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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780750957458 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Written in Blood
A Cultural History of the British Vampire
By Paul Adams
The History Press
Copyright © 2014 Paul AdamsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5745-8
CHAPTER 1
Gothic Beginnings and Victorian Vampires
(1816–1873)
The British vampire was born appropriately enough under the wet grey skies of the 'year without a summer', a world of rain-lashed cemeteries, waterlogged graves and dark fearful imaginings over 450 miles from home. Across Europe this, to coin a phrase from American writer Richard Matheson, 'Brontean weather' caused crops to fail, which resulted in food riots and looting across England and France, marking 1816 as the time of the worst famine of the nineteenth century. A cumulative series of volcanic eruptions during the preceding four years, the most powerful of which took place at Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa in April 1815, was the turbulent background to one of the most important and seminal events in the history of supernatural horror fiction, and which simultaneously established two of its greatest and most enduring franchises into European literature and beyond: the vampire myth and the world of the artificially created living dead. The fictional vampire was not new in 1816, but its various disparate strands found a focus and permanence at this time. In his book The Monster with a Thousand Faces (1989), Brian Frost suggests that the honour of the first example of an undead creature in a work of 'pure imagination' dates to the eleventh century and a piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry entitled 'A Vampyre of the Fens'. He then subsequently traces a chronological lineage of fictional blood-drinking and vampire activity that encompasses Sir Thomas Malory's late fifteenth-century Le Morte d'Arthur, Heinrich Ossenfelder's 1748 poem 'Der Vampir'; then from Gottfried Bürger's Lenore (1773) and late eighteenth-century de Sade – Juliette (1791) and Justine (1796) – through Goethe's 1797 The Bride of Corinth and on to early nineteenth-century works including Johann Tieck's Wake Not the Dead (republished in 1973 as The Bride of the Grave), Robert Southey's 1801 Thalaba the Destroyer, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel (1816), at which point our present survey begins its bloody and patriotic course.
In the early part of 1816, two Englishmen – the noted Romantic poet George Gordon, the 6th Baron Byron, together with John William Polidori, a physician and writer employed at the time as Byron's travelling companion and secretary – took up residence in a large rented house, the Villa Diodati, in Cologny on the southern shore of Lake Geneva. Polidori, aged 20, and eight years his employer's junior, had been paid by the London publisher John Murray (who would later burn the manuscripts of Byron's memoirs in his office fireplace for fear that their scandalous contents would damage the poet's posthumous reputation) to keep a diary of their travels. Murray had successfully published the second volume of Byron's narrative poem 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' in 1812, but the two men did not get on. Before the year was out the young doctor had been dismissed from his lordship's service and after a brief and unhappy sojourn in Italy had returned to England.
Byron's high-profile affair with English socialite Lady Caroline Lamb (then married to Lord Melbourne, MP for Leominster, who subsequently held the office of Prime Minister in 1834 and from 1835–41) had been the talk of the country four years before. Its bitter conclusion resulted in her former lover's immortalisation by Lady Caroline's own hand, as the dastardly Clarence de Ruthven (pronounced 'Ruvven'), the titular anti-hero of the novel Glenarvon, published in May 1816 only days after Byron and Polidori had left the country for Switzerland.
Byron's presence in Geneva caused something of a stir amongst fellow English tourists, who took to spying on the occupants of the Villa Diodati through telescopes from across the lake. Their gossip mongering soon reached feverishly new levels with the arrival of Byron's former lover Clara 'Claire' Clairmont at another rented house nearby called Montalègre. Claire, then in the early stages of pregnancy with the poet's daughter Allegra, arrived with her stepsister, the 18-year-old Mary Godwin, and another poet, Mary's lover and soon-to-be husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. Claire, Mary and Shelley took to making regular visits to be in Byron's company, and it was amongst the neurosis of the Villa Diodati's candle-lit decadence during that 'wet, ungenial summer', as Mary later famously described it, that legends were born.
In his book Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (1991), Christopher Frayling has demonstrated that Mary Shelley's posthumous recollections of the events of that time (included in an introduction to a third edition of Frankenstein in 1831, by which time Byron, Polidori and Shelley were dead) are not as accurate as its famous author would make out, but still it remains a monumental landmark in the history of supernatural horror fiction.
Confined by constant heavy rain to the rooms of the Villa Diodati for several days in mid-June, the assembled company amused themselves by reading aloud from a French edition of the Fantasmagoriana or Tales of the Dead, a collection of German ghost stories that had been published anonymously by Jean Eyriès in 1812 (a similarly nameless English edition appeared the following year). Inspired by the first story in the book, known as 'The Family Portraits', the group began an exercise to see who could write their own successful ghost story, the competition eventually taking several days to complete. Stultified with laudanum and on the verge of a nervous collapse, Shelley was unable to write a line and no details of Claire's contribution (if it ever existed) have survived. However, the teenage Mary Godwin famously delivered what amounted to the bones of a fully-formed Frankenstein that on publication two years later went on to become, in the words of H.P. Lovecraft, the twentieth-century American master of the weird tale, 'One of the horror-classics of all time', containing, as Lovecraft noted, 'the true touch of cosmic fear'.
Polidori was able to set down an account of incest and spirit-rising that was later published in 1819 as Ernestus Berchtold, while Byron took the opportunity to create a supernatural parody of his present situation, describing a tale of sinister happenings in a Turkish cemetery involving two travelling Englishmen on a sightseeing tour of the East. Having told the story aloud, Byron felt enough of the work to write out the opening pages but soon tired of the project and quickly cast it aside. At some point during his remaining time at the Villa Diodati, John Polidori was challenged to complete Byron's 'fragment', which he duly did: over the course of three days he reworked the basic plot, grafting on an ending that followed closely the conclusion that he himself had heard Byron relate to that strange company of 'sexual and literary outlaws' only a short time before. By the time he left Cologny under a cloud at the end of the year, the handwritten pages of what Christopher Frayling has considered to be 'probably the most influential horror story of all time' lay behind, forgotten and discarded in a drawer.
Polidori's The Vampyre found its way to England two years later and was eventually published in the London New Monthly Magazine on 1 April 1819. The anonymous manuscript, bundled with a gossipy letter about the rainy shenanigans at the Villa Diodati, seemed to imply that the entire story was from Byron's own hand and in this fashion it was enthusiastically embraced by the flagging New Monthly's editor Henry Colburn, who threw caution to the wind and in what proved to be a successful coup, presented 'A Tale by Lord Byron' to the public at large, a bold decision that not only boosted the sales and literary reputation of the magazine (particularly as a suitable outlet for macabre and sinister stories) but also imprinted both the scourge of the undead myth and the singular character of the 'Byronic Vampire' firmly and indelibly into the unsuspecting human psyche.
Taking the character of Augustus Darvell, the mysterious traveller from Byron's own story, Polidori overlaid Caroline Lamb's Lord Glenarvon (and therefore Byron himself) to create the vampire Lord Ruthven, 'a nobleman, more remarkable for his singularities, than his rank' who, appearing unexpectedly in the midst of fashionable London society, a strange figure with dead grey eyes and a similar unnatural pallor, quickly becomes the object of much speculation and attention: '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.'
The licentious Ruthven, however, like the noble poet on whom he was based, is bankrupt and, in order to escape both his creditors and the soon-to-be revealed string of torrid affairs amongst a clutch of high-society women, plans to leave the country. Before he sails he is joined by Aubrey, a rich young gentleman who is tired with the London scene and desires to escape England.
As they journey to Italy on their tour across Europe, Aubrey witnesses the strange ill fortune that befalls all those that come into contact with the mysterious Ruthven: the young gamblers who are bankrupted by him at the casino, and the curse that seems to afflict any of those on whom Ruthven bestows his charity – '... for they all were either led to the scaffold, or sunk to the lowest and the most abject misery'.
In Rome, Aubrey watches as his companion attempts to seduce an Italian countess, but when a letter arrives from his guardians in England exposing the ruin of all the society women that have fallen under Ruthven's spell, Aubrey successfully prevents a union between the couple and, abandoning Ruthven, leaves for Greece alone. In Athens he falls in love with Ianthe, a young innkeeper's daughter who tells tales of vampires that haunt the countryside surrounding the inn. Aubrey dismisses such stories, but promises to return from an outing to an ancient temple before nightfall, as his trip involves passing through an olive grove 'where no Greek would ever remain after the day had closed, upon any consideration'. However, Aubrey lingers in the ruins and it is dark before he attempts to make the return journey. Caught in a storm, the Englishman shelters in a mud hut deep in the woods where he is attacked by an unidentified assailant. Aubrey survives and is rescued by a party of torch-wielding villagers but amongst the trees the men find the body of Ianthe, the first vampire victim in the history of English literary horror:
He shut his eyes, hoping that it was but a vision arising from his disturbed imagination; but he again saw the same form, when he unclosed them, stretched by his side. There was no colour upon her cheek, not even upon her lip; yet there was a stillness about her face that seemed almost as attaching as the life that once dwelt there:- upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein:- to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, 'a Vampyre, a Vampyre!'
Stricken with fever, Aubrey is confined to a bed at the inn where he is discovered by Lord Ruthven, who has followed him to Athens. The two men continue on together but in the mountains are attacked by brigands and Ruthven falls, mortally wounded. On his deathbed, he challenges Aubrey to withhold any information about the happenings on his return to England: '"Swear!" cried the dying man, raising himself with exultant violence, "Swear by all your soul reveres, by all your nature fears, swear that for a year and a day you will not impart your knowledge of my crimes or death to any living being in any way, whatever may happen, or whatever you may see."' Aubrey eventually complies, at which point Ruthven slumps dead. In the morning, the dead man's body has disappeared and Aubrey, now '[w]eary of a country in which he had met with such terrible misfortunes' sets out to make the return journey home alone.
Back in England, Aubrey is busily preparing to present his 18-year-old sister at a reception for her formal entry into the London society scene. Among the many guests in a crowded salon, he is horrified to again see the apparition of the sinister Lord Ruthven, who takes his former companion by the arm and gives a chilling reminder of his 'year and a day' oath. The young man collapses and is taken away in a carriage. In the days that follow, Aubrey is haunted by visions of the sinister vampire and his health fails; the horror is almost complete when, after his sister announces her engagement to the Earl of Marsden, the tormented hero sees in a locket about her neck 'the features of the monster who has so long influenced his life'. Powerless to act, as the wedding is scheduled to take place on the very day the oath expires, Aubrey sinks further into insanity and is confined to bed by a physician. In an attempt to delay the union, he writes a letter to his sister warning her of the danger but it remains undelivered and the marriage goes ahead, after which the couple leave on their honeymoon. On the stroke of midnight, Aubrey, now on his own deathbed, relates the entire series of events to his sister's horrified guardians and expires immediately afterwards. The revelation, however, as Polidori notes with grim finality in his closing lines, has ultimately come too late: 'The guardians hastened to protect Miss Aubrey; but when they arrived, it was too late. Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey's sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!'
Neither Byron or Polidori would live to see the later manifestations of the literary phenomenon that between them they had unleashed. Henry Colburn's sudden and incorrectly assigned publication of The Vampyre took both men by surprise and was the cause of much annoyance, although its immediate success was something that could only be marvelled at. The tale was published in book form soon after it appeared in the New Monthly – still credited to Lord Byron – and it was only in later printings that the correct author's name was amended on the title page.
The following year, French writer Cyprien Bérard wrote the first vampire novel, Lord Ruthven ou les Vampires, an expansive two-volume work using material extracted directly from Polidori's narrative. A little over thirteen months following its release, the first stage adaptation of Polidori's The Vampyre had taken place when Charles Nodier's Le Vampire was presented at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris on 13 June 1820 to much acclaim.
Byron had sent John Murray the incomplete manuscript of his own Villa Diodati tale shortly after The Vampyre had first appeared in print and it was published the same year – without the author's permission and much to his chagrin – as Fragment of a Story (and subsequently using the name of the titular character Augustus Darvell) tacked onto the end of his narrative poem 'Mazeppa'. Less than five years later Byron was dead at the age of 36, slain by a fever while fighting on the side of the revolutionaries in the Greek War of Independence. 'Poor Polidori', as Mary Shelley subsequently described him in her introduction to Frankenstein, had already preceded his former employer to the grave. Suffering from depression and saddled with gambling debts he committed suicide with prussic acid at his residence in Great Pulteney Street in London on 24 August 1821 – he was 25 years old.
European commentators on vampires pre-Polidori described their undead foes as loathsome creatures of the fields and the farmyard: rancid, swollen, peasant corpses gorged on the blood of both animals and humans alike; educated, urban vampires from the middle or upper classes were conspicuous by their absence. Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick, in their introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of The Vampyre, published in 1997, reiterate what modern researchers such as Anthony Masters, Basil Copper, Christopher Frayling, Tina Rath and Kim Newman have described both before and since. 'The historical and mythological importance of Polidori's The Vampyre,' they note, 'lies in its ... 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 [Polidori] set in motion the glorious career of the aristocratic [original emphasis] vampire'. In this respect, future British and non-British vampires such as Le Fanu's Carmilla and Stoker's Dracula, as well as Anne Rice's Lestat (Interview with the Vampire, 1976) and Stephen King's Mr Barlow from the 1975 novel Salem's Lot, share a macabre lineage that begins with the seemingly effortless appearance of Lord Ruthven on the rain-soaked shores of Lake Geneva so many years before.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Written in Blood by Paul Adams. Copyright © 2014 Paul Adams. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title,Dedication,
Introduction and Acknowledgements,
1 Gothic Beginnings and Victorian Vampires (1816–1873),
2 The Beast of Croglin Grange and Other Strange Happenings (1100s–Present),
3 Bram Stoker: A Benchmark in Blood (1847–1912),
4 The Undead in Britain: Vampire Fiction Before and After the First World War (1890s–1940),
5 The Vampire Murderers (1920s–2012),
6 The Mysterious World of Montague Summers (1880–1948),
7 A Silver Scream: The Road to British Vampire Cinema (1921–1955),
8 Lord of Misrule: The Rise and Fall of Hammer's Dracula (1956–1974),
9 Sex and Blood: Hammer's Legions and Beyond (1970–1988),
10 The Strange Story of the Highgate Vampire (1965–Present),
11 Undead Television: Vampires in British Broadcasting (1968–2010),
12 The Music of the Night (1960–2000),
13 In the Shadow of Stoker: Modern Vampire Literature (1975–2013),
About the Author,
Bibliography and Further Reading,
Plates,
Copyright,