M, polidori died in london in 18 21. He was weighed down by depression and gambling debts. His family suspected that he'd taken prussic acid or syenide. But the verdict came back that he died by the visitation of god. Because he died natural causes, he was allowed to be buried at saint pancres old church. It has become a kind of site of gothic torism, but not because of polodori. The mother of mary wolstoncroft is buried there,. And shelley and mary shelor conducted much of their courtship in that graveyard. There are even rumours that they consummated their relationship in that graveyard
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