Chapter 5: Vampires of the Imagination
In 1797 the famous German writer and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote The Bride of Corinth: A young woman returns from the dead as a vampire to her parents’ house and seduces a young man who is staying with them. Her parents, desperate to see her again, interrupt the pair as they are making love, whereupon the young woman explains that she has been allowed back from the underworld to taste a night of passion with a man, but that now that they have broken the spell, she must return again. She then becomes a corpse once more, before their very eyes.That same year, 1797, the well-known English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge began the first part of a long narrative poem, Christabel. In the poem, the central character, Christabel, meets a mysterious woman, Geraldine, who appears to have magical powers. Although she is very beautiful, and makes a close and trusting friend of the innocent Christabel, as well as Christabel’s father, she later reveals an underlying demonic quality. Although vampires are never mentioned in Coleridge’s poem, the setting and emotional dynamic between the characters, especially between Christabel and Geraldine, have all the characteristic features of a vampire story.
Coleridge’s friend Robert Southey, another of the Romantic poets, as they were known, also penned a ballad concerning a vampire, The Old Woman of Berkeley. In this story, a seemingly respectable old woman, among whose children are a monk and a nun, summons her offspring to her side before she dies. To their surprise, she reveals that she has lived a life of terrible sin, and asks them to bolt and chain her coffin so that the devil cannot come for her. She explains:
‘All kind of sin have I rioted in,
And the judgement now must be,
But I secured my children’s souls,
Oh! pray, my children, for me!
‘I have ‘nointed myself with infant’s fat,
The fiends have been my slaves,
From sleeping babes I have suck’d the breath,
And breaking by charms the sleep of death,
I have call’d the dead from their graves.
‘And the Devil will fetch me now in fire,
My witchcrafts to atone;
And I who have troubled the dead man’s grave
Shall never have rest in my own.
The children do their best for their mother, but their efforts to spare her from the Devil are in vain, and he duly arrives in a mighty blast of fire and wind, to take her off to hell.
‘Wake Not the Dead!’
At the height of the Gothic craze for ghost stories and tales of the supernatural, a Northern English poet called John Stagg, known as the Blind Bard of Cumberland, wrote a poem called The Vampire. In the preface, he explained that the story was:
‘founded on an opinion or report which prevailed in Hungary, and several parts of Germany, towards the beginning of the last century. It was then asserted, that, in several places, dead persons had been known to leave their graves, and, by night, to revisit the habitations of their friends whom, by suckosity, they drained of their blood as they slept. The person thus phlebotomized was sure to become a Vampyre in their turn; and if it had not been for a lucky thought of the clergy, who ingeniously recommended staking them in their graves, we should by this time have had a greater swarm of blood-suckers than we have at present, numerous as they are.’
Another Romantic poet to write about vampires was Johann Ludwig von Tiecke, in his poem, The Bride of the Grave, and in his story, Wake Not the Dead!. The story was part of a collection of folk tales on the model of the Brothers Grimm, and was published in English in 1823. It tells of Walter, a lord, and his wife, Brunhilda. Although they share a passionate erotic love, Brunhilda has a dreadful temper, and terrorizes the household. When Brunhilda dies suddenly, Walter takes a new wife, Swanhilda and they have two children. But Walter begins to miss his lustful nights with Brunhilda, and compels a sorcerer to wake her from the dead by giving her corpse blood to drink. Brunhilda returns to life, more beautiful than ever, but with a worse temper, and a pair of razor-sharp fangs to boot. She feasts on the blood of the household staff and the family until all are dead. Finally, she turns on Walter himself. Walter kills her, and then takes another woman, but while in his new love’s embrace, she turns in to a snake. The castle catches fire, the walls fall in, and as he is crushed to death, he hears a voice command, ‘Wake Not the Dead!’.
‘Mad, bad, and dangerous to know’
The theme of the seductive enchantress as harbinger of death was a very popular one among the Romantic poets, including John Keats, whose poems The Lamia and La Belle Dame Sans Merci both evoke the idea of a fabulously beautiful woman who turns out to be a supernatural being. In these stories, the woman typically charms a mortal man into spiritual slavery, leaving his life in ruins.
Lord Byron, one of the leading Romantic poets, famously described by his married lover Lady Caroline Lamb as ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’, also reprised this theme in his poem, The Giaour, which actually mentions vampires by name. The story concerns a Turkish girl, Leila, who falls in love with an infidel (‘the giaour’ of the title). The infidel kills Leila’s husband, and is punished by becoming a vampire. It is thought that Lord Byron first heard of vampires on his ‘grand tour’ of Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Tales of the Dead
Lord Byron also served as a model for the first real vampire story, John William Polidori’s The Vampyre, published in 1819. Polidori was Byron’s personal physician, and in the summer of 1816, he stayed with Byron in Switzerland at the Villa Diodati beside Lake Geneva. There, he and Byron spent time with Byron’s friends Percy Shelley, Shelley’s fiancé Mary Godwin, and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Claire had had an affair with Byron in London, and was pregnant with his child, but Byron refused to be in her company unless Shelley and her sister were present.
The little circle of friends were kept indoors for several days that summer as it rained incessantly. To while away the time, they read tales from Fantasmagoriana, a collection of horror fiction later translated into English as Tales of the Dead. They then proposed a ‘ghost writing’ contest, and took to writing their own stories. Mary Godwin, who later became Mary Shelley, came up with the idea for her novel Frankenstein, perhaps the most famous horror story of all time.
Lord Byron, for his part, began a story concerning a narrator who embarks on a ‘grand tour’ with an old man, Augustus Darvell. As the journey progresses, Darvell becomes weaker and weaker, until, when they reach a cemetery, his face turns black and his body begins to decompose. Byron had intended to have Darvell come to life again as a vampire, but never finished the story, and it was left to his friend Polidori to revive it.
The debauched aristocrat
Not long after this sojourn in Switzerland, John Polidori and Lord Byron fell out, and Polidori went travelling, eventually returning to London. However, Polidori had been inspired by Lord Byron’s fragment to write a short story of his own, The Vampyre. Its hero, Lord Ruthven, a bored and spoiled aristocrat, was based on the personality of Lord Byron himself. ‘Lord Ruthven’ was a name originally used in Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon, a thinly disguised portrait of her former lover.
Polidori’s story was published in the New Monthly Magazine as ‘A Tale by Lord Byron’ in 1819. Both Polidori and Byron protested that Byron was not the author, but to no avail. At this period, Lord Byron was so famous that the public – particularly his armies of female admirers – were clamouring for his work. Byron had not only made a name for himself as a writer, but his outrageous behaviour had scandalized English society, and he had been forced to leave the country, accused of incest and sodomy. Yet although he was reviled in many quarters, like many of today’s celebrities, his bad behaviour and many shocking sexual liaisons only made him more attractive to his female fans.
The story became an immediate sensation, partly because Byron was believed to have written it, but also because it met the public’s growing enthusiasm for gothic horror stories. Moreover, it was highly original, since it transformed the ugly, brutish vampire of Slavic folklore into the suave, charismatic, upper-class villain that we are so familiar with today.