VAMPIRES
See Also: CEMETERIES Highgate Cemetery, The Vampire; HORROR FICTION
Blood-Suckers By
Appointment
12thC
Britain had a vampire tradition of revenants.
They were dealt with by means such as beheading, severing the limbs,
fire, staked. Human remains that had
been subjected to these have been dug up at Wharram Percy, a deserted village
in the North Riding of Yorkshire.
However, by the 18thC the folk tradition no longer seems to
have contained them. However, some
immigrants maintained a firm credence in the creatures' existence. The German-raised King George II believed
them to be real. Upon one occasion the
politician Sir Robert Walpole made a remark that indicated that he did not
share the view. This incensed the
monarch, who expressed his opinion upon the matter in no uncertain terms.
In the
mid-18thC vampire started to be used as a metaphor in English for
exploitative people.
Nineteenth-Century Vampires
The
poet John Stagg (1770-1823) was known as the Blind Bard. In 1810 he wrote The Vampire. It features Getrude who kills her husband
Herman with a stake.
Byron s
poem Giaour (1813) included a long footnote about vampires as a forensic
phenomenon on the eastern edge of the Habsburg state during the preceding
century. During his travels in Greece,
he had encountered people who had claimed that family members had had
encounters with vampires. They were
small, hairy creatures. After the poet
had put the story aside it was taken up by his physician John Polidori. The vampire in The Vampyre (1819) was
modelled upon Byron. It is not known
whether Byron had already made this change.
Previously, vampires had been zombi-like whereas Lord Ruthven could pass
for human and had a distinct personality.
The book had satirical elements and there was a gay undertow in the two
principal characters interaction. The
two men fell out because an unscrupulous publisher issued the novel as though
the poet had written it.
Vampires
were tangible in a way that ghosts were not.
They could be investigated by Enlightenment scientific means.
Varney
The Vampire was issued by Edward Lloyd's publishing house over the years
1845-7. Varney was the first vampire to
have had fangs. He possessed a degree of
sympathy for many readers because he disliked being a vampire. The work's coherence breaks down after the
first twenty chapters. This is because
it was almost certainly produced by numerous authors who were being paid by the
line. Those who were involved probably
included James Malcolm Rymer (1814-1884) and Arthur Peckett Prest. The book was over 667,000 words long.1
The
French took up the genre. Paul F val (1816-1887) wrote several vampire novels in the
1850s, 1860s, and 1870s. The Irish
author Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) crystallised sapphic elements
that F val books had contained. It portrayed a complex human-vampire
relationship. Camilla could transform
into an animal - a black cat.
Florence
Marryat's The Blood of The Vampire (1897) appeared in the same year as Dracula. It was a subtler work; the deaths portrayed
could have been from causes other than the vampire's actions. If they were by the vampire then she killed
them unknowingly by draining their life energy.
There were elements of racism and hereditary; Harriet the vampire was an
orphaned West Indian heiress who was of creole descent.
Location:
38 Great Pulteney Street, W1F 9NX.
Polidori's home. (orange, blue)
See
Also: FOLK TRADITIONS; LITERATURE The Salisbury Square of Fiction; WEATHER
Rainfall, Global Weather; WOMBATS The Wombatti
(Polidori's sister was Frances Rossetti, the mother of the Rossettis.)
1. Karl Marx is known to have read Varney. A trope of his prose style was to refer to
vampires and vampirism.
Dracula
Bram
Stoker worked as a civil servant in his native Ireland, however, he harboured
literary ambitions. He broke into the
theatrical world by working as an unpaid drama critic. He became known the actor Sir Henry
Irving. In 1878 the thespian invited
Stoker to become his business manager.1
In 1890
Stoker started compiling notes for a Gothic adventure in which a vampire was
encountered by a British adventurer. In
it, the anti-hero comes to Britain, landing in Whitby, before being slain by
the hero. The name Dracula was derived
from Vlad Dracula (Vlad the Impaler), the soubriquet of Prince Vlad III of
Wallachia (d.1476). The project was
perhaps inspired by Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872). The 'shape shifting' aspect of Stoker s
character was drawn from Irish folklore.
The
fact that Dracula (1897) was principally written in the form of letters
and journals meant that the reader was given access to the human characters'
thoughts. The requirement of having to
be hospitable to a vampire before it could act against you was from folk
tradition. Stoker embedded it into the
genre. The novel created the motif of
the vampire being able to turn into a bat.
Stoker
was well aware that many novels were adapted for theatrical performance. Therefore, he was careful to tailor the
character of Count Dracula so that it could easily be moulded into a role for
Irving. However, the actor declined to
take the bait and was no stage adaptation of the book was mounted during
Stoker's lifetime. The volume sold well
but it did not provide its author with the financial independence that he had
been hoping for.
Location:
26 St George's Square, SW1V 2HP.
Stoker's final home. (purple, turquoise)
18 St
Leonard's Terrace, SW3 4QG. Stoker s
home. (red, white)
See
Also: ANIMALS Suppliers To The Count; PUBS The
Prospect of Whitby; WEST END THEATRES The Lyceum; OSCAR WILDE
Website:
www.thedraculasociety.org.uk (The Dracula Society was founded in 1973 by the actors Bernard Davies
and Bruce Wightman.)
1. In 1878 Stoker married Florence Balcombe, a Dublin beauty. Oscar Wilde had been one of her other
suitors.
The
Ecumenical Dimension
Christianity
is central to Dracula (1897). The
vampire perverts the faith by rising from the dead and drinking blood. Initially, the novel plays with 19thC
Protestant stereotypes of Roman Catholicism.
However, it is essentially ecumenical in its nature. Dr van Helsing is expressly a Catholic. He uses the crucifix and the host to counter
the count and teaches others, whom the book's early readers would almost
certainly have taken to be Protestants, to use them.
David
Backhouse 2024