Letitia E. Landon (1802–38), better known as ‘L. E. L.’, was an immensely popular author of the 1820s and 1830s. She published six volumes of poetry, including The Fate of Adelaide (1821), The Improvisatrice (1824), and The Vow of the Peacock (1835), as well as four novels, most notably Ethel Churchill (1837). Landon also contributed voluminously to annuals like Friendship’s Offering, and to magazines like Fraser’s and the New Monthly. In the mid-1820s scandal began to circulate about her personal life, particularly her liaisons with her mentor William Jerdan and the magazinist William Maginn, and though the rumours gradually died down, their revival in 1834 led her fiancé John Forster to break off their engagement. After a period of depression and ill-health, Landon accepted the marriage proposal of George Maclean, Governor of Cape Coast, West Africa, but within four months of her marriage and emigration to Africa, she was dead, apparently from an accidental overdose of prussic acid. See Glennis Stephenson, Letitia Landon: The Woman behind L. E. L. (Manchester, 1995).
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73) was born in Dublin into an old and well-established Huguenot family. The playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan had married his great-aunt. Le Fanu was educated at Trinity College and was called to the Irish Bar in 1839, though he never practised. He wrote poetry, essays, political commentary, and historical romances, but he is best known for his skilfully constructed tales of terror and mystery, particularly The House by the Churchyard (1863), Wylder’s Hand (1864), Uncle Silas (1864), and Guy Deverell (1865). Le Fanu also published collections of short fiction, most notably In a Glass Darkly (1872), which features the terrifying vampire story ‘Carmilla’. He was a key contributor to the Dublin University Magazine for over thirty years, and its owner and editor from 1861 to 1869. See W. J. McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1980).
Charles Lever (1806–72) was a native of Dublin, and grew up a member of the Anglo-Irish class. He trained in medicine at Trinity College, but was unable to establish himself as a physician, and turned to writing. After 1845 he lived in Italy, becoming British Consul at Trieste in 1867. His many novels include The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer (1837), Charles O’Malley, the Irish Dragoon (1840), Roland Cashel (1850), and Lord Kilgobbin: A Tale of Ireland in Our Own Time (1872). Lever’s work appeared in several important periodicals, including Blackwood’s, The Cornhill, and the Dublin University Magazine, which he edited from 1842 to 1845. See Lionel Stevenson, Doctor Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever (London, 1939).
John Polidori (1795–1821) was the son of a distinguished Italian scholar and translator. He received his medical degree from Edinburgh in 1815 at the unusually early age of 19, and displayed his fascination with the stranger aspects of science in his thesis on somnambulism. In 1816 he became Lord Byron’s personal physician and travelling companion, and was present at the famous ghost story competition at the Villa Diodati that was the genesis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and his own The Vampyre (1819). Polidori returned to England in 1817 but he failed to establish himself as a writer or a physician. He committed suicide in his father’s house in 1821. His other works include Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus (1819), Ximenes, the Wreath, and Other Poems (1819), and The Fall of the Angels: A Sacred Poem (1821). The Vampyre was his only contribution to the magazines. See D. L. Macdonald, Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of The Vampyre (Toronto, 1991).
Horace Smith (1779–1849) made his fortune as a merchant and insurance broker, before becoming a stockbroker in 1812. With his brother James, a solicitor, he published Rejected Addresses (1812), an enormously successful collection of poetic parodies. In 1816 Smith became a member of the London literary circle that included Shelley, Hunt, and Keats, and he followed Shelley to the Continent in 1821. After 1825 he produced a series of pseudo-Waverley novels, the best known of which are Brambletye House (1826), Reuben Apsley (1827), and Arthur Arundel (1844). Smith’s finest magazine work appeared in the London and the New Monthly. See Arthur H. Beavan, James and Horace Smith (London, 1899).
N. P. Willis (1806–67) was born in Portland, Maine, and educated at Yale. He was a member of the so-called Knickerbocker group of New York writers, but travelled extensively in Europe, and made his national and international reputation with a collection of travel sketches, Pencillings by the Way (1835), and three collections of short tales, most notably Inklings of Adventure (1836). He was one of the pre-eminent magazine editors and writers of his age, and most of his work first appeared in leading journals like Graham’s and Godey’s in America, and the Metropolitan and the New Monthly in Britain. See Courtland P. Auser, Nathaniel Parker Willis (New York, 1969).
EXPLANATORY NOTES
Attribution of The Vampyre is based on The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold, eds. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Toronto, 1994), 21–6; attributions of all other tales from the New Monthly Magazine are based on the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, eds. W. Houghton et al. (5 vols.; Toronto, 1966–89), iii. 182–234. Attribution of Carleton’s ‘Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman’ is based on his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, second series (Dublin, 1833), where the tale appeared, with minor alterations, as ‘Wildgoose Lodge’; attribution of Hogg’s ‘Some Terrible Letters from Scotland’ is based on the Metropolitan Magazine, 3 (1832), 422; attributions of tales from the Dublin University Magazine are based on the Wellesley, iv. 228, 238; attribution of the tale from Fraser’s is based on the Wellesley, ii. 335.
The Vampyre
Published in the April 1819 issue of the New Monthly Magazine (old series: 11/63, 195–206) as ‘A TALE BY LORD BYRON’, The Vampyre is actually the work of Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori. Twitchell asserts that this tale ‘set off a chain reaction that has carried the myth both to heights of artistic psychomachia and to depths of sadistic vulgarity, making the vampire, along with the Frankenstein monster, the most compelling and complex figure to be produced by the gothic imagination’. Frayling observes that The Vampyre is ‘probably the most influential horror story of all time’. For details of the genesis and reception of Polidori’s tale, see the Introduction, vii–xiii (James Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham, NC, 1981), 103; Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, ed. Christopher Frayling (London, 1991), 107).
The annotation that follows draws on the scholarship of previous editions of The Vampyre, particularly that of Macdonald and Scherf (Toronto, 1994).
ton: fashionable world.
Lady Mercer … left the field: an unflattering portrait of Lady Caroline Lamb (1785–1828), who married William Lamb in 1805, and who had a brief but tempestuous affair with Byron in 1812, the most famous episode of which occurred in July of that year when she dressed in a page’s uniform in order to gain access to his rooms after his interest in her had begun to wane. In May 1816 Lamb published her highly successful novel Glenarvon, an extravagant roman-à-clef which featured Byron as the villainous hero Clarence de Ruthven, Lord Glenarvon. Less than five months later, when Polidori wrote The Vampyre, he borrowed the Ruthven name, thus ensuring that readers of his tale would immediately associate Byron and the vampyre. In the revised version, Polidori changed Ruthven’s name to Strongmore, possibly because there actually was a Lord Ruthven at the time, more probably because by 1819 he wished to claim the tale as his own, and to make its connection with Byron less obvious.
Lord Ruthven’s affairs … to travel: Byron’s financial affairs had grown increasingly straitened during the opening months of 1816. He left England for good on 25 April of that year.
faro table: faro is one of the oldest of all gambling games played with cards, and apparently named from the picture of a pharaoh on a French deck of cards. The game was a favourite of high-born gamblers throughout Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Mahomet’s paradise … had no souls: cf. a note to The Giaour, in which Byron explains that ‘the Koran allots at least a third of Paradise to well-
behaved women; but by far the greater number of Mussulmans interpret the text their own way, and exclude their moieties from heaven’ (Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford, 1980–93), iii. 419).
Pausanias: (fl. AD 143–76); a Greek traveller and geographer, whose Description of Greece is an invaluable guide to ancient ruins.
Smyrna: now Izmir, a port in western Turkey.
ataghans: in a note to The Giaour, Byron describes an ataghan as ‘a long dagger worn with pistols in the belt, in a metal scabbard, generally of silver; and, among the wealthier, gilt, or of gold’ (Byron, Complete Poetical Works, iii. 418).
drawing room: formal reception.
‘busy scene’: the phrase is a common one. It appears in the same context immediately following ‘The Editor’s Introduction’ in Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761); see also Byron, ‘I Would I were a Careless Child’, ‘This busy scene of splendid Woe’ (Byron, Complete Poetical Works, i. 122).
Sir Guy Eveling’s Dream
Published in the January 1823 issue of the New Monthly Magazine (7/25, 59–64), this tale by Horace Smith purports to be ‘Extracted from an old Manuscript’ which ‘appears to have been an Essay upon Sleep’. Smith was a voluminous contributor to the New Monthly in the first half of the 1820s. In a letter of July 1824 Charles Lamb stated that ‘the best’ of the New Monthly was by Smith (The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (3 vols.; London, 1935), ii. 432).
bruited: spoke.
Fountains Abbey: the Cistercian monastery founded in the twelfth century near Ripon, Yorkshire.
maugre … not agnize: despite … of a proud, haughty temperament … recognize.
ribalds … giglots: knaves, revellers, swashbucklers … harlots.
ronyons and bonarobas: strumpets and wenches.
tristful ostent: sad appearance.
incontinent: immediately.
cautelously: cautiously or craftily.
Nathless … amort: nevertheless … dispirited.
happy man be my dole: my destiny must be fortunate.
our late King Edward: presumably Edward VI, who acceded to the throne in 1547 and died six years later at the age of 15.
St Mary Woolnoth Church: a church in the City of London. The reference here is to the second church on this site, built in the fifteenth century and subsequently replaced (after being damaged in the Great Fire of 1666) by Hawksmoor’s church from 1716. There is no record of the tower of the second church having been damaged by lightning.
within the Bar: within Temple Bar, the old gate of the City of London.
facete entertainment and argute compassment: elegant entertainment and subtle contrivance.
the dulcimer of Miriam: a confused allusion, presumably to the biblical Miriam, sister of Moses and Aaron, who celebrates the crossing of the Red Sea by playing a timbrel, not a dulcimer (Exodus 15: 20).
likelihood of sphere: promising circumstances.
applejohns … sack-posset: long-preserved apples; marzipan; sugar-plums; delicacies; a sherry in hot milk.
tirevolant: the word is not found elsewhere, but must refer to some form of headdress or possibly cape.
intenerated: softened.
a Bezonian and a lozel: a vagabond and a scoundrel.
gimmal rings … braveries: rings composed of two or three parts; jewelled necklaces; pieces of finery; adornments.
writhled: withered or wrinkled.
Spittal for the crazed: lunatic asylum.
Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman
Published in the 23 January and 30 January 1830 issues of the Dublin Literary Gazette (1/4, 49–51; 1/5, 66–8), this tale by William Carleton is based on historical fact. In the first instalment, a bracketed subtitle describes it as ‘An owre true tale’, and an editorial note explains that ‘had the following story been a pure fiction, it would not have gained a place in our pages, but …it is unfortunately “a true record”’, and ‘afford[s] an insight into the habits and secret actions of a very extraordinary set of wretches, some of whom are said even yet to disgrace the wilder parts of the country’.
The incidents described in the tale took place on 30 October 1816, near Reaghstown, in County Louth. The Ribbonmen were a secret organization of Irish nationalists founded in about 1808 to combat the Orangemen of the northern counties; they soon became notorious for their sectarian outrages. The name derives from the green ribbon worn as a badge by members. Events leading up to the atrocities described in Carleton’s tale began on 10 April 1816, when Michael Tiernan, Patrick Stanley, and Philip Conlon broke into a huntsman’s lodge occupied by Edward Lynch. The three men demanded guns and assaulted Lynch and members of his family before being driven off. At the trial Lynch and his son-in-law Thomas Rooney identified the invaders and, in the face of strong public sympathy, all three men were convicted and hanged, most probably on 21 August. In the early hours of 30 October, the Ribbonmen meted out their revenge. Led by Paddy Devaun, a weaver and parish clerk at Stonetown Chapel, they massacred Lynch and seven others, including his daughter and grandchild. In the aftermath, Devaun and seventeen other Ribbonmen were executed. In summing up, Judge Fletcher noted that ‘religious bigotry had no part in producing these monstrous crimes. There were not here two conflicting parties arrayed under the colours of orange and green; not Protestant against Catholic, nor Catholic against Protestant—no, it was Catholic against Catholic’ (Daniel J. Casey, ‘Wildgoose Lodge: The Evidence and the Lore’ in County Louth Archaeological and Historical Journal, 18 (1974), 140–64; Barbara Hayley, Carleton’s Traits and Stories and the 19th Century Anglo-Irish Tradition (Gerrards Cross, Bucks., 1983), 124).
In about 1814 Carleton himself became a Ribbonman but, in his Autobiography, he insisted he was ‘seduced into this senseless but most mischievous system’ by an ‘adroit scoundrel’, as ‘in like manner were hundreds, nay thousands, of unreflecting youths’. Later Carleton described the first time he heard ‘a brief outline of the inhuman and hellish tragedy’ of the Lynch massacre, and called ‘the effect upon me … the most painful I ever felt from any narrative. It clung to me until I went to bed that night—it clung to me through my sleep with such vivid horror that sleep was anything but a relief to me.’ Carleton also claimed that he had seen the gibbeted tar sack which contained Devaun’s body, and explained how the body had decomposed and begun to ooze out the bottom of the sack in ‘long ropes of slime shining in the light’ (The Autobiography of William Carleton, preface by Patrick Kavanagh (London, 1968), 77–8, 114–17).
When Carleton’s tale appeared in the Literary Gazette, its chief rival, the Dublin Monthly Magazine, labelled it ‘offensive’ and claimed it was best ‘to avoid controversial discussion’, but by 1852 the Edinburgh Review noted that it was in Carleton’s works, ‘and in his alone, that future generations must look for the truest and fullest—though still far from complete—picture of those, who will ere long have passed away from that troubled land, from the records of history, and from the memory of man for ever’. W. B. Yeats chose this tale as one of five for inclusion in his Stories from Carleton, and remarked that ‘the whole matter made a deep impression on the mind of Carleton, and again and again in his books he returns to the subject of the secret societies and their corruption of the popular conscience’. More recently, critics have commented on the effectiveness of the tale’s first-person narrative, and Hayley explores the ‘psychological inertia that holds the narrator passive in a wild dreamlike hell—‘he describes scenes, movements and expressions as hell-like or Satanic time and time again, as he is carried along towards actions from which his mind revolts and of which the memory “sickens” him’ (Dublin Monthly Magazine, 1 (1830), 174; Edinburgh Review, 96 (1852), 389; W. B. Yeats, Stories from Carleton (London, 1889), xiii; Hayley, Carleton’s Traits and Stories, 125).
In 1833 Carleton revised the ‘Confessions’ as ‘Wildgoose Lodge’ for inclusion in his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, second series.
He made dozens of minor alterations in wording and punctuation, but only one important change. In the magazine text, Carleton writes ‘we directed our steps to the house in which this man (the only Protestant in the parish) resided’. In revision, he changed this to the harmless ‘in which this devoted man resided’, and thus removed the incorrect implication that the massacre of the Lynches was due to sectarian hostility (Hayley, Carleton’s Traits and Stories, 124–5, 133).
ghud dhemur tha thu: may be translated approximately as ‘how are you?’
The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre Page 31