocratic Byron and Shelley. His visceral understanding of the human condition contrasted vividly with his quixotic literary ambitions. As with his contemporary, John Keats (1795–1821), his intrinsic Romanticism was anchored by the prosaic necessities of life, Polidori as a medical physician and Keats as an apothecary, both constantly seeking expression through literary ambitions.
II
In 1816 Byron travelled through France, Belgium and into Switzerland before settling upon a summer’s residence near Geneva at the Villa Diodati by the lakeside of Lac Léman. Nearby in a cottage called Maison Chappius was the ménage à trois of Percy Shelley with his lover Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Shelley) and her step-sister, Claire Clairmont, pregnant after an affair with Byron in London.
The group dynamics were complex: the members of the Shelley ménage were practising advocates of free love and radicalism; Byron was a cynical Romantic patronising Catholicism with mocking humour; and Polidori was a Catholic with fierce literary ambitions. Byron, irritated by the demands of Claire, used the presence of Polidori to frustrate her intended amorous nocturnal visits to the Villa Diodati. Many years later, when Byron was dead and Claire was able as a middle-aged woman to examine her teenage obsessive love she described Byron as ‘the merest compound of vanity, folly and every miserable weakness that ever met together in one human being… never was a nature more profoundly corrupted than his became, or was more radically vulgar than his was from the very outset’.15
During that fateful summer tensions within the group would manifest themselves in petty rows and irritations, especially between Byron and Polidori. Initially relations between Polidori and Percy Shelley seemed very amiable – both shared a common enthusiasm for chemistry and medicine although only Polidori held professional status. Shelley’s radicalism, atheism and embracing of Godwin’s philosophy of free love were at odds with Polidori’s Catholicism and belief in an afterlife. After one incident he challenged Shelley to a duel, which was laughed off. In his diary for 4 June 1816 Polidori wrote: ‘Went on the lake with Shelley and Byron, who quarrelled with me.’ Polidori’s vanity, sensitivity to criticism and religious psychological tensions proved a highly volatile mixture, although his friendship with Mary always appears harmonious if we read his diary – he gave her Italian lessons on a regular basis, went boating out on the lake with her until late at night and took her son William to be inoculated in Geneva. She was eighteen and he twenty, so flirtation cannot be ruled out. Certainly Polidori was not averse to the pleasures of the opposite sex: he records visiting a brothel in Geneva and he had female admirers at the numerous soirées he attended at the villas of the rich aristocrats. With Claire the situation was diametrically opposite – she found him a nuisance and an obstacle to her intended amorous liaisons with Byron.
Byron’s immediate rapport with Percy Shelley increasingly led to the exclusion of Polidori – the most notable occasion being when Byron and Shelley went on a tour of the lake in Rousseau’s footsteps, leaving the physician behind in the company of Mary and Claire. Polidori even tired of visiting the famous bluestocking intellectual, Madame de Staël,16 at the Château du Coppet although he was a regular visitor to many other aristocratic households around Geneva; indeed, Byron actively encouraged him to partake of the local high society. Polidori, with his good looks, was not short of ardent female admirers in the wealthy villas and châteaux surrounding Geneva; he also made numerous male friends both in the medical and literary circles. He delighted in giving friends a copy of his medical thesis to read and even Madame de Staël made complimentary remarks about it. Except for his friendship with Mary, it was Polidori who was increasingly made to feel the male outsider of the group. Thomas Moore17 (a friend of Byron) wrote that Polidori was the ‘constant butt for Byron’s sarcasm and merriment’.
Once when out in a boat, Byron was hurt by Polidori, who accidentally struck him on his knee with an oar; instead of apologising, the physician reportedly said, perhaps in retaliation for the many slights he had received from the poet, ‘I am glad you can suffer pain.’ Thomas Moore, a biographer of Byron, records that Polidori was ‘in a constant hectic of vanity, he seems to have alternatively provoked and amused his noble employer.’
On 15 June Polidori records in his journal that he and Percy Shelley, a keen but amateur chemist, had a ‘…conversation about principles, – whether man was to be merely an instrument’. The reference to principles concerned the then popular scientific theory of man being nothing more than a kind of animated machine. Experiments in galvanism were well known and Polidori would have been familiar from his time at medical college in Edinburgh with the work of its discoverer Luigi Galvani (1737–98) and the gruesome experiments on cadavers by Giovanni Aldini (1762–1834) which suggested life might be restored. Polidori’s Catholic sensibilities would be offended by this concept, but Percy Shelley as an atheist would have no such inhibitions. Mary Shelley overheard these conversations and they became a significant catalyst for her Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
The summer of frequent storms and rain often confined Byron, Polidori and the visiting Shelley ménage to evenings spent in the Villa Diodati. With conversations often extending into the early hours of the morning and subjects growing more obscure and macabre the group (most probably on 16 June, a night of particularly heavy storms and rainfall), agreed each to write a ghost story, as a direct result of Byron’s suggestion after readings of German ghost stories translated into French from a two-volume set ornately entitled Fantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d’Historiesd’Apparitons, de Spectres, Revenans, Fantomes, &c. (1812). The flickering fire in the grand salon of the Villa Diodati provided a suitably ghostly atmosphere for the group late into the night. Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont soon gave up on their efforts at prose, while Byron wrote only a desultory fragment of an unfinished vampire tale. Mary began her Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and Polidori, Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus (1819) his only novel.
Polidori, besides writing Ernestus Berchtold, was inspired to write up a vampire tale based upon the idea suggested by Byron’s uncompleted fragment. Later, in a letter to Henry Colburn, Polidori explained the origin of the tale in Geneva in 1816: ‘the Vampyre which is not Lord Byron’s but was written entirely by me at the request of a lady… which I did in two idle mornings by her side’.18 It was with her that Polidori carelessly left his original manuscript and apparently forgot all about it until he saw the story published in the New Monthly Review two years later.
Comparison with Byron’s piece of dreary prose confirms that it was without doubt Polidori who breathed life into the vampire tale and made it into a genre of literature that continues to fascinate, horrify and intrigue. Polidori, by basing his vampire upon the character of Lord Byron, deftly transformed the monster of distant Eastern European tradition, giving it an immediate menace and potency.
The physician turned for his inspiration to the one man he had known intimately during that summer, the famous poet who had shown to his physician that he was a mere mortal, subject to the same foibles and bodily complaints as any other. Transposing the aspects of Byron that were less than meritorious, Polidori imbues his vampire with great presence. Polidori perhaps used the tale even as a wickedly humorous kind of exorcism to release his own feelings of anguish against Byron. His description of the vampire, Lord Ruthven is highly perceptive – a portrait drawn from his intimate observations of Byron: ‘He gazed upon the mirth around him, as if he could not participate therein. His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him – in spite of the deadly hue of his face…’ The intense, anxiety-filled, claustrophobic yet restrained prose of Polidori weaves a dreamlike intimacy throughout the tale. The companion of Lord Ruthven (the vampire) is a young man called Aubrey, enticingly something of a self-portrait of the physician. Polidori unmistakably demonstrates some acute knowledge of his own failings and inclinations: ‘He thought, in fine, that the dreams of poets were the realities of life. … the daughters – by their brightening countenances when he approached, and by their sparkling eyes, when he opened his lips, soon led him into false notions of his talents and his merit…’
Polidori belatedly tried to revive the vampire tale when he wrote, in November of 1819, to the publishers Longman to see if they ‘would undertake to buy a second part of The Vampyre from me – as I must have something to engage my mind’, but they refused his offer perhaps because the publishing furore and sensationalism of the original vampire tale had passed by.
Also published in 1819 was his only full-length novel, Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus. The novel uses military, political and domestic themes, interwoven with supernatural events. The character of Olivieri may be modelled on Byron – not this time as vampire but as a corrupting aristocrat who excels in all vices and delights in debasing Ernestus. The Literary Gazette observed the novel to be, ‘well constructed and ably written…’ whilst the Monthly Review said the ‘considerable powers of imagination… proved [Polidori] capable of writing in a higher and purer strain’. However, sales of the novel were miniscule and did nothing to establish Polidori as an author.
Byron and Polidori’s ill-fated relationship during their brief period of intimacy during the summer of 1816 concluded in reflective vitriol from the physician and ambivalence from the poet, who saw only the annoying vanities of youth in his physician. Ironically, it was this failed relationship with Byron that provided Polidori with his most successful literary work, The Vampyre, casually yet cathartically written while at the feet of a female admirer. The petty rows and Polidori’s indiscretions tried Byron’s patience while the perfidy of Byron dismayed the physician. Polidori’s Catholic sensibilities and insecurities placed him constantly on the defensive in religious and spiritual debates with Byron and Shelley. Neither did his literary pretensions impress since they induced ridicule whenever he attempted to bring any of his writings to their attention. Byron relinquished with Polidori’s company in September of 1816 after just a few months. ‘We have parted, finding that our tempers did not agree. …There was no immediate cause, but a continued series of slight quarrels. I believe the fault, if any, has been on my part…’ wrote Polidori to his father.
Polidori’s historic transformation of the hideous, village vampiric ghoul of the Orient and Eastern Europe mythology into an aristocratic, travelling seducer in The Vampyre began a unique genre of vampire literature. J. M. Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1847) reincarnated the aristocratic vampire as Sir Francis Varney whilst J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) features a female aristocrat – the Countess Mircalla Karnstein; Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) brings his vampire Count from Eastern Europe to England. Anne Rice with her best selling novel Interview with the Vampire (1976) and sequels thrilled yet another new generation of readers. The fictional vampire is constantly being re-energised for new audiences. Polidori is responsible for creating a literary vampire figure that has become part of the popular imagination and perhaps it is entirely appropriate that both he and his iconic vampire figure have achieved immortality – in a literary sense.
Notes
1 Gaetano Polidori (1764–1853): an Italian writer and scholar, son of Agostino Ansano Polidori (1714–78) a physician and poet. Gaetano was onetime secretary to the great Italian tragedian Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803). He came to settle in London from Paris in 1790 after resigning as Alfieri’s secretary. He translated various literary works into Italian, notably John Milton’s ParadiseLost and Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. He married in 1793, an English governess, Anna Maria Pierce.
2 Thomas Medwin (1788–1869): see his Journal of Conversations of Lord Byron ed. Ernest J. Lovell (Princeton University Press, 1966).
3 Gabriel Dante Rossetti (1828–82): a co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848.
4 Christina Rossetti (1830–94): poet famous for Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862).
5 Mary Shelley (1797–1851): only daughter from the marriage of philosopher and novelist William Godwin (1756–1836) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
6 Clara Mary Jane ‘Claire’ Clairmont (1798–1879): daughter of Mary Jane Vial Clairmont (1766–1841).
7 Robert Southey (1774–1843): Poet Laureate and one of the first generation of writers in the Romantic Movement. Celebrated as one of the Lake Poets along with William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).
8 Gothic novels were a style of writing popular in the late eighteenth century, which produced stories set in lonely frightening places usually with ghosts, apparitions and hauntings and lost inheritances. Supernatural events were invariably explained away in the dénouement by prosaic means. Major authors include Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, William Beckford and Robert Maturin amongst many others.
9 Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823): author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) the first ‘best seller’ gothic novel in English literature.
10 Anti-Catholicism in England and general prejudice against Catholics was common until the campaign for Catholic Emancipation succeeded in 1829.
11Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1772) by Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694–1778).
12 The Romantic Movement developed in the late eighteenth century in opposition to the Enlightenment and its emphasis upon reason and science. The term Romantic was to do with the importance of emotions and individual experience.
13Dr Polidori and the Genesis of Frankenstein from Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 (1963), p. 471.
14 Henry Fuseli (1741–1825): artist and author famous for the often nightmarish contents of his paintings.
15 Claire Clairmont in a letter to Mary Shelley dated 15 March 1836.
16 Madame de Staël (1766–1817): French novelist and intellectual, a pioneer of French Romanticism. Her most famous novels are Delphine (1803) and Corinne ou I’talie (1807). She held notable soirées at her Château de Coppet near Geneva.
17 Thomas Moore (1779–1852): see his biography of Byron (1830).
18 Letter to Colburn, 2 April 1819.
Further Reading
The Diary of Dr John William Polidori, 1816, ed. William Michael Rossetti. Elkin Mathews, 1911
Franklin Bishop, Polidori! A Life of Dr John Polidori. The Gothic Society at the Gargoyle’s Head Press, 1991
D.L. Macdonald, Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of ‘The Vampyre’. University of Toronto Press, 1991
Derek Marlowe, A Single Summer with Lord B. Viking Press, 1970
Angela Thirlwell, William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis. Yale University Press, 2003.
Henry R. Viets, The London Editions of Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’. Bibliographical Society of America, 1969
The Vampyre
A Tale
(1819)
It happened in the midst of the dissipations attendant upon a London winter, that there appeared at the various parties of the leaders of the ton a nobleman, more remarkable for his singularities, than for his rank. He apparently gazed upon the mirth around him, as if he could not participate therein. It seemed as if the light laughter of the fair only attracted his attention, that he might by a look quell it, and throw fear into those breasts where thoughtlessness reigned. Those who felt this sensation of awe, could not explain whence it arose: some attributed it to the glance of that dead grey eye, which, fixing upon the object’s face, seemed not to penetrate, and at one look to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart; but to throw upon the cheek a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it could not pass. Some however thought that it was caused by their fearing the observation of one, who by his colourless cheek, which never gained a warmer tint from the blush of conscious shame or from any powerful emotion, appeared to be above human feelings and sympathies, the fashionable names for frailties and sins. His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him, and those who had been accustomed to violent excitement, and now felt the weight of ennui, were pleased at having something in their presence capable of engaging their attention. Nay more in spite of the deadly hue of his finely turned head, many of the female hunters after notoriety attempted to win his attentions, and gain, at least, some marks of what they might term affection. Lady Mercer, who had been the mockery of every monster shewn in drawing-rooms since her marriage, threw herself in his way, and did all but put on the dress of a mountebank, to attract his notice: – but in vain: – when she stood before him, though his eyes were apparently fixed upon hers, still it seemed as they were unperceived; – even her unappalled impudence was baffled, and she left the field. Yet though the common adultress could not influence even the guidance of his eyes, it was not that the sex was indifferent to him: but such was the caution with which he spoke to the virtuous wife and innocent daughter, that few knew he ever addressed himself to females. He had, however, the reputation of a winning tongue; and whether it was that this even overcame the dread of his singular character, or that they were moved by his apparent hatred of vice, he was as often among those females who adorn the sex by their domestic virtues, as among those who sully it by their vices.
About the same time, there came to London a young gentleman of the name of Aubrey: he was an orphan left with an only sister in the possession of great wealth, by parents who died whilst he was yet in childhood. Left also to himself by guardians, who thought it their duty merely to take care of his fortune, while they relinquished the more important charge of his mind to the care of mercenary and negligent subalterns, he cultivated more his imagination than his judgement. He had, hence, that high romantic feeling of honour and candour, which daily ruins so many milliners’ apprentices. He believed all to sympathise with virtue, and thought that vice was thrown in by Providence as by authors in Romances merely for the picturesque effect of the scene: he though that the misery of a cottage merely consisted in the vesting of clothes, which were as warm, perhaps warmer than the thin naked draperies of a drawing room, but which were more pleasing to the painter’s eye by their irregular folds and various coloured patches. He thought, in fine, that the dreams of poets were the realities of life. He was handsome, frank, and rich: for these reasons, upon his entering into the gay circles, many mothers surrounded him, striving which should describe with least truth their languishing or romping favourites: many daughters at the same time, by their brightening countenances when he approached, and by their sparkling eyes, when he opened his lips, soon led him into false notions of his talents and his merit. Attached as he was to the romance of his solitary hours, he was startled at finding, that, except in the tallow and wax candles flickering not from the presence of a ghost, but from a draught of air breaking through his golden leathered doors and felted floors, there was no foundation in real life for any of that congeries of pleasing horrors and descriptions contained in the volumes, which had formed the occupation of his midnight vigils. Finding, however, some compensation in his gratified vanity, he was about to relinquish his dreams, when the extraordinary being we have above described, crossed him in his career.
He watched him; the very impossibility of forming an idea of the character of a man entirely absorbed in himself, of one who gave few other signs of his observation of external objects, than the tacit assent to their existence, implied by the avoidance of their contact: at last allowed his imagination to picture some thing that flattered its propensity to extravagant ideas. He soon formed this person into the hero of a romance, and determined to observe the offspring of his fancy, rather than the individual before him. He became acquainted with him, paid him attention, and so far advanced upon his notice, that his presence was always acknowledged. He gradually learnt that Lord Ruthven’s affairs were embarrassed, and soon found, from the notes of preparation in _____ Street, that he was about to travel. Desirous of gaining some information respecting this singular character, who, till now, had only whetted his curiosity, he hinted to his guardians, that it was time for him to perform the grand tour, a tour which for many generations had been thought necessary to enable the young to take some important steps in the career of vice, put themselves upon an equality with the aged, and not allow them to appear as if fallen from the skies, whenever scandalous intrigues are mentioned as the subjects of pleasantry or of praise, according to the degree of skill shewn in their conduct. They consented: and Aubrey immediately mentioning his intentions to Lord Ruthven, was surprised to receive from him a proposal that they should travel together. Flattered by such a mark of esteem from him, who, apparently, had nothing in common with other men, he gladly accepted the invitation, and in a few days they had passed the circling waters.
Hitherto, Aubrey had had no opportunity of studying Lord Ruthven’s character, and now he found, that, though many more of his actions were exposed to his view, the results offered different conclusions from the apparent motives to his conduct. His companion was profuse in his liberality; – the idle, the vagabond, and the beggar, received from his hand more than enough to relieve their immediate wants. But Aubrey could not avoid remarking, that it was not upon the virtuous, reduced to indigence by the misfortunes attendant even upon virtue, that he bestowed his alms. These were sent from the door with hardly suppressed sneers; but when the profligate came to ask something, not to relieve his wants, but to allow him to wallow in his lust, or to sink him still deeper in his iniquity, he was sent away with rich charity. This was, however, attributed by him to the greater importunity of the vicious, which generally prevails over the retiring bashfulness of the virtuous indigent. There was one circumstance about the charity of his Lordship, which was however still more deeply impressed upon his mind: all those upon whom it was bestowed, inevitably found that there was a curse upon it, for they were all either led to the scaffold, or sunk to the lowest and the most abject misery. At Brussels and other towns through which they passed, Aubrey was surprised at the apparent eagerness, with which his companion sought for the centres of all fashionable vice; there he entered into all the spirit of the faro table. He betted, and always gambled with success, except when the known sharper was his antagonist, and then he lost even more than he gained; but it was always with the same unchanging face, with which he generally watched the society around. It was not, however, so when he encountered the rash youthful novice, or the luckless father of a numerous family; then his every wish seemed fortune’s law – his apparent abstractedness of mind was laid aside, and his eyes sparkled with vivid fire. In every town, he left the formerly affluent youth, torn from the circle he adorned, cursing, in the solitude of a dungeon, the fate that had drawn him within the reach of this fiend; whilst many a father sat frantic, amidst the speaking looks of mute hungry children, without a single florin of his late immense wealth, wherewith to buy even sufficient to satisfy their present craving. Yet he took no money from the gambling table; but immediately lost, to the ruiner of many, the last gilder he had just snatched from the convulsive grasp of the innocent. This might but be the result of a certain degree of knowledge, which was not, however, capable of combating the cunning of the more experienced. Aubrey often wished to represent this to his friend, and beg him to resign that charity and pleasure which proved the ruin of all, and did not tend to own profit; – but he delayed it – for each day he hoped his friend would give him some opportunity of speaking frankly and openly to him; this, however, never occurred. Lord Ruthven in his carriage, and amidst the various wild and rich scenes of nature, was always the same: his eye spoke less than his lip; and though Aubrey was near the object of his curiosity, he obtained no greater gratification from it than the constant excitement of vainly wishing to break that mystery, which to his exalted imagination began to assume the appearance of something supernatural.
They soon arrived in Rome, and Aubrey for a time lost sight of his companion; he left him in daily attendance upon the morning circle of an Italian countess, whilst he went in search of the memorials of another almost deserted city. Whilst he was thus engaged, letters arrived from England, which he opened with eager impatience; the first was from his sister, breathing nothing but affection; the others were from his guardians, these astonished him; if it had before entered into his imagination, that there was an evil power resident in his companion, these seemed to give him almost sufficient reason for the belief. His guardians insisted upon his immediately leaving his friend, and urged that such a character was to be dreaded, for the possession of irresistible powers of seduction, rendered his licentious habits too dangerous to society. It had been discovered that his contempt for the adulteress had not originated in hatred of her character; but that he had required, to enhance his gratification, that his victim, the partner of his guilt, should be hurled from the pinnacle of unsullied virtue, down to the lowest abyss of infamy and degradation: in fine, that all those females whom he had sought, apparently on account of their virtue, had, since his departure, thrown even the mask aside, and had not scrupled to expose the whole deformity of their vices to the public view.
Aubrey determined upon leaving one, whose character had not yet shown a single bright point on which to rest the eye. He resolved to invent some plausible pretext for abandoning him altogether, purposing, in the mean while, to watch him more closely, and to let no slight circumstances pass by unnoticed. He entered into the same circle, and soon perceived, that his Lordship was endeavouring to work upon the inexperience of the daughter of the lady whose house he chiefly frequented. In Italy, it is seldom that an unmarried female is met with in society; he was therefore obliged to carry on his plans in secret; but Aubrey’s eye followed him in all his windings, and soon discovered that an assignation had been made, which would most likely end in the ruin of an innocent, though thoughtless girl. Losing no time, he entered the apartment of Lord Ruthven, and abruptly asked him his intentions with respect to the lady, informing him at the same time that he was aware of his being about to meet her that very night. Lord Ruthven answered, that his intentions were such as he supposed all would have upon such an occasion; and upon being pressed whether he intended to marry her, merely laughed. Aubrey retired; and, immediately writing a note, to say, that from that moment he must decline accompanying his Lordship in the remainder of their purposed tour, he ordered his servant to seek other apartments, and calling upon the mother of the lady, informed her of all he knew, not only with regard to her daughter, but also with regard to the character of his Lordship. The meeting was prevented. Lord Ruthven next day merely sent his servant to notify his complete assent to a separation; but did not hint any suspicion of his plans having been foiled by Aubrey’s interposition.
Having left Rome, Aubrey directed his steps towards Greece, and crossing the Peninsula, soon found himself at Athens. He there fixed his residence in the house of a Greek; and was soon occupied in tracing the faded records of ancient glory upon monuments that, apparently ashamed of chronicling the deeds of freemen, only before slaves, had hidden themselves beneath the sheltering soil or many coloured lichen. Under the same roof as himself, existed a being, so beautiful and delicate, that she might have formed the model for a painter wishing to portray on canvas the promised hope of the faithful in Mahomet’s paradise, save that her eyes spoke too much mind for any one to think she could belong to those beings who had no souls. As she danced upon the plain, or tripped along the mountain’s side, one would have thought the gazelle a poor type of her beauties, for who would have exchanged her eye, apparently the eye of animated nature, for that sleepy luxurious look of the animal suited but to the taste of an epicure. The light step of Ianthe often accompanied Aubrey in his search after antiquities, and often would the unconscious girl, engaged in the pursuit of a Kashmere butterfly, show the whole beauty of her form, floating as it were upon the wind, to the eager gaze of him, who forgot, in the contemplation of her sylph-like figure, the letters he had just deciphered upon an almost effaced tablet. Often would her tresses falling, as she flitted around, exhibit in the sun’s ray such delicately brilliant and swiftly fading hues, as might well excuse the forgetfulness of the antiquary, who let escape from his mind the very object he had before thought of vital importance to the proper interpretation of a passage in Pausanias. But why attempt to describe charms which all feel, but none can appreciate? – It was innocence, youth, and beauty, unaffected by crowded drawing-rooms and stifling balls. Whilst he drew those remains of which he wished to preserve a memorial for his future hours, she would stand by, and watch the magic effects of his pencil, in tracing the scenes of her native place; she would then describe to him the circling dance upon the open plain, would paint to him in all the glowing colours of youthful memory, the marriage pomp she remembered viewing in her infancy; and then, turning to subjects that had evidently made a greater impression upon her mind, would tell him all the supernatural tales of her nurse. Her earnestness and apparent belief of what she narrated, excited the interest even of Aubrey; and often as she told him the tale of the living vampyre, who had passed years amidst his friends, and dearest ties, forced every year, by feeding upon the life of a lovely female to prolong his existence for the ensuing months, his blood would run cold whilst he attempted to laugh her out of such idle and horrible fantasies. But Ianthe cited to him the names of old men, who had at last detected one living among themselves, after several of their near relatives and children had been found marked with the stamp of the fiend’s appetite. When she found him incredulous, she begged of him to believe her, for it had been remarked, that those who had dared to question their existence, always had some proof given, which obliged them, with grief and heartbreaking, to confess its truth. She detailed to him the traditional appearance of these monsters, and his horror was increased, upon hearing a pretty accurate description of Lord Ruthven. He, however, still persisted in persuading her, that there could be no truth in her fears, though at the same time he wondered at the many coincidences which had all tended to excite a belief in the supernatural power of Lord Ruthven.
