Worse yet, The Vampyre had been registered by the book publisher, meaning that Polidori had lost the copyright. Polidori protested the unauthorized use of his work and threatened a lawsuit, but in the end received a token payment of only thirty pounds. It must have been galling to him, because the book became a bestseller.
Polidori’s tale is a reworking of Byron’s own failed attempt to meet his Diodati challenge, with a different setting and name. In the eight-page fragment Byron completed, his vampire, Augustus Darvell, had been a wanderer who ends up in a Muslim graveyard rotting from an inner corruption. Polidori changed the name of the character to Lord Ruthven, who is “killed” by a bandit’s bullet, and he changed the locale of some parts of the story from the Near East to London. Lord Ruthven, not by coincidence, is the name of the Lord Byron character in Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel, Glenarvon.
Polidori cast himself as the innocent Aubrey who is destroyed by Lord Ruthven. Ruthven appears as a striking and mysterious figure in the fashionable drawing rooms of London, attracting the attention of all the ladies. Of course, Polidori had seen the real-life Byron draw similar reactions when he visited the salons of Geneva. Aubrey, despite his observations of the Count’s “deadly hue” and “dead grey eye,” is also drawn to him. Like Polidori himself, Aubrey eagerly joins his new friend on a tour of the Continent. Along the way, however, Aubrey sees additional evidence of Ruthven’s vicious character, becomes disillusioned, and leaves him. Aubrey heads for Greece to study antiquities and there falls in love with a young Greek woman named Ianthe. Ianthe had been a dream maiden in Shelley’s Queen Mab, a poem that Polidori read and admired during the summer of 1816.
Ianthe and her parents warn Aubrey not to go to a certain place after dark, because it is the haunt of vampires. He disregards their advice, and hears the cries of a woman coming from a hut. When he tries to rescue her, he is set upon in the darkness by “one whose strength seemed superhuman.” Aubrey breaks free, and then villagers with torches arrive to save him. They find the body of Ianthe, with the marks of a vampire on her neck.
Aubrey falls ill from a fever, and lies in a half-conscious state for some time; in his delirium he imagines that it is Lord Ruthven who has killed Ianthe. But when he awakens, he finds that he has in fact been tended by Lord Ruthven, who arrived in Athens and came to his aid. The two men begin to travel together again, and are set upon by bandits in the mountains. Ruthven is mortally wounded, but as he lies dying he makes Aubrey promise to “conceal all you know of me,” in order to protect his reputation. Aubrey swears an oath to comply with his friend’s last wish.
Aubrey returns to London, where his younger sister is about to be presented into society. At the reception, Aubrey hears someone say in his ear, “Remember your oath!” He turns to find that Lord Ruthven has returned. Aubrey becomes aware that Ruthven intends to court his sister, but feels honor bound not to reveal what he knows about the mysterious nobleman. The conflict drives Aubrey nearly to madness, and again he spends a long time convalescing. When he becomes lucid, he learns that his sister is preparing to be married to Lord Ruthven. Aubrey struggles to persuade her not to go through with the wedding, but he is regarded as deranged. He ruptures a blood vessel and dies, but not before he finally breaks his oath and tells the whole story to his sister’s guardians. They rush to rescue her, but are too late. The last sentence of the story reads, “Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!”
The power of the story is clearly related to the way it plumbs Polidori’s own tortured relationship with Byron, which was always an unequal one. Polidori desperately wanted to be in the first rank of artists but he was forever overshadowed by the talent of others. His anxiety about his artistic ability was magnified by Byron’s sadistic teasing. Byron could not control his contempt for Polidori for the same reason he could not bring himself to love Claire: both desired him too much—they were needy. Yet like Claire, Polidori not only resented, and even hated, Byron but was also attracted to him, a duality that must have caused self-loathing. Polidori’s vampire story shows his fascination with the dark sexuality of the seducer and his fear of being seduced. In The Vampyre, Ruthven dominates Aubrey just as Byron dominated Polidori. Polidori gained some revenge by depicting Byron as a vampire, a monstrous and evil being who sucks the lifeblood from people who cannot resist his charms. Yet when the story later appeared in a book version, the name of the central character was changed from Ruthven to Strongmore, possibly because the publisher (or Polidori) feared a lawsuit.
Despite all of Aubrey’s efforts, evil triumphs completely at the end of The Vampyre, and in that too lies some of the tale’s peculiar power that has enabled its central character to survive several incarnations over the two centuries since. Frankenstein is more conventional in that sense, for in the end, Victor is punished for his hubris, Captain Walton decides to abandon his reckless quest, and the monster repents. Lord Ruthven never repents; he conquers, and will apparently continue to do so. Mary’s monster is ultimately a good person with an ugly exterior; the vampire Lord Ruthven has a fascinating appearance that masks the evil within.
There were other differences. Lord Ruthven is obsessed with sexuality while Victor avoids—even flees from—the sexual, regarding it as a distraction from his work. His whole project is, in many ways, an effort to excise women—and sex—from procreation. Victor’s ideals may have been noble (though the results are not), whereas Ruthven is truly wicked, but it is hard to know who is the more alien—and alienated. Ruthven is a supernatural being; he can rise from the dead and reappear elsewhere. (When Aubrey considers trying to kill him, Polidori wrote, “death, he remembered, had been already mocked.”) Victor Frankenstein, on the other hand, attempts to control the powers of nature and use scientific means to “mock death.” But both, equally obsessed with harnessing the élan vital, end up remarkably inhuman.
Annoyed that The Vampyre was being passed off as his own work, Byron sent the fragmentary beginning of his own vampire story to John Murray, who printed it at the end of Byron’s poem Mazeppa. That still did not prevent many people from believing that Byron was the true author of The Vampyre, and Polidori’s story became popular, particularly on the Continent. Goethe reportedly felt it was Byron’s finest work. Not long after its publication, plays and operas of the story attracted audiences.
Polidori’s tale would inspire others. Thomas Peckett Prest, a prolific English writer who is best known today as the originator of the character who later became Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, published in 1847 Varney the Vampire or The Feast of Blood. This 868-page blockbuster seems to have been the first novel to introduce the idea that the vampire could change form into a batlike creature and fly (the better to appear at the windows of young women’s bedrooms)—but he still had the aristocratic background and the other characteristics of Lord Ruthven.
Polidori left Norwich and moved to London, where he entered the literary world. He succeeded in finding a publisher for Ximenes, the play that John Murray had turned down, and found work reviewing books for one of the city’s many journals. In 1819 he published the book that he claimed was the result of the challenge Lord Byron had thrown down to his friends on a stormy night in June 1816. This was Ernestus Berchtold: The Modern Oedipus, the title an obvious parallel to Mary’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. In a preface to the novel, Polidori claimed, “The tale here presented to the public is the one I began at Coligny, when Frankenstein was planned.”
Polidori’s novel included a supernatural spirit who makes short peripheral appearances, but its plot really revolves around incest, as the subtitle implies. It too is a tale told primarily in the first person, by the title character. Ernestus, a young man who was raised from infancy by a village pastor in Switzerland, relates that his mother died giving birth to twins—Ernestus and a sister. The man who had apparently been their father died earlier of wounds he had suffered before they arrived in the village. Ernestu
s grows to adulthood and falls in love with a wealthy young woman named Louisa Doni. Louisa’s brother, a Byron-like figure named Olivieri, seduces Ernestus’s sister, causing her to flee. When Ernestus finds her, dying along with her newborn infant, she tells him that the Doni family patriarch, Count Filiberto, has a dark secret: he can summon up an evil spirit to do his bidding. Olivieri is soon punished: unexpectedly discovered to be the leader of a band of robbers, he is arrested and dies in jail.
Nevertheless, Ernestus marries Louisa. To decorate their rooms in Count Filiberto’s palatial house, they hang a portrait of the Count next to one of Ernestus’s mother. When the Count sees the latter image, he is violently disturbed. A few days later he dies, followed shortly by Louisa herself, who had suffered from consumption. Ernestus finds a manuscript that Count Filiberto had written in his last days, and this completes the book. In it, the count confesses that as a young man he and a friend traveled to Asia in pursuit of wealth. Both he and his companion loved the same woman, Matilda. Count Filiberto learned from a dying Arab the secret of summoning up an evil spirit who would grant his wishes. The spirit says, however, that each time the count is granted a wish, some disaster will befall those close to him. Heedless of the danger, the count agrees to the bargain and does become rich, although his friend dies. Returning home, he marries Matilda but becomes jealous because he suspects that his friend has somehow returned from the dead and is seducing her. He chases a carriage in which he believes they are fleeing, fires at it, and hears Matilda scream. He learns later that the man in the carriage with her was not her lover, but her father. The count presumed that he had killed her, but on seeing the portrait of Ernestus’s mother, he recognized it as Matilda. She had survived, only to die giving birth to the twins, of which the count was the father. The count realized that his two children by a later wife have committed incest with Ernestus and his sister. Ernestus is left alone and despairing, the self-portrait of Polidori, who frequently noted his own loneliness in his journal.
The copies of Ernestus Berchtold that went on sale were lonely too: only 199 were sold, and the publisher offered the rest to Polidori at a cut rate. Persevering, Polidori wrote other works, but they too failed to find many readers. Finally, the brilliant but hapless Polidori turned to yet another profession: the law. He was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in November 1820 and gave his mother’s maiden name, Pierce, on the register. Pierce had a nice English sound which would be better for business than an Italian one. Rejecting his father’s name may also, of course, have been Polidori’s way of asserting his independence.
In August 1821, Polidori went to the seaside resort of Brighton with a friend. Apparently they spent their time at the gambling tables. Polidori was in desperate need of money, and had evidently forgotten what happened to the eager young men who played at faro with Lord Ruthven: “In every town, he left the formerly affluent youth, torn from the circle he adorned, cursing, in the solitude of a dungeon, the fate that had drawn him within the reach of this fiend.” Polidori had no better luck, and when he returned to London, friends noticed that he seemed distracted and upset. He had lost far more money than he could pay; his only recourse would have been to ask his father once again to lend him money. That was too humiliating, and Polidori found another solution.
Polidori was living in his family’s London house. John Deagostini, his godfather, had an apartment upstairs and on the evening of August 23, 1821, the two had dinner together. Deagostini recalled that the young man was acting strangely, but assumed it was the aftereffects of the head injury Polidori had suffered two years earlier. Retiring to his room, Polidori asked Charlotte Reed, a servant, to leave him a glass, explaining that he was ill; Reed assumed he intended to take medicine. Polidori told her that he might sleep late, so that if he did not arise before noon, she should not worry. Nevertheless, Reed later testified, she went to his room about ten minutes before twelve to open the shutters. (Not even the family servants respected him enough to follow his instructions.) The sunlight revealed Polidori lying on his bed, seemingly “very ill.” Suspecting the worst, Reed told Deagostini what she had seen, and he sent her for a doctor. Two of them arrived. The first found signs of life and attempted to pump Polidori’s stomach, but it was too late. He died a few minutes later, just a month short of his twenty-sixth birthday.
Deagostini later testified that one of the doctors drank some of the liquid left in the glass, to show that it was not poison. However, there had been a considerable period of time when Deagostini was left alone with the body, and the family had an interest in averting a coroner’s verdict of suicide since that would mean Polidori could not be buried in consecrated ground. The coroner’s jury was sympathetic, ruling that Polidori had “departed this Life in a natural way by the visitation of God.” The body was interred on the twenty-ninth of August, 1821, in Old St. Pancras Churchyard, the same burial ground where Mary Wollstonecraft rested, and where Shelley and Mary had declared their love for each other.
Gaetano, his father, professed to be heartbroken. “I have been left miserable and unhappy for the rest of my life,” he wrote a friend in December. “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.” He survived his son by thirty-two years; his grandchildren recalled being told never to mention John Polidori’s name in his presence.
Of the five people who agreed to write a ghost story in the summer of 1816, Polidori was the first to die. Byron received the news from John Murray, who seems to have reached a different conclusion than the jury had about the cause of death. Byron told a friend,
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 . . . he has prescribed a dose for himself . . . whose effect, Murray says, was so instantaneous that he went off without a spasm or struggle. It seems that disappointment was the cause of this rash act.
The journal in which Polidori recorded his anguish, his hopes, and his version of reality survived, but—as with so many other documents in this story—in a form revised by other hands. Polidori’s sister Frances married Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian exile who taught Italian at King’s College. They were the parents of several talented children, including the poet Christina, the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Michael Rossetti, an art critic and editor. William published his uncle’s journal in 1911, when he himself was in his eighties, but reported that years before his mother had removed all elements from it that she did not think were appropriate to print. This left, needless to say, considerably less than modern readers would hope for.
More than forty years after Polidori’s death, William Rossetti recorded a contact with his deceased uncle during a séance. By the rules of this séance the spirit responded to questions by rapping on the table—once for yes, twice for no. For more elaborate messages, the participants would go through the alphabet and when they reached the right letter the spirit would rap. William Rossetti’s séance diary for November 25, 1865, recorded that a spirit gave his name as “Uncle John.” The person conducting the séance had no uncle of that name. Rossetti spoke up:
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 surname?—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] several times, but wholly failed.—Are you happy?—Two raps, meaning not exactly.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE LITTLEST VICTIM
I am ashes where onceI was fire,
And the bard in my bosom is dead;
WhatI lovedI now merely admire,
And my heart is as grey as my head.
My life is not dated by years —
There are moments which act as a plough;
And there is not a furrow appears
But is deep in my soul as my brow.
Let the young and the brilliant aspire
To sing whatI gaze on in vain;
For sorrow has torn from my lyre
The string which was worthy the strain.
— “To the Countess of Blessington,”
Lord Byron, 1823
IN ALL THE BOOKS that resulted from Byron’s challenge—Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and Ernestus Berchtold, the first victims are the innocents, those most loved by the protagonists. So it was in the lives of those who had received his challenge, as well as those around them. Mary’s half-sister, then Shelley’s first wife, gentle souls who could not stand up to the ruthless blows that life delivered them, had killed themselves. Next little Clara and Willmouse became victims of their frenetic father’s inability to consider the needs of others before his own desires. All four of these deaths, in one way or another, were caused by the two men who had inspired the character Victor Frankenstein: Godwin and Shelley.
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