20

Death and Afterlife

In August 1821, Polidori spent about three weeks in Brighton.1 He

returned to London on Monday, the twentieth, and died on Friday, the
twenty-fourth.
It was in Brighton, apparently, that 'some false friend' took him
gambling. Perhaps he was desperate to win enough money to make up
for the failure of his first two careers, or to win his independence from his
father; perhaps he was so desperate that he did not care if he won or lost.
Perhaps his gambling spree was a self-destructive act, not a cause of his
suicide but a step towards it. In any case, he lost, contracted debts he
could not pay, and (unlike Ernestus) did not ask his father to pay them.2
At the inquest into Polidori's death, Gaetano's servant Charlotte Reed
testified:
He returned from Brighton on Monday last. He did not then
seem as heretofore in his behaviour for he then spoke quick &
short. Before he went to Brighton he did not appear well in his
health. And since his return he has ordered his dinner in such a
way as he was not used to do.3
Gaetano was to maintain that Polidori was only ill - 'very weak and
sickly, complaining of a pain in the breast and of losing his eyesight from
time to time' - but he was away at his country house at the time, and was
never able to admit that his son had killed himself.4 Reed's testimony
indicates that Polidori was already ill before his trip, but that on his
return he was also unusually agitated.
John Deagostini, his godfather, who lived in an upstairs flat in the
Polidori house, was in town. He invited Polidori to dinner the day before
he died. He told the Brought
inquest:
to you by | UCL - University College London
Authenticated
Download Date | 7/4/18 1:46 PM
236 After Byron: 1816-1821

The deceased dined with me in this House last Thursday [23

August]. He accepted my invitation in an abrupt way. This had
been usual with him for some time and for the last 2 [actually
almost four] years when he had an accident & was thrown from
his Gig and hurt on the head. He spoke on Thursday in half
sentences in conversing on politics & future time. He said I
should see more than him. This was said in a very harsh way,
before he left Table & shook the Gentleman in our company by
the hand so violently that it forced him to kneel. The deceased
appeared deranged in his mind and his countenance haggard.
He ate but little at Dinner. We parted but he joined us again at
Tea when he hardly spoke a word. He left us about 9 that
night.

Even apart from his alarming appearance and behaviour, which De-
agostini attributes to the effects of his concussion, it is sinister that
Polidori should predict that Deagostini, a much older man, would see
more of a future time than he would himself.
The last person to see him that evening was Reed; his instructions to
her were equally sinister:

He asked me to leave a Glass (a Tumbler) in his Room. This

was not usual, but I left one. He told me he was not well & if
he was not up by 12 next day I was not to call him.

The next morning, however, she disobeyed his instructions:

I went to his room about 10 minutes before 12 to open the

shutters. I opened them. As I was returning back I saw he
looked very ill. He was in Bed and undressed. He lay in a
common position. I soon left the room & told the Gentleman
up stairs, who came down stairs immediately. I afterwards
went for medical assistance.

While Reed went for help, Deagostini searched Polidori's room. He

obviously suspected that Polidori had taken poison, though he found
nothing to confirm his suspicions: 'There was a Tumbler on the chair.
This contained only water. I did not observe in the room the remains of
any deleterious substance.'
Reed summoned two doctors who lived nearby, first William Davies
and then Thomas Copeland (1781-1855), a respected surgeon and an
authority on diseases of the rectum. Copeland arrived first:
Brought to you by | UCL - University College London
Authenticated
Download Date | 7/4/18 1:46 PM
Death and Afterlife 237

Yesterday about one o'clock I was suddenly called. I went

immediately and found the deceased in a front Room on the
first floor of this House. He was dressed - he was perfectly
senseless and in a dying state. I attempted to discharge the
contents of the stomach but ineffectually. He died (I believe)
ten minutes after.
Deagostini testified that Copeland, evidently a brave man, 'drank part of
the water in the Tumbler' to confirm that it was only water. Davies did
not arrive until after Polidori was dead.
The inquest was held at the Polidori house on the evening of the next
day, Saturday the twenty-fifth. Copeland, Davies, Reed, and Deagostini
were the only witnesses. The verdict was that Polidori had 'departed this
Life in a natural way by the visitation of God.' Henry Viets, who
uncovered the records of the inquest, has argued that the verdict was
justified, since there was no conclusive evidence of suicide.5 This is true,
but only because the coroner and jury seem to have taken care not to
discover any. The Rossettis believed that the coroner and jury acted as
they did partly out of consideration for the feelings of the family and
partly because one of the jurors had known Polidori at Ampleforth.6
Copeland's attempt to empty Polidori's stomach and his checking the
water in the glass show that he, like Deagostini, suspected poison; the
jury asked neither for his opinion. Nor did it even try to clear up such
details as whether or not Polidori was dressed when he was found.
Viets also argues that suicides occur most often late at night, not late in
the morning,7 and that Polidori could not have taken cyanide, as the
Rossettis believed, since cyanide is a rapidly acting poison. The latter
point seems incontrovertible. The timing of Polidori's suicide and his
choice of a slow poison suggest that he may have hoped, perhaps
subconsciously, to be saved again, as he had been by Byron in 1816. His
bizarre and sinister behaviour of the previous evening might have been
meant as a warning, a plea to be stopped. Such a gesture is always a
gamble.8 Polidori lost: no one arrived in time to hold out a straw.
One consequence of the verdict was that Polidori could be buried in
consecrated ground (English suicides were still being buried at
crossroads as late as 1823).9 He was buried on 29 August in Old St.
Pancras Churchyard - where, in 1814, Mary Godwin had proposed to
Percy Shelley at the grave of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Polidori's
headstone has since been removed.
Gaetano had returned home a few hours after his son's death. He was
heartbroken, though there are signs in a letter written in December that
he was appropriating his son's death, as he had so much of his life:
Brought to you by | UCL - University College London
Authenticated
Download Date | 7/4/18 1:46 PM
238 After Byron: 1816-1821

I have been in such affliction these three months past that it is

a divine miracle I am not dead or mad. First, a scarlet fever to
my much loved daughter Fanny, but very successfully cured by
her brother John; and then (my supremest misfortune) the loss
of this excellent son, upon whom I relied for the honour of the
English branch of my family, and who had always been the
chief object of my fatherly care, whom I loved more than
myself. He died the 24th August. He had been at Brighton for
about three weeks, while I was at my little villa in Bucking-
hamshire. I returned every week to London, and the first thing
that I asked was if my son had already returned. I leave it to
you to consider what was my anguish, on my last return from
that place, to hear that he had returned - and that he was dead
... I have been left miserable and unhappy for the rest of my
life: the idea of not seeing him again, of not hearing his voice
any more, compared to those times when I used to see and
hear him, accompanies me continuously, and if I did not have
other children who need my help, I do not know what would
have happened to me. To wish death and not be able to die is
now my sad fate, and I have to pray to Heaven to grant me a
few more years of life, and to preserve me from the mad-
ness which would be an even more serious evil than death ...
this is my present condition ...10
Gaetano lived until 1853. He was never able to bear hearing his son's
name; his grandchildren were warned never to mention it in his pres-
ence.11 If Polidori's suicide was in part an act of aggression, it was a
successful one.
A month after her brother's death, Frances wrote a painful elegy:
Could beauty have sav'd, thou hadst not been here;
Could talents redeem, thou hadst nothing to fear;
Thy all that is mortal lies now in the grave,
Yet I trust our Redeemer thy soul will save.
Grant O my God in that terrible hour
When Thou hidest thy mercy while showing thy po[wer]
When the good and the bad alike must appear
Before thy tribunal, their sentence to he[ar]
Tho' the sins of my Brother were scarlet as wool
And the cup of thy wrath were brimmingly full,
The merits of Him who for sin has died,
Those infinite merits his faults may hide,
Brought to you by | UCL - University College London
Authenticated
Download Date | 7/4/18 1:46 PM
Death and Afterlife 239

And thus the greater his sins have been

The more will thy mercy clearly be seen.
Lord hear my prayer, I beseech Thee hear,
And let trust in Thy mercy calm my fear.12
She also copied into her commonplace-book a long extract from A
Practical Discourse concerning Death (1689) by William Sherlock (1641[?]—
1707), which argues, discouragingly, that if suicide is a sin it must damn
those who commit it, since it leaves them no time to repent (assuming
that they die immediately, like Gustavus in Ximenes, but unlike Pol-
idori). Sherlock claims to be reluctant to conclude that all suicides are
inevitably damned, but he considers it extremely likely.13
In later life, Frances was careful to impress her children with 'a horror
of gambling.'14 Very late in life - sixty-two years later, when she was
eighty-three - a visitor from Norwich delighted her with 'a small quan-
tity of exceptionally fragrant pot-pourri, made by John for a Norwich
lady whose maiden name [she] could not learn.'15
Harriet Martineau's response to the news of Polidori's death, despite
her disapproval of the way he had spent the last years of his life, was
almost as painful as that of Frances:
the shock was great, and the impression, on my mind at least,
deep and lasting ... I was then in the height of my religious
fanaticism; and I remember putting away all doubts about the
theological propriety of what I was doing, for the sake of the
relief of praying for his soul. Many times a day, and with my
whole heart, did I pray for his soul.16
Byron, in Pisa, did not learn of Polidori's death until 2 January 1822,
when he received a letter about it from Murray.17 He told Medwin:
I was convinced something very unpleasant hung over me last
night: I expected to hear that somebody I knew was dead; - so
it turns out! Poor Polidori is gone! When he was my physician,
he was always talking of Prussic acid, oil of amber, blowing
into veins, suffocating by charcoal, and compounding poisons;
but for a different purpose to what the Pontic Monarch did, for
he has prescribed a dose for himself that would have killed
fifty Mithridates', - a dose whose effect, Murray says, was so
instantaneous that he went off without a spasm or struggle.18
Murray's report that Polidori had died instantaneously was a merciful
untruth (merciful from the human point of view, if not from that of
Brought to you by | UCL - University College London
Authenticated
Download Date | 7/4/18 1:46 PM
240 After Byron: 1816-1821

Sherlockian theology): from the testimony of Reed and Copeland, it is

clear that it took him over an hour to die.
Two years later, Byron himself was dead. At his funeral, Hobhouse
reflected on the strange fatality that had hung over his friends: 'Of the
five that often dined at Byron's table at Diodati, near Geneva - Polidori,
Shelley, Lord Byron, Scrope Davies, and myself - the first put an end to
himself, the second was drowned, the third killed by his physicians, the
fourth is in exile!'19 Davies had fled to the Continent to avoid being
arrested for debt. Hobhouse himself lived until 1869, and died as the first
Baron Broughton de Gyfford.
Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries was published
by Colburn in 1828. Hunt had not arrived in Italy until the middle of
1822, ten months after the death of Polidori, but that did not stop him
from claiming to have seen him there, calling 'in a strange manner for
water and a towel.'20 It must have been a strange manner indeed. Hunt
may have confused Polidori with Francesco Bruno, the Italian doctor
who did accompany Byron to Greece (and who, as Hobhouse not un-
justly suspected, helped to kill him); but with Hunt one can never be
sure.21 The anecdote may serve as an index to the unreliability of his
memoir, or as an example of the irresponsibility with which authors
have often felt free to treat a minor figure. In Brian Aldiss's Frankenstein
Unbound (1973), Polidori becomes a hysterical Italian exhibitionist. In
Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy's screenplay for Frankenstein:
The True Story (1973), he becomes (as played by James Mason) the
suavely villainous inventor of a process that Frankenstein only bungles -
which more than makes up for Shelley's exclusion of him from the
conversation on principles that helped inspire her novel. In Howard
Brenton's Bloody Poetry (1985), he becomes a cynical voyeur. In Ken
Russell's Gothic (1986), he becomes (as played by Timothy Spall) a
bloated, masochistic religious fanatic and the rejected homosexual lover
of Byron. In Ivan Passer's Haunted Summer (1988), he gives Byron a well-
deserved fright by masquerading as Frankenstein's monster. In Paul
West's Lord Byron's Doctor (1989), he becomes a prurient - and clair-
voyant - plagiarist, who borrows not only from Byron but also from
Russell's movie and (less surprisingly) from West's critical book Byron
and the Spoiler's Art (1960). These, however, unlike Hunt's, are frankly
fictional works - though Isherwood and Bachardy's tongue-in-cheek
subtitle has misled at least one scholar who apparently had not reread
Frankenstein recently. 22
W.M. Rossetti recorded a possible contact with Polidori's spirit in his
seance diary for 25 November 1865. (At this type of seance, the spirit was
Brought to you by | UCL - University College London
Authenticated
Download Date | 7/4/18 1:46 PM
Death and Afterlife 241

supposed to answer questions by rapping on the table, once for yes and
twice for no. More complicated answers had to be spelled out: the sitters
would recite the alphabet over and over, and the spirit would rap when
they reached the right letter.) One of the sitters asked:
'Is there a spirit who will communicate with me?' - Yes. -
Who? - Uncle John. - He said: 'I had no uncle of that name.' I
then said: 'Is it my Uncle John?' - Yes. I asked for the surname,
by the alphabet, but could not get it. Then: Is it an English sur-
name? - No. - Foreign? - Yes. - Spanish, German, etc., etc.,
Italian? - Yes. - I then called over five or six Italian names,
coming to Polidori. - Yes. - Will you tell me truly how you
died? - Yes. - How? - Killed. - Who killed you? - I. - There
was a celebrated poet with whom you were connected: what
was his name? - Bro. This was twice repeated, or something
close to it the second time. At a third attempt, 'Byron.' - There
was a certain book you wrote, attributed to Byron: can you give
me its title? - Yes. - I tried to get this title [The Vampyre] severaal
times, but wholly failed. - Are you happy? - Two raps,
meaning not exactly.23

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London

Authenticated
Download Date | 7/4/18 1:46 PM
This page intentionally left blank

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London

Authenticated
Download Date | 7/4/18 1:46 PM