John Polidori, “The Vampyre,” and the Rise of the Aristocratic Vampire

Abstract

Vampires in the eighteenth century are commonly assumed to have been monstrous undead peasants who slew indiscriminately and with no intellectual rationale, and that it was only with the publication of John William Polidori’s tale “The Vampyre” (1819) that the creatures became alluringly aristocratic. In fact, fashionably gentrified, socially respectable, and politically influential vampires were already the norm in the eighteenth century. Moreover, Polidori’s admittedly ground-breaking story (the first vampire prose narrative in English) was written as part of a literary publicity campaign, its Byronic overtones were the result of his editor’s input, and it was actually Byron himself who initially developed the figure of the patrician vampire that had inspired Polidori.

This chapter rewrites the rise of the aristocratic vampire, focusing on the upwardly socially mobile vampires of the eighteenth century, as well fundamentally revising not only the publication history of Polidori’s tale “The Vampyre” but also its significance in “v-lit” (vampire literature). From the perspective of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century, the aristocratic vampire was as much a creation of the cinema and popular culture.

This chapter is a supplement to The Vampire: A New History (Yale, 2020); “Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’: Composition, Publication, Deception”, Romanticism 28.1 (April 2022), 46–59; and “Literary Vampires in the Long Eighteenth Century” (in The Vampire: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. William Hughes and Nick Groom. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, Forthcoming-b).