You're Dead to Me - Vampires in Gothic Literature

Episode Date: August 7, 2020

Host Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Corin Throsby and Comedian Ed Gamble to look at the role and development of vampire characters throughout 19th century Gothic literature and its continuing effect on pop culture today. Which vampire character is based on infamous bad boy Lord Byron? Who was the first vampire character to have fangs? And in case you ever need to know, just how many ways are there to kill a vampire?

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a history podcast for everyone. For people who don't like history, people who do like history and people who forgot to learn any at school. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. And you might have heard my other podcast, Homeschool History, but that one's mostly for the kids. On this podcast, we're all about finding the geeky giggles with our signature blend of

comedians and brainiacs. And today we are sinking our teeth into the gorgeously gothic explosion of vampire literature in 19th century Europe. Yummy. And to do that, I'm joined by two very special guests in History Corner. She's a writer, broadcaster and expert on romantic literature and early celebrity culture. She's a BBC New Generation thinker and she presents the Literary Pursuit show on BBC Radio 3. It's one of your Dead to Me's best pals. It's Dr. Corinne Throsby. Hi, Corinne. How are you? Welcome back. I've actually been sleeping in a coffin full of earth since I last saw you, Greg. But I've been waiting for this moment and it's great to be back. I'm really thrilled to be here.

You've risen from the dead and we have to shut all the curtains to make sure the sun doesn't burn your skin. Very delighted to have you back. Last time we heard you was on the Mary Shelley episode as well. And this is sort of gothic again, isn't it? We're kind of back into the gothic stuff. Yeah, they all tie in together. We'll be hearing a bit about Byron and Mary again today.

So yeah, it's what I'm into. No judgment here. And in Comedy Corner, you'll have seen him on Mock the Week, live at the Apollo Taskmaster, 8 out of 10 cats. And his brilliant stand-up special Blood Sugar is on Amazon Prime right now. It's very funny. He's the co-host of the smash hit imaginary dining podcast Off Menu with James Acaster. And he got a perfect 10 out of 10 on the quiz with the Lord Byron episode of You're Dead to Me,

also available on BBC Sounds. It's Bloomin' Ed Gamble. Hi, Ed, how are you? Fine, thank you, Greg. How are you? I've got to say, now you've mentioned that my special is called Blood Sugar, this feels even more appropriate. Yeah.

I mean, I have to say, I'm starting to wonder. You're a you're a comedian you work at night you're into heavy metal kind of gothic blood sugar i mean are you a vampire i do own a leather trench coat oh that's very blade did the leather trench coats come at a sort of moment of like this is going to be something i'm gonna invest in for the rest of my life and it's my new look? Or was it a moment of weakness? It was when I was 14 I thought this is going to be my look and I had big boots with flames on them as well. I don't wear them anymore. I've still got the trench coat though because actually in another piece of vampire content

I did a musical, Buffy musical episode that we did at the Clapham Grand and I played Spike. So there you go, I have played a vampire. You have played a vampire and that's just your cover story for being a vampire. Exactly. I'm refusing to accept. Yeah, I mean, Joss Whedon was there. You got to Spike in front of him. It was incredible and he came out on stage. He stood next to me at the end for this big sing-along at the end and I was the only one who didn't really know the words for the last bit, so that was quite embarrassing. You had the coat and that's all that matters exactly Corinne who's your favourite pop culture vampire not 19th century but modern it all started for me at Simone Thompson's 12th

birthday party when we got the VHS of the Lost Boys and I was terrified and also felt another feeling I couldn't quite put my finger on. But really, I'm a massive, massive Buffy nerd. I can even say that I have a published article on Buffy and fashion. That is how nerdy I go. And would the leather trench coat have made it into the article? The leather trench coat is central, central to the thesis. So what do you know? We begin the podcast as ever with a so what do you know? This is where I have a guess at what

listeners at home might know about today's episode. So vampires, well you know what that is, sexy, sexy, undead bloodsuckers. There's no shortage of them. They pop up all over the place in pop culture. They are the bloodthirsty babes we love to be scared of. And maybe you're thinking of the cult classics. So you've got your buffies, obviously. You've got True Blood, Vampire Diaries. There's the old school Nosferatu. You've got your Gary Oldman crawling like a lizard up the side of a castle. Lost Boys, Corrin's mentioned. You've got your sparkly vegetarian vamps in Twilight. Never really my speed, but, you know, very popular with lots of other people. Then there's Blade with his big old sword. And what we do with the shadows with the big old laughs. So vampires come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They are very much alive and kicking

in terms of our appetite for them, even though they're very much undead. So where do these vampire stories come from? And why are vampires sexy? Because you know, there's something pretty weird about the idea. So today's show is about the 19th century but corin in fairness we do sort of have vampires in the medieval world of a sort and this is sort of my area i'm a medievalist by training but i know you know a fair bit about this as well ed do you know what they were called at the time i have absolutely no idea okay i'm so they I take a guess, but then... Yeah, go on. Nah, I'm not going to

because I'm going to embarrass myself in front of historians. Oh. What I'll do is I'll wait for you to tell me the right answer and then I'll go, oh, that's what I was thinking of. All right then, we'll compromise there.

They were known as revenants. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. So literally meaning the returned, the people who return. they turn up in medieval sources in the 12th century and william newber is the most famous scholar who writes about them so he was a chronicler of his age so he wrote about the history of england from 1066 until he died in about 1198 i think and he told the story of various villages around England that had been under attack from revenants, which are sort of vampires, basically reanimated corpses lurching out of the grave,

but bloated and smelly, oozing blood from their eyes and ears and their bodies, kind of like a squished leech. One of them is a man who climbs out of his grave and then tries to get into bed with his wife and then climbs on top of her and crushes her and she throws him out and then he tries to get into his brother's house and then he runs him up with some animals there are various stories of dogs barking smell a miasma arriving as they sort of

bring a plague it's kind of grim these stories of people who awake out of the grave and cause havoc and commotion what do you think ed was the go-to cure for dealing with these rampaging night revenants it's a way of killing them fire it's normally fire isn't it yeah yeah there was a bishop who wrote a nice letter and put it on his chest and that worked apparently so so just like a nice letter saying god forgives you that's okay but yeah fire cutting them up so severing the limbs and decapitation were the main things that William and Nubra recommended in the 12th century. So good to know. And what's interesting, actually,

is that for a while, historians used to think, well, these are just folk stories. This is just metaphor for, you know, the 12th century is a time of war and plague and pestilence. This is just people getting a bit carried away. It's not real. And then archaeologists have found some bodies, carried away it's not real and then archaeologists have found some bodies and the bodies have been cut up and they have been smashed up decapitated burned and sometimes even staked and they've been found in yorkshire in a place called warren percy men women and children and everyone went oh is this genuinely real that no that doesn't mean the revenants are real does it it just means there's someone else who believed it yes it means that the't mean the revenants are real, does it? It just means there's some matters who believed it. Yes, it means that the belief in the revenants was real.

But I do like the idea that people did actually fear that perhaps there would be people lurching out of the grave. In Venice, they also found people with bricks stuffed into their mouths, which apparently is a way of stopping a vampire biting you, allegedly. That'll stop anyone biting you, really. Yeah, it's quite hard to bite with a brick in your mouth. It's the old phrase, you can't bite with a brick in your mouth. Corinne, we have a lovely story from the 1500s from Silesia in Poland, and a man,

his nickname was the Bad Breath Vampire of Pench, but his real name was unfortunate. It was, Greg. It was Johannes Cant kantias he really wasn't a nice guy yeah apparently he was awful in life and then he came back to haunt everyone as a ghost and was really the worst ghost you could possibly imagine yeah ed do you want to guess how he died oh i'm still i mean i'm still on the name to be honest, Greg. How he died. Yeah. Did he get staked? Sort of, but not in the heart.

In terms of his name, do think in that kind of region of the body. He got staked up the bum. Nearly. He got kicked in the dick by a horse. The only other way to kill a vampire. This was while he was alive. So this is what killed him. We're not sure if it was definitely in the crotch the crotch translation i think is good enough for me difficult to get it

with a horse's hoof right on the dick isn't it i'd imagine it's just the full area really yeah i think so i think you know general groinal damage general groinal damage that's my new character he's in the army this is what kills him And Corinne, in terms of how he returns, he's really, really committed to being the worst possible kind of nuisance, isn't he? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, he does everything. He gives full poltergeist noises. He's a rapist. He turns milk into blood. I mean, there is just nothing this guy doesn't do. Dogs bark at night. There are weird footprints all over the town. He turns milk into blood. I mean, there is just nothing this guy doesn't do. Dogs bark at night.

There are weird footprints all over the town. Old men are strangled. He was seen galloping... This is when he's a ghost, right? So he's a revenant. So he's come back as a kind of night beast. Can I ask how he was trying to commit sex crimes when clearly his genitals had been absolutely obliterated by a horse?

He was seen galloping around the town like a horse on all four limbs. So I don't know what happened there but he vomited fire it's quite good that's good he wrestled people to the ground he sucked the milk out of cows udders that's very specific he chucked goats around are you making this up now i think you got to the end of the list after the fire thing. And now you chucked a goat around. Called a chicken a name. But he smelled disgusting as well. So his nickname was the Bad Breath Vampire.

So he was this famous revenant of the 16th century. We're talking today about creative storytelling, about fiction and so on. But Corinne, in fairness, these stories are part of the culture. They're part of the way people understand the world. And so the, in fairness, these stories are part of the culture, they're part of the way people understand the world. And so the folklore is important, isn't it? This story was part of a collection of stories by a theologian called Henry Moore. It was this kind of weird combination where these are obviously ghost stories, but he presents them as this very factual scholarly account of, you know, these sort of true happenings. And so

it really raises this question of what actually happened, what was going on here. And it really starts a whole trend in vampire literature throughout the 19th and 20th century, where it's often framed in this medical, philosophical way, where it's all about listing things, way, where it's all about listing things, categorising things. And we really see this shift in the 18th century. This is where we start to see the vampire as we know it. And all of these stories lead up to the vampire really being codified and having all the properties that we now associate with vampires and ideas about how to kill them and all these rules that we now know are associated with vampires. Yeah. I mean, them and all these rules that we now know are associated with vampires. Yeah, I mean, in 1746, we get a French biblical scholar called Dom Augustin Calmet,

and he writes a very catchy title, Dissertation on the Apparitions of Angels, Demons and Spirits, and on the Revenants and Vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. That is not going to fit on the Kindle, is it? And he has some top tips on how to kill vampires as well as beheading and burning. He's got a couple of really special ones do you want to have a quick guess ed give him a kiss just really make them fall in love with you and then break their heart oh wow that's really brutal seduce them catfish them then leave them the altar no uh sucking on their gums so you were kind of close with the kiss that's what i call a kiss yeah and the other thing you could do apparently was smear yourself with their blood right which i don't

recommend that the sucking on your gum sounds like he was a vampire trying to get people to come really near his mouth apparently you kill a vampire by just sucking on their gum so come give it a go there is one very short german poem about a vampire from 1748 called Der Vampir by Augustus Heinrich Ossenfelder. Good name. And it's probably the first literary vampire in the Western tradition. Western tradition being an important word there, because today we're really talking about stories in the kind of European and Western literature tradition, aren't we, Corinne? Yeah, we are. I mean, there are vampires in loads of other cultures. But today we're just focusing particularly on Britain, actually, on how vampires emerged in British literature specifically. Corinne, where do we really start with vampire lit? Is it John Stagg?

Yeah, you could say that. So in the mid 18th century, we're starting to see the word vampire being used more regularly in English, not just to describe bloodsuckers, but also as a metaphor for people who exploit other people. But we haven't really yet had a piece of fiction totally dedicated to vampires. That happens in 1810 when the poet John Stagg, who was known as the Blind Bard due to the fact that he was blind, he writes a poem imaginatively called The Vampire, which we'll see that title come up again and again. I don't know why this like fantastic mythical creature conjures such imaginative titles. But in his poem, he tells the story of a guy called Herman, who is haunted by a friend of his who died recently and is draining him of blood,

no longer a friend. And Herman tells his wife, Gertrude, that he will probably come back and do the same thing to her. And Gertrude is like, no, I don't think so. And she drives a stake through his heart. Ah, well, that's love for you. You know, I'd like to think my wife would do the same for me. I mean, that's a stake through the heart in 1810. That's, you know, that's 200 years ago, and we're already staking the heart. That feels like a nice trope. Yeah, I mean, this is when it all comes together. And people say vampires are as old as time itself. And there are vampire-like creatures all the way back to ancient

mythology. This is when we start to see the vampires as we know it. At that point, the book is called The Vampire, but it's spelled with a sexy Y, isn't it? V-A-M-P-Y-R-E. The Vampire. The Vampire, yeah. And the wife in that is called Gertrude. So Gertrude kills Herman. So that's fun. And Ed, you're probably familiar with the next chap

we're going to talk about because it's Lord Byron. And last time out, 10 out of 10, but you did say that you'd forget everything you learned within one calendar month. And this shows you how good my memory is. I was about to say I've forgotten everything, forgetting that I'd already said that I would forget everything. Feel free to ask me some more questions about him, but I have forgotten.

That's all right. That's all we've got, Corinne, here. She can remind you. Byron dabbles with vampire fiction as well, roughly the same time, in the 1810s. His story is called The Jawa, which is a great pronunciation, I think. It's from Ottoman Turkish, is it? It is. It means infidel or someone who is a non-believer, or in this case, a Christian, because he's being described by someone in Turkey. Byron had travelled to Greece

on his grand tour, and he'd heard local stories of vampires and was really interested in them and excited by them. And so he includes in his poem, The Jawa, suggests that the Jawa, it was the victim of a vampire curse that meant that when he died, he would come back and eat his family. Lovely. It's a thing in vampire literature. It keeps going. You see it all the way through. And it was in the Stagg poem as well. This idea that vampires end up hurting the people that they're closest to. Oh, it's like Buffy again. It is like Buffy. There are so many relatives in vampire fiction. There's always like a brother or a sister and they're always in danger. And yeah, we see this time and time again. Byron was hanging around the same time as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the great romantic poets, and he wrote a story called Christabel. And Christabel is about the mysterious Geraldine.

I love the idea of the mysterious Geraldine. That's a great, I mean, you know, you don't meet many Geraldines who are mysterious. Well, so far, we've had Geraldine and Gertrude, picking the two least mysterious female names possible. The two least mysterious female names possible. But the story of Christabel Corrin is, it's a sort of seduction poem. It's quite sexy. Yeah, it is quite sexy. There's always these things where something's labelled like queer erotica and it always comes down to like there was a glance or something

and you're like, really? That's not like that sexy. But yeah, this one is is they kind of get hot and heavy and not just hot and heavy ed last time out we got you to read some byron fan mail i remember that i was about to say the pubes and the boobs we are going to go boobs again because um christabel features a scene where geraldine's chest features something rather supernatural and so this sounds like a really erotic episode of vicar of Dibley at the moment. Oh, yeah, she is called Geraldine, isn't she? All right, well, let me read you the line.

So like one that shuddered, she unbound the cincture from beneath her breast, her silken robe and inner vest dropped to her feet and in full view. Behold her bosom and half her side, a sight to dream of, not to tell. And she is to sleep by Christabel. So she's getting naked, but there's something a bit weird about her body. And when Lord Byron read this poem, do you remember, Ed, they went on holiday together in Switzerland and they rented a house and Mary Shelley was there and Byron was... Well, Byron read this poem out and it freaked Percy Shelley out. He had a full-on panic attack, ran out of the room screaming and had weird visions that night in his sleep. Is it because of the inner vest, then?

It could be. It's to do with the description he'd just heard. I think the inner vest sounds like she's taken her skin off. That's so dark. I imagined it like an idea of a vest isn't very sexy so i thought it's probably some sort of metaphor for skin so she's taking her skin off like the robbie williams rock dj video percy shelley was very much into early robbie williams he didn't like the later stuff but he really enjoyed millennium actually the division he had was of a woman's breasts with eyeballs for nipples.

Oh. That's weirder than mine. It sort of is and it sort of isn't. I mean, yours is really gross. Yours is like Gunther von Hagen, like, taking off all the skin and, like, looking at the musculature. And his is basically just boobs with eyes. Useless place for a pair of eyes, though. If you're going to have an extra pair of eyes... I don't know, because, like, you know know when men look down at a lady's breast and then you have those t-shirts that say i'm up here

you don't you don't need them you can literally just like have the eyes like looking up to direct them back yeah okay so that is byron and and percy shelly and hopefully that's going to get the kids reading romantic poetry because who doesn't want to think about boobs with eyes. So let's move on to a real game changer, The Vampire, another one also called The Vampire. And this one is by Dr. John Polidori, who's also staying at the house during that storytelling session. Polidori is Byron's doctor. Yeah, I think Byron was a massive hypochondriac because he took his own doctor with him on this big trip.

And he was there on the famous evening when they decide to tell ghost stories, the evening that leads to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein, and Byron tells slash writes this fragment of a poem about a vampire. And Polidori, who was there, really picks up on this idea and writes his own short novel about a vampire. And this is really the first piece of prose fiction about vampires as opposed to poetry that we see. And it's about a young Englishman called Aubrey who meets a mysterious nobleman called Lord Ruthven and they decide to travel to Europe together.

And there are some mysterious deaths and then they're attacked by bandits and Lord Ruthven is killed. And Aubrey is like, phew, because that guy was weird. And then imagine his surprise when at a party in London a year later, who should turn up? But Lord Ruthven, he's not dead. Or is he? And then Lord Ruthven marries Aubrey's sister and kills her because he's a vampire.

And Lord Ruthven is basically Byron. That was definitely the interpretation at the time because you have this story of two guys traveling to Europe together and one of them's this powerful seductive nobleman and one is like the sort of enthralled follower and that was very much the perceived dynamic between Byron and Polidori. Polidori and Byron have a bit of a falling out in real life because of this story, really. A really unscrupulous publisher called Henry Colburn, who was like the hit maker of the 19th century, he's like the stock Aitken waterman. He loves publishing anything to do with Byron because it's always a massive hit. He gets the manuscript for this book and publishes it with Byron's name on it. And Byron is really pissed off and totally blames Polidori, even though he was

completely against them doing this and tried to get the name corrected. Two years later, Polidori, who'd been in this depression and got into gambling debts, ended up committing suicide. Sad story. So we're starting to see the kind of romantic thing coming as well, aren't we? The idea of the vampire now is brooding and sexy and dark and a bit scary, but also attractive. Yeah, I mean, Polidori is really riffing on the Byronic hero, dark, brooding, loner figure. And the really key thing about this vampire story is in this, the vampire becomes a personality. So previously, all the vampires have been dead-eyed zombies. We haven't really got a sense that they have any feelings or thoughts about things. And now in Lord Ruthven,

we have this sexy, intelligent, sociable creature who crucially is able to pass for human. Up to this point, vampires were largely seen as coming from Europe. Now here's one going to a London party and he walks amongst us. So it was a real game changer. There's a film coming out soon, apparently an adaptation of the Polidori vampire story. I don't know who's playing the lead roles. Who would you cast, Ed? You've got the kind of the posh English guy and then the sexy, vampire. Who's going to be your two leading men? I'm playing both of them, like Eddie Murphy and Norbert. I'm playing all of the roles.

And would you do really offensive sort of dragging up and all that stuff as well for all the female roles? Of course. It's going to be, oh, it's not even going to make it onto the screens. It's going to be so offensive. I'd like to see Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger back together again. Surprising the twins role, yeah.

I'd like to see DeVito as the sexy, seducing, dangerous man and Arnold Schwarzenegger back together again. Surprising the twins role, yeah. I'd like to see DeVito as the sexy, seducing, dangerous man and Arnold Schwarzenegger as the posh Englishman. I think he can pull it off. So we get the end of the romantic movement. It sort of fizzles out. Everyone dies tragically, as we talked about in the Mary Shelley episode. Vampires do not go out of fashion.

They keep going. And in the 1840s, we get Varney the Vampire, which I love. That's like Barney the Dinosaur. It's written by james malcolm reimer this is a massive book 667 000 words 876 pages apparently it's because he got paid by the line so he just kept writing it got released as a series as well like in kind of shorter volumes like a series of penny dreadfuls yeah so it's sort of released chapter by chapter and you just kept going and another thing um is that why vampires

keep coming back from the dead basically because you can write as many books you like about them like oh and then he came back again more money please it's genuinely true vampires have been associated with money right from day one the way way that we still use it, like a vampire is feeding off the money of another. Walter Scott calling his bookseller a vampire. The two are connected. So Francis Verney is the character. He's the first literary vampire to have fangs, but he's also the first sympathetic vampire. He's brooding and he's sad. He hates being a vampire. He hates his bloodthirst. And in the end, he chucks himself into Mount Vesuvius. So he's a vampire who feels cursed by his condition, which feels like the sort of humanising of him. A bit of an erotic landmark moment as well, because Varney the vampire also

seduces and turns a beautiful young woman called Clara. So in the 1840s, we get the fangs, we get the sad vampire cursed forever, and we get now female vampires. And that then takes us to Paul Feval, who's a French writer, and he wrote a series of vampire novels, including Nightshade, The Vampire Countess, and Vampire City in the 1850s, 60s and 70s. And in The Vampire Countess, Faval gives us the saucy Countess Adhema, who might be a vampire, might not be a vampire, but to stay young and gorgeous forever, she doesn't drink the blood of young women. She does something else to them.

Do you want to have a guess, Ed, what she might do? Oh, no. Now I'm just going to sound like an absolute filth bucket, whatever I say. It's not filthy, actually. It's quite gross. Oh. Eat, Ed, eat.

I panicked. I didn't see that coming, I say. It's not filthy, actually. It's quite gross. Oh. Eats their feet? I panicked. I didn't see that coming, I guess. Me neither, I said it. Other end of the body. Oh, she eats their hair. Oh, nearly. She scalps them, rips off their hair and wears it. And that gives her a few extra days of beauty and youth.

The power wanes and then she turns into a sort of crumbly old skeleton woman again, bald and horrible until she has to find another victim. Clearly, she hasn't heard of moisturiser. But the other thing that Favell talks about in his Vampire City novel is that vampires can duplicate themselves. They also puncture their victims with a barbed tongue rather than fangs in the neck. And they are fleshy robots who need to be wound up like a clock by an evil priest. And they explode when they come into contact

with another vampire's burnt heart. Basically, anything like vampires or anything sort of like a traditional thing in literature, everyone has every idea for it and then it just naturally narrows down to the good ones, right? Ah, which one of these do you not think is a good idea?

Oh, the fleshy robot, the evil priest winding them up, probably. Exploding when they come into contact with another vampire. That's every idea they possibly could have had. They've gone, oh, just stick with the steak through the heart. So 1872, we get Carmilla by the Irish writer Le Fanu. And it's perhaps the first sort of lesbian vampire erotica book. But Christabel has given us sort of erotic sapphic themes beforehand.

So it's a bit of a tradition, isn't it, Corinne? Yeah, I just think if it wasn't for Camilla, maybe we'd never have had James Corden's Lesbian Vampire Killers. I mean, what kind of world would that be? It's the seminal classic of cinema. This is a really beautiful and haunting vampire story. It's quite short and it's online. So I say go and read it as soon as this podcast ends. It's really, really good. Laura, the young protagonist,

lives in a castle in the middle of nowhere, and she longs for a friend. And it's almost as if she wills the vampire Carmilla into existence. And it really highlights something that becomes more of a thing, I think, particularly in recent vampire stories, that the human vampire friendship can be really complex, like a codependent, mutually abusive, but also loving relationship. I definitely see it in things like Let the Right One In, and even in Twilight, where we get this really intense human vampire bond. What's interesting about this story is we get the transformation of a vampire into an animal. Do you want to guess what the animal is that Myakala or Carmilla becomes when she bites

Laura in bed? Now there's a lot of classics, aren't there? Is it one of the classics, Greg? I would not say it's the classic, but it feels relatively classic to me. All right, ferret. all right, ferret. I'd love that. I would love it. She transforms into a ferret. Oh, my God. It's a large black cat, but ferret is better.

Oh, you've ruined the book for me now because now if I read it, I'll be like, why isn't this a ferret? Okay, so she transforms into a cat and bites her neck. And in the end, Miakala or carmilla is found asleep alive but dead in her tomb covered in blood still breathing she's lived there for 300 years or whatever and they obviously then stake and decapitate her classic fair but then we get to 1897 and this is the big year. This is the year of the absolute classic novel, Ed. Dracula. Dracula is right. But also, you could have had a slightly less well-known novel written

by Florence Marriott. Corinne, what's the name of this one? This is The Blood of the Vampire. And yeah, it didn't get as much attention as Dracula. But it's a really interesting novel. It's about a girl called Harriet who's an orphaned heiress from Jamaica and who's a vampire but unlike traditional vampires she unknowingly kills her victims through draining their life energy. So she's just like a paid in the arse basically. Just like that really really boring guy in the office. But the novel also includes the possibility that all of the deaths around Harriet were actually a coincidence and due to other things like disease and suicide. And so it sort of suggests that she could have been an innocent victim.

It feels really ahead of its time. And even though there's no blood in it, aware of the fact that disease was hereditary. You know, this really ties into the idea that we keep coming back to of you're going to hurt the people that you love and that your blood might be tainted and this will get passed down. With Harriet, she has a Creole background. And so there's racist talk in this about her her tainted blood and her vampire blood so yeah again so much going on in these texts so much metaphor yeah but it does get eclipsed by bram stoker's dracula you know the definitive vampire novel i looked it up on indb there are over 200 movies about dracula so ed what are your top 83 uh in alphabetical order

you've not mentioned one of the best vampires in pop culture, which was Leslie Nielsen in Dracula Dead and Loving It. It's surprisingly faithful to the original. I watched her recently. And I was genuinely, yeah, they really read their Bram Stoker. But there's an element of camp in vampire fiction that sort of lends itself to comedy. Yeah, definitely.

And I mean, I think even with this novel by Polidori, Polidori is kind of making fun of the Byronic hero as well. There's an element of satire there. And also the campiness, you know, there was some speculation over Polidori's sexuality. It can definitely be sort of read as this, you know, that there's a frisson between the two men in the book that seduced and seduce a thing. So, yeah, there's a lot going on. If you say to someone in the street, name a vampire, they're not going to say Gertrude. I'm not Gertrude, the slayer, but they're not going to name, you know, Lord Ruffin or whatever. They're going to name Dracula.

I think I've read like versions of Dracula, not the full whack. You know, there's just like versions available where they're like just the main bit of the story we're not going to mess around with any of the fancy language let's just write the bullet points the basics of what happened the cliff notes yeah i've read the cliff notes for dracula yeah so corinne can you very quickly i mean it's a massive book and it's so complicated but can you quickly summarize the plot of dracula i can try um i've set you up to fail there haven haven't I? It'll only take me about 10 to 15 minutes. It's a really interesting form where it's a series of letters and journals. So we really get to hear the inner thoughts of all the main characters,

except Dracula, where there's a little bit from Dracula. It starts with a young solicitor called Jonathan Harker, who's travelling to Transylvania to broker a real estate deal with a mysterious aristocrat, Count Dracula. And Jonathan stays in his incredibly spooky castle where three sexy vampire women attack him and he sees Dracula crawl down the wall like a lizard. And then the focus shifts to England, where Jonathan's lovely fiancee Mina is staying with her best friend Lucy in Whitby. And Lucy is beautiful and amazing and has three guys who are all friends in love with her and kind of proposing to her. Then a ship washes up in Whitby with uh-oh no crew and a dead captain and a huge dog leaps ashore and we

obviously all know that that's Dracula. Lucy starts sleepwalking, develops a mystery illness. One of her suitors calls his old teacher, Dr. Van Helsing, and he quickly realizes it's a vampire attack. And all the suitors give their blood for transfusions to try and save her, which is definitely sexual and presented as such in the novel. But it's basically too late to save her. And she becomes a vampire who they stake in their head. Jonathan has escaped the novel. But it's basically too late to save her and she becomes a vampire who they stake in behead. Jonathan has escaped the castle. He helps them work out that it's Dracula and

Dracula is now preying on Mina and the three suitors plus Jonathan plus Van Helsing go on a mission to kill him using Mina's psychic connection to Dracula to track him. They stab Dracula through the heart and he turns to dust and they all live happily ever after. That's hugely impressive, Corinne. That's better than the Wikipedia one, which goes on for ages. So thank you very much. It's a really great story. We've got Dracula turning into a dog, so not a big cat, but does he turn into a bat as well? Or is that just the films? Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's a bat and he's fog as well. He turns into fog. It's a really disappointing fart, just waffling through. Why was it so successful? And how has it stayed so successful as a story? Because it's so complicated,

what you've just explained. Yeah, well, I think that this novel, like all vampire fiction, really reflects in some ways the anxieties of its time. And certainly in 1897, this was a really anxious time. Britain was changing rapidly. And one of the things that's really striking about Dracula is just how modern it is. It really fetishizes technology and gadgets. Like Jonathan has a Kodak camera and there's an audiograph and the Harkers use shorthand for their journal, which was a new thing then. And I actually love a quote from Jonathan where he describes shorthand as 19th century up to date with a vengeance. And they use slang a lot. And so to a contemporary reader reading at the time, it would have felt really, really cool. And yet there's also this recognition that knowledge of

the old ways helps them to navigate the threat of Dracula. So Van Helsing is a doctor of the very latest science, but he also knows the folklore. He needs both in order to defeat Dracula. And as a novel, it really kind of validates folklore. It's like all the villagers at the beginning who are warning Jonathan, don't go to Dracula's castle. They're right. And, you know, Jonathan's like, yeah, whatever, dude, don't go to Dracula's castle. They're right. And, you know, Jonathan's like, yeah, whatever, dude. It's like, I'm going.

You know, and vampire fiction often celebrates popular culture in this way. Like in The Lost Boys, for example, it's the Frog Brothers' knowledge of comic books that helps them to fight the vampires. That's really interesting. And also the folklore thing, as we said before, you know, people did believe this stuff and vampire folk tales come from Bulgaria and Greece in particular. So the Transylvania connection makes sense from what we know about those stories. Vampires sort of represent this transition. They're kind of, they're dead, but they're alive. They're a world of contradictions. Just as one example from Dracula, you know, this is a time when things were really changing for women. And you had this image

of the kind of Victorian woman who was pure and angelic and should be a wife and mother, but then also, you know, feminist movement of the new woman, which Stoker mentions in Dracula, where women were wanting equality and finding independence. And then you get this image of the sexy vampire woman, which encapsulates this ambivalence where you could read her as super sexist, slut-shamey, like this is kind of monstrous female sexuality, or you could see it as empowering. So yeah, it kind of has all of these tensions in it, which work really, you can apply it to lots of different periods and people can read whatever they want into it. They're very open texts. Ed, if I was telling you to go and write me a screenplay for a new type of vampire story, would you borrow any elements from what you've heard so far?

It's weird, isn't it? Because if you're going to write a vampire story, no one's going to start from scratch now, are they? No, I guess not. Like, especially within the Bram Stoker, there's so many bits of lore that you have to stick to. Like, Dracula is canon now for all vampires. I mean, you could put him in a canon. You could fire him out of a canon. Very true. I guess the twist is like, it's a vampire who can just walk around during the day. Some of them could, though, couldn't they? The Nightwalker thing is late 19th century isn't it corinne yeah certainly carmilla they have a thing that she sleeps late she sleeps till 1 p.m but then but then she can kind of hang out in the

afternoon yeah it was one of the one of the later developments carmilla is 1872 so you know quite late into the 19th century you've got day walker vampires as norm. So the idea of them as being night owls or night bats or night ferrets is kind of late and probably is more of a Hollywood thing. I was going to ask where the thing of you have to invite them in comes from, because that seems like a weird addition to vampire lore that you have to be like coming for a cup of tea before they can do anything. I think it's a really ancient idea common in sort of more ancient myths. And I think that then Bram Stoker popularized it.

I think he's possibly, I could be wrong, but he's possibly the first person who really writes about that particular rule. You were talking before, Corinne, about the kind of intimacy, these problematic friendships where you sort of have to know someone. So you've got to welcome them into your life for them to harm you. And that feels like the crux of that. Yeah, absolutely. In Carmilla again, she has a dream about Carmilla when she's young. So when they actually meet, she recognises her, although we realise that the dream was actually real because she's a vampire. And so, you know, looked the same 10 years ago. This thing of sort of recognition also that vampires are mirrors of us. And, you know, and that's so perfect, I guess, apart from the fact that they don't have a reflection. There's this joke that we kind of get the vampires that we deserve. So Edward Cullen, you know, this incredibly uptight,

he's constantly trying to self-improve. He's a vegetarian. He feels like this kind of post-Gwyneth Paltrow, post-Oprah self-help vampire, the perfect kind of vampire for the COVID age. I don't know. But Ed, you mentioned film playing a role and really for the success of Dracula, that was absolutely key. Actually, funnily enough, the novel itself,

although it was a bit of a hit, it wasn't a mega hit. And famously in his obituary in The New York Times for Bram Stoker, they don't actually mention Dracula until like the last paragraph is this kind of aside along with his other novels. We have two different versions of vampires in the way we look at them. either think of them as eternally young so frozen in time but they're kind of sexy and glamorous or they're these sort of knackered decrepit gray men with blue eyes and fangs who are weird looking i mean they look human but they look archaic and ancient and then of course the jokes are in often in movies and of course in what we do in the shadows is you've got like the ancient vampires who are basically skin and bones like literally a skeleton with a long mullet. And they look like they've been rotting for a thousand years. And we're fine with all three of those existing simultaneously.

Yeah, I think so much of the enjoyment of vampire fiction comes from that sense of the past coming into the present. You know, there's nothing funnier than a fish out of water vampire story where a vampire is like trying to work out modern technology. And because, you know, vampire narratives tend to be set in very modern settings a la Dracula, there's always so much to mine there. The Nuance Window! Well, that brings us right to my favourite part of the podcast, which is the nuance window. This is where we allow our expert Corinne to talk for two uninterrupted minutes on anything at all related to our fiendish bloodsucking foes. Corinne, you are going to talk again about Byron, which, you know, I'm sure Ed will remember everything once it comes flooding back in.

But Byron and vampires, without much further ado, Corinne, three, two, one, the nuance window. Yeah, so I want to discuss a thing about Lord Byron that I didn't explore in our episode on him last time. And that is that Byron went from writing about vampires and being the inspiration for Polidori's vampire to being depicted in 20th century books and films as himself an actual vampire. In Ken Russell's 1986 film Gothic, Gabriel Byrne plays Byron pretty much as a vampire without the pointy teeth. He performs satanic rituals, crying out in one scene, yes, I am the devil. And he lusts after blood, which he manages to draw from his girlfriend during a particularly disturbing oral sex scene. And by the mid-90s,

I can think of four novels in which Byron is depicted as a fully fledged vampire, including Tom Holland's kind of brilliant Lord of the Dead. And we know Byron had a cup made from a skull and was a great seducer and was no saint when it came to his relationships. But there's a big difference between being a bit of a bastard and nearly 200 years after your death being portrayed as a blood-sucking demon from hell. We don't see Dickens regularly portrayed as a ghost or Tolkien as a hobbit or Mary Shelley as a monster, though that would actually be really cool. So why Byron is a vampire? If I have to think about it, I think it has to do with his

celebrity status. During his lifetime, he was the subject of endless gossip and speculation. And he was one of the first people whose personality became a commodity. His name was exploited to sell books. So as a victim of a vampiric publishing industry, it feels like beautiful poetry that that same industry would give him new life as a vampire. It shows the power of the vampire allegory that it can turn an already mythologized figure into an actual mythological creature. In our celebrity-obsessed society now, who better to show us who we are than the very first literary celebrity? He's the perfect vampire for our age thank you

very much beautifully done i love the uh the idea of tolkien as a hobbit that's really adorable so ed uh who is going to be the vampire of the future who amongst us now do you think in 200 years time people will be like yeah he was a vampire oh i mean the entirety of the government i'd imagine gov's a vampire isn't he gov is definitely a vampire when they did that thing of him drinking water wrong and clapping badly i think probably on behalf of bbc i have to say that michael gove oh yeah sure vampire sorry because of stringent bbc guidelines we do have to say that michael gove might be a real human so what do you know now all right well i mean we've had a fantastic chat or rather a fang-tastic chat see what i did there it's now time for the quiz to see how much our comedian ed has learned 10 out of 10 last time ed

you you nailed it i was so worried about getting 10 out of 10 last time that i really focused and this has just been this has been a lovely chat, and I feel like I've let some things get through the net. Right, well, OK. Maybe some things went in. You know, we'll see. So I'm starting the clock now. Question one.

What name was given to medieval reanimated corpses that came back from the dead? Oh, revenants. Revenants is correct. Next one. In one of our favourite vampiric ghost stories, how did Poland's Johannes Kuntius die? Oh, got kicked in the dick by a horse

It's a tale as old as time Next question Name two of the ways you could kill a vampire Decapitation Chop them up Yep, and also think about the gums Oh, suck the gums Suck the gums

Question four Written in 1810 John Stagg's poem was the first British vampire story What was it unoriginally called? The Vampire. It was, but with a Y, which is a bit cool. Yes. Question five.

Aubrey and the dangerous seducer Lord Ruffin, brackets, definitely Byron, close brackets, are the main characters in a different story, also called The Vampire. But who wrote it? Absolutely no idea. It was Dr John Polidori, the Doctor of Byron Question 6 Percy Shelley freaked out when he heard a retelling of Coleridge's poem Christabel because he saw, well, something strange came to mind during a dream

What was it? Boobs with eyes Boobs with eyes Question 7 In Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu's lesbian vampire story Carmilla what animal does she transform into when biting Laura? Big cat. Big cat, not a ferret.

Question eight. Paul Favall's vampire countess stays forever young by stealing what from beautiful young women? Scalps and hair. Yeah, and stick it on her head. Very weird. Question nine. Bram Stoker's Dracula was published in which year? Oh, that's boobs

boobs with eyes sticks in my mind years absolutely not give us a decade have a crack at the 1870s 1897 okay and question 10 how many novels did florence marri, author of The Blood of the Vampire, write in total? 78. Oh, it was 68. Oh, you did well. That was a good nearly. She could have written another 10. You just made a point for that. I'm giving you a point for that because actually you were pretty close. So I'm going to give you 8 out of 10, which is a very solid score. Not bad, not bad. And the Polidori thing, I think. Names and numbers I'm never going to remember. That's fine. But you remember Boobs with Eyes? Boobs with Eyes, absolutely. Big cat, fine. Well, sadly, it's time to drive a stake through the heart of this discussion.

We have run out of time. So if you want to hear more from Corinne and Ed, check out the Lord Byron episode. It's on BBC Sounds in the back catalogue, along with, of course, Corinne's episode about Mary Shelley with Lauren Patterson. If you've had a laugh and you've learned some stuff, then please do share this podcast with your friends or leave a review online. Make sure to subscribe to You're Dead to Me on bbc sounds so you never miss an episode

a huge thank you to our guests uh in history corner the marvelous dr corinne throsby oh thanks so much for having me back i feel like i am the vampire that just is you know you try and stake me and i'm back again well we love having you haunt us it's delightful so don't worry you can come back as often as you like and of course of course, in Comedy Corner, the impeccable Ed Gamble. Thank you, Ed. Thanks for having me again. It's been really fun. Sorry about calling you the vampire at the beginning. Absolutely fine.

That's enough from us. Thank you very much to my guest. And, yeah, come back another time. But I'm off to basically go and try and suck the gums of a reanimated medieval peasant. Bye! You're Dead to Me was a Madinese media production for BBC Radio 4. The researchers were Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow and Olivia Wyatt. The script was by Emma Negus and me.

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