The Earliest Vampire Stories in English
19th Century Writers Shelley, Polidori, and LeFanu Revive Nosferatu
The word “vampire” today carries some specific connotations. The vampire is a pale stranger; he shuns the light, and detests garlic. Some of these motifs have their roots in mythology, while others were featured in Bram Stoker’s watershed Dracula. But a few integral components of today’s vampire were established somewhere in between: they come from the short but influential works that first brought the image of the bloodsucker to British popular culture.
Two of these tales were conceived on the same famous voyage of 1816. Poet Lord Byron and doctor John Polidori had gone to Switzerland to visit Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Several days spent reading German tales of the macabre while the rain came down prompted Byron to suggest that they each write a horror story.
Mary Shelley’s eventual contribution would be Frankenstein. Byron and Polidori, meanwhile, each wrote short works about vampires.
“Fragment of a Novel” by Lord Byron
This fragment takes the epistolary format that would eventually be used in Dracula, though the inferred letter or diary cuts off before an internal author is identified. This narrator describes a voyage that he undertakes with an ailing but fascinating friend, Augustus Darvell. Their travels take them to the Izmir province of Turkey, where they are compelled to stop at a cemetery.
A weakening Darvell reveals that he had come there to die. At that moment a stork perches nearby with a snake in its beak, and Darvell asks to be buried at that exact spot. But there’s something a little off about the way Darvell dies…
“The Vampyre” by John Polidori
This story begins in London, where the poetic youth Aubrey becomes entranced by the distant and misanthropic Lord Ruthven. Anxious to learn something of this enigmatic man, Aubrey joins Ruthven on a traveling expedition.
In Rome, Aubrey finds Ruthven on the brink of seducing an innocent. Aubrey prevents the encounter and leaves, alone, for Athens. There, he falls in love with the young Ianthe, and is heartbroken when she is found dead from a wound in her neck.
A returning Ruthven nurses Aubrey out of his delirium and travels with him more. Soon killed in an altercation with some robbers, Lord Ruthven, upon being laid in the moonlight, disappears.
Aubrey hurries home, discovering Lord Ruthven alive, well, and about to marry Aubrey’s sister. Aubrey’s mental condition deteriorates and, as much as he tries, he can’t prevent the inevitable...
“Carmilla” by J. Sheridan LeFanu
Irish writer J. Sheridan LeFanu made a significant contribution to the vampire mythos when, in 1872, he published the novella “Carmilla”. While it was written half a century after Byron and Polidori’s tales, it built on the foundations of these earlier stories to form a novella of wide-ranging influence.
The narrator of this tale, Laura, inhabits an Austrian castle with her father. Their existences are somewhat solitary, but comfortable enough. One night, a strange lady wakens Laura and lies next to her, frightening her out of her wits. Laura can summon no proof, later, that the lady existed - but when Bertha, a would-be friend, dies before she can visit Laura, and a note from her father blames an unnamed “fiend”, Laura is more than a little distressed.
Carmilla is brought into Laura’s acquaintance when her carriage crashes near the property. And while Laura and she quickly become friends, there’s something a little off about this new friend. Laura is haunted by nightmares from the night she arrives; what’s more, she discovers a portrait of an ancestor that is the spitting image of Carmilla.
When Laura and her father converse with a General Spielsdorf, they find some striking similarities between the circumstances that surrounded the death of Spielsdorf’s niece and Laura’s current situation. Finally convinced that there is something sinister afoot, Laura and her father will require the aid of one Baron Vordenburg to uncover the tomb of Carmilla and destroy her once and for all.
Legacy
Interestingly, each story features a characteristic that would re-emerge in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Byron’s fragment is, as mentioned, in the epistolary format, and Polidari’s tale has the protagonist undergo a decidedly Renfieldesque mental degradation. And that’s not to mention Baron Vordenburg's similarity to Van Helsing.
Also of note, the vampires in these tales have some traits in common: they are unhealthy-looking, oddly intriguing, and deeply associated with the Continent. All of these qualities have become essential to the modern vampire.
As background to Stoker's novel, these tales are enlightening; read simply as tales for an autumn night, these works have a subversive appeal all their own.
Reference
Vampires. Ed. Alan Ryan. Garden City: Doubleday, 1987.
Early 19th Century Precursors to Stoker’s Dracula
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