By Bill Hughes
1816 was the Year Without a Summer. The eruption of Mount Tamora had caused a volcanic winter, darkening skies; the abnormally low temperatures resulted in famine and food riots.
That year, Lord Byron, fleeing into exile to Europe, met up with Percy Shelley and the then Mary Godwin (later Shelley) at the Villa Diodati on the coast of Lake Geneva. Accompanying them were Claire Claremont, Mary’s half-sister, and John William Polidori, who had been hired as Byron’s physician.
Many know the story of how the company held a ghost-story writing competition, out of which Mary later wrote Frankenstein. However, Byron also wrote a short fragment which Polidori later reworked into The Vampyre, the first vampire story in English prose (published 1818). Hence, two of the archetypal monsters were born under the same bleak sky in 1816.
Polidori was very young (twenty-one); bright; somewhat irascible; and ambitious as a writer (incurring the scorn of Byron and the others). From the start, The Vampyre caused him difficulties. Published anonymously at first, it was attributed to Byron, which spurred its fame but denied Polidori his success. Polidori’s later life was short and sad: a carriage accident in 1817 left him seriously ill with a brain injury; then in 1821 he was found dead. The coroner issued a verdict of natural causes but his family thought it was suicide from an overdose of cyanide.
Polidori’s novella was enormously successful throughout Europe. It inspired further tales, novels, and stage adaptations. The tale is powerful and uncanny. It transformed the brutish vampire of Eastern European folklore into a sophisticated, seductive aristocrat, preying on the women of high society London. Polidori’s vampire, Lord Ruthven, thus became the model for most of the vampires we are familiar with today through novels, films, comic books, and other media. Yet Polidori has been unfairly neglected.
The Open Graves, Open Minds Project (OGOM) at the University of Hertfordshire has long been under the vampire’s spell. We (Drs Sam George and Bill Hughes) founded the project in 2010 when we held a lively and innovative international conference, ‘Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture’. From this, we published an edited collection of essays with MUP, Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day. And Sam initiated the pioneering MA module, ‘Reading the Vampire’ at the University of Hertfordshire. We’ve had quite a few other vampire events over the years![i]
Then, in 2019, we held a symposium to begin the scheme of recovering Polidori from his undeserved neglect, ‘“Some curious disquiet”: Polidori, the Byronic vampire, and its progeny’. And now, again with MUP, we are proud to announce the publication of The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny, the first book-length critical study of Polidori.
Our contributors trace Polidori’s legacy from the origins and composition of what Sir Christopher Frayling called ‘the most influential horror story of all time’ through its reincarnations in various genres and media. Sir Christopher, the founder of academic vampire studies, honoured us with a preface. Our introduction reveals the complicated birth and dissemination of The Vampyre, recounts the strange affairs whereby Polidori himself appears in fictions, and summarises the critical discussions of the text. Eminent and emerging scholars then contribute to a collection of original essays on the stage productions derived from The Vampyre; the significance of supernaturalism in the tale; the background of Byromania and the phenomenon of celebrity worship; the intertextuality with Lady Caroline Lamb’s Gothic novel Glenarvon; the influence of Romantic conceptions of tuberculosis; the novella’s relation to Frankenstein; The Black Vampyre, a tale of vampires and slavery inspired by Polidori and hardly noticed by critics; images of optics in Polidori’s novel Ernestus Berchthold and vampire texts; the allusions to The Vampyre in Neil Jordan’s film Byzantium; the oblique transformation of Lord Ruthven into Twilight’s Edward Cullen; the legacy of pseudoscience from The Vampyre and Frankenstein in twenty-first-century vampire novels. Finally, there is an afterword which takes the reader through the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church, where Polidori lies. His grave is lost – a sad emblem of the neglect of his life and work, which our book hopes to remedy. We have also appended a new, annotated edition of The Vampyre which will be invaluable to students and scholars.
The OGOM Project continues to flourish. We expanded out from vampires and turned our attention to werewolves, with symposia, another international conference, and various talks and publications, while continuing to revisit vampires. Our vocation with OGOM is to explore the fantastic, the folkloric, and the magical and their affinity with Gothic, but the latter as enchantment rather than simply horror.
We are now exploring the world of Gothic Faerie; following an online conference, we have a forthcoming book, Gothic Encounters with Enchantment and the Faerie Realm in Literature and Culture: ‘Ill met by moonlight’. We hope that you will follow us further, via our website and social media. We are on X as @OGOMProject and @DrSamGeorge1, BlueSky as @ogomproject, and we have a Facebook group, Open Graves, Open Minds Project.
If you research or teach within the field of Gothic Studies or Romanticism, please consider ordering a copy of this book for your university library (available in an affordable e-book edition). And we have some review copies to send out so do please contact us.
[i] A vampire special issue of Gothic Studies; a symposium to honour the centenary of Bram Stoker’s death; an online discussion of The Black Vampyre and other Gothic topics; an online seminar in 2022 to celebrate the centenary of F. W. Murnau’s adaptation of Dracula, Nosferatu – Robert Egger’s remake of this is out soon! 2022 was the Year of the Vampire for quite a few reasons – please explore the pages we set up here from the menu.