Preface

John William Polidori is remembered, if at all, as Byron's physician, as

the butt of a number of his best jokes, and as the author of a brief and
mediocre but extraordinarily influential Gothic tale, The Vampyre. Even
on this basis, he merits more critical attention than he has received,
which is almost none. First, it can be argued - indeed, it has been - that
Byron's medical history (both as we would try to understand it and as he
did) is part of literary history. Then, it is necessary to recognize that
Byron's jokes had a context in order to understand them - and him -
fully. One can, to a certain extent, sympathize with the attitude of Byron
(and others, notably Mary Shelley) towards Polidori; but merely to
reproduce it, as biographers have tended to do, is not only to do Polidori
an injustice but also to neglect an opportunity to consider what it was
about his more famous contemporaries themselves that made them find
him so amusing - and, more generally, that made them respond to him
as they did, both in person and in print. Finally, though some of the
works influenced by The Vampyreare so much more interesting in their
own right that the tale's influence (if it is mentioned at all) is usually
dismissed as soon as it has been conceded, the tale occupies a pivotal
position in the history of a major Romantic symbol: vampires were never
the same again, and it seems worth asking why not.
The study of a marginal figure like Polidori - indeed, of many mar-
ginal figures like Polidori - is necessary if literary studies are to be
rescued from the ahistorical canonization in which they have been
entrenched since before the days of the New Criticism. Even apart from
the unquestionable need for a larger context against which to understand
canonical authors, it may be that marginal ones provide clearer examples
of certain kinds of intertextual phenomena. Weak authors may well
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x Preface

they certainly have more reason to be anxious. The organization of this

book, around Polidori's relationship with Byron, reflects an interest in
Polidori as marginal: this is his most important relationship - to us. One
could also argue that it was the most important to him as a writer, though
to him as a human being it appears to have been largely another version
of his relationship with his father. (It may be that marginal authors are
particularly likely to regard other, more successful authors as parental
figures.)
But Polidori is also worthy of interest in his own right. His second tale,
Ernestus Berchtold, is a work of considerably greater scope and sophis-
tication than The Vampyre; James Rieger has said that it 'certainly de-
serves a modern edition,'1 a judgment with which I heartily agree,
though I cannot agree with his conclusion that 'had he fulfilled [its]
promise ... [he] might now hold a place in the nineteenth-century hier-
archy slightly above Charlotte Bronte,' if only because I am not sure
what it means.2
There are also specific reasons for a specifically biographical interest in
Polidori. To put it bluntly, he was so unsuccessful in everything he tried
to do - demonstrating the pattern of compulsive failure that Karl Men-
ninger regards as a form of chronic suicide3 - that he ended up trying an
unusually wide variety of different things: medicine, literature, politics,
philosophy, law (in particular, penology), and religion. Trying to make
sense of such a life necessarily involves trying to give a more complete
picture of the cultural life of the period than would a study of a figure
more illustrious in a more narrowly defined sphere.
It could even be argued that there is something peculiarly Romantic
about Polidori's wanderings among so many different disciplines, as
there is about his travels through Europe. Perhaps even more thor-
oughly than Byron's, Polidori's life illustrates the physical and psycho-
logical mobility that Byron saw as essential to his own character, and that
he made the defining characteristic of his Don Juan. A biography can
address the personal and historical factors conditioning Polidori's ver-
sion of Romantic mobility.
Biographical criticism, or critical biography, is often considered sus-
pect, and rightly so, though no more rightly than most other kinds of
criticism. On the one hand (say, the left), it can be accused of perpetuat-
ing a naive view of texts as the transcendent expressions of transcendent
consciousnesses. Such a tendency is certainly too common, and not only
in explicitly biographical criticism. But the simple exclusion of the author
from discussion - the repression of the author, one might say - evades
the problem rather than solving it, and so always leaves the risk that the
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Preface xi

repressed will return as some theoretical symptom. A criticism that is

aware of itself as biographical, however, can examine the relations
between a text and the consciousness that produced it, or reproduced
itself in it; such a criticism can also examine the historical conditions that
produced the author's consciousness and governed its reproduction in a
text. If one of the central tactics of the newer criticism is the comparison
of texts, and one of its central strategies is the extension of analysis to
texts not previously considered 'literary,' then it should not exclude a
priori the comparative study of 'literary' and biographical or historical
documents. Such a comparison must work both ways: if the life illumi-
nates the works, the works also illuminate the life (if only because they
are part of the life). I cannot claim to have squared the hermeneutic circle.
On the other hand (say, the right), biographical criticism can be
accused of irresponsible speculation, of making assertions on matters
about which it is impossible to be certain - for example, the historical
conditions that produced a particular author's consciousness. Such a
lack of certainty, however, is a condition of all criticism. The techniques
of biographical criticism do not differ radically from those of other kinds
of criticism; the meanings it produces are not necessarily any more or less
subjective. We are, perhaps, more acutely aware of the subjectivity of the
biographer, but our awareness is a critical advantage, though an uncom-
fortable one.
This is a documentary biography: it depends heavily on quotations
from Polidori's letters, most of which have never been published and
some of which have never been translated from Italian; from his doctoral
thesis, which has never been translated from Latin; and from his pub-
lished works, most of which have been out of print for over 160 years.
Much of the interest of the book, I believe, lies in the primary material it
makes available; accordingly, I quote as much of this as the narrative will
bear. Polidori's surviving writings are few enough that it is possible to
give a fairly comprehensive account of them in a single volume, and I
have tried to do so. (I also quote a certain amount of primary material
which is already available, partly for reasons of balance and partly
because it is hard to deny oneself the pleasure of quoting Byron.)
There is another reason for the abundance of documentation. Though
it is neither convenient nor appropriate to foreground questions of
theory in a study like this one, it will be clear that my approach is
psychoanalytic.4 This seems appropriate enough for the author of
Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus, but I am aware that it will be
contentious. I hope, of course, that the documentation will be seen as
abundantly supporting my conclusions, but if not, I hope that it is
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xii Preface

abundant enough to make the book useful to readers who do not accept
the latter - to allow them to come to conclusions of their own.
Documentation cannot guarantee a complete and unbiased treatment:
some of the necessary documents simply no longer exist. This is par-
ticularly the case with a neglected figure like Polidori: there must have
been much that did not seem, to various people, worth the bother of
saving. Given my approach, for example, I am particularly interested in
my subject's relations with his family. The surviving materials do not
permit a proper treatment of this crucial topic. There are a number of
surviving letters to and from Polidori's father and one of his sisters; there
are none to or from his mother or any of his other siblings.5 This cannot
be taken to mean that these others were less important to him. What
evidence there is suggests, in fact, that he was closer to his mother than to
his father. But there is not enough to be sure, or to say much about what
that closeness meant. One can try to fill the gaps with informed specula-
tion, but not with unfounded fictions. Some analyses must be left
incomplete.
I should add a note on my use of names. Wherever possible, I refer to
people simply by their surnames (or, in the case of aristocrats, by their
titles), but sometimes this approach would cause confusion. Accord-
ingly, I call Polidori by his surname, and the rest of his numerous family,
when I have occasion to refer to them, by their first names. I follow
similar procedures in other cases; for example, since I am more interested
in Lord Byron than in Lady Byron, I refer to him as Byron and to her as
Lady Byron. The Shelleys present peculiar difficulties, which biog-
raphers have usually met by referring to Percy Shelley as Shelley and to
Mary Shelley as Mary; in 1991 that no longer seems an acceptable
solution. I hope that the various alternatives I have contrived are neither
uncouth nor unclear.6
Most of the work for this book was done on an Izaak Walton Killam
Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship, at the University of British Colum-
bia. It was completed on a Canada Research Fellowship from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, also at the Uni-
versity of British Columbia. I am grateful to the Killam Foundation, the
council, and the university for their support.
I am grateful to the staff of the following institutions for their assist-
ance: first of all, the University of British Columbia Library, especially
the Special Collections Division; Ampleforth Abbey, Ampleforth, Eng-
land, especially Fr Patrick Barry, Abbot, and Br Terence Richardson,
librarian; the Berg Collection, New York Public Library; the Bodleian
Library, Oxford, especially S.R. Tomlinson; the Bristol City Archives,
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Preface xiii

especially Mary E. Williams; the British Library; the Clifton Diocesan

Archives, Bristol, especially Fr J.A. Harding; the Colman and Rye Library
of Local History, Norwich; the Administration du Chateau de Coppet,
Geneva, especially Pascale de Mulinen; the Francis A. Countway Li-
brary of Medicine, Harvard, especially Richard Wolfe; Downside Abbey,
Stratton-on-the-Fosse, England, especially Dom Aidan Bellenger; the
Edinburgh City Archives; the Houghton Library, Harvard, especially
Jennie Rathbun; the Lincoln's Inn Library, especially Frances Crouch;
John Murray Ltd, especially John G. Murray and Virginia Murray; the
National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, especially Jane M. Jeffrey; the
National Register of Archives, Edinburgh, especially B.L.H. Horn; the
Norfolk County Library, Norwich, especially C. Wilkins-Jones; the Nor-
folk Record Office, Norwich, especially Jean M. Kennedy; the Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin,
especially Cathy Henderson; the Royal College of Physicians, Edin-
burgh, especially Joan S.P. Ferguson; the Royal College of Physicians,
London, especially Geoffrey Davenport; the Royal Commission on His-
torical Manuscripts, London, especially Anthony R. Smith; the Scottish
Catholic Archives, Edinburgh, especially Fr Mark Dilworth; the Scottish
Record Office, Edinburgh; the Staffordshire Record Office, Stafford; the
University of East Anglia Library, especially Alex Noel-Tod; the Univer-
sity of Edinburgh Library, especially Marjorie Robertson; the University
of Reading Library, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, especially
Francesca Hardcastle.
I am grateful for the hospitality of Leslie and Priscilla Inverarity, Ed
and Elaine Lott, Robert and Sylvia MacDowall, Jay Macpherson, Mrs
Alexander Merivale, Laura Rival and Emilia Sanabria, and Alan and
Megan Roughley. Not content only with making my research possible,
they also made it very pleasant.
Parts of a number of letters by and to Polidori were translated from the
Italian by William Michael Rossetti, apparently for a projected edition;
Robert Vidoni and Eve Shamash translated the remaining Italian docu-
ments for me, and Marguerite Chiarenza corrected the translations. John
Lepage corrected my translations from French; Lyn Rae, my translations
from Latin. Kathleen Scherf corrected my transcriptions of manuscripts,
and helped in preparing the notes and bibliography. Helena Petkau
helped me to read proofs and prepare the index.
Stuart Curran, Jana Davis, Patricia Elliot, Richard Fatechand, John
Lepage, John McAllister, Kathleen McGrath, E.B. Murray, Stuart Pe-
terfreund, and J.R. Wytenbroek read varying amounts of various drafts
of my manuscript. I have been helped by their comments and sugges-
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xiv Preface

tions, and by those of Prudence Tracy, my editor at University of Toronto

Press, and Linda Biesenthal, my copy-editor, and the anonymous read-
ers for University of Toronto Press and the Canadian Federation for the
Humanities.
I am also indebted for advice, encouragement, and various kinds of
help to Anthony Barrett, Thomas E. Blom, Michele Carter, Sue Collard,
Eleanor Cook, Mrs Imogene Dennis, Surinder P. Dhiman, Justine Dun-
can, Conor Fahy, Ian Fairclough, Janice Fiamengo, W.E. Fredeman,
Sheldon Goldfarb, Roberta Jackson, Lee M. Johnson, Trevor Levere, Jay
Macpherson, Leslie A. Marchand, Mrs Alexander Merivale, Patricia
Merivale, Kim Michasiw, John Norris, Ian Ross, Philip Smiley, Lewis
Stiles, Holly Tuokko, Ian Weir, Peter Wilkins, John Woodhouse, and
Doreen Macdonald Zaharuk.

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Frances Polidori Rossetti, with her daughter Christina.
Portrait by D.G. Rossetti. National Portrait Gallery, London

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Polidori's first surviving letter (see page 9).
Photograph by Don Chaput
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Gaetano Polidori. Portrait by D.G. Rossetti, 1848.
From Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters.
Photograph by Don Chaput
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Villa Diodati.
From Finden's Illustrations of the Life and Works of Lord Byron.
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Byron. Portrait by R. Westall, 1813.
National Portrait Gallery, London
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No 38 Great Pulteney Street, London (left, with the neo-classical porch):
the house where Polidori died.
Photograph by the author
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