Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

by Sims, Michael

  In his 1746 compendium, The Phantom World, excerpts of which appear in Part I, Dom Augustin Calmet writes at length about “the vampires or ghosts of Hungary, Moravia, and Poland; of the vroucolacas of Greece.” In a section headed “Do the excommunicated rot in the earth?” he explores the common fear that the body of a heretic does not decompose but instead lingers in the earth, profaning the laws of God in death as it did in life, polluting the ground with its sinfulness and disease. Unlikely comrades, such as Academy scientists and village priests, found themselves allied in the antipollution movement, fighting for the segregation of cemeteries to rural areas beyond dense centers of population—where their decomposing inhabitants could inflict less harm on the living. Scholar Marie-Hélène Huet sums up the subtext of many early vampire accounts: “All the dead are vampires, poisoning the air, the blood, the life of the living, contaminating their body and their soul, robbing them of their sanity.”

  Not surprisingly, decay within a subterranean chamber was little understood at the time; no forensic Body Farm to graph a corpse’s fade from stink to bones to a mere stain in the dirt. Any variation from a presumed norm in decay provoked fear. Yet what people were unable to comprehend within their limited frame of reference is that there are innumerable ways a body may change after death. Graves in different climes and latitudes vary enormously, depending upon air temperature and humidity, soil composition, insects and other subterranean animals, and the microscopic sanitation workers who turn us all back into the dust from which we came. (About these latter creatures, of course, the vampire-fearing were completely ignorant.) Lime helps preserve a body, as do clay soils and low humidity. Some coffins defend their inhabitant better than others.

  Yet all sorts of natural bodily changes were revealed to posthumously convict someone of vampirism. Fingernails, of course, don’t actually continue to grow after death, any more than hair does, but as fingers decompose, the skin shrinks, making the nails look abnormally long and clawlike. After sloughing off its top layer, skin appears flushed as if with fresh blood. Damp soil’s chemicals can produce in the skin a waxy secretion, sometimes brownish or even white, from fat and protein—adipocere, “grave wax.” In one eyewitness account from the eighteenth century, a vampire is even found—further proof of his vile nature—to have an erection. Yet the genitals often inflate during decomposition.

  And what about the blood reported around the mouths of resurrected corpses? This phenomenon, too, has a surprisingly natural explanation. Without the heart’s pump to keep it moving, blood, like other liquids, follows the path of least resistance and pools at the lowest point available. Many bodies were buried face-down, resulting in pooled blood in the face. Blood also gets lifted up toward the mouth by the gases of decomposition. Life is messy, but death is messier, even without invoking the supernatural undead.

  We can learn even more about the origins of vampire stories by looking at the reasons why someone might turn into a vampire after death. Much of the original folklore does not include our familiar theme nowadays, that the undead recruit their own next generation by infecting victims when they drink their blood. Peasant superstitions were saturated with the fear that a corpse might spontaneously transform into a monster even without its having made any unwilling blood donation during life. Suicides were considered a high risk for posthumous transformation, as were murderers, their victims, felons of every stripe, the battlefield dead, stroke victims, the drowned, the first person to fall in an epidemic, heretics, wizards, redheads, curmudgeons, women of ill repute, and people who talk to themselves. Alcoholics were considered especially likely to return as vampires.

  With these signals of potential unease in the grave to warn them, grieving survivors tended to emphasize prophylactic strictures in the hours and days following death to reduce the likelihood of such a tragedy. In fact, as Paul Barber and other commentators have pointed out, one reason that suicides, murder victims, and those slain in war made it onto this list of vampire nominees may be that, dying unattended, they were not properly escorted from this world into the next. Every culture has its venerable funerary procedures, comprised half of primordial custom and half of imaginative response to natural history. With communicable disease rampant, for example, it was a sound idea to dispose of the deceased’s belongings in the grave alongside the corpse—a habit for which archaeologists are always grateful. Other notions seem less reasonable to us now, such as keeping mirrors away from the dead, so that doubling the corpse’s image won’t result either in its living on after death or in the death of another.

  The risk of trouble at the end of life might even be signaled at its beginning. Some children were thought to arrive in this world marked with a warning that they would have trouble leaving it. Those at risk included babies born tailed, furry, split-lipped, with an extra nipple, out of wedlock, or with a red birthmark. Anything blood-red is a helpful badge of vampirism. Those born with a red caul, instead of the normal grayish white, were prime candidates. The amniotic sac that protects a fetus in the womb remains intact through only about one tenth of 1 percent of births, or even fewer now with prenatal medical interference. Throughout history this rarity has contributed to the idea that such a birth betokens good luck in childhood and the rest of life; this belief, too, is medically sound, because the sac protects the infant from infection. (David Copperfield is born with a caul, which is later, to his discomfiture, raffled off.) But a red sac, resulting from prenatal bleeding, naturally wound up on the list of warning signs for vampirism. Worried parents tackled this risk head-on by preserving a red caul, drying it, and sprinkling it into the child’s food as a form of inoculation. In myth and superstition, the line between natural and supernatural has always been blurry.

  ONE REASON TO KEEP a corpse indoors until burial was that outdoors it ran the risk of a bat flying over it. Such proximity alone might communicate vampirism. Any animate creature passing over the corpse however, might have the same effect. Bats—despite their crepuscular habits and their refusal to fit snugly into a single category with either birds or beasts—were not considered particularly important in early vampire folklore. Europe has no indigenous blood-imbibing bats, so these animals could not join vampire folklore until after Europeans learned of their existence elsewhere in the world. This meeting of myth and reality took place in the eighteenth century, just in time for the Romantic revolution, with the discovery of the bloodsucking Central and South American bats that the legendary taxonomist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, soon dubbed “vampire” bats. Blood is a distilled, nutrient-rich fluid. Many creatures—including lampreys, leeches, one species of catfish and one finch, as well as vampire bats—have evolved clever methods to tap into its stored nourishment, a survival mechanism that scientists call hematophagy. Even the imagination of horror writers rarely surpasses nature’s reckless creativity.

  The discovery that bloodsucking is not an imaginary form of predation added new cachet to vampire stories, but in turn such fiction seemed to taint real-life exploration. Many naturalists faced incredulity as they returned from foreign lands with exotic animals or their remains. When Charles Waterton, the nineteenth-century English naturalist and explorer, described his experiences with vampire bats, his account sounded to many like peasant folklore:

  At the close of the day, the vampires leave the hollow trees, whither they fled at the morning’s dawn, and scour along the river’s banks in quest of prey. On waking from sleep, the astonished traveler finds his hammock all stained with blood. It is the vampire that hath sucked him. Not man alone, but every unprotected animal, is exposed to his depredations: and so gently does this nocturnal surgeon draw the blood, that instead of being roused, the patient is lulled into a still profounder sleep.

  It didn’t help Waterton’s reputation that he did indeed perpetrate a hoax or two, employing his extraordinary skill at taxidermy, but his account of the vampire bat was accurate. The three known species—white-legged, hairy-winged, and the more common one
cleverly dubbed common—are all native to Central and South America. (These three are the only known blood-feeding bats among eleven hundred species; most are highly beneficial to humans, feeding on countless millions of insects every night.) Two of these species feed primarily on birds or small mammals, but the common vampire bat finds human blood the tastiest of meals. It facilitates its bloodthirst with heat-seeking thermoreceptors worthy of the Pentagon. While dining, the bats inject their victims with an anticoagulant enzyme to keep the nutrients flowing smoothly. And what might this glycoprotein be called? Draculin, of course. You may consume it yourself one day. Draculin’s four-hundred-plus amino acids are many times stronger than any other known anticoagulant; as a consequence, a drug derived from it, desmoteplase, has been approved for victims of stroke or heart attack.

  A vampire bat’s saliva even produces a compound that prevents the edges of its victim’s wound from constricting. Lacking fat in their diet to bind protein, the vampire bats possess a curious trait familiar to fans of their human counterparts: they must feed every single night to quench their steady thirst for blood. As a further example of Bram Stoker’s outrageous legacy in the modern world, scientists have also identified fossils of a prehistoric giant vampire bat, which they inevitably named Desmodus draculae.

  LIKE MOST PEOPLE I know who aren’t historians, I tend to casually say “the Victorian era” as if referring to a brief period characterized by definite commonalities. Yet Victoria ruled Britain and its empire from 1837 to 1901—and besides, this book includes authors from several other countries. So I use Victoria’s reign as the time span of Part II, with Part I devoted to Victorian authors’ recent ancestors and Part III to their immediate descendants, leading up through World War I, or roughly a generation after Victoria’s death. The borders of a time period are as porous as those of a nation, and the calendar itself is arbitrary.

  In this book you will find authors not only from Britain but also from the United States, France, Germany, and Russia. As we all know from the books and movies of the twentieth century and of our science fictional new millennium, vampires have a global appeal, but it’s interesting to see that the earliest stories about them are equally widespread. Long before the media whirlwind surrounding new books and movies about them, vampires had been established as international celebrities.

  Their star power also attracted some fine writers. The roster of brilliant authors within includes, for example, Lord Byron, Aleksei Tolstoy, and Fitz-James O’Brien. A new anthology in any genre must decide upon a policy toward the usual suspects: How many of the acknowledged classics ought to be included and how many can be omitted to make room for equally deserving but lesser known gems? In Dracula’s Guest, you will find a compelling blend of the finest stories in both categories. We can’t explore the great original vampire tales without Byron’s and Polidori’s groundbreaking contributions. But I omit their contemporaries’ early vampire poetry, to make room for less famous but even more powerful works, such as Johann Ludwig Tieck’s and Theophile Gautier’s stories. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella “Carmilla” is brilliant and influential, but its length would be out of proportion to the other stories here—and besides, it has already been endlessly reprinted. Some stories that show up often in vampire anthologies aren’t truly vampire stories (such as Eliza Lynn Linton’s “The Fate of Madame Cabanel”) or just barely sneak in under that definition (such as Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla”). So I omit these and make room for some of the fascinating nonfictional accounts from over the centuries, including eye-witness reports of seventeenth-century exhumations and on-sight exposure to nineteenth-century superstitions. I have assigned titles to excerpts by choosing a phrase from within the text.

  In a number of places throughout this book, you will glimpse the role of dreams in the making of these fictions. As I began writing this introduction, my own teenage nightmares came to mind in part because recently I had been reminded that a number of horror stories have resulted from or been influenced by nightmares. Even Horace Walpole credited a dream with sowing the seed of his melodramatic novel The Castle of Otranto—the book generally considered to have launched the Gothic revival of the late eighteenth century. All he could remember of his 1764 dream “was that I had thought myself in an ancient castle…and that on the upper-most banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.” It was enough. “In the evening I sat down to write.” Walpole’s contemporaries, such as the English novelist Ann Radcliffe and the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli, deliberately consumed raw meat and other troublesome foods in the hope of provoking interesting nightmares. Byron and Coleridge turned to opium. Shelley liked laudanum. During the famously stormy summer at the Villa Diodati in 1816, with Shelley and Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft—not yet Mary Shelley—woke from a nightmare to begin writing Frankenstein.

  This tradition continues today. One June morning in 2003, a twenty-nine-year-old named Stephenie Meyer, who had never written a book before, woke up to vivid memories of a dream. She dreamed that a young woman and a young man were carrying on an intense conversation in a woodland glade. The woman, really more of a girl, was an ordinary human being. “The other person,” Meyer later recalled, “was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire.” He wasn’t attacking her, but he was talking about his desire to attack her, his attraction to the scent of her blood, and his determination to resist because he was in love with her. After feeding and dressing her three children, Meyer postponed as many household tasks as possible in order to type up the dream before it began to fade. The result grew into Twilight and its sequels, some of the bestselling fiction of recent memory and the inspiration for the series of blockbuster films. It seems appropriate that the most popular characters in contemporary vampire lore—the latest heirs to Lord Ruthven and Varney and Dracula—appeared in a vision while Stephenie Meyer was asleep. For centuries, the restless undead have crept in and out of our dreams.

  “You begin in a very Victorian manner,” I said;

  “is this to continue?”

  “Remember, if you please,” said my friend, looking at me over his spectacles, “that I am a Victorian by birth and education, and that the Victorian tree may not unreasonably

  be expected to bear Victorian fruit.”

  —M. R. James

  I

  The Roots

  Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’Argens

  (1703 –1771)

  BEFORE WE BRING OUR Victorians onstage, we need a glimpse of certain real-world attitudes toward the undead that were well established before even Byron put quill to paper. These are the stories that were circulating among both peasantry and gentry in the century before the one that mostly concerns us in this anthology; they formed the raw ore from which the Victorian era would refine an entire vampire mythology. The Renaissance rediscovery of classical learning and art had resulted in the period to which historians have since pinned such labels as the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant invoked a line from the Latin poet Horace as the motto of the entire period—Sapere aude, “dare to know,” meaning to think for yourself instead of merely trusting authority. But the era doesn’t look enlightened or reasonable in these eyewitness accounts of vampire frenzy.

  Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, the Marquis d’Argens, was a French Enlightenment philosopher and writer—a philosophe, a public intellectual engaged with the issues of his time. His youth seems to have been one wild carouse even after he joined the military in his midteens, and eventually his father disowned him. As an adult, however, Argens became well-known for his many writings, helping disseminate the ideas of Voltaire and of Pierre Bayle, the advocate of rational religious tolerance, and of Bernard de Fontenelle, who is often considered the first popular-science writer. The thirty-eight volumes of writings Argens left behind include the Correspondance philosophique (Chinese Letters, Jewish Letters, Cabalistic Letters, and others) and an earlier work that was revised and expanded into fourteen volumes of a History o
f the Human Spirit. Argens spent a quarter of a century in the court of Frederick the Great at Potsdam, beginning when his patron was merely Prince Frederick. While in Berlin, he married a French actress.

  His account of “a scene of vampirism” comes from Letter 137 of Jewish Letters, first published anonymously between 1738 and 1742. Augustin Calmet, whose work follows this selection, included this excerpt from Jewish Letters in his own Phantom World, which is why the two have the same translator, an industrious Victorian named Henry Christmas.

  They Opened the Graves

  WE HAVE JUST HAD in this part of Hungary a scene of vampirism, which is duly attested by two officers of the tribunal of Belgrade, who went down to the places specified; and by an officer of the emperor’s troops at Graditz, who was an ocular witness of the proceedings.

  In the beginning of September there died in the village of Kivsiloa, three leagues from Graditz, an old man who was sixty-two years of age. Three days after he had been buried, he appeared in the night to his son, and asked him for something to eat; the son having given him something, he ate and disappeared. The next day the son recounted to his neighbors what had happened. That night the father did not appear; but the following night he showed himself, and asked for something to eat. They know not whether the son gave him anything or not; but the next day he was found dead in his bed. On the same day, five or six persons fell suddenly ill in the village, and died one after the other in a few days.

  The officer or bailiff of the place, when informed of what had happened, sent an account of it to the tribunal of Belgrade, which dispatched to the village two of these officers and an executioner to examine into this affair. The imperial officer from whom we have this account repaired thither from Graditz, to be witness of a circumstance which he had so often heard spoken of.