The Vampyre

Seriously.

The Vampyre is the first vampire story in the English language, and as most people close to me know, I am obsessed with it.

So obsessed that I have written a great screenplay on its inception because the story was written by John Polidori, who felt rejected by his crush, Lord Byron.

He essentially turned Byron into a vampiric character, sucking the life out of him and everyone he knows.

It's-

... which, uh, you know, um, I, I know that people...

If, if people know me personally, which is probably just three listeners, thank you, um, you know that I'm obsessed with vampires, and I'm obsessed with, uh, John Polidori, who wrote the very first vampire story in English literature, the V- The Vampyre.

And he essentially wrote it because he, of his, uh, complicated relationship with Lord Byron.

Yeah.

And John Polidori actually writes his own little story, um, that, that summer, and he publishes it as The Vampyre in 1819.

Mm-hmm.

It's partly kind of a rip-off of a story that Byron had written, uh, a fragment which had a certain sort of vampiric appeal to it.

But really importantly, The Vampyre by Polidori has a vampire in it called Lord Ruthven, spelt Lord Ruthven, and that is directly an illusion to Byron, who is s- called Lord Ruthven in Lady Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon.

I see.

Okay, so it is literally how it's known, right?

Mm-hmm.

The rigging strains as though every rope might break at any moment, and the sailors holler at each other, struggling to reef the sails before they can tear free.

But their efforts are hampered by the way the boat is pitching and rolling, and the concern on their faces has been replaced by a grim terror.

Suddenly, the vessel lurches sharply to the starboard side, and an enormous wave crashes onto the deck, soaking everyone.

Percy splutters and clings to Mary more tightly, protecting her from the worst of the elements.

Although she has the idea over the summer, Mary begins the work of putting pen to paper after she, Percy, baby William, and Claire return to England in the autumn.

She is simultaneously producing an account of their travels through France and Switzerland, which will soon be published.

Yet her literary efforts are hampered by not one but two tragedies.

In October 1816, her older half-sister dies by suicide.

So this brings us to 1819.

John Polidori publishes his novel, The Vampyre, and it is the first English language vampire novel.

The origins of that come from the summer of 1815, the, the year without a summer, when Byron and Shelley and all of them were hanging out in the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, along the shores of Lake Geneva, and he challenges them to write the best ghost story.

Mary Shelley invents science/speculative fiction as a teenage girl with Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus.

Byron starts a story that he never really finishes, and Polidori writes The Vampyre, and he calls his antagonist Lord Ruthven, which at the time, readers would have recognized, that's Lord Byron.

Uh, Lord Byron's ex-girlfriend, Lady Caroline Lamb, had already written her scandalous tell-all fictionalized account of their relationship in the novel Glenarvon, and in it she called Lord Byron Lord Ruthven.

So this name showing up again is sort of, it, it communicated to the public that this is, this is another scandalous tell-all about Lord Byron being mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

So that is where the idea of vampires started.

I will say that in 1819, John Polidori wrote a book called The Vampyre, but it was spelled V-A-M-P-Y-R-E.

And in this book, he's the one that introduced the idea of a vampire being aristocratic, being a socially magnetic force, and he didn't put the vampire as some gruesome corpse.

Mm-hmm.