Authors: Mark Collins Jenkins
F
OR DECADES TO COME,
1816 would be known as the Year Without a Summer. In the previous April, Mount Tambora had erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, filling the atmosphere with ash and blocking enough of the sun’s rays to trigger temporary climate change around the world. In Boston some 15 months later, snow fell in July. In Europe, an incessant cold rain blanketed much of the Continent, confining a small circle of English poets and intellectuals inside the Villa Diodati, their rented lodgings on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Lord Byron, 28, and Dr. John Polidori, 20, Byron’s personal physician and traveling companion, had been joined by Percy Bysshe Shelley and his lover, 18-year-old Mary Godwin, along with her half sister, Claire Claremont, who was secretly carrying Byron’s child. Throughout the long, storm-swept June nights, they passed the time with conversation and books. By the glow of the hearth and the flicker of candlelight, Mary later recalled, the friends discussed ghosts and vampires and the “nature of the principle of life.” “Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated,” she remembered, for “galvanism had given token of such things.” Recent Italian experiments in galvanism, or applied electricity, purportedly showed that supplying current to a corpse could prompt it to behave in strange ways: clenching its fists, for instance, blowing out candles, or sitting up in its coffin.
On the night of June 16, as violent thunderstorms cracked overhead, Byron read from a volume of ghost stories called
Fantasmagoria.
One tale in the collection told of a “reanimated” dead girl whose body, when her grave was opened a year after her death, showed no signs of corruption.
That spooky evening gave rise to the world’s most famous ghost story contest. Perhaps the electricity in the air sparked to life the conceptions that eventually gave birth to the two most influential reanimated corpses in literature: Frankenstein’s monster and the vampire.
E
NTER THE
V
AMPYRE
Lord Byron drafted the original sketch for what became “The Vampyre.” It would be the story of a mysterious nobleman who traveled to Greece, where his death would reveal, among other things, that he had been a vampire all along. That was as far as the great poet progressed before setting the tale aside.
Doctor Polidori then picked it up. He discarded his original idea about a skull-headed lady peeping through a keyhole and fleshed out Byron’s idea instead. As a writer, the doctor was not without talent; as a human being, he was touchy, petulant, envious, quick to take offense—and ultimately self-destructive. He and Lord Byron had quarreled endlessly, so as Polidori continued to create the vampire of his tale, Lord Ruthven, he modeled him on the now-hated figure of the poet. Thus did Polidori’s jaundiced view of a former friend become the prototype of the literary vampire—which, in turn, has given rise to popular depictions of the vampire today.
The most lionized poet of his time, Lord Byron at first glance made a good model for a vampire. Dark and irresistibly handsome, he was, according to one former lover, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Even his friends, such as the dashing naval officer Edward John Trelawny, acknowledged he was “prouder than Lucifer” and flashed the “smile of a Mephistopheles.” Byron stayed up all night, slept most of the day, and once used a human skull as a drinking bowl. He ate sparingly because he could not exercise; a lame leg, he said, made strenuous activity extremely painful. After Trelawny eventually saw the poet’s corpse, he noticed that, beneath the magnificent torso, “both his feet were clubbed, and his legs withered to the knee—the form and features of an Apollo, with the feet and legs of a sylvan satyr.”
But it was Byron’s character that caused the most controversy. Much has been made of the Byronic hero—the man who lives by his own code outside the conventions of society, the figure that novelist Charlotte Brontë called the “corsair.” But to Polidori, Lord Byron resembled nothing so much as Lord Ruthven in the opening scenes of “The Vampyre” he may have been the talk of the ballrooms, but he was also cold, arrogant, haughty, cruel, and predacious—“a man entirely absorbed in himself.”
Aubrey, the story’s narrator, accompanies Ruthven on a tour of Europe but grows disenchanted with him after witnessing his voracious sexual appetites and his cruel treatment of women. Ruthven has a cold, gray eye, while his skin exhibits a hue “which never gained a warmer tint, either from the blush of modesty, or from the strong emotion of passion.” Furthermore, all those to whom he gave money “inevitably found that there was a curse upon it, for they were all either led to the scaffold, or sunk to the lowest and most abject misery.”
In Greece, Aubrey falls in love with Ianthe, a beautiful girl who is attacked in a remote place one night and killed by a vampire. Regaining consciousness after wrestling with the fiend, Aubrey beholds Ruthven sitting there. After further adventures in Greece, bandits ambush the two men, and Ruthven is killed—or perhaps not, for the moonlight seems to revive him.
Ruthven next appears in London at an engagement party for Aubrey’s sister. Because he must feed at least once a year on the “life of a lovely female to prolong his existence for the ensuing months,” Ruthven preys upon Aubrey’s sister, which so enrages the young man that he dies of a stroke. In the closing line of the story, evil has emerged triumphant: “Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!”
Soon after being published—under Byron’s name, which Polidori had not approved—in the April 1, 1819, issue of the
New Monthly Magazine,
“The Vampyre” was released as a book and became a best seller. Its initial connection with Byron was undoubtedly the reason; in Germany, for example, the poet Goethe supposedly pronounced it the greatest of all Byron’s works.
Whether in England or on the Continent, the saga of the rapacious Ruthven was soon in readers’ hands everywhere. Within a year, it had been mounted on the stage as well. French writer Cyprien Bérard churned out a sequel,
Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires
(1820), which was attributed to the multitalented librarian and master of the literary fantasy, Charles Nodier. Though he had nothing to do with its genesis, Nodier proceeded to give Polidori’s tale a second life as a play,
Le Vampire
, though he switched the locale from Greece to Scotland. The play’s success incited a run on vampires in Paris, moving one critic to lament, “There is not a theatre in Paris without its Vampire!”
Several seasons later, the fad was still going strong: An English correspondent declared that the vampire was being received with “rapturous applause at almost all the spectacles from the Odeon to the Porte St. Martin…. Where are the descendants of the Encyclopedists and the worshippers of the goddess Reason,” he asked, when Parisians were mad for
“apparitions nocturnes”
and
“cadavres mobiles?”
A young theater innovator named James Planché brought a version of the French play back to London.
The Vampire, or the Bride of the Isles,
opened in August 1820 at the Lyceum; it was given an incongruous Scottish setting, Planché wrote despairingly, only because the producer had “set his heart on Scotch music and dresses—the latter, by the way, were in stock.” Sensationalism, then as now, ruled the pens of copywriters; the playbill stated that vampires “are Spirits, deprived of all Hope of Futurity, by the Crimes committed in their Mortal State” but nevertheless are allowed to exert “Supernatural Powers of Fascination.” They cannot be destroyed, it asserted, if they kill one female each year—“whom they are first compelled to marry.” (That proviso clearly didn’t stick.) Planché, who invented a “vampire trap” that allowed the fiend to vanish and reappear onstage in startling fashion, got it right on his second attempt a few years later, when he set a revised version of
The Vampire
in Wallachia, using Magyar costumes.
The literary vampire had been loosed upon the world, but Polidori did not live to see its success. He died in August 1821, only 26 years old, and was buried in the consecrated ground of London’s St. Pancras churchyard. The truth of his demise—that he had poisoned himself in despair over gambling debts—was covered up, for in 1821, an Anglo-Saxon law grimly matching Polidori’s fevered imagination still remained on the books: It stipulated that a suicide must be buried at a crossroads, with a stake through his heart. The law was repealed two years later.
Two others who shared those hours in the Villa Diodati that stormy summer of 1816 soon followed Polidori to the grave. In July 1822, Percy Shelley drowned in a sailing accident off the coast of Italy. His body was cremated on a makeshift pyre on the beach where it had washed up—a consummation common among the pagan Greeks the poet had so admired.
Not long after the torch was applied, eyewitness Trelawny recalled, the carcass cracked open; where the skull rested on the red-hot iron bars, the “brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time.” When the flames subsided, there remained only ashes, some bone fragments—and Shelley’s heart, somehow undamaged. “In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace,” Trelawny recalled, “my hand was severely burnt….”
Less than two years later, in April 1824, Lord Byron died in Greece, where he had journeyed to fight in the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Turks. Byron apparently succumbed to a fever—if he wasn’t in fact bled to death by overzealous physicians—in swampy Missolinghi, just south of the Albanian border.
Mary Shelley would die of a brain tumor in 1851, at the age of 53. As her son sifted through her effects, he found not only locks of her dead children’s hair but also a copy of Percy Shelley’s
Adonais,
an elegy for the poet John Keats, who had likewise died young (though of tuberculosis). One page of the elegy was folded around a silk bag, which, when opened, contained some ashes—and a desiccated human heart.
B
Y
H
OOK OR BY
C
ROOK
Such descriptions and mementos were not unusual in the 19th century, an era of fascination with death. People would hold picnics in such imposing cemeteries as Père Lachaise in Paris—
before
visiting the morgue, one hopes. Until a halt was put to the practice in 1905, thousands of people filed through the viewing gallery of that Paris morgue each year, gaping at the ever-changing display of corpses in much the same way they gazed into the new department-store windows a few blocks away. It was a social occasion, a place to take one’s girl.
A deep tremor of unease, however, often rattled this apparent aplomb. Young David Copperfield senses it in Dickens’s novel of that name: So frightened is David by the biblical story of Lazarus returning from the dead that the adults are “obliged to take me out of bed, and show me the quiet churchyard out of the bedroom window, with the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon.”
Such a tranquil aspect, though, can mask a restless graveyard. Horrible things might be going on down there. Stories of bodies found in their coffins arched, contorted, turned prone, their shrouds ripped, or otherwise wrenched into positions of inconceivable agony fed one of the morbid phobias of the age: the obsessive terror of premature burial.
By the 19th century, it was widely believed that many people fell into catalepsies or comas—one doctor posited a “death trance”—in which their vital functions were somehow suspended without incurring death. Such people appeared quite dead, of course—the ear could detect no heartbeat, the finger felt no pulse, the mirror held below their nostrils betrayed not a trace of breath—and so they were promptly buried. Yet, they still might revive in the grave, a thought so horrible that most people could not bear to imagine it.
So before being committed to the coffin, in an age before embalming was widespread, bodies were subjected to actual tortures—fingers were dislocated, feet were burned—to provoke a response. Sometimes they were just parked someplace and left—the Duke of Wellington remained unburied for two months—until the sure signs of decomposition began to show. Nevertheless, instances piled on instances of last-minute revivals at the graveyard gate, of corpses sitting up in their coffins and looking wonderingly about them. At a time when graves were often only 18 inches deep—and sometimes only six or eight—it was not hard to believe that someone might claw his way out and appear, like Madeline Usher in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a bloody, haggard, shrouded figure returned from the dead.
Those with a morbid dread of premature burial could obtain all kinds of ingenious survival devices with which to outfit one’s final home. Pipes leading aboveground might be fixed to the coffin so that its inmate would not suffocate should he awaken. Or “Bateson’s Belfry”—a bell attached to the coffin—could be installed, with its cord thoughtfully placed in the corpse’s hand so that he might give it a pull and ring for assistance. An inexpensive measure was to enclose a shovel and crowbar inside the coffin.
Some people opted to have their hearts cut out—the theory being that whatever can’t revive you on the operating table certainly won’t wake you in the grave. Chopin, for example, was so terrified of premature burial that he had his heart removed; it was preserved in alcohol (rumored to be cognac) and interred in the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw.
The idea of premature burial prefigured the larger idea of reanimated corpses, and for that reason, it was inevitably invoked as an explanation for vampirism. Premature burial was also seized upon as the rationale for why some bodies found in graves were better preserved than others: They had somehow remained
alive
down there. The atrocious concept also came in handy for explaining the blood found in coffins: The victim, buried alive, had understandably severed his veins and arteries in a frantic attempt to claw his way out, finally exsanguinating himself. Indeed, the whole vampire legend might be based on dim memories of living people who had actually returned from the grave. That seemed the rational explanation, for as an 1847 article in
Blackwoods
magazine put it, “no ghastlier terror can there be than the accredited apprehension of Vampirism.”