Byron and Polidori’s Vampire Tale

Tall, dark, handsome, … and bloodthirsty. We’re all familiar with the image of the seductively suave vampire. Usually a wealthy aristocrat, he mingles with respectable society while secretly preying upon innocent young maidens in the dead of night. But how did this depiction come to dominate the popular imagination? It all comes back to Byron.

George Gordon Byron, better known as Lord Byron, was an English peer and poet who became known for his revolutionary politics, his pioneering of Romanticism, and his scandalous sexual exploits. In 1816, Byron was meandering about Continental Europe in an attempt to escape the gossip around his crumbling marriage and rumors of incest back home. That summer proved to be a particularly fateful one for the future of literature. While staying at Villa Diodati in Switzerland with his personal physician Dr. Polidori, Byron joined up with Percy Shelly, his future wife Mary, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont (who was pregnant at the time with Byron’s child). For entertainment, Byron proposed a ghost story contest—which, as many of you know proved to be the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But Byron, himself, also wrote a contribution to the contest: an unfinished piece that was published in 1819 under the simple title “A Fragment.”

Bryon’s fragment is a vampire tale with no vampires. Or rather, Byron lays the groundwork for a pretty intriguing vampire tale, but didn’t make it far along enough in the story to get to any mention of supernatural creatures or of nocturnal attacks and the drinking of blood. The fragment opens with the story’s narrator deciding to tag along with his mysterious friend Augustus Darvell on his travels through Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. A few pages later, Darvell falls ill and dies in a Turkish cemetery, after extracting from the narrator a promise to keep his death a secret. The fragment ends with Darvell’s burial, but Byron hinted to Polidori that he intended to have the narrator return home to find Darvell alive and courting his sister. Byron never returned to this story, however, and instead Polidori took it over—with a few creative alterations.

John William Polidori was a freshly graduated medical doctor who entered Byron’s service as his personal physician in 1816 and accompanied him on his travels across Europe. Polidori admired Byron’s literary prowess, but their relationship was volatile and Polidori often found himself on the receiving end of Bryon’s cruel and incisive wit. Perhaps this was what induced Polidori to borrow bits of Byron for the blood-sucking monster in his vampire tale. Shortly after Byron drafted his fragment, Polidori borrowed his premise and elaborated on it in a short story called “The Vampyre,” which was published in 1819. The titular vampire is a charismatic nobleman named Lord Ruthven—a clever allusion to Lady Caroline Lamb’s Gothic novel Glenarvon, where a character by that name is an obvious stand-in for Byron. (Lamb was a spurned ex-lover of Byron’s.)

In Polidori’s story, a young gentleman named Aubrey tags along with Lord Ruthven on his travels through Europe. Aubrey falls in love with a beautiful Greek woman, who tells him all about quaint superstitions like vampires, but their fairytale romance comes to an abrupt end when she is found dead with teeth marks in her neck. Aubrey then witnesses Lord Ruthven’s death and promises not to speak of it for a year and a day. But when he returns to London, Aubrey is shocked to find Lord Ruthven alive and in the process of seducing his sister. Aubrey’s oath seems to have a supernatural hold over him, and he devolves into a nervous breakdown for several months, unable to warn his sister about the vampire. Aubrey tries to stop the wedding, but to no avail—his sister marries Lord Ruthven and then is found dead and drained of blood on their wedding night. The story can be read as a rather apt metaphor about the ruinous effect of Byron’s various relationships with women.

So, there you have it, these two early vampire stories popularized the image of the vampire as an alluring aristocrat, whose hold over women would ultimately lead to their doom. And vampires have continued to be depicted as “Byronic” anti-heroes ever since. Who are some of your favorite Byronic vampires? Let me know in the comments!