New Critical Edition of Varney the Vampire

Review of James Malcolm Rymer's Penny Dreadful, Edited by Curt Herr

Nov 8, 2009

Review of a new critical edition of the nineteenth century vampire serial Varney the Vampire, with an introduction, footnotes and other supplementary material.

In the modern age, Varney the Vampire and many other rare, out-of-print works of literature are available online at sites like Project Gutenberg and Google Books. As a result, it can be difficult to appreciate the fact that many nineteenth century works, such as the infamous vampire serial Varney the Vampire, were long lost to readers and scholars.

Varney was serialized by a penny dreadful press from 1845 to 1847, then reprinted in three volumes. These books, reprinted by Dover in 1972, suffer from many printing errors (including a segment of pages which were printed twice), and are in some places nearly illegible.

Varney the Vampire: New Edition Updated

In this new edition of Varney the Vampire, published by Zittaw Press, Curt Herr corrects the major printing mistakes and presents the text for modern readers, complete with explanatory footnotes and supplementary material.

Herr's edition of Varney the Vampire includes a wealth of information for the readers unfamiliar with Varney the Vampire and the culture of penny dreadful publications. In his introduction, he goes through the history of penny dreadfuls – cheap, sensationalized serials mass-produced by hack writers and sold to England's newly literate lower classes. Stories, which included plagiarized versions of Dickens and other popular authors, were often published anonymously, leading to the confusion about Varney's authorship.

Critics have treated Varney unfairly, Herr explains, because they expect it to read as a novel. But Rymer was churning out ten different serials a week, with no time to proofread or fact check. No author under these conditions could be expected to write a story with the plotting of a novel, let alone remember the characters' names or the story's time period.

Penny Dreadfuls and Other Essays

Herr also includes several out-of-print essays about Varney the Vampire, including the introduction to the 1972 Dover edition. These essays and Herr's introduction alone are worth the book's cover price for anyone interested in the history of Varney's influence in vampire literature. Also included are contemporary views on penny dreadfuls, including G.K. Chesterton's essay "A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls," several more popular penny dreadful stories, and a handful of woodcuts from Varney's original printing.

Length and Other Downsides

As you can imagine by the amount of supplementary material included, Herr's Varney is a monster nearly the size of a college-level science textbook. Varney alone has over two hundred chapters, and is usually published in three separate volumes. By printing the book on letter-sized paper in ten point font, the editor and publisher have managed to squish everything into a bit more than eight hundred pages at the expense of making it easy to read. Simply dividing the text into two columns would have increased the ease of reading immensely without increasing the page count too significantly.

The book's other distraction is the wealth of formatting errors, from italicized footnote numbers to the use of hyphens for em dashes. Such a useful, informative edition would have appeared more scholarly and authoritative without these frequent errors.

The copyright of the article New Critical Edition of Varney the Vampire in 18th & 19th Century British Fiction is owned by Amelia Hill. Permission to republish New Critical Edition of Varney the Vampire in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.