The Vampyre

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"The Vampyre" is a short story written by John William Polidori and is a progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction.

"The Vampyre" was first published on 1 April 1819 by Colburn in the New Monthly Magazine with the false attribution "A Tale by Lord Byron." The name of the work's protagonist, "Lord Ruthven", added to this assumption, for that name was originally used in Lady Caroline Lamb's novel Glenarvon (from the same publisher), in which a thinly-disguised Byron figure was also named Lord Ruthven. Despite repeated denials by Byron and Polidori, the authorship often went unclarified.

The story was an immediate popular success, partly because of the Byron attribution and partly because it exploited the gothic horror predilections of the public. Polidori transformed the vampire from a character in folklore into the form that is recognized today — an aristocratic fiend who preys among high society.

The story has its genesis in the summer of 1816, the Year Without a Summer, when Europe and parts of North America underwent a severe climate abnormality. Lord Byron and his young physician John Polidori were staying at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva and were visited by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Claire Clairmont. Kept indoors by the "incessant rain" of that "wet, ungenial summer", over three days in June the five turned to telling fantastical stories, and then writing their own. Fueled by ghost stories such as the Fantasmagoriana, William Beckford's Vathek and quantities of laudanum, Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Polidori was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron's and in "two or three idle mornings" produced "The Vampyre".

The work is described by Christopher Frayling as "the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre.

Polidori's work had an immense impact on contemporary sensibilities and ran through numerous editions and translations. An adaptation appeared in 1820 with Cyprien Bérard’s novel, Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires, falsely attributed to Charles Nodier, who himself then wrote his own version, Le Vampire, a play which had enormous success and sparked a "vampire craze" across Europe. This includes operatic adaptations by Heinrich Marschner and Peter Josef von Lindpaintner. Edgar Allan Poe, Nikolai Gogol, Alexandre Dumas, and Leo Tolstoy all produced vampire tales, and themes in Polidori's tale would continue to influence Bram Stoker's Dracula and eventually the whole vampire genre.

Characters

• Lord Ruthven – a suave British nobleman, the vampire
• Aubrey – a young gentleman, an orphan
• Ianthe – a beautiful woman Aubrey meets on his journeys with Ruthven.
• Aubrey's sister – who becomes engaged to the Earl of Marsden
• Earl of Marsden – who is also Lord Ruthven

See also

• Medieval revenant for the medieval origins of vampire-like stories.

Sources

• Christopher Frayling; Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula 1992. ISBN 0-571-16792-6

References

External links

• Text of Byron's fragmentary story at sff.net
• NY Times article on the famed night

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Last updated on Wednesday March 12, 2008 at 08:13:39 PDT (GMT -0700)
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