Vampires by Nigel Suckling

Author:Nigel Suckling [Suckling, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: G2 Rights Ltd
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter III : Shadows in the Night - Vampires in Fiction

The first real prose vampire story in English literature was the novella titled The Vampyre by John William Polidori published in 1819 and based on an idea by the poet Lord Byron, whose companion and doctor Polidori was for a while, supplying him with prescriptions for his drug habits (which he shared).

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Because of Byron’s involvement it was first of all assumed that he was the author and the book was enormously popular. The German poet Goethe called it Byron’s finest piece of writing to date. When Byron disowned it, the story plummeted into obscurity, contributing to Polidori’s death at the age of 26, probably from drug abuse or even suicide.

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The Vampyre’s outline was conceived on the same damp summer holiday at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland that inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

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In mainland Europe the myth of Byron’s authorship of The Vampyre was prolonged by publishers and its popularity inspired many copies and sequels by other writers in Germany and France. In Paris it led to a craze for vampire plays that were booked out for years. Especially successful was one by Charles Nodier which is said to have inspired a youthful Alexandre Dumas to write his own play Le Vampire with Auguste Maquet thirty years later in 1851.

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Polidori’s vampire, Lord Ruthven, established the aristocracy of vampires that has persisted in fiction ever since and was a direct inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

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Although Byron disowned Polidori’s tale, he took up the theme himself in this memorable curse from his poem Giaor:

But first on earth, as Vampyre sent,

Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent;

Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

And suck the blood of all thy race;

There from thy daughter, sister, wife,

At midnight drain the stream of life;

Yet loathe the banquet which perforce

Must feed thy livid, living corpse.

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The next landmark in English gothic fiction is Varney the Vampire: or the Feast of Blood by, probably, Thomas Preskett Prest, a prolific author of ‘penny dreadfuls’ who also brought to his public the evergreen tale of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street whose business at no. 186 supplied the contents for Mrs Lovett’s delicious meat pies, besides enriching him with whatever his unlucky customers happened to be carrying on them.

At last [Father] Serapion’s pick struck the coffin, which gave out the dull, sonorous sound which nothingness gives out when it is touched. He pulled off the cover, and I saw Clarimonda, pale as marble, her hands clasped, her white shroud forming but one line from her head to her feet. A little red drop of blood shone like a rose at the corner of her discoloured lips. Serapion at the sight of it became furious.

“Ah! There you are, you demon, you shameless courtesan! You who drink blood and gold!” and he cast on the body and the coffin quantities of holy water, tracing with the sprinkler a cross upon the coffin. The holy dew no sooner touched poor Clarimonda than her lovely body fell into dust and became only a hideous mass of ashed and half-calcined bones.

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