Sam George’s Afterword indulges in a spot of Gothic tourism and investigates John William Polidori’s links to St Pancras Old Church, the site of his burial, together with its associations with the group of visionary writers, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary and Percy Shelley.
In his essay, Ivan Phillips explores themes of vision and visibility as they are developed through The Vampyre. He examines Polidori’s distinctive concern with the imagery of eyes, and with acts of seeing (or not seeing) and being seen (or not being seen), in connection with the evolution of the modern vampire. Phillips understands these motifs through Sigmund Freud’s famous essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) as a fantastical challenge to the limits of the human. The vampire, in this sense, enters the fiction of modernity as a threat to stable assumptions about identity, experience, and being. As well as exploring tropes of vision in The Vampyre, this essay also considers other texts by Polidori, notably his medical dissertation on sleepwalking and his novel Ernestus Berchtold, written at the same time as his vampire story and published in the same year. Ultimately, Phillips argues that the work of this remarkable but neglected writer generates an anatomy of the modern vampire that is still influential today.
Harriet Fletcher argues that The Vampyre uses vampirism as a vehicle for critiquing Lord Byron’s literary celebrity, specifically by drawing out the Gothic qualities of Byronic fan culture and the mutual relationship of consumption between Byron and his readers. In doing so, Polidori reconsiders the parameters of the Gothic; by attaching celebrity to the vampire, he reshapes the image of this Gothic trope in Western culture. Fletcher identifies the early nineteenth century as the advent of modern celebrity culture due to the emergence of mass culture, within which the role of Byron and the rise of industrial print culture is paramount. She combines Gothic studies, celebrity studies, and fan studies to develop what she calls ‘a Gothic celebrity reading’ that draws inspiration from Romantic literary culture. Lord Ruthven is a model of Byron, and in turn Aubrey is a model of the Byron fan or ‘Byromaniac’.
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.