In Our Time - Polidori's The Vampyre

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the influential novella of John Polidori (1795-1821) published in 1819 and attributed first to Lord Byron (1788-1824) who had started a version of it in 1816 at the Villa Diodati in the Year Without A Summer. There Byron, his personal physician Polidori, Mary and Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont had whiled away the weeks of miserable weather by telling ghost stories, famously giving rise to Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'. Emerging soon after, 'The Vampyre' thrilled readers with its aristocratic Lord Ruthven who glutted his thirst with the blood of his victims, his status an abrupt change from the stories of peasant vampires of eastern and central Europe that had spread in the 18th Century with the expansion of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The connection with Lord Byron gave the novella a boost, and soon 'The Vampyre' spawned West End plays, penny dreadfuls such as 'Varney the Vampire', Bram Stoker’s 'Dracula', F.W Murnau's film 'Nosferatu A Symphony of Horror', and countless others.The image above is of Bela Lugosi (1882-1956) as Count Mora in Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer's 'Vampires of Prague' (1935)With Nick Groom Professor of Literature in English at the University of MacauSamantha George Associate Professor of Research in Literature at the University of HertfordshireAnd Martyn Rady Professor Emeritus of Central European History at University College LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, in 1819, John Pollydori's novella, The Vampire, thrilled readers with his aristocratic Lord Ribbon, who glutted his thirst with the blood of his victims.

Polydori's personal link with Lord Byron gave it a boost, and soon the vampire spawned West End plays, penned redfills, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Nosferatu and ever onwards. And noble Lord Ribbon was an abrupt change from stories of peasant vampires of Eastern Europe scrutinized by scientists, philosophers and doctors over the previous century to see if they were true.

With me to discuss Polydores of Vampire and Vampires are Nick Groom, Professor of Literature in English at the University of Macau. Sam George, Associate Professor of Research in Literature at the University of Hartfordshire and Martin Rady, Professor Emeritus of Central European History at University College London. Martin Rady, can you tell us what the origins of the vampire story

were in the Austro-Hungarian Empire? We can locate it almost precisely. In 1718, the Austrians take possession of a slice of the former Ottoman Empire, and they take possession of what is now Serbia, northern. Serbia and parts of southwestern Romania. And they start encountering folk superstitions and practices that are of a vampiric origin. In fact, very many of these, much more than the books will suggest, we know of hundreds from the 18th century just in the area of southwestern Romania today, in an area of the size of Belgium.

The first of these to come to prominence was in 1725 when an internal report gets leaked into the Vienese press. I'm saying Viennese press. There's only one newspaper at this time. It's the Veneryshire diarium. It doesn't have a great resonance because nobody reads what is effectively a court circular, which is what the Veneryshire diarium is. But then in 1731 to 32, a series of reports, one written by what's called a proviso, he's a treasury official, a man called Glazer who's operating in Serbia, what is now northern Serbia, and his boss, who is a medical man called Flukinger, their reports find their way to Nuremberg. And Nuremberg is important. And these reports are public.

and they spawn probably something in the region of almost a dozen books and several dozen academic articles. And this is where the vampire begins because their reports create the modern idea of the vampire. There have always been reverence, people coming from the past. There have always been people who live in trees and attack and suck the blood of people passing beneath. But what is important about the vampires that are described in these reports is that they bring together the three features of the vampire. Which are? The first of these is that they're a revenant. They come back from the dead. They are undead. They are not zombies. They look more or less like ordinary people. Secondly, they suck blood in order to obtain the life force from their

victims and thirdly they're contagious. How seriously did the authorities take this report that spread the idea of vampires? We're talking about Eastern Europe and so how seriously did they take it? They take it very seriously as a disruptive element. From the very beginning they are skeptical that there is any truth in it. A few reports suggest that there might be some type of witchcraft involved. but we're dealing here with the early onset of the Enlightenment, and people are beginning to be suspicious about appeals to the supernatural.

And right as early as the 1730s, in these reports and discussions that are coming out over the Serbian vampires, we're finding people saying, look, corpses in cold weather will not decay. There is a process of mummification, which happens under certain atmospheric conditions, that nails don't grow, but the skin falls back. They are very shrewd indeed in their assessments. And continuously, the authorities are trying to impose scientific explanations rather than folk explanations.

Thank you. But their stories were emerging in the Enlightenment. And looking back, as well, the Enlightenment was past all that, surely. but it was taken seriously by philosophers, by churchmen, by medics. Can you give us some idea to develop what's been said now? It was taken extremely seriously, and I think the real reason for that was, as Martin is suggesting, is because these are official reports.

These are military surgeons, these are notaries, these are magistrates. This is to the authorities who are investigating and producing forensic evidence, sometimes performing their own autopsies on these corpses. and therefore providing a body of material that then creates what's been called a media sensation. Dozens of articles, a whole series of books and dissertations that get published not only in the early 1730s, but in fact throughout the century. And so it provides a whole field of potential research, both in terms of theology and also in terms of philosophy.

It gives some traction to theology in what? one way, doesn't it? That will be life after death. Absolutely. This is proof of the afterlife. It might not be an afterlife that you necessarily want to look forward to. But there seems to be a supernatural element that needs to be explained. Now, the leading theologian here is somebody called Dom Augustaun Calme, who is Benedictine Monk. He had already published 26 volumes of commentary on the Bible. And he writes a series of dissertations on the vampires, published in France in 1746, translated into English in 1759.

And it's almost like an early compendium of supernatural tales. And he really analyzes the evidence and tries to, with a certain degree of skepticism, because he's a rational Catholic. He's trying to yoke Catholicism to Enlightenment thinking, an Enlightenment reason. But he's also open to the possibilities that this is challenging ways of thinking.

He does, let's maybe to be too generalized about it, but he does end up. believing in vampires? Well, it appears in the first edition he seems to think that the evidence is fairly finely balanced by the second edition, perhaps on the instructions of the Pope, who was dismissed vampires. He's much more skeptical. But he takes the evidence seriously, and that's when the French philosophers come in and start to ridicule him, and he's held up as somebody who's very credulous. It's a little unfair, I think, because he's simply trying to weigh this different evidence and look at the different cases. But philosophers who, I mean,

mentioned and Voltaire took vampires seriously to some extent. Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, for example. The thing that really challenged the philosophers was the fact that there was so much testimony. There seemed to be so much evidence. There seem to be witnesses and there seemed to be this official documentation. And it really casts the whole notion of proof into doubt. Even though Rousseau says, you know, we all know they don't exist,

yet nevertheless you'll find that there are hundreds of witnesses. So that's one stem where the vampire comes into people. The other is this, we could say perhaps, comes in this extraordinary year without a summer in 1816 where this meeting in Villa Diodati and the telling of ghost stories. But when you take it on from there? Yes, well, I think that there's another important strand

which is medical research. And you do have a series of medical studies trying to determine whether this is the psychology of mass delusion, whether it's to do with diet or access. a dental ingestion of drugs and so forth, or whether there really are vampires. But this builds up into a body of recognisable work. It's a history of Eastern Europe based on vampires.

And vampires get everywhere in the 18th century. There are sort of vampires being used as in figurative ways to describe stock jobbers and commissioned officers and so forth. And this is what the Via Diodati inherits. So what happens in 1816 is that Byron and his physician, Dr. John Polidori, go to Switzerland in part to escape the terrible weather in England because this is the year without a summer or 1800 and froze to death. There was an enormous volcanic explosion the previous year in Indonesia,

shot ash into the sky, changed the climate for about a decade. And so the weather is terrible. They go to Switzerland and the weather's just as bad there. Anyway, they sit down and Byron suggests the all right ghost stories. So we've got Byron, we've got Pollydori, we have Mary Shelley, we have Percy Shelley, and away they go. There's also Claire Claremont. She doesn't seem to have taken part in the competition.

How did the vampire come out of that gathering? Well, they're staying up late at night. They're reading each other ghost stories. The famous incident where they read Coleridge's Christabel and Percy Shelley gets terrified by that. Now Byron suggests that because they're a group of aspiring writers, they have a ghost story challenge. Byron starts to write a vampire story,

abandons it after a few pages and then simply tells a story by the fireside. Percy Shelley doesn't appear to ever get going, neither does Claire Claremont. Polidori starts writing a story that becomes his novel, Ernestus Bukthold, or the modern Oedipus, and Mary Shelley, which is then Mary Godwin,

starts writing Frankenstein. What then happens, or so Polidori claims, is that he then takes up Byron's unfinished vampire story and completes it. He leaves it in Switzerland, and then lo and behold, or so he claims, in 1819, it suddenly appears in the English press in a publication called The New Monthly magazine.

There's a lot of fudge around there, isn't there? Not in what you say. You describe the fudge very clear about it, whether how much Palladori was the author of this. But can we just slightly put that aside for a second? Ask Sam George, can you tell us about the background of John Pallori? We know he was a medical man. Yeah, well, Palladori was,

born in September 1795. His father was an Italian man of letters and his mother was an English governess. He was the oldest son. He went to Ampleforth in Yorkshire so he was taught by Benedictine monks. Yeah, and then he went on to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh.

And in fact he graduated as the youngest MD in the university's history and he was just 19. So he showed an awful lot of promise. And his thesis was on somnambulism, which is interesting. I think at the time somnambulism wasn't really just about sleepwalking in the way that we'd understand it now. So I'd say it was more about the relationship between sort of pain and nightmare.

So it's a little bit reminiscent of Fuseley's famous painting of the demon, you know, that called the nightmare, sort of squatting on this sleeping woman. So Pals Dau had a very interesting background in medicine and interest in the supernatural as well. But Byron took him with him as his personal, personal doctor, I presume, one friend. So he had that place in that society. The other people, some of the other people at the village, Diodati,

the Awe-Tel called him poor Polidori, which could be a patronising remarked by a bunch of literary snobs, or it could be something else. What do you think? Yeah. It's very interesting how Polidori, you know, has this rather sort of tarnished reputation in a way. We have to remember that he was extremely young

when he went abroad in April of 1816 with Byron. And in fact, he was only 20 years of age. You know, Byron was 28 by then. Shelley was 23. And I think it's interesting to sort of note the way that Polidori was treated, slightly with contempt in some ways by Byron and Shelley and Mary Godwin. You described a very bright young man

who'd done extremely well in medicine. And he joined in this contest that they gave us. other and produced something rather that began to, as we will be talking about, the rest of the programme, became the vampire. I think of it, I've given my rather swashboggling idea of why they turned on him, but what's your view? He had a reputation for being rather petulant and it's difficult to know where this came from and also precocious. Certainly they had their own names for him, so they called him, yeah, Pauli-Dory. That was Mary's specific name for him, which she mentioned in the introduction to Frankenstein as well. And also Dr. Polydolly, so just two,

dismissive kind of names that they bestowed on poor John William Palladoury. And I think it's interesting that they, you know, biographies tend to depict a kind of petulant and quick-tempered upstart almost with literary pretensions. So I'd say in the hands of Palladoury, but maybe under the influence of Byron, the vampire transitioned from this kind of dishevelled peasant into this alluring, seductive aristocrat. The vampire has these irresistible powers of seduction. Can I ask Martin to take that on a bit? This short work, the Mampire, can you tell this as the plot of it? And what's different about it?

It's been indicated by Sam that he brought a different view and bearing on it. Can you just summarise it? Well, you've got the central character is a man called Aubrey. And Polly Dory doesn't describe him in particularly glowing terms. He says he's a sort of rather callow youth, impressionable. He teams up with Lord Riven. He finds him a fascinating individual. and they decide to go on a tour together.

The tour is unsuccessful and they part company in Italy because Aubrey has received letters that have suggested that Riven is a terrible womanizer, misogynist and so on and not only commits adultery with women but attempts to sort of socially degrade them as well. and he witnesses Riven in precisely that type of seduction with an Italian lady.

So they part company, Aubrey goes on to Greece. And while he's in Greece, he is very affectionate towards a Greek girl who dies very mysteriously and her neck is ripped out. And he has a nervous breakdown, but he's looked after by Riven, who miraculously reappears to look after him. and they then continue their travelling together. It seems that Riven's peccadillos have been forgiven until they're attacked by robbers

and Riven in his death throes and he says, you must, Aubrey, you must never tell anybody for a year and a day that you've seen me die and swear it, swear it, yes, I solemnly swear it on my oath as a gentleman, etc., etc. And Aubrey returns to London, and blow me down, Riven is back.

He is in Salon society, and even worse, he is now courting and is betrothed to Aubrey's sister. Another beautiful young woman. And Aubrey, after a year and a day, is released from his vow of silence, dashes to his sister, but it is too late. She is already dead. The vampire has struck. End of book. The other thing that really comes across for me when I read it, it's the first time we really get an urban vampire,

let alone a kind of educated or one of high social rank. And this idea of the vampire as predator as well, which we're now very familiar with. So I like to think of Riven as a kind of rake or libertine figure, really. And it's the first time we really see the vampire as a kind of lady killer. You've got the two elements that Sam has just picked up. You've got, on the one hand, the aristocratization of the vampire, the sexualization of the vampire. The aristocratization has to be there because you've got to get these people to move around Europe to go to interesting places.

And you links in together with the genre of Gothic fiction of castles and abys. You've got to, you can't have a villager doing all of these things. And the sexualization, that's there as well to an extent in, I'm thinking of, of Gertes Bride of Corinth, where the woman having been unable to marry her loved one comes and drains his soul and drains his blood. So there is a sexual freesle there already within the vampire story, particularly on the continent, which then gets pulled in and developed by Polly Dory. Thank you, Nick. The vampire is published. They say it's a portrait of Byron, this man, this man, Lord Ribbon.

So there's a bit of a mess around here. What happened? It was published. It doesn't appear until April 1st, 1819 in the New Monthly magazine. And Polly Dory is apparently amazed that this is resurfaced, and it's published along with an introduction explaining the history and a letter, which is full of snippets of gossip about Byron's time in the Viodati. and Polidori is apparently outraged at this. And it's also attributed to Lord Byron.

Now, it then turns out, and this hasn't really been properly researched until very recently, that looking through the archives, they tell a very different story. They tell the story that it's actually Polidori who goes to the New Monthly. He meets with the editor, Allerick Watts. Between the two of them, they actually put this together. Polidori remembers Byron's story, but doesn't have it. And so he says, well, the groundwork is Byron's,

and it can be sold as being an idea of Lord Byron's, but it's not by Lord Byron. And Alaric Watts says, that's great, we can publish it as a piece of Byroniana, so to speak. So they agree to do that, and they really concoct the story between themselves. But it's published as if it's by Lord Byron. And Byron loses his temper.

Byron's henchmen see that the trademark Byron is being abused here. The Byron brand is being abused. And so over the next weeks and months, there's a great row in the literary press in which Pollydora is attempting to secure his ownership of it but also while acknowledging that the idea is Byron's, he loses the copyright and his name is mud. It really wrecks his career.

He's called a plagiarist, he's called a forger, he's seen as a hack writer, and Byron comes out of this pretty much pristine and glowing, but Pollydori then finds it impossible to really re-establish his literary career. So it becomes, in a sense, it's a stick with which to beat a second-rate writer with. What effect did it have?

Well, the effect on Polidore's career was absolutely calamitous. The effect in terms of the sales, it sold very well. But it was the publisher Henry Coburn, who in fact had changed the attribution at the last minute, who benefited from that. Byron managed to escape any... Ofluquy. Yes, although Gertes said it was the finest thing that Byron had ever written.

So they... I think we're in deep enough, really. But I think the point is, is that although it's attributed to Polydori now, I think that it's co-written, it's based on an idea of Lord Byron's, and Lord Byron should perhaps be the person that we are looking towards who actually makes the vampire a more aristocratic figure and a more predatory, erotic figure. Sam.

The work was very popular and had many theatrical allies. adaptations quite quickly. Can you give us a, can you give the listeners a taste of some of that? Just to recap on what Nick was saying, after its magazine debut, the story was published in book form. So it went through something like seven English printings in 1819 alone. And it was expanded into a two-volume French novel and then adapted to the stage the following year. So the main one that people will probably have access to or may have read is by the playwright James Robinson Planchet. and it's one of a growing number of vampire theatricals and melodramas that were inspired by Polly.

There's some really interesting things that occur once the vampire reaches the stage. But there's still this kind of... For example, it becomes very much more sensational. There's a kind of debt to phantasmagoria, and we get the first use of the vampire trap, for example. I think it's also worth pointing out that it's often put on the stage as a double bill with adaptations of Frankenstein. and you have the same actor playing the being in Frankenstein and Lord Riven.

The changes that occurred once the vampires sort of reached the stage, once Polidori's story was adapted, include the first ever use of the stage door device known as the vampire trap so the vampire could kind of disappear and appear again. And so there is this kind of debt to Fantasmogor in melodrama. But there's also some very interesting changes that they make to the figure of the vampire. So, for example, in Planchet's vampire or Bride of the Isles, we get the aristocrats called Earl Marsden,

and Riven sort of returns from the dead. So he's reincarnated as Cromwell, the Bloody, a Celt. So we get this Scottish setting coming in. And this is noteworthy for a number of reasons, because we get, for the first time in the vampire's history, the arrival of vampires in kilts. So that when Lord Riven, aka Cromwelludy, appeared on stage, he was dressed in a played kilt and a grey cloak.

So, yeah, a very kind of interesting moment in the vans. vampire's history. Martin, apart from the kiltz, which is obviously great attraction to the audience, can you explain the popularity of the vampire story? We've had a fair indication already. There's sex, there's aristocrats, there are wonderful backdrops, and of course the reason they use Scotland is, Scotland is, the subtitle is Bride of the Isles in that performance. It's set in the Hepadies. This is an exotic place. I mean, this is the place of of Lossien and Macpherson, a place of legend and mystery. So it fits in there with mysterious places.

The original that Byron has his fragment of a novel, which purports to be what he said at the Deiardati. That's set in a Turkish cemetery. Obviously, you've got Greece featuring in Polydori's work. There are some fantastic locations. On top of that, I think as the century moves on, vampirism starts to hit and cross-cut with other concerns of the time. The first is the problem of disease and tuberculosis in particular. And all of the female victims are described as if they were tubercular victims.

And of course, one of the peculiarities about the second half of the 19th century, is that tubercular females are regarded as sexually alluring in some way and also thought to have a lot. Why is that? Can you give us, you can't just pass that by? I have no idea why it is. And you suggested to us and you just let it drop like that. I'm not, okay, you want the footnotes. You'll get the footnotes.

Let's just take the classic one, Elizabeth Siddell, who becomes Dante Gabriel Rossetti's mistress. Rosetti is related up actually to Polydory and she is regularly featured as a tubercular woman. She is put in baths of cold water in order to make her even more pallid. Edgar Allan Poe, who himself dies of tuberculosis, writes of the sexual excitement he feels

when he watches his wife playing the piano and the blood falling from her mouth onto her white blouse. Could you take this? back to the safer shores of the vampire, please. You were the one that wanted the footnotes. Yeah, I like it, it's my. The point is that what you're dealing with, once we get on to Lucy Westernra,

once we start getting into Bram Stoker's accounts, what we are seeing is tubercular women. And on top of this, of course, we have the discovery of the bacillus in 1870 by clock. And suddenly the idea of a biological or microbe

invading the body of the society and polluting it that is straight in on the vampire and of course this will become one of the leading motifs in the late 19th and early 20th century is the idea of the outsider

the outsider race the outsider groups that come in and destroy decompose is the big word used, a set sung in German, who decompose the society. Nick, Nick Ruham, Polidori's novella, the Mampi,

was, as we know, rather dismissed by his friends or that you turn out to be very good friends. But you think it deserves reassessment. Oh, absolutely. I'm really, and I was fascinated by, some of the passages were terrific. I think the first thing to bear in mind

is that Polidori, Polly probably didn't write it when he said he did, he didn't write it until 1819. Can we just figure that? No, because it's important. Well, I'm going to do it. Right, okay. And where you go? So Polydori probably didn't write it until after Frankenstein.

And it bears the imprint of Frankenstein very deeply in it. So it features comparable characters and comparable issues, such as a central figure who has a series of nervous breakdowns and enters periods of delirium. Now, I think that, unfortunately, it's a book whose reputation goes before it. So it's treated as oh, this is the aristocratic vampire, this is a sexual predator vampire, this is a bironic vampire.

And I think that those are open to more argument. It can be read simply as the deranged fantasy of the central figure Aubrey. That, in fact, there's no vampire at all. He's simply imagining that Riven is a vampire. Riven dies.

Aubrey imagines Riven comes back. Aubrey is haunted by Riven. Aubrey, in fact, is indulging in breaking the sort of sexual taboos, to do with the Countess's daughter, to do with his Greek lover, Ianthi, and in fact, to do with his sister. So the whole thing can be seen really as a sort of psychotic thriller. So there are different ways of reading it. It's not just a vampire story. There might not be any vampires in it. There might just be the hallucination of these vampire figures because the idea's

been planted into Aubrey's mind by his Greek lover. The interplay of the two psychologists is a reason to actually read the book quite closely. And I think that sort of Pollydori has really been, not exactly misread, but he hasn't been afforded the literary credit that he perhaps deserves. And that's because of the, partly because of the whole backstory of this and also because of the figure of Byron looms so large in the story.

And I think if you begin to dismantle that, it becomes a much more interesting story. And let's not forget that Riven escapes at the end. Riven isn't found. The door is left open for a sequel. that Pollydori wanted to write, but you couldn't get a contract for it. I mean, what would have happened? Who knows? Because Aubrey also dies, of course, covered in blood, and his sister's dead as well. So it seems to me it's almost like an early detective story,

but it's a very strange detective story. It's a romantic detective story. It's a sort of detective story that Thomas de Quincy would have written. You know, it's full of dreams, delusions, fantasies, hallucinations, and you're never quite sure what's really happening. Sam, what happened to Polaroi? It's a sad tale, really. Polidori died in London in 1821. He was weighed down by depression. How old was he then?

He was 26. He was weighed down by depression and gambling debts. And his family suspected that he'd taken prussic acid, possibly cyanide. But the verdict came back that he died by the visitation of God, which means that he died by natural causes. And sadly, yeah, he wasn't to know of the fame that his creature would achieve, really, as the star of hundreds of books, films and plays, and actually millions of nightmares. But there's a very interesting story about Palladori's grave as well.

But just before we get to that, it's interesting to note that I think Byron didn't learn of Polly's death until much later. I think it was in January 1822, given the fact he died in August. And I think he just said something like, you know, oh, poor Pallidori is gone. And he kind of speculated over what had caused his death. But he was led to believe that Palladori had died sort of, you know, without a struggle. But there wasn't much sense of mourning, I don't think, for poor Palliorey at that point. Because he died by natural causes, he was allowed to be buried.

And he was laid to rest in St. Pancras' old church. The church has a very interesting history, and it's kind of become a kind of site of Gothic tourism. but not because of Pollydory, because first of all, Mary Walsoncroft is buried there, the mother of Mary Shelley. And of course, Shelley and Mary Shelley, or Mary Godwin, as she was then, conducted much of their courtship in that graveyard. There are even rumours that they consummated their relationship in that graveyard. But certainly Shelley was drawn to Mary because of her melancholy habit of reading on her mother's grave. But the interesting story about Polly's grave is that he was caught up again in further kind of. of turmoil and disruption.

And the church has withstood the Industrial Revolution, Victorian improvements, wartime damage, and even an attack by Satanists in 1985. And its motto is, I am here in a place beyond desire or fear, which is actually very interesting in relation to Polidori, the idea of transcending death. But to go back to this uncanny story of Polidori's grave, the churchyard ceased to be a graveyard in about 1850. by which time it had accommodated probably centuries of burials.

But twice in the 1800s, the St. Pancras Railway sought to acquire the land, and the graves were subsequently disturbed and dismantled, and the bodies were exhumed. And the architect at this time was none other than Arthur Bloomfield, but his assistant was the Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy, who was then a very young man in training as an architect. But the point of this is that many of the disturbed graves, were stacked up against an ancient ash tree known as the hardy tree,

which is a very kind of uncanny fusion of abandoned gravestones and the roots of a living tree. And Pollydori's tomb is rumoured to be one of those unsettled graves that lie under this hardy tree. So poor Pollydori, who was somewhat uncelebrated in life, is also unmemorised in death. Nick, I think Sam's right in saying that, you know,

the coroner's report suggested this was a visitation from heaven that caused his death. But I think there's strong evidence as well that he might have committed suicide. He was always threatening to commit suicide, and Byron remembered this. And the day on which he died was the anniversary of Thomas Chatterton's death. Martin, Bram Stoker called his vampire Dracula, again from Eastern Europe. Is there a direct connection, no? Well, there is a connection.

I mean, just to backtrack a little, I mean, the great novel that is, produced in the, I think 1870s, is Sheridan Lefanoos Carmilla, which is about a female vampire. It's actually sexualized as well. She's not only an aristocrat. She is a lesbian as well. So we're getting even deeper shades of sexual referencing there.

That's the big one. And it's set in Styria in southeastern Austria. And originally Stoker planned to set, his vampire story in Styria, and the person that was going to be the main character, was going to be known as Wampere rather than Dracula. And we know that he's reading in Whitby Library, and he comes across two classic works,

William Wilkinson, which is a history of the Danubean Principalities, what we would now call essentially Romania, and it goes into the history of that region, and perhaps more particularly Emily Gerard's Transylvanian superstitions. And this transforms his work, and there are a huge number of references that are taken straight out of Gerard and planted into the Dracula book.

And what he writes in his notes is out of Gerard Dracula is the Romanian name for devil that is as far as he knows he appears to be unaware that there is a man

called Vlad Tepesh Vlad the Impaler Dracula son of the dragon or of the dragon he appears to be unaware of this he doesn't think that

there is a link he's unaware of that link. I mean, people would love to be able to read in, you know, Vlad the impaler and sticking stakes through vampires. There's no evidence that there's a link to all that he knows about this. He knows very little about Transylvania.

But Dracula sweeps into our consciousness has never left it since. Can we, we're working towards an end here, Nick. This vampire, Dracula and so on,

has a tremendous life. in theatre, cinema, and so on. The British was a Varney the Vampire, serialised for hundreds of times and so on. Can you give us some idea of the extent of the reputation, if not the quality of it? Of Varney the vampire. No, of the whole vampire.

Yeah, a whole vampire thing, including Dracula. Yes, well, I think that if Polidora's vampire had any long-lasting impact. It was in popularising the figure of the vampire, as Sam has been saying, for example, on the stage, and there are a whole succession of later 19th century vampire stories. You've mentioned Varney the vampire, Martin mentioned Lefanoe's Car Miller.

All of these really then culminate in Bram Stoker's Dracula. And Stoker spent years researching Dracula. It wasn't just a pot boiler. He'd read the earlier vampire stories. he knew Poladora's work, he'd read a lot of the medical and historical work as well. I think one of the things that come through very strongly is the medical themes in these. So often you have doctors, you have medical science being involved, you have contagion and disease, as Martin was pointing out.

Unusually, you also have most of these 19th century vampires are also female. So that's, I mean, there are three female vampires in Dracula, but of course the central figure. In fact, there's four, if you include Lucy. but the actual central figure is male. So Bram Stoker is adapting the story, but he's also drawing very heavily on those earlier incarnations of the vampire.

And I think you can see Dracula as the culmination of decades of writing about vampires. Final short word from you, first Martin, and then from Sam. The point about Dracula and Transylvania and location is that when we're writing vampire stories, should we ever come to our own little villa Diodarthe, we will no doubt choose an area to set in it, which people don't know much about,

so we can inscribe the fantasies of the vampire in a mysterious place. Sam? The legacy of Lord Riven and Palladori's vampire goes beyond even the vampire figure. So he spawned a whole series of demonic lovers, really, from the Brontes, Mr. Rochester, to the more sexy incarnations of Dracula.

and the contemporary paranormal romances. So, for example, now in the present day, we get this idea of mortal women seduced by brooding, bad and dangerous vampires. And this is something that Palladori also started. So I think Palladori's vampire is sexualized and mesmeric as is Dracula. So he does provide a template for that model of vampire,

this kind of byronic hero or satanic lord, I think is what Christopher Fraling would call it. But I think one thing we haven't touched on maybe is the legacy of Palladoury in the present day. So I'd say, you know, you need to go to paranormal romance, really. So we even mentioned, say, Stephanie Mayer's Twilight series. Edward Cullen, Robert Patterson, continues this tradition of British actors playing vampires. This idea of Englishness comes from Pallori's Lord Riven. So you get British actors from Christopher Lee to Gary Oldman playing these vampires in film.

And I think, going back to Edward Cullen, there is a kind of reproduction of an earlier archetype who is Lord Riven. And he's something of a kind of consumerist fantasy in Mayer's Twilight series. There's something very expensive and kind of about him. And I think, again, this comes from the vampire aristocrat archetype that we've spoken about. But there's also a kind of, I think Edward Cullen represents that earlier model of massacist. skinnility as well. And this shows the long-reaching, you know, legacy of Pollydori's vampire. And I think just to sum this up, I mean, Catherine Spoon has spoken about this really well. She's Professor of Gothic Literature at Lancaster. And she says over a period of about 200 years,

vampires have changed from the sort of grottie living corpses of folklore into witty, sexy superachievers. It's an excellent quote. Last word, short words now, Nick. Well, I just want to point out something which we haven't discussed. which is how you slay vampires. Because, of course, this doesn't happen in Polydora's story of the vampire. And there is an established part of vampire law, of vampirology in the 18th century.

There are a number of ways in which you dispatch them. You nail them to the coffin so they can't get out. That's where the other staking comes from to, you know, stick them to the ground. You hamstring them or break their legs or break their teeth. And then there are a number of other things such as scattering incense. When do you drive this take through their hearts, when does that come in? That's very early, about 1730s, I think. But in fact, it goes right back to early Gothic societies in the 5th and 6th centuries.

It's something to do with... You get them out of the ground and put us to take to the last. Well, the way that you prevent the dead from rising, it's nailed them to the ground. So that has a long history. But the way that it becomes incorporated into vampire law is, I think, indicative of this longer folkloric history. But it's also, interestingly, not only doesn't happen in. in Polydores the vampire. Dracula himself isn't slain like that.

And so Van Helsing is saying, well, you need to stake him and decapitate him and fill his mouth with garlic. It doesn't happen with Dracula. Well, thank you very much. Thank you all very much. Thanks, Sam George, Nick Groom and Martin Rady and to our studio engineer, Duncan Hannan. Next week, arguably our most successful human ancestor,

Homo erectus, who populated this planet for two million years, that's seven times longer than we've been here. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you like to say that you didn't get time to say? Why don't we start with you, Nick? Thank you.

I think one thing that it's important to really question is this idea that the 18th century vampire was usually considered to be an East European peasant. It's very interesting when vampires are really, arrive in the English press and the report of these cases, they're straight away seen as political allegory, and it's seen as a way of criticising the authorities, and then this report talks about ravenous government ministers who suck the blood of the people. And so straight away, you have the vampire going up into those higher social classes. So I think you can see vampires

as being socially mobile throughout the 18th century. As I said, they also went into the army as commissioned officers. They work in the church, and Voltaire talks about monks being vampires. They're very much in the commercial world, certainly overseas traders, South Sea bubble investors, speculators are seen as vampires.

Literary critics are seen as vampires, and so are booksellers. So it's really anybody who exploits another group of society. And there is a sort of sense that Princess von Schwarzenberg in Poland is considered to be a possible vampire. So they do very rapidly ascend into the higher levels of society.

So I think that really sort of Byron and Pollydori are riding on that wave that vampires, you know, have already been demonstrated that they are not just stuck in some East European village, but they have the potential to be a figure that has a place at many different levels of society. My don't? Yes, I mean, it goes down the scale as well, because Linnaeus describes makes one of the fruit bats into a vampire bat.

So, you know, it can be applied to animals as well. The point what I would want to say is that we tend to look at the literary vampire and forget about the actual origins of where it comes from, which is something to do with orthodoxy. I mean, orthodoxy is a very respectable religion. I mean, it has a pucker theology behind it. The problem is, as with all religions, it's the vernacular religion. It's the religion as preached by often ill-educated priests that really determines what the popular reading of orthodoxy is. And there are all sorts of beliefs current within the lower echelons

of orthodox belief about the dead and the undead, and feeding the dead, and preventing them chewing, preventing them walking around after death. This is, you know, deeply there in Orthodox popular spirituality. And the impact of it is really quite astonishing for these Habsburg administrators. There are hundreds and hundreds of vampires.

cases. Far more than most people think about. We always talk about the big ones that make it into the press. There are, from Serbia, from southwestern Romania alone, there are about three or 400 cases from the 18th century. There's stuff in the Hungarian archives, there's stuff in Vienna relating to all of this material and these surveys. So there's a vast amount that can be looked at. And historians are only just beginning to have a look at. the real hard evidence of what the folk belief is that's there. And the way it links in to other, Nick may know more about this than I do, but this obsession that we have around about 1700 with shroud eating.

The book I know is by a man called Ranft on the chewing of shrouds. It's a proper scientific book written in German. What are people doing when they eat them? through their shrouds and start eating their own faces. Because this is what, when corpses are exhumed, this is what they discover. Ravent calls it manducation, and he describes how walking through a graveyard, you can sometimes hear the corpses eating their grave clothes and then feasting upon themselves. And so this is clearly extremely sinister and grisly folk belief.

But it's a very good example of something that Bram Stoker picks up on in Dracula, when he has the female vampire, the she vampire, coming down towards Harker and her jaws are churning and he can sort of hear this horrible sound. And that echoes all the way back to this idea of manducation and people, you know, sort of auto-cannibalism of the corpse. So it's a very sort of sinister and unnerving image. But you're quite right, it was also sort of seen as a field of scientific inquiry.

Sam, do you want to come in? Yeah, I mean, just going back to Polaro's story again, I think after Lord Riven, as Martin has said, most of the notable vampires are aristocratic. So we've got Rhymers, Sir Francis Varney, the Penny Dreadful. We've got Nfanoos Carmilla or Countess Carnstein, Stokers Count Dracula. But I think the thing that really stands out for me

is just this idea that Polidori's story seems to suggest that British society itself is vampirish in some way. You know, it's aristocratic representatives, prey on the people wherever they go. This is something that comes from, Polidori's story. So there's themes of national identity and social class, and this really very much anticipates Marx, because Marx drew on the metaphor of the vampire again and again to describe the processes of modern capitalism. And I think, so, for example, he said, you know, capital survives by constantly sucking in living labour, vampire-like, and so on.

And so this is the kind of imagery that I feel comes from Polidori's idea about the vampire's aristocrat, the vampire's blood suck. And this is a imagery that's prevalent in Marx's 1847 lectures. And so it forms about the writing that form the basis of capital. And it's also around about the same year that Varney the Vampire is published. So there's obviously a relationship there as well. And this all kind of in some ways links back to Polaro's. I think that that sort of proved the modernity of the vampire. Yeah.

It's not just about the aristocracy. It's also about the modern capitalist. Yeah. And Marx is very much sort of on the. button by sort of thinking about relating vampires to immediate social and economic issues. And this is something which I think it's easy to overlook, is that we think about these age-old superstitions, you know, going back into the beginning of the 18th century. In fact, the portrayal of the vampires in the 19th century from the time of Polly

onwards is as a modern creature, as a tangible physical creature who is up to date, who is part of contemporary society. and that's why Bram Stoker in Dracula includes things like Kodak cameras and the phonograph and the telegraph and Winchester rifles and all those sorts of things it's not just about garlic and crosses it's also about modern consumer society

But the notion of the Mumpines become a fantastic metaphor hasn't it? As you were saying, as Sam was saying all over the place now they have these blood-sucking people who are... You wouldn't say something, Martin? No, well you look this if you wanted to say something You have that look about you. I'm just hanging on every word of God.

I don't believe that one I see. Okay, Nick. I can say something about that. In terms of only a few years after Dracula is published, the idea of contagion that Martin was talking about is really made explicit in a vampire story by Sabin Bering Gould, in which the vampire stands up and said they used to call us vampires, now they call us the influenza.

So there's an explicit relationship there. to the notion of, you know, pandemic contagion being associated with vampirism. Right. Thank you all very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. I thought it was going to be like, we have such a great friendship that we can talk about things that I can't talk about with anyone else, even my wife. I can't talk to you about things that I can't talk to my wife about. Because when I tried to talk to my wife about work, she just rolls her eyes.

I thought you're going to say, like astronauts, we're the only ones who've been to the moon. and no one else has seen what we've seen. I'm Louis Theroux, and if, like me, you enjoyed listening to John Ronson's Things Fell Apart podcast, you might also like this conversation where I ask him all about how he made it. Funny, so you're conflict-averse, I'm conflict-averse, yet we spend our lives putting ourselves in very conflict-heavy situations.

Why is that, Louis? That's How Things Fell apart with John Ronson and Louis Therou, on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.