Vampyres

Genesis and Resurrection from Count Dracula to Vampirella

Christopher Frayling

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780500773482
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Christopher Frayling has spent 45 years exploring the history of one of the most enduring figures in the history of mass culture the vampire. Vampyres is a comprehensive and generously illustrated history and anthology of vampires in literature, from the folklore of Eastern Europe to the Romantics and beyond. Frayling recounts the most significant moments in gothic history, while extracts from a huge range of sources including Bram Stokers detailed research notes for Dracula, penny dreadfuls and Angela Carters The Bloody Chamber, new to this edition are contextualized and analysed.

This revised and expanded edition brings Vampyres up to date with 21st-century vampire literature, including new text extracts, commentary and a revised introduction. For the first time, Christopher Frayling also explores the development of the vampire in the visual arts in four colour-plate sections, with illustrations ranging from 18th-century prints to 21st-century film stills, demonstrating the enduring appeal of the vampire from popular press to fine art and, finally, to film.

The Invisible Giant, from Bram Stoker’s collection of fairy tales Under the Sunset, 1881.

PART ONE

A LITERARY HISTORY

LORD BYRON TO COUNT DRACULA

‘If Lord George Selwyn returns, let him in by all means. If I am still alive I shall be pleased to see him; if not, he will be pleased to see me.’

Lord Holland on his deathbed, as reported by Horace Walpole

‘A WET, UNGENIAL SUMMER …’

The modern vampire story was born – in suitably oral circumstances – inside a villa overlooking Lake Geneva rented for the holidays on the night of 17 June 1816, when the weather was unusually wet and the atmosphere unusually tense. The birth coincided with that of Frankenstein, and their paths were destined to cross over the next two hundred years, many, many times. The modern vampire arrived in the world, fully formed, as a fashionably pallid aristocrat, complete with seductive voice, pouting lips, blue blood and mean, moody and magnificent personality.

A month before the night of the birth, on 13 May 1816, Percy Shelley, eighteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, their five-month-old son William and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont (who was eight months younger than Mary) had checked into Monsieur Dejean’s fashionable Hôtel d’Angleterre facing the Alps on the north side of the lake, just outside the city of Geneva. They were tired out. Mary had been seasick and coach-sick for most of the ten-day journey from London, via Paris.

The Hôtel d’Angleterre, a large three-storey stone building set back from the lakeside, with a park leading to the road from Geneva to Lausanne, was a stopover favoured by the well-heeled British starting on their grand tours. It was the first coaching inn on the way out of the austere walled city, which shut its gates at 10 p.m. sharp.

A week later, Lord Byron and his personal physician/travelling companion Dr John Polidori, accompanied by a valet de chambre, two servants and two drivers, arrived at the hotel in Sécheron. Before he left England at the end of April, Byron had given Claire Clairmont (then known as Clara, or to her family as Jane) his address as ‘Milord Byron, Poste Restante, Genève’, which was why she had managed to persuade Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin to go to Geneva. For, in April 1816, Claire briefly – in a characteristically impetuous move which, she later wrote, gave her ten minutes of pleasure and a lifetime of pain – had become Byron’s mistress.

Unknown to his noble employer, twenty-year-old Dr Polidori, who had recently graduated in medicine from the University of Edinburgh with a thesis on sleepwalking, had been offered 500 guineas to produce a publishable diary of their adventures, so he noted the Byron party’s movements in some detail. It is the only surviving diary of June 1816 to have been written on the spot and at the time – albeit published with ‘peccant passages’ removed by Polidori’s aged aunt Charlotte. The entries for that crucial month in Mary Godwin’s Journal have disappeared, and only a few of her relevant letters have survived. Polidori was, in the words of his acquaintance Harriet Martineau, ‘a handsome, harum-scarum young man’. He also had painful ambitions to be a poet rather than a medical man, and a thin skin. But, as his Diary amply shows, it has to be said he was not a very gifted writer:

May 26 – Went to the house beyond Cologny that belonged to Diodati. They ask five-and-twenty louis for it a month … The view from this house is very fine; beautiful lake; at the bottom of the crescent is Geneva. Returned …

May 27 – … L. B. met M. Wollstonecraft Godwin, her sister [in fact stepsister] and Percy Shelley. I got the boat into the middle of Leman Lake, and there lay my length, letting the boat go its way … Dined; P. S., the author of [the poem] Queen Mab came; bashful, shy, consumptive; twenty-six [in fact only twenty-four]; separated from his wife, keeps the two daughters of Godwin, who practise his theories [of the emancipation of women, and of open marriage; evidently Byron had been gossiping]; one L. B.’s [Claire Clairmont] …

A few days later, the Shelley party – now with a Genevan nursemaid called Louise Duvillard but known as ‘Elise’ – moved across the lake to the smaller of two secluded properties owned by a M. Jacob Chappuis, below the Villa Diodati on the sloping shore of Lake Geneva. The address was ‘Maison Chappuis, Montalègre’, but Mary Godwin referred to it as ‘Chapuis’. The square, stone-built, two-storey ‘cottage’ set among vineyards near the winding lake road had access to a small harbour, which belonged to Chappuis. Mary Godwin wrote to her half-sister about the weather on 1 June, from ‘Campagne C, near Coligny’:

Unfortunately we do not now enjoy those brilliant skies that hailed us on our first arrival to this country. An almost perpetual rain confines us principally to the house; but when the sun bursts forth it is with a splendour and heat unknown in England. The thunder storms that visit us are grander and more terrific than I have ever seen before. We watch them as they approach from the opposite side of the lake, observing the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heavens, and dart in jagged figures upon the piny heights of Jura, dark with the shadow of the overhanging cloud …

Mary Godwin was beginning to share Shelley’s ‘enjoyment’ of storms, though she still preferred ‘sunshine and gentle breezes’ to the extremes of the sublime, which were his preference. Byron, too, was busy exploring the impact of the increasingly extreme weather conditions on his emotions. In Canto the Third (92 & 93) of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which he wrote at this time, he described a heavy storm he had experienced on 13 June:

Thy sky is changed! – and such a change! Oh night,

And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong.

Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light

Of a dark eye in woman!

The year 1816 has subsequently become known as ‘the year without a summer’ – a meteorological freak in Europe, resulting in widespread harvest failures and even famine.

Lord Byron had moved into the Villa Diodati on 10 June. Its original name had been the Villa Belle Rive. This villa, which had belonged to the family since Gabriel Diodati supervised its construction in 1710, was not occupied: Edward Diodati and relatives lived in a smaller house near the village of Cologny, and rented out the main house to visitors. It was a two-storey grey stone villa with a substantial porticoed basement, surrounded on three sides – at first-floor level – by a large balcony with an elaborate iron balustrade. The Byron party were under the impression that John Milton once stayed there. He didn’t, for the simple reason that the villa was not built in his lifetime. Maybe the Milton connection had been stressed as part of the sales pitch. There were some family connections between the Diodatis and John Milton. Certainly, the Satan of Paradise Lost (1667) would have felt very much at home in the villa by mid-June. The villa was a few minutes away from the Maison Chappuis, and in the evenings the Shelley party would walk up the slope to join Lord Byron.

Earlier that month, Claire Clairmont had discovered that she was pregnant, but waited a while before breaking the news to Byron. His response was: ‘Is the brat mine?’ In the meantime, he continued to have sex with ‘that odd-headed girl’ (‘if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours of the night – there is but one way’). And he used her to copy out Canto the Third of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (which he had finished by 27 June) for despatch to his publisher in London.

Mary Godwin also copied verses – a job she enjoyed, since she, too, evidently felt an attraction for Byron (though not always for his behaviour) and was impressed by his staggering ‘intellectual energy’. When Byron later made his announcement to Claire Clairmont and Percy Shelley that his relationship with Claire was over, he specifically asked that Mary should not be present to hear the news. This confused but did not surprise her, for Byron had made it abundantly clear, since their meeting on 27 May, that he preferred to have conversations about important matters with men rather than women. As Mary was to recall, in October 1822:

I do not think that any person’s voice has the same power of awakening melancholy in me as [Byron’s] – I have been accustomed when hearing it to listen and to speak little – another voice, not mine, ever replied … Since incapacity and timidity always prevented my mingling in the nightly conversations of Diodati – they were as it were entirely tête-à-tête between my Shelley and [Byron] …

Polidori’s Diary also makes it clear that Byron preferred to dine and talk with Shelley alone – ‘Dined with S …’, ‘Then to see Shelley …’, ‘Thence to Shelley …’, ‘To Shelley in boat …’ – and that the ladies were expected to amuse themselves with less grown-up pursuits. Being excluded from these intimate tête-à-têtes was a new and possibly disturbing experience for Mary Godwin. From her earliest conversations with Percy Shelley in June 1814 – in front of the tomb of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft in St Pancras Cemetery – she had come to expect her relationship with him to be a communion of equals, a meeting of like-minded individuals who had freely chosen to live together outside the conventions of society. She was the daughter of Shelley’s two favourite political philosophers – ‘a child of love and light’ he called her – and the most impressive scholar of any woman he had ever encountered.

In her Journal for October 1822, Mary wrote that Percy brought out the best in her: ‘I thought how superiorly gifted I had been in being united to one to whom I could unveil myself, and who could understand me.’ He was the only person who could achieve this: she tended to feel much less ‘natural’ with his friends and acquaintances, and sometimes felt upset when he discussed their intimate affairs with them. In other words, her life had become sharply focused on his. So when she found herself excluded from the ‘nightly conversations of Diodati’, it must have come as a shock. It told her a lot about Lord Byron, and maybe a little about Percy Shelley as well. Dr Polidori, on the other hand, had been relentlessly teased and patronized by Lord Byron from the moment they landed in Ostende on 25 April. As Byron wrote:

I never was much more disgusted with any human production – than with the eternal nonsense – and tracasseries – and emptiness – and ill-humour – and vanity of that young person; he was exactly the kind of person to whom, if he fell overboard, one would hold out a straw to know if the adage be true that charming men catch at straws.

It seems from his Diary that the doctor was acting as Byron’s accountant as well as his physician and companion, perhaps at the publisher John Murray’s request. If so, it was a role that was unlikely to endear him to his employer.

The earliest published account of the circumstances in which the first modern vampire – and Frankenstein – were born comes from Percy Shelley’s Preface to the first (anonymous) edition of Frankenstein, dated September 1817. This was presented ‘as if’ by Mary, but was in actual fact subtly diminishing of her efforts (in comparison with those of her two better-known friends, Byron and Shelley):

… this story was begun in the majestic region where the scene is principally laid, and in society which cannot cease to be regretted. I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends (a tale from the pen of one of whom would be far more acceptable to the public than any thing I can ever hope to produce) and myself agreed to write such a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence. The weather, however, suddenly became serene; and my two friends left me on a journey among the Alps, and lost, in the magnificent scenes which they present, all memory of their ghostly visions. The following tale is the only one which has been completed.

But a fuller and much better-known account comes from Mary Shelley’s own Introduction to the 1831 popular edition of Frankenstein – written some fourteen years after Shelley’s, and fifteen years after the events it purported to describe. This account has been retold and embellished, over and over again, ever since.

But it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands. There was the History of the Inconstant Lover, who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted. There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise … I have not seen these stories since then; but their incidents are as fresh in my mind as if I had read them yesterday.

‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us. The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa [1819]. Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language, than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole – what to see I forget – something very shocking and wrong of course … The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task.

I busied myself to think of a story – a story to rival those which had excited me to this task … I thought and pondered – vainly. I felt that blank incapacity of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative …

Many and long were the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other titles of interest
• Contents
• Preface to the New Edition
• Part One: A Literary History
• Part Two: An Anthology
• Postscript
• Bibliography and Acknowledgments
• Sources of Illustrations
• Copyright