Title: Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood
Format: Novel (originally a Penny Dreadful series)
Author: either James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Peckett Prest
Nationality: English
Written: 1845
Published: 1845 -7 as a serial, 1847 as novel
Impact: 10
“There was a tall, gaunt form—there was the faded ancient apparel—the lustrous metallic-looking eyes—its half-opened mouth, exhibiting tusk-like teeth! It was—yes, it was—the vampyre!”
This was the big one. This was when vampire lore, and indeed Gothic literature, really began to take off and became so popular it would be hard to keep up with it. Published originally in what was known as the “Penny Dreadful” - both from its price of one penny and its perceived lurid and inappropriate stories, possibly comparable to pulp fiction in the 1940s and 1950s -
Varney the Vampire built on the work of John Polidori and further embellished the literary vampire, creating many of the tropes and characteristics we still see today. It’s the first story not to be set in a specific time (though that may have been down to poor writing or memory) and also to take place in more than one location. Usually, English people either wanted to read about stories set in England or in a faraway place, but
Varney the Vampire utilises such settings as Venice and Naples as well as more familiar territory in Bath, Winchester and London.
As would most writers of vampiric fiction for decades, the author keeps his vampire a member of the nobility, an aristocrat, and he is Sir Francis Varney, who has been cursed to become a vampire after accidentally killing his own son in Cromwellian England. By all accounts (all right, by the account I read in Wiki) it’s not a very good story, very confused and jumps from subject to subject, but it does differ from Polidori’s story in that Varney appears disgusted with his condition, and the novel tries to elicit sympathy for him from the reader, whereas in
The Vampyre there is no such remorse on behalf of Lord Ruthven, and we’re happy to see him die. Also differing is the death of Varney, who commits suicide at the end by jumping into a volcano (as you do) and leaving behind the account of his life.
But readers of Penny Dreadfuls could hardly have been accounted the greatest of literary critics, and they ate this up and screamed for more. Particularly as a serial, it must have seemed great stuff, as they waited breathlessly for the next instalment. The author uses the idea of the vampire being immortal and basically indestructible to allow him to die several times in the novel, only to come back to life, providing perhaps the first example of a cliffhanger that ends with the “hero”’s death and then resolves it in the next chapter, almost, but not quite, cartoon-like.
Varney is the first vampire in literature to be mentioned having fangs. Ruthven is merely described as having torn the throat of his victims, and it could as easily be by use of some knife or machete or other tool as by fangs, whereas Varney’s attack leaves what would become the classic mark of the vampire: two small incisions on the neck where the fangs had sunk in. He makes his entrance through windows, another trope that would become a classic feature of Hollywood vampires, especially Dracula (and be parodied almost as much); he has superhuman strength and can hypnotise his victims. Conversely, the author ignores many of the legends behind vampire tales. Like Byron’s Darvell, Varney has no fear of the sun and also doesn’t get spooked by crucifixes or garlic, he can eat and drink human food, but it does not agree with him, and there’s as yet, so far as I can see, no mention of his not having a reflection.
One thing that is taken account of in the novel is the claim by Lord Byron, going all the way back to that passage from
The Giaour, in which it’s claimed that vampires are doomed to kill their own family, as in Varney the Vampire, the creature torments, hunts and slays mostly the members of the Bannermouth family, of whom it is hinted - though never confirmed - he is an ancestor. Unlike Byron’s Darvell however, in
A Fragment, and indeed also unlike Lord Ruthven, Varney, while he can pass as a human, is not the suave, debonair gentleman that Polidori shows us in
The Vampyre, for when he is hungry, lusting for blood, his appearance changes dramatically:
“The figure turns half round, and the light falls upon the face. It is perfectly white—perfectly bloodless. The eyes look like polished tin; the lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful eyes is the teeth—the fearful looking teeth—projecting like those of some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like. It approaches the bed with a strange, gliding movement. It clashes together the long nails that literally appear to hang from the finger ends.”
A world removed from the aristocratic Ruthven, or indeed Count Dracula, who would not appear on the scene for another fifty years. Whoever wrote the novel, they were certainly going for sensationalism and appealing to the crowd, and while they could write, it doesn’t appear they were given to too much in the way of restraint. Nor, indeed, averse to a little plagiarism, as in this account where the hypnotic effect of Varney is described:
“The glance of a serpent could not have produced a greater effect upon her than did the fixed gaze of those awful, metallic looking eyes. . . . She cannot withdraw her eyes from that marble-looking face. He holds her with his glittering eye.”
Holds her with his glittering eye, eh? Samuel Taylor Coleridge might have something to say about that! Something explored by Polidori and expanded on in the plays and operas that used his writing, but that, so far as I can see, died out of vampire literature was the healing qualities of the moon. While the sun went on to be the end of every vampire, even the strongest (other than the ridiculous ones that walk around impudently in the sunshine in series
A Discovery of Witches), the moon as a restorative force does not seem to have caught on with later writers, possibly because it would be hard to explain how and why it should work.