The eighteenth century vampire was usually considered to be an east european peasant ar it's very interesting when vampires arrive in the english press. The report of these cases there, straightway seem as political allegory, and it's seen as a way of criticising the authorities. And so straightway, you have the vampire going up into those higher social classes. So i think that really od of byron and polydori are riding on that wave that vampires, you know, have already been demonstrated not just stuck in some easter european village, but they have the potential to be a figure that has a place at many different levels of society.
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 Macau
Samantha George
Associate Professor of Research in Literature at the University of Hertfordshire
And
Martyn Rady
Professor Emeritus of Central European History at University College London
Producer: Simon Tillotson