Carleton’s tale exemplifies most powerfully an important tendency, almost inherent in the miscellaneous and sensation-hungry nature of these magazines, to incorporate elements of the recent ‘true crime’ material into the tale of terror, eroding the boundaries between fact and fiction. His ‘Confessions’ revisit an actual massacre in County Louth that had taken place fourteen years before their publication. Similarly, Catherine Gore’s ‘The Red Man’ starts with an account of an execution that had indeed taken place in Paris less than two years before she published the story. The anonymous tale ‘The Victim’ again draws upon readers’ recent recollections of Edinburgh’s most notorious murder case, the Burke and Hare trial of 1829, in which it emerged that a shortage of suitable corpses for anatomical dissection in the medical schools had been made good by the random abduction and suffocation of living victims. The extreme case of such ghoulish opportunism is reached in Hogg’s ‘Terrible Letters’, which exploit the widespread anxieties about the spread of cholera, initially from Sunderland and Newcastle to Edinburgh and Glasgow in the winter of 1831/2. Placing these morbid little tales in the London Metropolitan was a particularly cruel stunt at a time—April 1832—when the English capital was daily expecting its own death toll (currently only six hundred) to escalate to unknown heights, and when the Metropolitan itself was providing monthly updates on the ravages of the epidemic in England, and deliberating on the vulnerability of the East End to a repetition of the Scottish disaster. In another way, the opportunistic exploitation of recent true-life marvels was also a feature of Colburn’s use of Polidori’s The Vampyre, which traded on the notoriety of Lord Byron.
These features of magazine fiction may appear scurrilous and reprehensibly commercial, remote from the higher possibilities of literary art. And yet it was upon the basis of such unwholesome traffic that the modern short story emerged as an internationally significant form in these decades—in the productions of Hoffman, Pushkin, Mérimée, Balzac, Hawthorne, and Poe. That the British and Irish writers from Polidori to Le Fanu could contribute to this process their own satisfyingly crafted works, the macabre tales that follow should demonstrate for themselves.
NOTE ON THE TEXT
THE fourteen tales reprinted in the main section of this volume were first published in a British or Irish magazine between 1819 and 1838, and in each instance the magazine text is the copy text. Details of dates and the magazine of publication appear in the explanatory notes, as does information regarding the various reprintings of specific tales. In the case of Polidori’s The Vampyre, no manuscript has been discovered, and though the tale appeared in book form shortly after it was published in the New Monthly Magazine, both the magazine and the book text were almost certainly printed without Polidori’s knowledge. In the text of The Vampyre, two obvious errors in tense have been corrected, and the punctuation has been altered in a small number of cases in order to improve the sense; this usually involves a comma being changed to either a semicolon or a full stop. In all other instances, the New Monthly text has been followed. For a full discussion of the textual history of The Vampyre, see Henry R. Viets, ‘The London Editions of Polidori’s The Vampyre’ in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 63 (1969), 83–103, and The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold, eds. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Toronto, 1994), 21–6.
The text of all fourteen tales has been modernized in a number of ways: double quotation marks have been changed to single, a standard format has been adopted for the headings, and, where necessary, square brackets have been changed to round. In James Hogg’s ‘Some Terrible Letters from Scotland’ the brief editorial introductions to the second and third letters have been taken out of square brackets and put into italics, and in the anonymous tale ‘The Curse’ rows of asterisks used as ellipses and to subdivide the text have been eliminated. In several of the tales obvious errors in spelling and punctuation have been silently corrected. Prefatory letters or statements have been omitted from the front of some of the tales and signatures have been removed from the end of the tales. Details of the signatures appear in the explanatory notes.
The copy text for the material reprinted in the three appendices to this volume is the first published version. The ‘Preliminaries’ for The Vampyre were first printed in the New Monthly Magazine immediately preceding the text of The Vampyre. The ‘Note on The Vampyre’ was first published as part of the Introduction to Polidori’s only full-length novel, Ernestus Berchtold (1819); for details of the novel’s publication, see Macdonald and Scherf, The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold (Toronto, 1994), 26–9. Byron’s ‘Augustus Darvell’ originally appeared, without his permission, at the end of his poem Mazeppa (1819); for details of the tale’s textual history, see Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford, 1991), 329–34.
Like the texts of the fourteen tales, the texts of the appendices have been modernized in several ways: in particular, double quotation marks have been changed to single, asterisks have been eliminated, and a standard format has been adopted for the headings.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
FOR critical discussions of John Polidori’s The Vampyre, see Richard Sharp Astle, ‘Ontological Ambiguity and Historical Pessimism in Polidori’s The Vampyre’ in Sphinx, 2 (1977), 8–16; Judith Barbour, ‘Dr John William Polidori, Author of The Vampyre’ in Imagining Romanticism: Essays on English and Australian Romanticism, eds. Deidre Coleman and Peter Otto (West Cornwall, Conn., 1992), 85–110; James Rieger, ‘Dr Polidori and the Genesis of Frankenstein’ in Studies in English Literature, 3 (1963), 461–72; Roxana Stuart, ‘Ruthven’ in Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19th-Century Stage (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1994), 11–175; Richard Switzer, ‘Lord Ruthven and the Vampires’ in The French Review, 29 (1955), 107–12; Henry R. Viets, ‘The London Editions of Polidori’s The Vampyre’ in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 63 (1969), 83–103.
The best general studies of the vampire include: Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago, 1995); Margaret Carter, The Vampire in Literature: A Critical Bibliography (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1989); Christopher Frayling, ‘Introduction’ in Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, ed. Christopher Frayling (London, 1991), 3–84; Brian J. Frost, The Monster with a Thousand Faces: Guises of the Vampire in Myth and Literature (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1989); Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London, 1994); Peter D. Grudin, The Demon Lover (New York, 1987); Carol Senf, The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1988); James Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham, NC, 1981).
There has been no detailed study of the nineteenth-century magazine tale of terror. For background discussion, see Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror (London, 1921); Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (London, 1990); William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire (Chicago, 1985); Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV, The Gothic’s Gothic (New York, 1988); Terry Heller, The Delights of Terror (Urbana, Ill., 1987); David Punter, The Literature of Terror (London, 1980); and Donald Ringe, American Gothic (Lexington, Ky., 1982).
For discussions of the development and significance of magazine fiction in the late Romantic and early Victorian periods, see Michael Allen, Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (New York, 1969); Elliott Engell and Margaret King, The Victorian Novel Before Victoria: 1830–1837 (New York, 1984); Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form (Baltimore, 1996); Benjamin Lease, Anglo-American Encounters: England and the Rise of American Literature (Cambridge, 1981); Harold Orel, The Victorian Short Story: Development and Triumph of a Literary Genre (Cambridge, 1986); Carol Polsgrove, ‘They Made it Pay: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1820–1840’ in Studies in Short Fiction, 11 (1974), 417–21; Lance Schachterle, ‘Oliver Twist and its Serial Predecessors’ in Dickens Studies Annual, 3 (1974), 1–13.
For individual magazines, see Linda B. Jones, ‘The New Monthly Magazine, 1821–1830’, unpublished thesis (Colorado University, 1970); William Kilbourn
e, ‘The Role of Fiction in Blackwood’s Magazine from 1817 to 1845’, unpublished thesis (Northwestern University, 1966); Michael Sadleir, Dublin University Magazine: Its History, Contents and Bibliography (Dublin, 1938); Austin Seckersen, ‘The Dublin Literary Gazette’ in British Literary Magazines: The Romantic Age, ed. Alvin Sullivan (London, 1983), 112–14; Lance Schachterle, ‘The Metropolitan Magazine’ in British Literary Magazines: The Romantic Age, 304–8; M. M. H. Thrall, Rebellious Fraser’s (New York, 1934).
For individual authors, see Bonnie Anderson, ‘The Writings of Catherine Gore’ in Journal of Popular Culture, 10 (1976), 404–23; Courtland P. Auser, Nathaniel Parker Willis (New York, 1969); Arthur H. Beavan, James and Horace Smith (London, 1899); James Campbell, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (Boston, 1986); Eileen A. Sullivan, William Carleton (Boston, 1983); Barbara Hayley, Carleton’s Traits and Stories and the 19th Century Anglo-Irish Tradition (Gerrards Cross, Bucks., 1983); David Hogg, The Life of Allan Cunningham, With Selections from His Works and Correspondence (London, 1875); D. L. Macdonald, Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of The Vampyre (Toronto, 1991); W. J. McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1980); Lewis Simpson, James Hogg: A Critical Study (Edinburgh, 1962); Glennis Stephenson, Letitia Landon: The Woman behind L. E. L. (Manchester, 1995); Lionel Stevenson, Doctor Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever (London, 1939).
CHRONOLOGY OF THE MAGAZINES
1796
Feb. Monthly Magazine established, edited by John Aikin.
1814
Feb. New Monthly Magazine established, edited by John Watkins.
1817
Oct. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine established, edited by William Blackwood.
1819
Apr. John William Polidori’s The Vampyre in the New Monthly; James Hogg’s The Shepherd’s Calendar in Blackwood’s (thirteen instalments ending in Apr. 1828).
1820
Jan. London Magazine established, edited by John Scott. June. William Hazlitt’s Table Talk in the London (thirteen instalments ending in Dec. 1821); John Galt’s The Ayrshire Legatees in Blackwood’s (eight instalments ending in Feb. 1821).
Aug. Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia in the London (twenty-eight instalments ending in Nov. 1822).
1821
Jan. Thomas Campbell becomes editor of the New Monthly. Feb. John Scott of the London is killed in a duel after weeks of feuding between Blackwood’s and the London.
Sept. Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in the London (second instalment Oct. 1821).
1822
Mar. J. G. Lockhart’s Noctes Ambrosianae in Blackwood’s (seventy-one instalments ending in Feb. 1835; most written by John Wilson, with help from several others).
1824
Jan. Hazlitt’s ‘The Spirits of the Age’ in the New Monthly (five instalments ending in June 1824).
1826
Jan. Stendhal’s Sketches of Parisian Society, Politics and Literature in the New Monthly (twenty-nine instalments ending in July 1829).
1829
June. London Magazine ceases publication.
Sept. Michael Scott’s Tom Cringle’s Log in Blackwood’s (twenty-three instalments ending in Aug. 1833).
1830
Jan. William Carleton’s ‘Confessions of a Reformed Ribbon-man’ in the Dublin Literary Gazette.
1830
Feb. Fraser’s Magazine established, edited by William Maginn.
Aug. Samuel Warren’s Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician in Blackwood’s (eighteen instalments ending in Aug. 1837).
1831
May. Metropolitan Magazine established, edited by Thomas Campbell.
Nov. Edward Bulwer becomes editor of the New Monthly.
1832
Feb. William Godwin the Younger’s ‘The Executioner’ in Blackwood’s (second instalment Mar. 1832).
Apr. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine established, edited by William Tait.
1833
Jan. Dublin University Magazine established, edited by Charles Stanford.
Nov. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus in Fraser’s (eight instalments ending in Aug. 1834).
1834
July. Benjamin Disraeli’s The Infernal Marriage in the New Monthly (four instalments ending in Oct. 1834).
1835
June. Catherine Gore’s ‘The Red Man’ in the New Monthly.
1836
Aug. Letitia Landon’s ‘The Bride of Lindorf’ in the New Monthly.
1837
Jan. Bentley’s Miscellany established, edited by Charles Dickens; Theodore Hook becomes editor of the New Monthly, which is renamed the New Monthly Magazine and Humorist.
Feb. Dickens’s Oliver Twist in Bentley’s (twenty-four instalments ending in Apr. 1839).
Mar. Marryat’s The Phantom Ship in the New Monthly (seventeen instalments ending in Aug. 1839).
Nov. William Thackeray’s The Yellowplush Correspondence in Fraser’s (nine instalments ending in Aug. 1838).
1838
Nov. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess’ in the Dublin University Magazine.
1839
Mar. W. H. Ainsworth becomes editor of Bentley’s.
May. Thackeray’s Catherine in Fraser’s (seven instalments ending in Feb. 1840).
THE VAMPYRE AND OTHER TALES OF THE MACABRE
THE VAMPYRE
John Polidori
IT HAPPENED that in the midst of the dissipations attendant upon a London winter, there appeared at the various parties of the leaders of the ton* a nobleman, more remarkable for his singularities, than his rank. He gazed upon the mirth around him, as if he could not participate therein. Apparently, the light laughter of the fair only attracted his attention, that he might by a look quell it, and throw fear into those breasts where thoughtlessness reigned. Those who felt this sensation of awe, could not explain whence it arose: some attributed it to the dead grey eye, which, fixing upon the object’s face, did not seem to penetrate, and at one glance to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart; but fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it could not pass. His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him, and those who had been accustomed to violent excitement, and now felt the weight of ennui, were pleased at having something in their presence capable of engaging their attention. In spite of the deadly hue of his face, which never gained a warmer tint, either from the blush of modesty, or from the strong emotion of passion, though its form and outline were beautiful, many of the female hunters after notoriety attempted to win his attentions, and gain, at least, some marks of what they might term affection; Lady Mercer, who had been the mockery of every monster shewn in drawing rooms since her marriage, threw herself in his way, and did all but put on the dress of a mountebank, to attract his notice;—though in vain:—when she stood before him, though his eyes were apparently fixed upon her’s, still it seemed as if they were unperceived—even her unappalled impudence was baffled, and she left the field.* But though the common adultress could not influence even the guidance of his eyes, it was not that the female sex was indifferent to him: yet such was the apparent caution with which he spoke to the virtuous wife and innocent daughter, that few knew he ever addressed himself to females. He had, however, the reputation of a winning tongue; and whether it was that it even overcame the dread of his singular character, or that they were moved by his apparent hatred of vice, he was as often among those females who form the boast of their sex from their domestic virtues, as among those who sully it by their vices.
About the same time, there came to London a young gentleman of the name of Aubrey: he was an orphan left with an only sister in the possession of great wealth, by parents who died while he was yet in childhood. Left also to himself by guardians, who thought it their duty merely to take care of his fortune, while they relinquished the more important charge of his mind to the care of mercenary subalterns, he cultivated more his ima
gination than his judgment. He had, hence, that high romantic feeling of honour and candour, which daily ruins so many milliners’ apprentices. He believed all to sympathise with virtue, and thought that vice was thrown in by Providence merely for the picturesque effect of the scene, as we see in romances; he thought that the misery of a cottage merely consisted in the vesting of clothes, which were as warm, but which were better adapted to the painter’s eye by their irregular folds and various coloured patches. He thought, in fine, that the dreams of poets were the realities of life. He was handsome, frank, and rich: for these reasons, upon his entering into the gay circles, many mothers surrounded him, striving which should describe with least truth their languishing or romping favourites: the daughters at the same time, by their brightening countenances when he approached, and by their sparkling eyes, when he opened his lips, soon led him into false notions of his talents and his merit. Attached as he was to the romance of his solitary hours, he was startled at finding that except in the tallow and wax candles, that flickered not from the presence of a ghost, but from want of snuffing, there was no foundation in real life for any of that congeries of pleasing pictures and descriptions contained in those volumes, from which he had formed his study. Finding, however, some compensation in his gratified vanity, he was about to relinquish his dreams, when the extraordinary being we have above described, crossed him in his career.
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