Timeline: 19th Century
Title: Thalaba the Destroyer
Format: Poem
Author: Robert Southey
Nationality: English
Written: 1800
Published: 1801
Impact: 3
Noted here only because it’s said to be the first time an English author/poet references vampires, “Thalaba the Destroyer” is a long, epic, Arabian Nights-style saga set in the Middle East, and the only point at which a vampire is mentioned is during one of the hero’s adventures, as detailed below. Other than that, I can’t see that it’s of any interest to us.
Synopsis: I have no intention of summarising the entire, twelve-book (!) poem, as ninety-nine percent of it has nothing to do with vampires. But the part that does concern us is when the hero, Thalaba, stands by his wife’s graveside, mourning her passing. A spirit appears and chides him, telling him God is not happy with him. But Thalaba recognises the spirit as a vampire, and kills it. Yeah, that’s it. Hardly worth it, huh?
Title: The Vampyre
Format: Poem
Author: John Stagg
Nationality: English
Written: 1810
Published: 1810
Impact: ?
Synopsis: Before we get to that, let’s just give this guy props, as he was blind, known in England as “the blind bard.” He’s also only the second English author to write about vampires, beating Lord Byron by three years. His poem concerns the worry of a wife for her husband, who is not looking the ticket.
"Why looks my lord so deadly pale?/Why fades the crimson from his cheek?”
Midnight seems to exert its mystical power over the husband, too, as his wife bemoans how at that time
“You sadly pant and tug for breath,/As if some supernat'ral pow'r/Were pulling you away to death?/Restless, tho' sleeping, still you groan/And with convulsive horror start.”
The husband tries to explain:
"Young Sigismund, my once dear friend,/ But now my persecutor foul,/Doth his malevolence extend/ E'en to the torture of my soul.” He tells his wife that his old friend is haunting him, visiting him at night, draining his blood. That’s not the worst though, as he sorrowfully tells her she’s next.
“When dead, I too shall seek thy life,/Thy blood by Herman shall be drain'd!” But he tells her of a way to prevent this, basically by staking him when he dies. She stays by his side till he does pass, and then uses a lamp to frighten off the bloodthirsty Sigismund.
The next day, after she has told the town council what her husband has revealed to her, they break open Sigismund’s coffin and sure enough there he is: not decayed and full of blood. So they stake him and poor old Herman too, and the curse is broken.
I have some questions. First, if Herman knew how to get rid of that pesky Sigismund, why did he wait till he was at death’s door to tell his wife? Why not get himself released earlier, when he might still have regained his strength? And how did he come by this knowledge? Who told him how to break the curse? And while we’re at it, how did Sigismund get vampirised? All questions, it would seem, that will never be answered.
Title: The Giaour
Format: Poem
Author: Lord Byron
Nationality: English
Written: 1810/1811
Published: 1813
Impact: 4
Synopsis: The poem itself is an epic one, and deals with the Turkish practice of what I suppose we would refer to today as “honour killings”, and the Giaour of the title refers to an infidel or unbeliever. In the poem, having learned of the folklore during his Grand Tour of the east, Byron mentions the vampire, and alludes that the Giaour is condemned to the following fate for his crimes:
But first, on earth as vampire sent,
Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life;
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid living corse:
Thy victims ere they yet expire
Shall know the demon for their sire,
As cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy flowers are withered on the stem.
Byron wrote in the notes his findings on vampire folklore while travelling through Europe:
The Vampire superstition is still general in the Levant. Honest Tournefort tells a long story about these 'Vroucolachas', as he calls them. The Romaic term is 'Vardoulacha'. I recollect a whole family being terrified by the scream of a child, which they imagined must proceed from such a visitation. The Greeks never mention the word without horror. I find that 'Broucolokas' is an old legitimate Hellenic appellation—the moderns, however, use the word I mention. The stories told in Hungary and Greece of these foul feeders are singular, and some of them most incredibly attested.
This is interesting to connoisseurs of vampire literature as it is the first time we hear actual specifics of what was believed - or used later by writers of vampire stories - to be the curse laid upon the Undead. Here, there are certain restrictions, as the vampire is doomed to take the life of his own family, though interestingly there is no allusion to his victims becoming like him, merely dying a horrible death. There are hints, like in the line,
“shall know the demon for their sire”, the last word being pounced upon by writers of Gothic and/or vampire fiction as a descriptor for the perceived relationship between a vampire and what became known as a fledgling or scion, sire being of course an old word for father, also used in the animal world, most typically of horses.
Intriguing, too, how Byron notes that the vampire seems to hate and loathe his new existence after death -
“Yet loathe the banquet” - and makes it seem as if he is compelled to kill, whereas later vampiric figures in literature and film would enjoy the hunt, the chase, the kill. The vampire sketched in
The Giaour is really a pathetic, almost pitiable figure, one who has committed a dreadful crime and been punished beyond all measure, marked as a killer who must satisfy his grisly urges, whether he will or no. In this passage at least (I haven’t read the whole thing of course) Byron does not make it clear if the vampire is meant to be immortal, nor is it clear what he means when he says the vampire must
“haunt thy native place”: is he saying the grave, or the city, town or village where the vampire lived, or indeed is he being more general, and referring to the world, Earth, the abode of the living? I can’t confirm that.
What is clear though is that, of the accounts we have looked at up to now, this is the first clear evidence of a writer using the vampiric legends to animate their character, and so would have to stand as one of the first vampire novels. If, that is, it wasn’t for the fact that it is a poem - and only twelve lines of it - and also that the vampire is a mere incidental to the entirety of the thing. So while
Leonore vaguely seems to be a poem about death, and not necessarily vampires, and
Christabel does not make it clear either that Coleridge is talking about the undead when he writes of Geraldine, we’re still on the hunt for the first real evidence of vampires in an actual novel.
Before we move on though, some interesting points.
The Giaour was, apparently, a great influence on the later writings of that most happy of scribes, Edgar Allan Poe, and also on John William Polidori, whose later novel
The Vampyre (1819) would go on to be recognised as one of the first of the genre. Polidori, it seems was Byron’s doctor at one point and had a real falling out with him, whereupon he wrote
The Vampyre and based its protagonist, Lord Ruthven, on the peer. The problem here was two, even threefold. First, he had neither advised Byron he was basing his character on him, nor obtained his permission to do so. Second, his story was inspired by - I won’t say ripped off from but apparently based very closely on Byron’s own work of the same year,
A Fragment - also known as
Fragment of a Novel and
The Burial: A Fragment - based so closely in fact that it was taken for Byron’s own work, and published, without Polidori’s knowledge, in a collection of Byron’s work. This caused a great scandal when Polidori demanded it be removed, citing himself as the author, and thus opening, I assume, himself up to charges of plagiarism.
Which brings us neatly to…
Title: Fragment of a Novel (A Fragment/TheBurial: A Fragment)
Format: Short Story
Author: Lord Byron
Nationality: English
Written: 1819
Published: 1819
Impact: 8
Synopsis: Two men travel through Europe on a Grand Tour, one of them quite old. As they go on the old man, Augustus Darvell, becomes weaker and begins to sicken. As they reach a cemetery in Turkey he collapses and dies, but before he does he extracts from his companion (who is never named, and is the narrator of the tale) a promise to release no information about his death. As Darvell dies, the narrator is shocked to see his body decompose rapidly, as a stork arrives in the cemetery with a snake in its mouth. The narrator buries him, feeling a strange lack of sorrow
(“I was tearless”).
Like the title says, it’s a fragment only and the story ends there, as Byron never completed it. Polidori claims - though how true this is I have no idea - that Byron intended for Darvell to come back to life and seek out the narrator’s sister in England, which would draw quite a parallel to Stoker’s later, and more famous work. Again though, there is no confirmation that the old man
was a vampire, and if he was, how come he got sick and died? Aren’t vampires meant to be immortal? And while we’re at it (although in fairness the “rules” of vampire literature had yet to be written, but even so, going from legend and folk beliefs) how could a vampire walk in the sun?
Again, we’re tantalisingly close, and there are certainly elements of vampire literature here, but it’s a case of joining the dots, and there’s no guarantee that we would see the same picture emerge as Byron had intended. I’d have to research further, but was
A Fragment meant to have a vampire as one of its two characters? There could have been other explanations, though I think it is generally accepted now that the idea was that Darvell was to have been a vampire. As I say, if that’s the case then there are certain questions to be answered which never will be.
Another thing that’s very interesting here is the style of the story. It’s told in the form of a letter, after the fact; the narrator writes the letter, presumably to a friend, relating his experiences, and of course this is how
Dracula will mostly unfold, as a series of letters written by Jonathan Harker to his wife-to-be. So it would be churlish to suggest Stoker had not read Byron before he embarked on what would become his masterpiece, and the most famous, if not the first, vampire novel. Also, the action takes place away from England, allowing the idea of “foreign ideas and practices”, and certainly foreign beliefs, to permeate it, give the reader the uneasy feeling that they are in unfamiliar, even hostile territory, and to long (in the person of Byron’s narrator) for the shores of good old England again, sentiments expressed most heartily by Harker, and with mounting despair that they will ever be realised, as he waits for a living death in Castle Dracula.
However, Byron himself claimed to have no interest in vampires:
"I have besides a personal dislike to 'Vampires,' and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to reveal their secrets." In many ways, it wasn’t so much his writing, but he himself who became the skeleton upon which the modern vampire in literature was built, given flesh and ascribed rules. This, then, you would have to say, would be down to Polidori and his thinly-disguised portrayal of Byron as Lord Ruthven. But if Polidori was “inspired” by
A Fragment, does the genesis, if you will, of the literary vampire bounce back into Byron’s hands, as he wrote that story? Who is the true grandfather of the vampire in print? He’s got to be in the running, despite his own views and his apparent wish to dissociate himself from vampire writing.