The Pre-Raphaelite Painter Whose Mother Saved the Diary of the Doctor Who Invented the Literary Vampire

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) — the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and one of the major Victorian English painters and poets — was the nephew of John William Polidori, the doctor who had spent the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati with Byron and the Shelleys and who had written the founding short story of the European literary vampire tradition. Frances Polidori, Polidori’s younger sister, was Dante Gabriel’s mother.

The family connection produced the only substantial primary documentary survival of Polidori’s personal life — the diary he had kept during the 1816 Lake Geneva summer and into the subsequent year, which Frances preserved after her brother’s 1821 suicide and which her son William Michael eventually edited for publication in 1911.

The Polidori family

The Polidoris had emigrated from the Italian Adriatic town of Vasto to London in the 1780s. Gaetano Polidori (1764–1853) — the patriarch — had been Vittorio Alfieri’s personal secretary in Italy, came to England as a tutor and translator, and built a respectable London émigré-literary practice. He fathered eight children with his English wife Anna Maria Pierce; the surviving five included John William (the eldest son, 1795–1821), Frances (1800–1886), and several younger siblings.

John William’s medical training at Edinburgh, his appointment as Byron’s personal physician in 1816, and the 1816 Diodati summer are described in the separate article on his death. After his 1821 suicide in his father’s London house, the family was substantially scarred. Gaetano lived another 32 years and reportedly never spoke his eldest son’s name again. Frances was 21 at her brother’s death and took on the substantial custodial role for the papers John had left behind — his medical notebooks, his correspondence, and the Lake Geneva diary.

Frances and the Rossettis

Frances married the exiled Italian liberal academic Gabriele Rossetti in 1826. Gabriele had been a figure in the Neapolitan uprising of 1820 and had escaped to England under a death sentence; he held the chair of Italian at King’s College London from 1831. The Rossettis had four children — Maria Francesca (1827–1876), Dante Gabriel (1828–1882), William Michael (1829–1919), and Christina (1830–1894) — all of whom would become figures in Victorian English literary or artistic life. Maria became a Anglican religious writer; Dante Gabriel founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; William Michael was a art critic and editor; Christina was the Victorian poet whose ‘Goblin Market’ and ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ substantively defined her literary reputation.

The four Rossetti children grew up in the extended Polidori-Rossetti household at 38 Charlotte Street and knew their grandfather Gaetano and their aunt Frances (their mother) intimately. The Polidori papers were a physical presence in the household through the 1830s and 1840s.

The diary

The Lake Geneva diary that John William Polidori had kept through 1816 was preserved through the 19th century in the Rossetti household. Frances had substantively edited it after her brother’s death — removing several personal passages and several substantively unflattering references to Byron and the Shelleys — but had preserved the edited remainder. The standing question of whether her editorial intervention affected the surviving text is one of the recurring puzzles of Polidori scholarship.

William Michael Rossetti — the Pre-Raphaelite biographer and Rossetti family editor, who had produced the standard editions of his brother Dante Gabriel’s and his sister Christina’s works — undertook the editorial preparation of Polidori’s diary in the 1900s. The volume was published by Elkin Mathews in 1911 under the title The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, 1816, Relating to Byron, Shelley, etc. The publication was the first major scholarly access to the direct primary documentation of the Diodati summer and produced the modern scholarly framework for understanding the 1816 circle.

William Michael’s introduction substantively defended his uncle’s literary reputation and argued that The Vampyre should be substantively credited to Polidori rather than to Byron. The argument won the subsequent scholarly consensus. The vampire-literature tradition that runs from Polidori’s 1819 story to Stoker’s 1897 Dracula is substantively recognised today as Polidori’s invention because of the work that Frances had done in preserving her brother’s papers and William Michael had done in editing them ninety years later.

The family connection preserved the primary record.