From John Polidori's Diodati Vampire to Bram Stoker's Dracula

The literary aristocratic vampire — the seductive, immortal, blood-drinking European nobleman who has dominated horror fiction and (subsequently) horror cinema for more than two centuries — was a Polidori invention. John William Polidori wrote the short novel The Vampyre in summer 1816 at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, where he was serving as personal physician to Lord Byron. He published it in 1819. The original audience took it for Byron’s work; Polidori spent two years insisting it was his.

The 78-year journey from Polidori’s 1819 publication to Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula — the canonical Victorian vampire novel that has substantially shaped every subsequent vampire story — runs through a small number of specific intermediate texts. Most have been forgotten.

Polidori, 1819

The Diodati ghost-story competition of summer 1816 — the famous Byron-Shelley-Polidori parlour game during the Year Without a Summer at Lake Geneva — produced two surviving major works. Mary Shelley produced the first draft of Frankenstein (published 1818). John Polidori produced a 40-page novella titled The Vampyre. The story features an aristocratic English protagonist, Lord Ruthven, who turns out to be an immortal blood-drinking creature. The plot follows Ruthven and a young naïve companion across Europe; Ruthven seduces a series of young women, drains their blood, and (in the final twist) marries the protagonist’s sister and kills her on their wedding night.

Polidori’s Lord Ruthven was substantially modeled on Byron — physically, temperamentally, and in his casual cruelty toward the women in his life. The roman-à-clef element was unmistakable to the original readers. When the novella was first published in April 1819 in the New Monthly Magazine by the London publisher Henry Colburn, Colburn attributed it to “Lord Byron” rather than to Polidori (probably deliberately, to maximise sales). The misattribution was a substantial commercial success and a personal humiliation for both Byron (who denied the work in print) and Polidori (whose actual authorship was acknowledged in the second edition of November 1819 but who was eclipsed by the Byron association).

The story established the basic literary structure of the modern vampire tale: an aristocratic, glamorous, immortal predator; a younger naïve human protagonist; a series of female victims; a Mediterranean/Eastern European setting; the impossibility of definitively killing the predator. Almost every subsequent vampire story is recognizable as a Polidori derivative.

The penny dreadfuls

The 1840s saw the popularization of the vampire trope through cheap serial fiction — the so-called penny dreadfuls. The most consequential was James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood, serialized in 109 chapters between 1845 and 1847 across the cheap-press penny weeklies of London. Varney was approximately 850,000 words long — longer than any vampire novel that would follow — and contained, in serial-narrative form, many of the genre conventions that subsequent more concentrated vampire novels would adopt: the vampire bite leaving two puncture marks, the vampire’s superhuman strength, the vampire’s repulsion from religious symbols, the vampire’s eventual destruction by suicide (in Varney’s case, by leaping into Mount Vesuvius).

Varney is now forgotten as a literary text. Its influence on the subsequent vampire genre was nonetheless; most of the supernatural-physiological conventions that Bram Stoker would systematize in Dracula fifty years later were present in Varney. The penny-dreadful serial form has badly aged. The substantive contributions to the genre have not.

Carmilla, 1872

The single most consequential 19th-century vampire text between Varney and Dracula was Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla — published in the small Dublin literary magazine The Dark Blue in three monthly installments and then collected in Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872). Carmilla takes the Polidori structure and queers it. The vampire is female, the human protagonist is female, and the central seduction is explicitly between the two women — published forty years before the female-female romantic content would have been printable in a respectable English literary venue.

Carmilla also introduced two specific narrative elements that would become canonical in the genre. The vampire is a Hungarian-Styrian aristocrat (the first major use of the Eastern European setting that Dracula would standardize). The vampire’s body, when finally discovered, is preserved in an unrotten state in its coffin and must be destroyed by impalement and decapitation (the first canonical use of the staking the vampire trope).

Le Fanu died in February 1873, four months after Carmilla’s book publication. His vampire novella was modestly successful in its initial publication and entered the standard late-Victorian English horror reading list. Bram Stoker read it.

Dracula, 1897

Bram Stoker was an Irish-born theatre manager working at the Lyceum Theatre in London under the great actor-manager Henry Irving through the 1880s and 1890s. He had published several earlier minor novels (The Snake’s Pass, 1890; The Shoulder of Shasta, 1895) without commercial or critical success. He worked on the manuscript that would become Dracula for approximately seven years between 1890 and 1897, conducting research on Transylvanian history and folklore (second-hand; he never visited the region) and on the literary vampire tradition.

The novel was published on 26 May 1897 by Archibald Constable. The Stoker contribution to the existing vampire tradition was the systematization of the genre conventions — the entire received vampire-folklore package (the count, the castle, the bats, the wolves, the garlic, the crucifix, the holy water, the wooden stake, the sunlight, the absence of reflection in mirrors) was assembled and codified in Dracula in a form that would dominate all subsequent vampire fiction. The novel was a modest commercial success in its 1897 publication and gradually grew into the standard genre reference text over the following century.

After Stoker

The 20th-century vampire genre — German Expressionist cinema’s Nosferatu (1922, a unauthorized Dracula adaptation that produced a Stoker-estate copyright lawsuit), Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula with Bela Lugosi, Hammer Films’ Christopher Lee Dracula series (1958-1972), Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and The Vampire Chronicles, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005) and successor texts, the entire modern young-adult-vampire romance genre — all descends directly from the Stoker codification. Almost every element traces back, through the documentary record, to Polidori’s 1819 Diodati novella and its specific roman-à-clef inheritance from Byron’s actually-observable personal behaviour.

Polidori himself killed himself with prussic acid in 1821, aged 25, two years after The Vampyre’s publication. He had not lived to see the literary genre his small novella would inaugurate. His niece’s husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti preserved his private papers; his nephew William Michael Rossetti edited and published Polidori’s Diodati diary in 1911 — almost a century after the events it described — and rehabilitated Polidori’s reputation against the long Byronic-personal narrative that had eclipsed his own. The literary historians’ subsequent reconstruction has placed Polidori reasonably accurately in his actual role: as the inventor of the modern aristocratic vampire and as the first sustained 19th-century literary victim of the Byron-personal-orbit pattern that would consume so many of Byron’s other intimate associates.