The Blood of the Vampire
by
Florence Marryat
edited with an introduction and notes
by Greta Depledge
Published by
Victorian Secrets Limited
www.victoriansecrets.co.uk
The Blood of the Vampire by Florence Marryat
First published in 1897
This Victorian Secrets Kindle edition 2011
Introduction and notes © 2010 by Greta Depledge
This edition © 2011 by Victorian Secrets
Composition and design by Catherine Pope
Cover photo © iStockphoto.com/Macros Park
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.
Contents
Introduction
The life and work of Florence Marryat
The Blood of the Vampire – Vampirism, hysteria, sexual aggression and the ‘other’
Suggestions for further reading
The Blood of the Vampire
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
Appendices
Appendix A - Hysteria
Appendix B - Race and Eugenics
Appendix C - The Occult
Appendix D - Review of The Blood of the Vampire
Introduction
The life and work of Florence Marryat
The life of Florence Marryat contains all the intrigue of one of her sensation fictions – marriage, adultery, separation, numerous children, bereavement, notoriety, fame and success. A glimpse of Marryat’s life can, perhaps, be gained from her 1892 novel The Nobler Sex which is generally perceived as being her most autobiographical work. It tells the story of a most eventful and dramatic life with a heroine who is admirable and infuriating in equal measure, but whose life is far from dull. The central protagonist of the novel is an unhappily (twice) married, successful author who converts to Catholicism and who finds comfort in spiritualism.
A book by Harry Furniss who was a regular contributor to the London Society journal during Marryat’s reign as editor contains the following anecdote about Marryat’s eventful life:
Known as Mrs Ross Church when I first met her, she decided to marry someone else, and discarded her husband, who I think was in the army. Anyway, she sent all her friends and acquaintances, myself included, a statement in cold printers ink, informing us that she was not divorced, but that in future she wished to be known as Mrs Lean. This little piece of eccentricity fell into her husband’s solicitor’s hands and thus ended the Church business.[1]
Hardly surprising then that a woman so doggedly determined to follow her own path has left us with a collected works full of independent, strong-minded female characters.
That this prolific novelist, editor, journalist, actress and spiritualist is finally receiving critical interest is no surprise. What is surprising is that it has taken so long for academic attention to bring to light her long-neglected work. Florence Marryat was immensely popular with the reading public throughout her long and prolific career. Furniss in his book on Victorian women writers describes her as ‘a prolific writer, but not a great one.’[2]
However, her popularity and success cannot be ignored. It is, perhaps, only with hindsight that we can really assess the place her work had in the nineteenth century. She regularly wrote about characters that challenged and transgressed social mores and that her novels sold in such vast numbers makes the content of her work of interest. Now, as Marryat’s novels, and appraisals of them, are becoming increasingly available her work can be reassessed.
Whilst names like Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Marie Corelli, and Rhoda Broughton are now quite familiar, it is likely that many readers of nineteenth-century fiction will not have heard of Marryat despite her prominent place in Victorian literary circles. Marryat’s contribution to the 1892 collaborative novel The Fate of Fenella alongside such writers as Frances Eleanor Trollope, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, and many others does give us a clear indication of her literary standing at this time.[3] In fact, Marryat was familiar with literary circles from a young age. For example, her father’s friendships with his leading literary contemporaries meant that Marryat was able to approach Charles Dickens for advice early in her career. The Marryat archive at Yale contains a letter from Dickens to Marryat with his detailed comments on her 1867 novel The Confessions of Gerald Estcourt. Yet this 1897 gothic tale The Blood of the Vampire, one of the few works by Marryat to have received some critical attention,[4] was published the same year as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and whilst Dracula has achieved the status of being probably the most regularly listed novel of all undergraduate English Literature degree programmes, The Blood of the Vampire is barely known – although as I will hopefully go on to show in the rest of this introduction, the central female figure of this novel, Harriet Brandt, is as worthy of academic interest as her fictional vampiric sister, Lucy Westenra. All this builds a somewhat confusing frame of reference to our understanding of Marryat’s prominence and then obscurity in the history of English literature.
An obituary published in the Academy perhaps sums up the dichotomy that was Marryat’s career – her popularity coupled with her inability to please the literary elite.
Miss Florence Marryat, who has died in Bayswater this week, bore a name that has been adored by successive generations of schoolboys. Captain Marryat, R.N., C.B (his titles are lost in his fame as a story-teller), had a large family; and his daughter Florence was only sixteen, and therefore much too young, when she became the wife of Captain Ross Church. When nursing her children through a fever she wrote her first novel – her first of some seventy novels! That they had a certain vogue their number suggests: that half their names are all known to any single individual it would be rash to aver.[5]
It could be argued that Marryat initially established her career on the coat-tails of her successful father. Marryat, apparently, showed an interest in becoming a writer at the age of 11, when she wrote a novel which she illustrated with her own pen and ink drawings.[6] Captain Marryat’s sea-faring novels were hugely successful and Marryat’s devotion to, and reverence of, her father is abundantly clear in her 1872 Life and Letters of Captain Marryat.
Furthermore, despite having been married a number of years before her first novel was published Marryat chose to publish in her maiden name. In an interview given in 1891 to Frederick Dolman for Myra’s Journal: The Lady’s Monthly Magazine when discussing her decision to try and get her first work, Love’s Conflict, published by her father’s publishers Bentley’s she said “Mr Bentley, probably glad to have the name Marryat again on his books if they had any merit at all, sent me a cheque within a very short time.”[7] Clearly it was an astute business decision to use her father’s name and reputation to get her own career off the ground. Marryat’s pride in her father’s legacy and the influence he had on her is evident throughout her life and career. In this 1891 interview Dolman describes the memorabilia related to her father that Marryat kept in her study, he writes: ‘with these and many other things to keep alive the memory of her gall
ant father, it was not strange that at the close of our conversation the novelist should be speaking of him rather than of her own varied and interesting career.’[8]
However, the Athenaeum, regularly quite critical of Marryat’s fictional output, was notably disappointed with Marryat’s work on her father’s life:
It would have been well had Mrs. Church taken counsel before putting together, in the same volumes, the materials of her father’s life, and materials which have little or nothing to do with it. What the public wanted was a reproduction of the living man, not of dead, dull documents, official and non-official, which refer to his professional deeds and duties. All that his daughter has told us of the sailor and novelist is worth reading. We only wish further details of his doings had been allowed to take the place of very ordinary letters, and still more ordinary documents. Mrs. Church complains that she has been able to collect but few letters; we regret that she has not collected fewer, and told more of what remains untold.[9]
However Marryat’s popularity and reputation were soon established and her literary talents came to be recognised in their own right. Her novels were regularly reviewed in many of the leading journals, and whilst some of the reviews appear somewhat double-edged, and sometimes very negative, her ability to write a readable story that some readers would respond well to was regularly commented on. The very tone of the reviews of her work that regularly appeared in journals like the Athenaeum and the Academy indicate, I think, how troubling Marryat was to the literary establishment. They regularly delight in finding fault, inevitably compare her less favourably to other writers, regularly condemn her on moral grounds, and begrudgingly acknowledge when they think she has done something well, or at least not too badly. It seems the reviewers struggle to understand the popularity of her work, but yet, at the same time, cannot ignore her. The review given to Marryat’s 1875 novel Fighting the Air in the Athenaeum, makes clear the reviewers disquiet with her work:
We are glad for once to be able to say this of one of Mrs. Ross Church’s books, and we do so with all the more satisfaction that we have once or twice found it our duty to speak strongly about her writings. We observe that on the title-page of the present one she calls to our memory not her more recent works, but those earlier ones, which were presumably written before she had fully acquired that repulsive style – and the epithet will equally apply to the matter – which has disfigured some of her later books.[10]
Marryat was, from the very beginning of her career, a very canny literary professional. She displayed an excellent astuteness for working her contemporary marketplace. Indeed the review for The Blood of the Vampire that appeared in the Speaker in January 1898 refers to her as a ‘possessor of a certain rough energy and vivacity that have generally made her stories readable.’[11] This talent and her ensuing popularity, whilst clearly clamoured for by many, were lamented too. In his London Literary Letter for the New York Times in 1898 W. L. Alden deplores the mass of Marryat novels, and those of other women writers in the same vein, in the Tauchnitz catalogue and held by libraries generally, compared to the much smaller number of works available by writers such as Kipling and Stevenson.[12]
There is no obvious answer why a successful novelist like Marryat should have disappeared from the history of Victorian fiction in the way that she has. Andrew Maunder, in his excellent introduction to Love’s Conflict for Pickering and Chatto’s Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction series, suggests that Marryat was aware of the ‘ephemerality’ of her own work and certainly that she has been, until now, largely out of print would support this assessment.[13] The Athenaeum, usually critical of her novels in their reviews, wrote in their obituary of her that she was the ‘author of some seventy novels, too hurriedly written, unfortunately, to prove of enduring value.’[14]
However, Marryat’s novels of the 1860s such as The Confessions of Gerald Estcourt, Love’s Conflict, For Ever and Ever and Nelly Brooke are typical of the sensation fiction that was so popular at that time and for which writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon became well-known. Marryat’s books sold equally well, although Maunder’s research has revealed that Marryat, in her early career, regularly felt that she was not paid as handsomely as many of her contemporaries.[15] So why Marryat is so far behind Braddon in terms of revival is curious. As Maunder rightly points out, Marryat was one of the most prolific writers of her time and her works were translated into a number of languages giving her international fame.[16] Clearly Marryat’s style of writing would have become increasingly unfashionable as the modernist period developed in the early decades of the twentieth century. However, appreciation of her work is certainly due for a revival and is very relevant to the current academic trend for revisiting forgotten and neglected Victorian popular novelists.
Whilst the novels which make up the greater part of Marryat’s oeuvre do deal with classic sensation themes – adultery, bigamy, murder, seduction, madness – there is, throughout Marryat’s writing, a strong vein of interesting and complex female characters. Unsurprisingly, given her own experiences of married life, raising and financially supporting her family, Marryat wrote about strong women but also about the vulnerability of women in the nineteenth-century marriage market. Her lurid themes regularly led reviewers to condemn her on grounds of morality. A review in the Academy, of her 1892 novel The Nobler Sex reads: ‘Indeed, the whole story is an odious account of the ways of people whom nobody would wish to know, and it is as undesirable to make their acquaintance in a novel as it would be in actual life. Books of this sort are repellent at best.’[17] The main subject matter of The Nobler Sex is divorce and the central protagonist, as mentioned above, is a strong independent woman who refuses to tolerate an unhappy marriage. By condemning ‘books of this sort’ the Academy seems to disapprove of novels that deal with, yes unpleasant, but arguably very real situations. If a fictional heroine who divorces her husband can be so thoroughly condemned one can only admire women, like Marryat, for making similar decisions in their own lives and having to deal with the repercussions.
So, Marryat does, in many of her novels, pay particular attention to the vulnerability of women in marriage but she also depicts the vulnerability of women at the hands of the medical profession and engages with scientific and medical debates throughout her writing. This awareness of contemporary aspects of science and medicine warrants further academic study. Through her presentation of Harriet in this novel we see an engage-ment with issues surrounding hysteria, race, eugenics and the fear of the racial ‘other’ – which will be covered in more detail later in this introduction.
Marryat’s popularity, professional acumen in the literary market-place, the range of writing she produced, and her varied career should have guaranteed her an enduring place in the study of Victorian fiction. However, this was not to be the case. As Maunder wrote, quite rightly, in 2004: ‘The idea that anyone would ever want to write a book solely devoted to this eminent Victorian woman or even republish some of her work has seemed eccentric or at least unnecessary.’[18] Thankfully 2010 sees a different picture emerging with Marryat’s work appearing regularly on conference programmes, editions of a number of her novels becoming available and at least one book devoted to her life and work being prepared for an academic press.
Marryat’s work most certainly warrants further academic interest, and the publication of this novel is a welcome addition to the range of works, penned by this writer, which is currently available.
A Brief Chronology
1833 (9th July) Born in Brighton. Parents were the former naval officer turned novelist Captain Frederick Marryat and Catherine (née Shairp).
1847 Brother, Frederick, drowned at sea.
1854 (13th June) Marryat married Thomas Ross Church, Ensign in the 12th Madras Staff Corps in Penang. She went on to have eight children by Ross Church, of whom seven survived in to adulthood.
1860 Marryat leaves Penang and returns to England pregnant with her fourth child. Ross Church travels regularly to s
ee his family.
1861 Death of Florence Marryat’s daughter, Florence, at the age of 10 days, (10th January).
1863 Begins writing Love’s Conflict whilst nursing her children through scarlet fever.
1865 Love’s Conflict is published by Bentley and Son. That year also saw the publication of Too Good for Him and Woman Against Woman.
1868 Publication of Gup – sketches of garrison life in India.
1872 Marryat publishes The Life and Letters of Captain Marryat.
1872 Begins her time as editor of London Society, a position she holds until 1876.
1872 First play Miss Chester produced.
1875 Open! Sesame! published.
1876 Her Father’s Name published.
1878 Sued for divorce by her husband Thomas Ross Church who cited his wife’s adultery with Colonel Francis Lean.
1879 Married Colonel Francis Lean – 5th June.
1881 Her World Against a Lie – Marryat became an actress performing in the above drama which she had written herself. The play was produced in London.
1882 Began touring with the D’Oyly Carte theatre company.
1886 Tom Tiddler’s Ground published – an account of her travels in the United States of America.
1891 There is No Death published.
1892 Collaborative novel The Fate of Fenella published.
1892 Publication of The Nobler Sex,regarded as Marryat’s most auto-biographical novel.
1894 The Spirit World published.
1895 Marryat becomes very active in the recently formed Society of Authors.
1897 The Blood of the Vampire published.
1899 Died on the 27th October aged 66 due to complications from diabetes. Her funeral was held on 2nd November at the Church of Our Lady, St John’s Wood. Marryat was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery.
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