As the basis of imaginative literature rather than of sick jokes, however, the folklore of vampires as represented in Calmet’s accounts had some serious deficiencies: it was obscure, confused, and above all comically disgusting. According to the villagers of Serbia and Hungary, their vampires were bloated, shaggy, foul-smelling corpses who preyed on their immediate neighbours and relatives, or on nearby cattle (so that vampirism could be acquired by eating contaminated meat). Popular remedies against vampires involved digging them up and smearing oneself with their blood, or pulling out their teeth and sucking their gums, as well as the more conclusive precautions of staking, decapitation, and incineration. Still more unappealing was the fact that the legions of the undead were composed entirely of peasants. Some readers of Calmet’s anthology pointed out that there seemed, oddly, never to have been an urban vampire, nor an educated bourgeois vampire, let alone one of noble birth. The historical and mythological importance of Polidori’s The Vampyre lies in its drastic correction of the folklore’s shortcomings, and especially in his elevation of the nosferatu (undead) to the dignity of high social rank. By removing the bloodsucker from the village cowshed to the salons of high society and the resorts of international tourism, he set in motion the glorious career of the aristocratic vampire, a figure later incarnated as Sir Francis Varney, in J. M. Rymer’s interminable Varney the Vampire (1847), as Countess Mircalla Karnstein in J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), and of course as Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the novel that has defined our conceptions of lordly vampirism for the last century and more. Polidori’s tale has commonly been treated as a fairly simple projection of its author’s passive subjection to Byron’s dominating genius, in the form of Aubrey’s hypnotic obedience to Ruthven. But, as Ken Gelder has pointed out, The Vampyre in fact takes a more actively ironic attitude to its Byronic villain, turning some of Byron’s self-dramatizations against their originator.2 Like Lady Caroline Lamb before him, Polidori knew himself to be an expendable amusement, and so inscribed the inevitable resentments of this position into his fictionalized Byron. And it is above all middle-class resentment against the sexual allure of the noble roué that sustains the modern vampire myth, at the same time absorbing it effortlessly into the conventions of melodrama.
Another volume in this series, Tales of Terror from Blackwood’s Magazine (Oxford, 1995), gathers some of the best short fiction from the early years of that pioneering magazine, including works by Samuel Warren, William Mudford, John Galt, William Maginn, and James Hogg. The aim of the present collection, however, is to exhibit the variety and vitality of the terror-tales and similarly macabre fiction published in the rival magazines of London and Dublin, in the two decades following the appearance of Polidori’s tale; that is, the 1820s and 1830s. Most of the stories selected come from the New Monthly itself, but there are two stories from the Dublin University Magazine, with one apiece from Fraser’s, the Metropolitan, and the Dublin Literary Gazette. More than any other single story, The Vampyre heralded a new phase of modern British fiction in which the opportunist sensationalism of the monthly magazines assumed an unprecedented importance. When The Vampyre appeared in 1819, there were three major divisions of the periodical press: newspapers, magazines, and reviews. Daily newspapers like The Times, and weekly newspapers such as William Cobbett’s Political Register and Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, were devoted largely to politics. Magazines such as Blackwood’s and the New Monthly appeared monthly and prided themselves on variety, instruction, and amusement, as well as on the regular publication of original fiction. Reviews like the Edinburgh and the Quarterly were published every three months, and were sombre, substantial, and highly respectable: in 1818 William Hazlitt commented that ‘to be an Edinburgh Reviewer is, I suspect, the highest rank in modern literary society’.3 But for many, including Thomas De Quincey, magazines were ‘entitled to … precedency’ over reviews because they were more intimately connected ‘with the shifting passions of the day’ and naturally became ‘a general depôt… both for life and literature’.4 The magazines offered a broader and more sophisticated consideration of political events than the newspapers, and they possessed an immediacy and variety that the reviews could not match. They were the most exuberant and original of the periodicals, while their preoccupation with violence, scandal, and hysteria made them a natural outlet for terror fiction.
Magazines at this time were also one of the most dependably profitable commodities for publishers such as Henry Colburn, William Blackwood, and John Murray. Technological advances in papermaking and printing meant that more copy could be produced faster and at a cheaper rate, and a growing middle class combined increased wealth and leisure with a voracious appetite for the kind of information and amusement the magazines provided. ‘WE ARE ABSOLUTELY COINING MONEY’, cried John Wilson in Blackwood’s in 1820, and two years later in the London Magazine P. G. Patmore wrote that magazines were ‘emerging from the shell with which they were encrusted’ and ‘soaring aloft into higher spheres’, chiefly because ‘the very highest names in English literature’ had become contributors.5 The days of Grub Street gave way to the patronage of the reading public, and magazines became powerful, lucrative enterprises, for both writers and publishers. In 1823 Mary Shelley was amazed to discover that Horace Smith was making ‘200 per ann … clear, regularly, for writing … for the New Monthly’.6
The rise of the magazines began with the founding of the Monthly Magazine in 1796, and was consolidated with the unprecedented success of Blackwood’s Magazine in 1817 which, along with the New Monthly (1814), dominated the magazine scene for over a decade, before being challenged in the early 1830s by powerful rivals such as Fraser’s, the Metropolitan, and the Dublin University. In the 1820s and 1830s all the leading magazines published large amounts of fiction, partly in response to the enormous public demand for novels generated by recent publishing successes like the ‘silver-fork novels’ of high society made popular by Edward Bulwer and Catherine Gore, and cheap reprints such as Colburn and Bentley’s Standard Novels series, founded in 1831. But there was a long tradition of serializing fiction in the magazines—Tobias Smollett’s The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves had appeared in the British Magazine in 1760–1—and the idea received new life as early as 1820–1 when Blackwood’s serialized John Galt’s Ayrshire Legatees, and then followed up this success with David Macbeth Moir’s The Autobiography of Mansie Wauch, Michael Scott’s Tom Cringle’s Log, and Samuel Warren’s Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician. Other magazines soon followed suit, and in the 1830s the New Monthly serialized Benjamin Disraeli’s The Infernal Marriage, Fraser’s ran Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and William Thackeray’s The Yellowplush Correspondence, the Dublin University published William Carleton’s Fardorougha the Miser and Charles Lever’s immensely successful The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, and the Metropolitan’s great popularity was based almost exclusively on its serialization of the sea adventure novels of Frederick Marryat and Edward Howard.
Short fiction, too, was a long-established tradition in the magazines, dating back to the late seventeenth century, thriving in the eighteenth, and increasing in sophistication and influence in the nineteenth, when the leading magazines featured hundreds of tales of sentiment, humour, folklore, fantasy, burlesque, and much else. Gothic tales and fragments began appearing in the magazines shortly after the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764, and were common after 1790, when the craze for the Gothic in Britain reached its height. Many of the Gothic tales that appeared in magazines between 1770 and 1820 were written by readers themselves, and were most often simply crude abbreviations or redactions of the novels of Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Charles Brockden Brown. What Robert Mayo has described as ‘Gothic fragments’, on the other hand, took as their model Anna Laetitia Aikin’s ‘Sir Bertrand’ (1773), and while like the Gothic tale they employed natural terrors such as mouldering castles and subterranean vau
lts, they differed from the tales in that they typically began in medias res, revelled in the use of the supernatural and the unexplained, and broke off at a crucial moment.7 Tales and fragments in these formats appeared continually in magazines such as the Lady’s, the General, the Monthly Mirror, and a host of others, while magazines such as the Marvellous were devoted exclusively to this kind of fiction. But, as Mayo notes, as early as 1791 both the Gothic tale and fragment ‘were well on the way to being stereotypes … and during the succeeding decades imitators in the magazines were to ring endless changes on the old forms and motifs’.8 Not until about 1820 did sensation fiction begin to shed the trappings of the Radcliffean school of the Gothic, as some of the most popular and influential authors of the day were drawn to the magazine tale of terror, and began to transform its range and potential.
The leading exponent of the newer kinds of terror fiction was Blackwood’s Magazine, which turned away from the Gothic tradition and offered in its stead a fresh realism and concentration of sensational effect in its best tales. In such stories as John Galt’s ‘The Buried Alive’ (1821), William Maginn’s ‘The Man in the Bell’ (1821), and Henry Thomson’s ‘Le Revenant’ (1827), a powerful new formula emerged for the modern tale of terror, in which the protagonist—usually the first-person narrator of the story—would record the extreme psychological effects of being trapped, incarcerated, or even entombed in unbearable conditions of confinement and panic. These fictional possibilities of claustrophobia were exploited to the full in William Mudford’s Blackwood’s tale ‘The Iron Shroud’ (1830), in which a prisoner discovers that his metallic cell is gradually shrinking and will thus certainly crush him to death. It was upon the basis of these works that Edgar Allan Poe soon developed the hysterical intensity of his most memorable stories, notably ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1843), which is indebted directly to Mudford’s tale. However, despite the influential prominence of these claustrophobic narratives, the terror fiction of Blackwood’s transcended any predictable formulae, and included a range of material, from traditional Scottish ghost stories to narratives of murder, famine, and shipwreck. A second distinctive feature of its fictional fare was the exploitation of public curiosity about the grisly secrets of the medical profession: Blackwood’s highly successful series of Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician (1830–7), written by the former Edinburgh medical student Samuel Warren, provided numerous lurid deathbed scenes along with startling pictures of lunacy, catalepsy, delirium tremens, amputation, and similar horrors, all presented in the form of ‘inside’ knowledge. In a similar vein, other Blackwood’s tales would recount, from the privileged point of view of a clergyman, the final confessions and ravings of madmen and murderers. In one way or another, the most powerful and characteristic effects of the Blackwood’s tale of terror derived from the impression of being ‘inside’—either an alarmingly enclosed space, or a secret realm of suffering. Neither the New Monthly nor its various competitors in London and Dublin ever evolved a distinctive formula for the tale of terror in the way that Blackwood’s had done, to the extent of attracting imitation and parody, in its early years; but they renewed and extended the possibilities of such fiction, most obviously in inaugurating the modern tradition of vampire stories, but also in adapting real-life incidents of terror to fictional forms, and in refreshing—as Blackwood’s had neglected to do—the mainstream of Gothic fiction itself. In general, although with some scope for exceptions, it may be said that where the hallmark of Blackwood’s terror fiction was a shrill intensity, the equivalent work of the London and Dublin monthlies was more composed, in both the psychological and the artistic senses of the word.
In the frantically competitive world of the magazines in the 1820s and 1830s, imitation was not just the sincerest form of flattery but the surest route to commercial survival. It should not, then, surprise us to find some echoes of the successful Blackwood’s tradition in the productions of its monthly rivals. For instance, two of the tales selected here could be mistaken easily enough for Blackwood’s material: ‘My Hobby,—Rather’, by the American author N. P. Willis, which describes the gruesome desecration of a corpse, is a short and violent excursion beyond the bounds of good taste, while Charles Lever’s ‘Post-Mortem Recollections of a Medical Lecturer’ uses the familiar device of the cataleptic trance which threatens the narrator with the fate of live burial. Each employs the convention of first-person testimony to suddenly overwhelming fright. On the other hand, many magazinists in Dublin and London diverged clearly from the school of Blackwood by developing more old-fashioned Gothic materials, either in the archaic mode of ‘Sir Guy Eveling’s Dream’ by Horace Smith, or in Letitia Landon’s elegant tale ‘The Bride of Lindorf’. The final story in this collection, Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess’, derives its plot from those founding texts of Gothic fiction, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), while looking ahead to the high Victorian Gothic of Le Fanu’s own novel Uncle Silas (1864), which is in fact an expanded version of the same tale.
A more general and substantial feature which several of the tales collected here share with a good number of their counterparts in Blackwood’s, and indeed with fiction and theatrical melodrama outside the magazines, is their moral impetus, directed chiefly at the thoughtlessness of the fashionable and dissolute young rake or libertine. As Samuel Warren and several other Blackwood’s contributors presented their tales of terror either straightforwardly or disingenuously as ‘moral tales’ serving the function of memento mori to the idle young man-about-town, so the authors of macabre fiction in the rival magazines adopted the conventional figure of the rake, devising various means of warning readers against his example and his fate. In some versions, as in Smith’s ‘Sir Guy Eveling’s Dream’ and Allan Cunningham’s ‘The Master of Logan’, the young firebrand utters a rash oath that conjures up demonic terrors to punish his sexual licence; in others, such as the anonymous ‘Life in Death’, a more calculating and jaded kind of debauchee attempts to recapture the sinful energies of his youth by unhallowed means. In this last-mentioned tale, the youthful protagonist lapses, while watching over his father’s corpse and looking forward to squandering his inherited wealth, into an odd kind of reverie: ‘Strange images of death and pleasures mingled together; now it was a glorious banquet, now the gloomy silence of a church-yard; now bright and beautiful faces seemed to fill the air, then by a sudden transition they became the cadaverous relics of the charnel-house.’ A clue is given here to the admonitory ambitions and to the imaginative instabilities of the ‘moral’ tale of terror, which typically brings into harsh juxtaposition the dimly evoked realm of Vice (a world of brandy, actresses, and card-tables, always safely offstage) and the more starkly drawn images of mortality. Le Fanu’s ‘Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess’ illustrates a further variation upon the stock figure of modern dissipation, in the character of Sir Arthur, a supposedly ‘reformed rake’ with his card-playing days behind him.
The recurrence of this topos in so many tales may serve to illuminate an often overlooked dimension of the lead story in this collection, Polidori’s The Vampyre. For obvious reasons, it has been the connections of this work with previous vampiric lore and with subsequent literary and cinematic adaptations that have occupied most discussion of the tale. Yet the significance of Polidori’s momentous transformation of the figure of the vampire from bestial ghoul to glamorous aristocrat cannot be grasped fully without recognizing that his Lord Ruthven is really the conventional rakehell or libertine with a few vampiric attributes grafted onto him. For Ruthven, at least, vampirism is merely a continuation of rakery by other means; and for Polidori, the ‘vampire story’ is conceived as a variant upon the moral tale, a tale designed principally as a warning—here, against the fascinating power of the libertinism represented by his employer Byron. The significance of this monitory motive, incidentally, can be felt in the tale’s strongest tensi
on, which is between the hero’s urgent need to warn his sister and others against Ruthven, and the even stronger force which prevents him from giving that warning utterance. The story is notably—and for some modern readers disappointingly—deficient in vampire-lore and its now customary paraphernalia, but this is because the figure of the vampire here has a restricted function, serving principally as a vivid metaphor for that kind of womanizer who may be said to ‘prey upon’ his victims, or to be, in a phrase that had recently come into use in Polidori’s day, a ‘lady-killer’. Polidori has received fairly earned credit for ennobling and glamorizing the vampire; but to look at the same transformation from this other side is to see that he just as certainly revamped (more precisely, vamped for the first time) the stock figure of the upper-class rake, which is perhaps the more significant mythic feat.
In the context of the broad range of macabre fiction, the vampire is merely one special version of the revenant or returner from the dead, who has numerous other guises. It is a noteworthy feature of the short fiction in the London magazines that it so frequently resorts to such figures, while the most characteristic Blackwood’s tales usually avoided them. There are weaker and stronger variations upon this theme: at one end of the spectrum, a skeleton hand will resurface sixty years later in a scrap-metal shop, or a woman believed to have died years ago turns out to be alive in the deserted wing of a Gothic castle, or a man about to be buried will awaken from his coma and spring upright in his coffin; at the other end, full-blown supernaturalism asserts itself as the truly dead are summoned from their graves as ghosts or worse. In one of Hogg’s ‘Terrible Letters from Scotland’, the narrator, after escaping premature burial, complains that his neighbours ‘called me the man that was dead and risen again, and shunned me as a being scarcely of this earth’. To present his predicament in just those terms is, of course, to draw attention to the way in which the grim ‘resurrections’ of macabre fiction darkly travesty the central myth of Christian theology itself, inverting its heavenly promises into hellish curses. A pervasive theological gloom hangs over many of these stories, especially those of Scottish authors—Hogg, Cunningham, and (we must suppose) the anonymous author of ‘The Curse’—whose historical memory is still overshadowed by the religious wars and persecutions of the seventeenth century. Darker still is the vision of the Irish writer William Carleton, who presents the murderous conspiracy in his ‘Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman’ as a satanic mass.
The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre Page 2