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.)

(www.blood.co.uk)

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