07/09/2023, 20:52 The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire – The Public Domain

ire – The Public Domain Review

ESSAYS

The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the

Modern Vampire
By Andrew McConnell Stott
From that famed night of ghost-stories in a Lake Geneva villa in 1816, as well as Frankenstein's
monster, there arose that other great figure of 19th-century gothic fiction - the vampire - a
creation of Lord Byron's personal physician John Polidori. Andrew McConnell Stott explores how a
fractious relationship between Polidori and his poet employer lies behind the tale, with Byron
himself providing a model for the blood-sucking aristocratic figure of the legend we are familiar
with today.
PUBLISHED
October 16, 2014

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07/09/2023, 20:52 The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire – The Public Domain Review

Detail from F.G. Gainsford's portrait of John Polidori, ca. 1816, the year he would accompany Lord
Byron to his Lake Geneva villa - Source

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07/09/2023, 20:52 The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire – The Public Domain Review

power is its ability to induce intense paranoia about the nature of social relations to ask, “who
are the real bloodsuckers?”

This is certainly the case with the first fully realized vampire story in English, John William
Polidori’s 1819 story, “The Vampyre.” It is Polidori’s text that establishes the vampire as we know
it via a reimagining of the feral mud-caked creatures of southeastern European legend as the
elegant and magnetic denizens of cosmopolitan assemblies and polite drawing rooms.

"The Vampyre" is a product of 1816, the “year without summer,” in which Lord Byron left
England in the wake of a disintegrating marriage and rumours of incest, sodomy and
madness, to travel to the banks of Lake Geneva and there loiter with Percy and Mary Shelley
(then still Mary Godwin). Polidori served as Byron’s travelling physician, and played an active
role in the summer’s tensions and rivalries, as well as participating in the famous night of
ghost stories that produced Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny,” Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus.

Like Frankenstein, "The Vampyre" draws extensively on the mood at Byron’s Villa Diodati. But
whereas Mary Shelley incorporated the orchestral thunderstorms that illuminated the lake and
the sublime mountain scenery that served as a backdrop to Victor Frankenstein’s struggles,
Polidori’s text is woven from the invisible dynamics of the Byron-Shelley circle, and especially
the humiliations he suffered at Byron’s hand.

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07/09/2023, 20:52 The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire – The Public Domain Review

Detail from a hand-colored engraving of Villa Diodati, by Edward Francis Finden, ca. 1833, after a
drawing by William Purser - Source.

John Polidori (1795-1821) was born in Soho, the eldest son of an English mother and an Italian
writer, translator, and literary jack-of-all-trades. Raised to great precocity in a multi-lingual
and hyper-literate home, he was sent to board at the Catholic Ampleforth College at the age of
eight. Then just a remote and drafty lodge housing twelve boys and twenty-four Benedictine
monks, Ampleforth provided instruction in history, languages, and the minutiae of Catholic
devotion. Given this intense and closeted environment, it is no wonder that John should dream
of entering the priesthood, but his father had chosen a different path for his son, pulling him
from school at the age of fifteen to attend the university of Edinburgh to study medicine.
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substances in the quickest way possible – and so John became skilled in blood-letting,
vomiting, enemas, blistering, and plunge-baths. But Polidori hated medicine. A restless loner,
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07/09/2023, 20:52 The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire – The Public Domain Review

he rejected his classmates as “automatons,” while he himself dreamt of achieving glory, first on
the battlefield fighting on behalf of Italy as it sought to repel the invading armies of Napoleon,
and then through a growing attachment to literature. Thanks to the success Byron had
achieved with the publication of his poem Childe Harold in 1812, it was only natural that young
men in the early nineteenth century should conceive of poetry as not only a creative outlet, but
as an avenue to fame, riches and sexual plenty. Under the long-distance mentorship of William
Taylor of Norwich, a once notable, but now near-derelict essayist who was attracted to John’s
remarkable good looks, Polidori began to dabble in literature. His father, who knew the more
likely privations of a literary life, ordered him to stick to his studies, and John obeyed, fulfilling
a family dynamic that remained unchanged throughout his life – bowing to his father’s wishes
while inwardly caviling at the restraints they placed upon him.

Where most students wrote dissertations on the circulation of the blood or assorted fevers,
John concluded his education by writing a dissertation on the uncanny phenomenon of sleep-
walking that was heavily influenced by the French encyclopedists, before returning to London
a newly-minted doctor at the tender age of twenty. Unfortunately, in order to practice in the
capital it was necessary to be at least twenty six years old. It was while contemplating this
stalling impediment that John was offered the job of physician to Lord Byron. John’s father,
who had once been the secretary to the vain and splenetic Italian tragedian, Vittorio Alfieri,
ordered him not to take the position, while across town, Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse
counseled the poet against employing the vain young man with the funny name. Neither
warning was sufficient, and together Byron and Polidori left for the Continent on St. George’s
Day, 1816.

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07/09/2023, 20:52 The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire – The Public Domain Review

Lord Byron in traditional Albanian dress, a replica painted by Thomas Phillips (in 1835) of his original
painting of 1813 - Source.
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07/09/2023, 20:52 The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire – The Public Domain Review

the urge to make them laugh one last time. Polidori, an outsider, an employee, was forced to sit
and listen as Byron lampooned his sophomoric efforts and reduced the table to fits of giggles.
Furious, John stormed off to pace the streets of Dover.

Away from Byron’s friends, things improved a little, with John writing to his sister from
Brussels to say that “I am with him on the footing of an equal.” The democratic idyll did not last
long, however, with Byron quickly losing patience with his doctor’s bouts of travel sickness,
and John resenting his employer’s undemocratic arrogance. “Pray, what is there excepting
writing that I cannot do better than you?” John asked Byron while stopped at an inn
overlooking the Rhine. “There were three things, answered Byron, calmly. ‘First,’ he said, ‘I can
hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door - Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder
point - and thirdly, I can give you a damned good thrashing.’”

These feelings of resentment only grew, as John felt increasingly overshadowed in the famous
man’s company, with those they met instantly gravitating towards celebrity while he remained
“like a star in the halo of the moon, invisible.” At the same time, the doctor’s petulance
provoked Byron, whose wit was often cruel and rarely let an opportunity pass to mock his
employee or put him in his place. In time, John began to feel that his own sense of self was
being drained by his proximity to the poet. Increasingly, he sought to distance himself and in
mid-June, made a half-hearted attempt at suicide.

It was no great leap for Polidori to believe that Byron was sucking the life from him, just as
others had accused Byron of possessing a charismatic power that eclipsed their own identities.
Amelia Opie, one of the many women Byron had charmed, described him as having “such a
voice as the devil tempted Eve with; you feared its fascination the moment you heard it,” a
mesmeric quality that critics also found in his verse, which had, according to the critic Thomas
Jones de Powis, “the facility of…bringing the minds of his readers into a state of vassalage or
subjection.”

But the most overt example of Byron as the devourer of souls was a novel John read over the
course of the summer – Glenarvon by Lady Caroline Lamb. Byron and Lamb had enjoyed a brief
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the wayward love of Calantha for the Irish rebel Lord Glenarvon. Glenarvon is a brooding anti-
hero who dresses as a monk, stalks ruined priories, and howls like a wolf at the moon. His face
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07/09/2023, 20:52 The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire – The Public Domain Review

glowers “as if the soul of passion had been stamped and printed upon every feature,”
possessing the ability to enslave her. “Weep,” he cries, binding her ever tighter to him, “I like to
see your tears; they are the last tears of expiring virtue. Henceforward you will shed no more.”
Calantha is powerless. “My love is death.”

Lady Caroline Lamb, painted by Eliza H. Trotter, ca. 1811 - Source.

That Polidori took inspiration from Lamb is revealed in the name he gives his villain – Lord
Ruthven, one of Glenarvon’s various ancestral titles. Polidori’s Ruthven also inhabits
Glenarvon’s aristocratic milieu as a member of the bon ton. He is a pale and fascinating
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In “The Vampyre,” Ruthven befriends a young gentleman named Aubrey, whom he invites to
accompany him on a journey to Greece. Once there, Aubrey falls in love with Ianthe, a beautiful
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07/09/2023, 20:52 The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire – The Public Domain Review

peasant girl who recounts the legend of the vampire but is brutally murdered soon after.
Aubrey comes to suspect Ruthven, but the mysterious aristocrat is shot by bandits before the
truth can be revealed. As Ruthven lays dying, he manages to extract a promise from the young
man, asking him not to announce his death in England for a year and a day. Aubrey agrees, and
Ruthven literally dies laughing.

After a long and meandering journey home, the sad and raddled Aubrey is finally able to return
to society, where he is horrified to discover Ruthven alive and well. “Remember your oath,”
whispers the man who has died in his arms, thus driving Aubrey so far from his wits that he
succumbs to a protracted illness. In the meantime, Aubrey’s sister is engaged to be married,
and though he has yet to meet the groom, it slowly dawns on him that it must be Ruthven.
Impatient for his oath to expire and growing weaker by the day, he finally sends his assistants
to her rescue only to discover they are too late: “Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s
sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!”

Knowing the context of Polidori’s story, it is hard not to read “The Vampyre” as an allegory of
the doctor’s relationship with Byron, a text that is seamed with the mocking laughter of a man
possessed of the power to debilitate through the force of personality alone. Furthermore, it
rewrites the well-known story of Byron’s success since the publication of Childe Harold, wherein
a young nobleman goes abroad and returns filled with capacious understanding of himself and
the world, by showing that his melancholy air is a deceit, a mendacious con perpetuated on a
gullible claque of fools for the purpose of their exploitation. As a meditation on the degeneracy
of a society that has encouraged the excesses of celebrity to such an extent that it has been
allowed to dwarf the higher values and enable the abuse of the virtuous and the innocent, it
damns absolutely the superficial lure of fame.

Rather than providing a creative outlet for Polidori, the publication of “The Vampyre” only
served to compound his humiliation. Although the text was similarly prompted by the ghost
story competition that inspired Mary Shelley so ably, John only completed his story for the
pleasure of a friend outside of the Byron-Shelley circle. The manuscript lay forgotten for three
years until finally coming into the hands of the disreputable journalist Henry Colburn, who
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07/09/2023, 20:52 The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire – The Public Domain Review

Title-page from the fourth state of the first edition published by Sherwood, Neeley and Jones in 1819.
Although this version of the title-page was reset to remove Lord Byron's name as author, someone has
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07/09/2023, 20:52 The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire – The Public Domain Review

assert his rights as its author in the face of accusations that he was either a plagiarist or
misusing Byron’s name to further his own reputation. John tried to take control by preparing
his own edition, but the public was not interested, and disgusted with the literary life, he
attempted to rejoin Ampleforth and train as a monk. Still “The Vampyre” plagued him as his
application was denied because of “certain publications which I have seen,” wrote the Prior,
“and of which I must tell [you] as a friend, I wish you had not been the author.” Polidori
enrolled to study law using his mother’s maiden name, but, finding no appetite for it, fell into
gambling. With the shadow of Byron making everything he did seem paltry and derivative,
and the weight of rejection impressing itself on him like a judgment on his being, John Polidori
took his own life at the age of twenty five by drinking a beaker of cyanide.

“Poor Polidori,” wrote Byron when he heard the news, “it seems that disappointment was the
cause of this rash act. He had entertained too sanguine hopes of literary fame.”

This essay is published under a CC-BY-SA license, see here for details.

Andrew McConnell Stott is the author of Comedy (Routledge, 2005; 2nd edn, 2014) and The Pantomime Life of Joseph
Grimaldi (Canongate, 2009), which won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction and was named as
one of the Guardian's "Books of the Year" for 2010. In 2013 he published The Poet and the Vampyre: The Curse of
Byron and the Birth of Literature's Greatest Monsters (Canongate/Pegasus 2013), which was a best book pick of 2013
for both The Big Issue and The Sunday Times.

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