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The Rise of the Vampire
BY
GRACE MOORE
(excerpts)
During a
wet and unpleasant summer in 1816, a group of
young writers gathered at the Villa
Diodati in
Switzerland. Having been confined to the house for
several days by the inclement weather, they sought
distraction by reading a series of chilling ghost
stories. Stimulated by spine-tingling tales of the
supernatural, one of the writers, Lord Byron,
proclaimed "We will each write a ghost story." The
group, whose members included the poet Percy
Bysshe Shelley, the novelist Mary Wollstonecraft
Godwin (later Mary Shelley), Mary’s half-sister
Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s private physician,
Dr. John Polidori (later to become an uncle of the
Pre-Raphaelite writer Christina Rossetti and the
poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti), set to
work on the task with gusto. The assignment turned
out to be far more difficult than it had initially
appeared. Many years later, in an introduction to
an 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary
Shelley described some of the obstacles the
authors faced.
"[Percy]
Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments
in the radiance of brilliant imagery, and in the
music of the most melodious verse that adorns our
language, than to invent the machinery of a story,
commenced one founded on the experiences of his
early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea
about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for
peeping through a keyhole—what to see I
forget—something very shocking and wrong of course
. . . he did not know what to do with her and was
obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the
Capulets, the only place for which she was
fitted."
Percy
Shelley and Claire Clairmont both eventually
failed to proffer ghost stories, despite their
best efforts, and the project’s initiator, Lord
Byron, came up with only a fragment. Although
initially intimidated by the challenge, however,
Mary’s contribution was to become her most famous
work, Frankenstein, while—after the false
start outlined above—Dr. Polidori’s offering, a
short story about a fiendish nobleman named
Ruthven entitled "The Vampyre," catapulted stories
of the blood-sucking undead into the
nineteenth-century literary
imagination.
John
Polidori’s story was first published on April
Fool’s Day, 1819 in The New Monthly
Magazine. The piece had somewhat mysteriously
arrived at the magazine offices as part of a
bundle of documents which included a letter packed
with gossip and speculation about the exploits of
a certain unconventional group of writers during
the summer of 1816. The story ended up being
attributed to Byron rather than Polidori, however,
because, according to gothic literature scholars
Chris Baldick and Robert Morrison, the magazine’s
proprietor, Henry Colburn, had seized upon the
name Ruthven as a direct reference to a
thinly-disguised fictitious representation of Lord
Byron in a novel entitled Glenarvon by his
spurned former mistress, Lady Caroline Lamb, and
had assumed the story must have been penned by
Byron.
Acutally,
the inspiration for Polidori’s story had come from
Byron’s unfinished piece "Augustus Darvell"—an
aborted product of the ghost story contest—but
Polidori wrote "The Vampyre" alone, later changing
the name of his character from Ruthven to
Strongmore in a bid to distance his character from
his former associate, the poet reputed to be "mad,
bad, and dangerous to know." Both Byron and
Polidori, who had by then parted company somewhat
acrimoniously, wrote to The New Monthly to
set the record straight. The story, meanwhile,
became a runaway success, and when it was
published in book form in 1819 it went through
seven editions almost immediately. "The Vampyre"
was turned into a play, widely translated, and
even expanded into a novel by the French writer
Cyprien Bérard.
In spite
of Polidori’s protestations, there were many
parallels between his alluringly sensual vampire
and the charismatic seducer, Lord Byron. Lord
Ruthven is an extremely attractive and compelling
figure who seems bent on destroying the
reputations of innocent society ladies and
trapping men into penury through gambling. It is
not sufficient for him to compromise his victims.
Instead, those he preys upon must become "the
partner of his guilt . . . hurled from the
pinnacle of unsullied virtue, down to the lowest
abyss of infamy and degradation." The satanic
Ruthven becomes the friend of a young man named
Aubrey, who is horrified to learn of the rumors
surrounding his companion and rapidly seeks to
distance himself from him. While traveling in
Europe, the object of Aubrey’s affections, the
pure and beautiful Ianthe, becomes one of
Ruthven’s victims, leaving Aubrey distraught.
Nevertheless, he and Ruthven are briefly
reconciled before they are ambushed by a gang of
robbers who appear to mortally wound the vampiric
aristocrat. Before he dies Ruthven extracts a
promise from Aubrey that he will not reveal his
friend’s peculiar and sinister history for a year
and a day. Aubrey agrees, although he is slightly
disquieted when the evil lord’s body disappears
before it can be buried.
On his
return to England following an apparent nervous
breakdown, Aubrey finds his sister smitten by a
man known as the Earl of Marsden, who he is
horrified to discover bears more than a passing
resemblance to Ruthven. Polidori emphasized the
entrancing qualities of the vampire, who depended
not only on superior strength, but also upon
gaining complete mastery over his
victims:
"Who
could resist his power? His tongue had dangers and
toils to recount—could speak of himself as an
individual having no sympathy with any being on
the crowded earth, save with her to whom he
addressed himself . . . in fine, he knew so well
how to use the serpent’s art, or such was the will
of fate, that he gained her
affections."
Bound by
his oath and dogged by ill health that leads
others to question his sanity, Aubrey is unable to
warn his sister about Ruthven’s true nature and
his attempts to prevent their marriage are
thwarted. Unlike later vampire adventures, where
the dangerous fiend is always ultimately defeated
and contained by a group of committed heroes,
Polidori’s short story ends with Ruthven’s
triumph. Miss Aubrey is killed, poor Aubrey
himself dies of an ironically significant blood
disorder, and the eponymous vampire disappears
altogether, presumably to wreak havoc elsewhere
within London society.
Although
he popularized the vampire story, Polidori did not
invent it. One of the earliest references to the
vampire in English comes from the anonymous book,
Travels of Three English Gentlemen from Venice
to Hamburgh, published in 1745 which explains
to the unfamiliar reader that:
"These
Vampyres are supposed to be the Bodies of deceased
Persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out
of the Graves, in the Night-time, suck the Blood
of many of the Living, and thereby destroy
them."
The origins of the
vampire myth are themselves difficult to establish
and seem to go back to ancient times. Some
scholars hark back to the Lilith story in the
Hebrew bible as the first reference to a vampire,
while others regard a mythical cannibalistic queen
of Libya as the progenitor of the mythical
figures. The origins of the word "vampire" are
equally difficult to trace. Some linguists suggest
that it stems from the Lithuanian word "wempti,"
which means "to drink," and others think that it
is a corruption of the Turkish word "uber"
(meaning witch), which was transformed into
"upior" when translated into Slavic, and then
eventually became "vampyre" or "vampire" when the
English form emerged in the 1700s. By that time,
the word had also become common in other
countries. In Spain, they were known as
"vampiros," Germans referred to them as
Blutsaeugers, and the French spoke of "les
vampires."
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