The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic vampire and its progeny

For Marcus Sedgwick (1968‒2022)

‘I will live seven times, and I will look for you and love you in every life’

(Midwinterblood, 2011)

Table of Contents

List of figures

Notes on contributors

Acknowledgments

Chronology

Christopher Frayling, Foreword: Polidori revisited

The birth of The Vampyre

1. Sam George and Bill Hughes, Introduction

2. Sam George, Phantasmagoria: Polidori’s The Vampyre from theatricals to vampire slaying kits

3. Fabio Camilletti, A séance in Bristol Gardens: Reassessing The Vampyre

4. Harriet Fletcher, Byromania: Polidori, fandom and the Romantic vampire’s celebrity origins

5. Bill Hughes, Rebellion, treachery, and glamour: Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon, Polidori and the progress of the Romantic vampire

6. Marcus Sedgwick, Sexual contagions: Romantic vampirism and tuberculosis; or, ‘I should like to die of a consumption’

7. Nick Groom, The Vampyre, Aubrey, and Frankenstein

The legacy of The Vampyre

8. Sam George and Bill Hughes, From lord to slave: Revolt and parasitism in Uriah Derick D’Arcy’s The Black Vampyre

9. Ivan Phillips, ‘But if thine eye be evil’: Tropes of vision in the rise of the modern vampire

10. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, ‘Knowledge is a fatal thing’, or from fatal whispers to vampire songs: Breaking Polidori’s oath in The Vampire Chronicles and Byzantium

11. Kaja Franck, ‘The deadly hue of his face’: The genesis of the vampiric gentleman and his deadly beauty; Or, how Lord Ruthven became Edward Cullen

12. Jillian Wingfield, Vampensteins from Villa Diodati: The assimilation of pseudo-science in twenty-first-century vampire fiction

Sam George, Afterword: St Pancras Old Church and the mystery of Polidori’s grave

Appendix 1: John William Polidori, The Vampyre

Appendix 2: George, Lord Byron, ‘A Fragment’

Bibliography

Index