Professor Sir Christopher Frayling meditates on the portrait of Dr John William Polidori by F. G. Gainsford and on the vulnerability displayed which manifested in his sadly unfulfilled life. Frayling expands on the composition of that portrait and on Polidori’s biography. He reminisces on the presence of the portrait as he uncovered the history of the vampire in his seminal work of the 1970s. Frayling remarks on the then invisibility of Polidori compared to the present-day recognition of his importance, in which this collection and its originary symposium (which he attended) play a part.
Sam George and Bill Hughes turn their attention to a little-known yet revelatory descendent of Polidori’s vampyre. Uriah Derick D’Arcy [Richard Varick Dey]’s The Black Vampyre, a short novella featuring the first Black vampire in literature, was published within months of the US publication of The Vampyre. There is a whole story of literary appropriation and intertextuality here which is quite crucial to D’Arcy’s text, which depicts literary production itself as vampiric. The Black Vampyre is situated in the context of slavery and the slave revolts in St Domingo (now Haiti). The text was written not long after Haiti was the first nation to abolish slavery during its revolution of 1791–1804. George and Hughes show how D’Arcy turns his satire on to contemporary society, where the members of a corrupt commercial society are now the vampires. D’Arcy very consciously plays with the theme of plagiarism that surrounded Polidori and connects it to the wider vampirism of society. The links The Black Vampyre makes between racial oppression and a vampiric, commercial society make its resurrection worthwhile.
In this introductory chapter, Sam George and Bill Hughes outline the scope of the collection, beginning with an account of Polidori’s life and the background to the composition of The Vampyre, noting all the problems that have surrounded this story. The legacy of The Vampyre is briefly detailed, from the early stage adaptations and appropriations of his tale to contemporary filmic and novelistic appearances of Polidori himself. Accounts of Polidori have not always treated him well; this collection aims to redeem him. A survey of the critical material on The Vampyre follows, analytically linking it with the chapters in the collection, which are summarised in the conclusion of this Introduction.
The Vampyre initiates two tantalising elements in vampire fiction which continue to inform its postmodern iterations today. The disclosure of a terrible secret and the forbidden, if not downright blasphemous, nature of vampirism itself informs a myriad of vampire confessions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn shows how Polidori’s tale incepts several elements that directly inform the literary legacy of Anne Rice and the cinematic vampires of director Neil Jordan. Jordan returns to numerous themes haunting the margins of Polidori’s tale and Byron’s unfinished vampire ‘Fragment’. His own vampire films, Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Byzantium (2012), meditate on the horrid nature of immortality as a brutal, masculine force which threatens to strip away and destroy all remnants of feeling and feminine influence. These tales also foreground vampire subjectivity as a means to liberate vampires from the torment of their lingering human guilt. These rich and cinematic ‘vulgar fictions’ disclose an unpaid debt to Polidori’s tale, and its continued influence in contemporary reimaginings of immortality.
John Polidori is the least regarded figure in the history of literary vampirism and yet his novella The Vampyre (1819) is perhaps ‘the most influential horror story of all time’ (Frayling). Surprisingly, it has never before been the subject of a book-length critical study. Polidori’s story transformed the shambling, mindless monster of folklore into a sophisticated, seductive aristocrat that stalked London society rather than being confined to the hinterlands of Eastern Europe. Polidori’s Lord Ruthven was thus the ancestor of the vampire as we know it. This collection explores the genesis of Polidori’s vampire. It then tracks his bloodsucking progeny across the centuries and maps his disquieting legacy from the melodramatic vampire theatricals in the 1820s, through further Gothic fictions and horror films, to twenty-first-century paranormal romance. It includes a critique of the fascinating and little-known The Black Vampyre (1819) – a text inspired by Polidori and the first Black vampire in fiction. Leading and emerging scholars of the vampire and Gothic provide innovative analyses of the variations on monstrosity and deadly allure spawned by Polidori’s revenant. The collection advances from the groundbreaking research of Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day and the first special issue of Gothic Studies devoted to vampires. Appended is an annotated edition of the text of The Vampyre and supplementary material. Polidori died a suspected suicide aged twenty-five; he has been sorely neglected. This stimulating collection makes a coherent case for the importance of John Polidori’s tale and redeeming ‘poor Polidori’.
Sam George explores vampire theatricals, focusing on the stage progeny of Polidori’s The Vampyre. In 1820, John Robinson Planché adapted Charles Nodier’s Parisian dramatisation Le Vampire of the same year for the English stage. Focusing on Planché, George argues that the Romantic vampire, and the plays that are its legacy, have a shared origin in phantasmagoria, from the German ghost stories that inspired Byron’s vampire fragment at the Villa Diodati, to the spectacular summoning of revenants on stage in Paris. George demonstrates how crucial stage props and stage effects (such as the star trap and vampire trap) are to the changing representation of the vampire, registering important shifts. George argues that it was Polidori, not Byron (nor Bram Stoker, the stage manager at The Lyceum), whose work succeeded in founding the stage vampire.
Bill Hughes shows how, in her 1816 novel Glenarvon, Byron’s spurned lover Lady Caroline Lamb turned her own attraction‒repulsion to the poet into a Gothic and sentimental fiction of amatory seduction and betrayal alongside political revolt. Here, the eponymous Glenarvon is notably Byronic, feeding off Byron’s own self-fashioning and Lamb’s mimicry of him, while drawing on Milton and Richardson. Glenarvon takes part in the anticolonial Irish Rebellion of 1803, inciting the people with his rhetoric and personal charm. Glenarvon’s political persuasiveness is linked to his sexual glamour. Glenarvon’s women themselves become Byronic; Byronism is an infection, like vampirism. With all these conflicting forces, Lamb’s novel shifts between an anti-Jacobin stance and radicalism. Polidori’s revision of Ruthven strips away Lamb’s ambivalence, but by clearly marking the aristocratic demon lover as both Byronic and a vampire, inaugurates a literary archetype. Yet many of Ruthven’s descendants, in Gothic and paranormal romance, resurrect the alluring mix of rebellion and faithlessness that Lamb depicted and whose progress is traced in this chapter.
Fabio Camilletti approaches Polidori somewhat obliquely at first, via Spiritualism and the various séances attended by the Rossetti brothers, William Michael and Dante Gabriel, who were nephews of Polidori. This prompts Camilletti to consider three topics – the composition of The Vampyre, the history of its publication, and the legacy of Polidori among the Rossettis. Polidori, says Camilletti, observed links between Englishness and the inhuman. Camilletti argues that Polidori’s writings, including those on somnambulism, are much concerned with free will and mechanical determinism, evoking too the discussions at the Villa Diodati. He claims that, through Lord Ruthven, Polidori targets Britishness and aristocracy as well as Byron. He also draws on the psychoanalysis of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok to show how from their readings of their uncle’s diary, the Rossetti brothers were haunted by family memories, which, in turn, were resurrected in later vampire fictions.
The original folkloric vampire was a very different notion from its modern conception – at some point in time a transformation occurred, moving the vampire from a repulsive undead peasant-corpse into a sexually alluring, frequently aristocratic supernatural being. John Polidori’s The Vampyre was the critical culmination of a variety of changing views about who and what a vampire is. In his essay, Marcus Sedgwick considers that a considerable part of this monster-makeover was due to contemporary beliefs about tuberculosis, with which Polidori, as a newly qualified doctor, would have been very familiar, and which he drew on in his recreation of the mythic beast. An implicit intertwining of the natures of the tubercular and the vampire occur, specifically that certain physical characteristics of the sufferer of late-stage TB, together with heightened sexuality and sensibility, become at this time permanently attached to the conception of the vampire, such ideas being reinforced by the already current metaphorical use of the word ‘vampire’ in popular parlance, as well as in medical textbooks.
Unlike his progeny, Count Dracula, Ruthven is able to pass in polite society, making his seductive nature more insidious and damaging. Thus he anticipates the arrival of late-twentieth-century vampires such as Anne Rice’s much-lauded sympathetic vampires. Kaja Franck, in her chapter, concentrates on Ruthven’s twenty-first-century children, the sparkling vampires of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels, through the intersections of gender, the Gothic, and consumerism. Where Polidori’s narrative is focalised through Aubrey’s increasingly disturbed viewpoint, Meyer’s novels usurp the masculine voice, replacing it with the object of the vampire’s desire, Bella Swan. Ruthven’s ‘deadly hue’ is replaced by sparkling attraction. Polidori’s narrative, and its critique of social mores, is reimagined for a twenty-first-century audience who are attracted to rather than repulsed by the Other. Like Ruthven, the Cullens are at once embedded within and yet permanently removed from their society. However, rather than being symbols of social degradation, they are held up as an aspirational, wholesome family. Franck shows how Meyer’s vampires act as reflections of consumerist desire in a society shaped by social media and celebrity culture.