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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The vampyre and other tales of the macabre / edited with an
introduction by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick.
(Oxford world’s classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Horror tales, English. 2. Vampires—Fiction. I. Morrison,
Robert, 1961– . II. Baldick, Chris. III. Series.
PR1309.H6V36 1997 823′.0873808375—dc21 97–915
ISBN 0-19-283894-6
3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd.
Reading, Berkshire
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
JOHN POLIDORI
The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
ROBERT MORRISON
and
CHRIS BALDICK
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
THE VAMPYRE AND OTHER TALES OF THE MACABRE
JOHN WILLIAM POLIDORI (1795–1821) was the oldest son of a distinguished Italian scholar and translator. He was educated at Ample-forth, a Catholic college near York, and later at the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote a thesis on somnambulism and received his medical degree at the unusually early age of 19. In April 1816 Polidori became Lord Byron’s personal physician and travelling companion, and was commissioned by Byron’s publisher John Murray to keep a journal of his time with Byron that was later published as his Diary (1911). Polidori was present at the famous ghost story competition at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva that was the genesis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Byron’s prose fragment ‘Augustus Darvell’ (1819), and his own tale, The Vampyre, which he based on Byron’s fragment, and which he completed in late summer 1816, just before he and Byron parted company. Polidori travelled extensively in Italy before returning to England in spring 1817, where he settled in Norwich and established a medical practice. The Vampyre was first published in the New Monthly Magazine in April 1819, and later that same year Polidori published his only full-length novel, Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus. The Fall of the Angels: A Sacred Poem appeared two years later, but by this time Polidori was in debt and deeply disappointed in his career as physician and writer. He committed suicide in his father’s house in August 1821.
Thirteen other authors are represented in this volume as contributors to macabre magazine fiction in the period 1819–38. These include Edward Bulwer, James Hogg, Letitia Landon, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Details of their lives appear in the Biographical Notes.
ROBERT MORRISON is Associate Professor of English at Acadia University, Nova Scotia. He has co-edited, with Chris Baldick, Tales of Terror from Blackwood’s Magazine (1995), and is the editor of three volumes of The Works of Thomas De Quincey (forthcoming).
CHRIS BALDICK is Professor of English at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. He has edited The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (1992), and is the author of In Frankenstein’s Shadow (1987), Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the Present (1996), and other works of literary history.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
Chronology of the Magazines
JOHN POLIDORI The Vampyre
HORACE SMITH Sir Guy Eveling’s Dream
WILLIAM CARLETON Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman
EDWARD BULWER Monos and Daimonos
ALLAN CUNNINGHAM The Master of Logan
ANONYMOUS The Victim
JAMES HOGG Some Terrible Letters from Scotland
ANONYMOUS The Curse
ANONYMOUS Life in Death
N. P. WILLIS My Hobby,—Rather
CATHERINE GORE The Red Man
CHARLES LEVER Post-Mortem Recollections of a Medical Lecturer
LETITIA E. LANDON The Bride of Lindorf
JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess
Appendix A: Preliminaries for The Vampyre
Appendix B: JOHN POLIDORI Note on The Vampyre
Appendix C: LORD BYRON Augustus Darvell
Biographical Notes
Explanatory Notes
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
WE would like to thank the following people for their help with the production of this book: Lindsay Bell, Peter Bell, Gerard Collins, Giselle Corbeil, Jane Desmarais, Maud Ellmann, Michael Fitzgerald, Ann Hennigar, Gillis Harp, Barbara Harp, Graham Hogg, Colin Jones, Larry Krupp, D. L. Macdonald, Andrew MacRae, Bill McCormack, Murdina McRae, Dale Miller, Carole Morrison, Sue Rauth, Ruth Richardson, Debbie Seary, Ralph Stewart, Darlene Sweet, Jennifer Taylor, and Beert Verstraete. We would also like to thank the staffs of the Acadia University Library, the Cambridge University
Library, the Widener Library, Harvard, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their generous research grant.
INTRODUCTION
IN the autumn of 1818 the London New Monthly Magazine came into possession of a package of documents that was certain to cause a literary sensation. It contained not just a letter retailing a few precious nuggets of gossip about the exploits of Byron and Shelley during their sojourn by Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, but also what appeared to be an original prose story composed by Lord Byron himself, at this time the most famous living writer in the world. Better still, this prose tale, entitled The Vampyre, seemed to follow the pattern of Byron’s best-known poetical productions—Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Manfred (1817)—by incorporating a strong element of confessional self-portraiture, but this time treating the familiar figure of the accursed outlaw in even more lurid terms as a bloodsucking demon or ‘vampyre’ with the tell-tale name of Lord Ruthven—clearly an echo of another recent fictional portrayal of Byron as Clarence de Ruthven, Lord Glenarvon in the novel Glenarvon (1816) by Lady Caroline Lamb, Byron’s cast-off mistress. The story seemed, then, to have Byron written all over it, lacking only the authentication of his signature.
To the New Monthly’s proprietor, Henry Colburn, disappointed by sluggish sales of his magazine, and alarmed at the great success of its new Scottish rival, Blackwood’s Magazine, the package from Geneva came as a godsend. He set his staff to work in preparation for the coming literary coup, commissioning an explanatory introduction that could illuminate for a readership still largely unfamiliar with vampire-lore the nature and literary lineage of the curious body of East European folk beliefs embodied in The Vampyre. The prefatory account of ‘this singularly horrible superstition’ was probably written by Colburn’s sub-editor Alaric Watts, who also prepared an editorial statement to appear above the ‘Letter from Geneva’ and the other preliminary materials, noting cautiously that
The tale which accompanied the letter we also present to our readers, without pledging ourselves positively for its authenticity, as the production of Lord Byron. We may, however, observe, that it bears strong internal evidence of having been conceived by him; though from the occasional inaccuracies, probably the result of haste, which occur throughout the whole, we should suppose it to have been committed to paper rather from the recital of a third person, than under the immediate direction of its noble author.1
Watts hereby discharged his journalistic duty with honour; but the less scrupulous Colburn, eager to seize the opportunity for greatly enlarged sales, was having none of this hesitation. He struck out the above passage, and saw to it that The Vampyre was announced forthrightly as ‘A TALE BY LORD BYRON’ when it appeared, appropriately, on April Fool’s Day, 1819.
Colburn’s commercial instincts were fully justified: The Vampyre, widely credited as Byron’s latest masterpiece, not only launched a vampire craze that still shows no sign of subsiding, but also helped to put the New Monthly itself back on the road to success, making it the natural repository of macabre short stories for the next twenty years. Alaric Watts, however, who resigned in protest at his employer’s unprincipled interference, was proved right in his hunch that Byron had ‘conceived’ the story but not himself written it. Byron quickly let it be known that he was the author not of The Vampyre but of an unfinished tale called ‘Augustus Darvell’, which his publisher subsequently printed as an appendix to the poet’s Mazeppa (1819) in order to illustrate the difference between his prose fragment and the piece published falsely under his name in the New Monthly. Meanwhile, the true author declared himself: it was John William Polidori, a young doctor who had, against his parents’ advice, accompanied Byron in 1816 to Switzerland as his paid travelling companion, personal physician, and amanuensis, staying with him at the Villa Diodati at Cologny, near Geneva, before being dismissed from his lordship’s service later in the year.
While Byron and Polidori were at the Villa Diodati, they were joined in June 1816 by a new party of sexual and literary outlaws, comprising Byron’s most recent mistress, the 18-year-old Jane ‘Claire’ Clairmont, who had conceived a child by the poet (a daughter, Allegra, was born in January 1817); her step-sister, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, also 18 years of age; the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had abandoned his wife and child to elope with Mary two years earlier; and their illegitimate infant son William. The Shelley entourage took up residence at the nearby Maison Chappuis, but regularly interrupted Byron’s composition of the third Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by walking up to the Villa for literary, philosophical, and other entertainments, which other English tourists in the neighbourhood assumed to be diabolical orgies. As the New Monthly’s ‘Letter from Geneva’ later disclosed—and it was the first public document to identify the persons involved—the five English tourists had amused themselves rather less strenuously by reading some German ghost stories and had then challenged each other to compose similar tales of supernatural terror. This legendary competition elicited from Byron himself the ‘Augustus Darvell’ fragment, in which a mysterious gentleman touring the ruins of Ephesus arranges for the fact of his impending death to be concealed by his travelling companion. Of the other competitors, Claire Clairmont and Percy Shelley defaulted, while Polidori began his only novel, Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus (1819), and Mary Godwin—soon to become the second Mrs Shelley after the suicide of the poet’s first wife, Harriet, later in 1816—embarked upon the composition of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, which was published anonymously, and with only the vaguest reference to the ghost-story contest, in 1818. Mary Shelley’s own fuller account of this competition did not appear until the third edition of Frankenstein was published in 1831, by which time Byron, Percy Shelley, and ‘Poor Polidori’, as she called him in the new Introduction to her novel, were all dead. As for The Vampyre itself, it was, as Polidori explained in a note attached to the Introduction of his Ernestus Berchtold, composed by him with some knowledge of Byron’s intended conclusion of ‘Augustus Darvell’, and in response to a challenge from an unnamed lady who doubted that the fragment could be developed into a plausible story at all. Polidori seems to have left the manuscript of The Vampyre behind him when he left Switzerland in the autumn of 1816, and how it reached the offices of the New Monthly in London two years later remains a mystery. Behind it lies some unknown scavenger of Byroniana, whose unwholesome curiosity led him or her to interrogate the servants in and around the Villa Diodati, with momentous results.
The principal documents in this tangled case—the ‘Letter from Geneva’ with its accompanying editorial notes, Byron’s ‘Augustus Darvell’ fragment, and Polidori’s explanatory note from the Introduction to his novel—are provided here as appendices to the present volume.
Colburn’s conveniently misleading attribution of The Vampyre to Byron was corrected, then, both by the imputed and by the true author; but by this time few readers were willing to bother about the exact details of the tale’s composition. Whether or not the celebrated poet was willing to put his name to the piece, it was clearly ‘Byronic’ in conception, and could thus be greeted as a product of his genius, even as the greatest of his works—a critical view held by Goethe among others. After its magazine début, the story was published in book form, running through seven English printings in 1819 alone. It was quickly adapted for the stage, in J. R. Planché’s The Vampyre (1820) and other versions; in France it was expanded into a two-volume novel by Cyprien Bérard as Lord Ruthwen ou les vampires (1820); and by 1830 it had been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. The story had made an indelible impression on the imagination of Europe, and Polidori had succeeded, however inadvertently, in founding the entire modern tradition of vampire fiction. Not only was his tale the first sustained fictional treatment of vampirism in English, it also completely recast the mythology upon which it drew.
There had indeed been earlier appearances of vampires in English literature,
as the editorial commentary of the New Monthly helpfully acknowledged: Robert Southey’s poem Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), Byron’s own poem The Giaour (1813), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s more celebrated Christabel (1816) had all fleetingly introduced vampiric figures or direct references to vampiric folklore. These three poets, all of them champions of the new Romantic movement, were engaged, along with many other writers of their generation, in the imaginative exploitation of folk beliefs, rescuing them from the degraded category of ‘vulgar superstitions’ and finding in them depths of moral and psychological significance that lay beyond the grasp of conventional rationality. In their rediscovery of the popular imagination and its symbolic resources, the Romantic authors of the early nineteenth century often relied upon the humbler efforts of the previous century’s antiquarians, bibliophiles, and folklorists—those numerous collectors of mythological curiosities, travellers’ tales, medieval romances, popular ballads, forgotten legends, and unusual local customs. The figure of the vampire found its way into the repertoire of English Romanticism by a similar route. Following a series of vampire scares in remote villages of Serbia, Hungary, and Silesia in the early part of the eighteenth century, a respected French biblical scholar, Dom Augustin Calmet, had gathered an extensive anthology of reported vampire sightings and exhumations with related anecdotes and discussions of these phenomena, as Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons & des esprits, et sur les revenans et vampires de Hongrie, de Boheme, de Moravie & de Silesie (1746). The significance of Calmet’s materials was in turn widely debated among some of the leading minds of the Enlightenment, usually as evidence of the limitless credulity of priest-ridden peasants. At the same time, the image of the vampire passed into the vocabulary of French and Engish satire as a vivid metaphor for such commonplace ‘bloodsuckers’ as landlords and governments. Eventually, Robert Southey at the turn of the century included a sample of Calmet’s vampirology in the notes to his Thalaba, along with an earlier French account of vampire-hysteria on the Greek island of Myconos; and English readers at last had more than a snippet of this folklore to bite on.
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