Lord Byron and the Metamorphoses of Polidori’s Vampyre

2012

The aim of this article is to investigate the links between vampire stories and plays and Lord Byron in the context of his early nineteenth-century reception in Europe, and particularly in Poland. Byron is often regarded as one of the main originators of vampire stories in modern European culture and occasionally even as a model for vampiric characters. This image of Byron was mainly constructed on the basis of a passage in The Giaour and John Polidori’s tale The Vampyre, which had fi rst been erroneously attributed to Byron. Owing to Byron’s literary fame as the greatest living British poet as well as to his scandalous reputation, The Vampyre gained great popularity both in Britain and on the Continent, which resulted in numerous theatrical adaptations, especially in France and in Germany. In Poland the French melodrama Upiór (Le Vampire) by Charles Nodier, Pierre Carmouche and Achille de Jouffroy was a great stage success and was published in book form. Polidori’s tale allegedly o...

2015

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort proved to be auspiciously influential as in Greece he would witness a classic case of vampirism attributed to a vroucolacas, a peasant superstition which would be assimilated by the Romantics a century later as exotic material for fiction. Tournefort’s account, A Voyage to the Levant (1702), is anthropological and critical, and dismissed such incidents as mania, ‘an epidemical disease of the brain, as dangerous and infectious as the madness of dogs’ (89). Yet such mania fed the Gothic imagination, and Tournefort’s voyage to the Levant served to transport the Greek vampire legend into British Romantic literature. Sir Christopher Frayling identifies several archetypes of the literary vampire; one of these, the Byronic, though born in that Romanticism, is still very much a presence in contemporary vampire texts. In this chapter I will show the evolution of the Byronic vampire as it mutated from its folkloric roots, as documented in the ethnography of the lik...

The Vampyre, 1819

‘Some curious disquiet’: Polidori, the Byronic vampire, and its progeny A symposium for the bicentenary of The Vampyre 6-7 April 2019, Keats House, Hampstead This symposium will trace Polidori’s bloodsucking progeny and his heritage of ‘curious disquiet’ in literature and other media. It is a return to the beginnings of the Open Graves, Open Minds Project, which began with a very successful conference on vampires in 2010 followed by an edited collection, Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day, ed. by Sam George and Bill Hughes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013) and the first special issue of Gothic Studies devoted to vampires (May 2013). Guest speakers have been invited to share their research into the many variations on monstrosity and deadly allure spawned by Polidori’s seminal textual reincarnation of Byronic glamour. The delegates have been selected for their expertise in the Byronic, the Gothic, and the vampiric. The speakers are: Sir Christopher Frayling, Prof. Catherine Spooner, Prof. William Hughes, Dr Stacey Abbott, Dr Sue Chaplin, Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes, Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Prof. Nick Groom, Prof. Gina Wisker, Dr Sam George, Dr Bill Hughes, Dr Ivan Phillips, writer Marcus Sedgwick, and OGOM ECRs and doctoral students Dr Kaja Franck, Daisy Butcher, and Dr Jillian Wingfield.

The Byron Journal, 2006

BAINBRIDGE i. 'Who could resist his power?': 'The Vampyre' and Byronism Towards the end of'The Vampyre', the remarkable short story in which John Polidori transformed the image of the legendary bloodsucking predator by associating it with the glamorous, aristocratic and mysterious figure of Lord Byron, the third-person narrator finally reveals the nature of Lord Ruthven's 'irresistible powers of seduction'.' Describing how the vampire Ruthven has 'won the ear of Miss Aubrey', the sister of his European travelling companion, the narrator asks: Who could resist his power? His tongue had dangers and toils to recount-could speak of himself as of an individual having no sympathy with any being on the crowded earth, save with her to whom he addressed himself;-could tell how, since he knew her, his existence had begun to seem worthy of preservation, if it were merely that he might listen to her soothing accents;-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. (pp. 22-23)

Moderna Sprak , 2018

This study of Polidori's story, The Vampyre, written at the beginning of the 19 th century aims at relocating the social relevance of both the story and Gothic literature in the contentious zone between the private and public sphere. The story vacillates between private and public realms, drawing its vampiric theme from such vacillations. It expresses the horrors of vampiric intimacy inherent in private life, which opposes the moral character of the public realm. The most dangerous sites of private life are represented as the realm of the imagination and that of intersubjective intimacy. The story also contains several prominent Romantic tropes, including nature and orientalism, all pointing to the intimate dangers of the private realm. Lord Ruthven, Polidori's " vampire " is an explosive figure at the fraught intersection between a private life that demands secrecy for its private pleasures, and a public realm that demands exposure to regulate and control.

2017

Note: this is creative fiction. A fictional discovery of a previously undocumented encounter between John Polidori, friend of Byron, and a teenage Harriet Martineau. Shortlisted finalist in the (fiction) writing competition Dead Romantic Interviews, part of Writing Romantic Lives Conference, Edge Hill University, UK, November 2017.

European Romantic Review, 2010

English physician John William Polidori (1795–1821) is today best known as the author of The Vampyre (1819) and as the traveling companion of Lord Byron. Less appreciated is Polidori’s interest in somnambulism and trance states, the subjects of his 1815 medical thesis at the University of Edinburgh. Until now, this little‐known document existed only in the original Latin. This essay draws upon a new English translation of the thesis in order to demonstrate how Polidori’s medical writing responded to the influences of mesmerism and phrenology, while anticipating mid‐Victorian theories of “unconscious cerebration” developed by William Benjamin Carpenter and Thomas Laycock. Polidori’s interest in somnambulism carried over into his fiction. Lord Ruthven, the villain of The Vampyre, experiences trance‐like states and sensory lapses peculiar to somnambulists. These behaviors evoke Romantic‐era medical controversies surrounding the activity of the brain during sleep, as well as the potential conflict between higher faculties like the will or the soul and automatic brain functions that could be carried out without conscious awareness. By foregrounding such concerns, The Vampyre set the stage for the somnambulistic, hypnotic vampire villains of tales like Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

H-Russia, H-Net Reviews, 2017

All Things Byron - The Byron Society, 2022

This paper deals with John William Polidori’s "The Vampyre: A Tale" (1819) as a response to the image of Greece in Lord Byron’s early works, and especially in “The Giaour” (1813) and “Fragment of a Novel” (1819). The aim of this paper is to investigate the difference of this image, as Byron views modern Greece as a ‘sad relic of departed worth’, while Polidori praises the simplicity of their rural lifestyle. Additionally, it will be attempted to trace the image of Greece and the Greeks in early nineteenth-century British travel literature in order to place both authors’ rhetoric about Greece in perspective. How was modern Greece represented in the early nineteenth century by British travelers? How did antiquarianism and the idealization of the ancient past fit into the Ottoman present? And more importantly, how does one create a different portrayal of modern Greece based on the intellectual standards of that time?