Lord Byron, Polidori and The Vampyre

.

.
John William Polidori's story, The Vampyre, was published in the April 1819 issue of New Monthly magazine. Much to both his and Byron's chagrin, The Vampyre was released as a new work by Byron who released his own Fragment of a Novel in an attempt to clear up the mess, but, for better or worse, The Vampyre continued to be attributed to the poet. Dismissed by Byron, Polidori returned to England and in 1820 wrote to the Prior at Ampleforth. His letter is lost, but Prior Burgess' reply makes it clear that he considered Polidori, with his scandalous literary acquaintances, an unsuitable case for the monastic profession. In 1821, after writing an ambitious sacred poem, The Fall of the Angels, Polidori, suffering from depression, died in mysterious circumstances on 24 August 1821 at approximately 1:10 pm, probably by self-administered poison, though the coroner's verdict was that he had "departed this Life in a natural way by the visitation of God". Polidori's fate has been to be remembered as little more than a footnote in Romantic history. Reprints of the diary he kept during his travels with Byron are available, yet are rather hard to find.
.

Polidori's diary, titled The Diary of John Polidori, edited by William Michael Rossetti, was first published in 1911 by Elkin Mathews (London). A reprint of this book, The Diary of Dr John William Polidori, 1816, relating to Byron, Shelley, etc was published by Folcroft Library Editions (Folcroft, Pa.) in 1975. Another reprint by the same title was printed by Norwood Editions (Norwood, Pa.) in 1978.

.
As well as being mid-wife to Frankenstein's monster, he was uncle to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. Three films have depicted John Polidori (whose portrait appears below) and the genesis of the Frankenstein and Vampyre stories of 1816: Gothic directed by Ken Russell (1986), Haunted Summer directed by Ivan Passer (1988) and Remando al viento (English title: Rowing with the Wind) directed by Gonzalo Suárez (1988).

.

The sixth Lord Byron, parodied as Lord Ruthven by Polidori in The Vampyre (1819), fortuitously crystallised an archetypal image that is centuries strong; yet the poet abhorred the vampire almost to the same extent as his blood descendant (who also happens to be the founding president of the Vampire Research Society). Some time back, Seán Manchester wrote the following:

.

"A message received from a kind woman in New Zealand whose husband had purchased for her an 1831 edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Byron told of an insertion within, namely an original letter by Byron to the publisher Galignani that was said to have been authenticated by the British Museum. The photocopied letter is identical to one I have in my own collection. The letter is particularly intriguing because it includes Byron's denial that he wrote a work entitled The Vampyre, and he then goes on to add: 'I have besides a personal dislike to Vampires and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to divulge their secrets.' The handwriting is certainly Byron's.

.
"How could there be two original copies of this letter? Who actually owned the original copy of this letter? I found myself on the trail of vampires and repeatedly bumping up against quirky historical personalities striving to use misrepresentation to advance their own ends.

.
"I quickly learned that Byron's 'vampire' letter had been published in the standard collections of Byron's letters by Coleridge and subsequently Marchand with whom I corresponded in the last century. Furthermore, Marchand's notes gave his source as a facsimile in Galignani's edition of Byron's Works. It would appear that these 'autograph letters' had actually been duplicated en masse by the semi-scrupulous Galignani, a man who made his living by putting out continental editions of the British poets without paying a penny for the copyrights. But how could a printer in the 1820s create a facsimile so convincing that it still allows unscrupulous booksellers to pass this letter off as an original? I have subsequently been consulted by many more individuals owning copies of the same letter, which they often believe to be an original in Byron's own hand. One professional artist declared herself absolutely certain that she possessed 'a real letter and not a copy.' Another copy belongs to a man in Denmark who has received assurances from the Danish National Museum that the paper dates from the early nineteenth century and the handwriting is Byron's. I have also heard from a professor in the United Kingdom who thought that perhaps the Galignani facsimiles were copies of an 'early draft' since the letter he had examined in Britain was so convincingly original.

.
"It turns out that this letter has a certain amount of fame (or even infamy) in collecting circles. The Encyclopedia Britannica seems to mention it obliquely in its entry on 'forgery' when the editors point out that 'some early editions of Byron's work ... contained a facsimile of an autograph letter of the poet,' adding that 'if such facsimiles are detached from the volumes that they were intended to illustrate, they may deceive the unwary.' Charles Hamilton in his book on Collecting Autographs and Manuscripts warns his readers specifically about this letter along with a handful of others.

.
"I have subsequently inspected three copies of it held in the Pforzheimer collection of the New York Public Library. They are indeed impressive. Each is folded up as if ready to be mailed, with the address inscribed on the back of the outer sheet. Nowhere within the table of contents or the preliminary 'Advertisement' in the books themselves is there any indication that a facsimile is included. This omission is all the more notable since the publisher sometimes devotes hundreds of words to brightly blazoning all the minute advantages of his edition. Perhaps Monsieur Galignani would not be too concerned or too surprised if an occasional rural bookseller passed the volume off as containing Byron's original letter ― just the right touch of stature for some wealthy patron's private collection. At the same time, he did mention the facsimile in the general catalogue of his firm included rather obscurely at the end of the 1829 printing of The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore. Discovering that the letter is a facsimile cracked open the door of history and began to whet my appetite for more biographical knowledge.

.

"Why was The Vampyre originally attributed to Byron? Why did that tale continue to be accepted as Byron's long after his denial? And how was such a convincing facsimile made so early? The genesis of The Vampyre is itself imbued with mystery and deception. The work was written by John Polidori, a bumptious young physician with literary pretensions who had accompanied Byron during the first few months of his exodus from England following Byron's scandalous separation from his wife Anabelle in the spring of 1816. Polidori had been the youngest man ever to graduate with a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh and could be irritatingly vain. He once asked what, besides scribble verses, Byron could do better than Polidori himself. To this Byron icily replied: 'Three things. First, I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door. Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point. And thirdly, I can give you a damned good thrashing.'

.
"While serving as Byron's personal physician, Polidori had been promised a substantial publisher's fee for keeping a journal of his experiences with the famed poet. When Byron found out about this betrayal of confidence, he was naturally outraged and dismissed Polidori ― though he seems not to have felt much personal animosity since he later intervened with the Milanese authorities to help get Polidori released from jail after he had insulted an Austrian military officer.
.

"Polidori's subsequent story is a sad one. He returned to England, took up writing, achieved scant success, and eventually committed suicide by drinking Prussic acid. Not surprisingly, it was his connection with Byron that has led to his permanent place in literary history.
.

"Polidori was present during the during the 'haunted summer' that Byron, Shelley, Mary, and Clare spent on Lake Geneva in 1816, and the prefatory pages of The Vampyre very cleverly hint not only that Byron told the story of The Vampyre during a contest on writing ghost stories, but also that Byron portrayed himself as the vampire. The "Extract of a Letter to the Editor: From Geneva" which precedes the tale is actually an integral part of Polidori's literary deception. Remember that Byron was still alive and infamous in 1819 when all this was published. The letter is a semi-fictional account by an anonymous correspondent of Byron's stay in Geneva and of the ghost story sessions at Diodati. Note, though, that Polidori creates a fictional character who is worshipful of Byron. This devotee reverentially describes Byron as the equal of Rosseau, Voltaire, Gibbon, and Bonnivard. He inspects the Villa Diodati 'with the same feelings of awe and respect as ... Shakespeare's dwelling at Stratford.'

.

"Unlike Polidori himself (who seems to have been motivated by jealousy, revenge, and greed), the worshipful narrator can evidently be trusted to portray Byron in a favourable light. He quotes approvingly from the third Canto of Childe Harold where the poet 'like the scathed pine' equates the storms afflicting the Alps with those that have raged about him. He tells of an aristocratic woman who fainted simply because the infamous Byron was about to enter the room, and he records Byron's famous recitation from memory of Christabel and its haunting effect on Shelley, who ran from the room screaming and claiming to have had a sudden vision of Mary's nipples replaced by widely staring eyeballs.
.

"All of this is fascinating biographical information about three major writers, but it also serves Polidori's literary purposes. Quite cleverly, Polidori is building a picture of Byron as a superhuman, suffering, slightly Satanic being. Then, in "The Introduction," Polidori recounts the historical basis for belief in vampirism and concludes this section even more cleverly by citing the lines from The Giaour in which the hero (whom Byron has made to resemble himself) is cursed with vampirism. At the time Polidori wrote, the scandals involving Byron's possible incest with his half-sister and his separation from his wife for mysterious causes were fairly well-known in elite circles. Thus, there would already seem to be a fulfillment of the curse in the words quoted by Polidori:
.

But first on earth, as Vampyre sent,

Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent;

Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

And suck the blood of all thy race;

There from thy daughter, sister, wife,

At midnight drain the stream of life;

Yet loathe the banquet which perforce

Must feed thy livid living corse . . . .
.

"The narrator also provides a discussion of Byron's daily habits which was probably designed to reaffirm the suggestion of vampirism. Polidori records that Byron 'retired to rest at three, got up at two, and employed himself a long time over his toilette; that he never went to sleep without a pair of pistols and a dagger by his side, and that he never eat animal food.' His nocturnal habits and his apparent lethargy are in keeping with a vampire pining for blood. Perhaps in mentioning that Byron declined 'animal food' Polidori wanted to make his readers wonder how Byron did satisfy his natural appetite for red meat.
.

"Finally, of course, by giving his vampire the name Lord Ruthven, Polidori firmly reinforces all of these devious innuendoes, for Lord Ruthven was the name that Lady Caroline Lamb had chosen for her fictionalised figure of Byron in Glenarvon. Thus, much of the impact of Polidori's tale springs from the way it teases out the possible connections between its fictional villain and the almost equally fictionalised image of England's most famous poet maudite, Lord Byron.
.

"There is also a great deal of ambiguity about who was responsible for the explicit attribution of the story to Byron. Polidori obviously could not publish the tale under his own name, for, as we have just seen, he went to a good bit of trouble to indicate that it was Byron's story and that Byron himself was the vampire within it. In this regard he may charitably be said to have exercised his artistic license, since these dark hints certainly make the story that follows more compelling, but it is also clear that he was exacting a bit of malicious revenge against his former employer while also trying to pump up the potential sales of his slim volume.
.

"That said, it is still unlikely that Polidori would have wished the tale to be attributed explicitly to Byron. He was too vain to give up his own status as its author. Most likely, he suggested anonymous publication, and it was either the editor of The Messenger or its publisher who calculated that eventual sales could only be improved by attaching the celebrated name of Lord Byron and pushed Polidori's veiled hints into outright duplicity. Polidori's subsequent explanations of the events - while somewhat confusing ― since he himself may not have known whom to blame - generally support this interpretation.
.

"If Polidori used a bit of deception in hinting at his tale's connections with Byron, Byron ironically plays into Polidori's hands when he denies having written the tale while acknowledging an acquaintance with vampires. If Byron really had written The Vampyre and if he really were the vampire portrayed within it, he would, of course, be inclined to deny having done so. And Byron, too, is being a bit duplicitous. Byron did tell a vampire story at the Villa Diodati, and Polidori jotted down the general plot in his journal at the time. In a sense, then, The Vampyre was Byron's story ― at least in outline ― just as Polidori claimed in his introduction. Byron never proceeded far in actually writing out his tale, but the opening pages which he published along with Mazeppa in 1820, support the notion that in a very general way Polidori was working from the story that Byron initially told at Lake Geneva.
.

"We can be certain that Byron wrote the now-infamous letter to Monsieur Galignani in large part because he was growing tired of the steady trickle of writers and publishers trying to secure a larger audience by passing off their maunderings as Byron's work. But why did Galignani store the letter for seven years before including it in his 1826 edition of Byron's works? Two answers are possible and the truth may be a combination of both. First, Galignani may have been reluctant to include such a facsimile during Byron's lifetime. It is true that Galignani had published unauthorised editions of Byron's works as early as 1819 (including an edition of The Vampyre attributed to Byron), but it is one thing to ignore a copyright which did not technically apply in Europe; it is an entirely different matter to publish a private letter in facsimile. There was a long tradition of considering letters to be, in some sense, the property of their authors. Gentlemen and gentlewomen regularly returned love letters, for example, at the request of the author. As long as Byron was alive, Galignani may have felt that Byron retained the right to demand return of the letter, and there was, after all, Byron's reputation with a pistol as well as a pen to be considered.
.

"Then, too, Galignani may not have known that he could reproduce the letter with enough accuracy to make it appear indistinguishable from the original. Facsimiles were not unknown in the early nineteenth century, but the standard technique required an artist to make an engraving on wood, copper plate, or steel plate. While such facsimiles could be satisfactory, there was almost no chance that they could pass for originals. At the very end of the eighteenth century, though, a Dutch printer named Alois Senefelder invented lithography and published his ideas in the book entitled A Complete Course of Lithography. Senefelder himself had experimented with making lithographic reprints of ordinary handwriting in ink, and his successors soon perfected the process, though it meant the destruction of the original in charging and transferring the ink to the lithographic plate. Paris was the center of lithography in the early nineteenth century, and Galignani may well have been the first to use the new technique to reproduce a famous poet's handwriting. He obviously became aware of an exciting new technology. His situation was a little like that of the earliest people with access to a high-quality colour photocopier. Surely there can be little wrong with photocopying a hundred dollar bill to see if you can do it (though it is against the law unless the copy is enlarged), and there cannot be much wrong with giving one of these facsimiles to a friend to illustrate what the new technology can do. But that facsimile of a hundred dollar bill doesn't have to pass through very many hands before it starts being mistaken for the real thing ― as was the case with Byron's letter. All of this makes it considerably more surprising that Galignani never identifies this letter as a facsimile on the letter itself or in the frontmatter of any of his editions of Byron's works. It is almost as if he wants the confusion to exist.
.

"This has been a tale of shaded truths. Polidori shaded the truth a bit in writing The Vampyre, Byron grazed it in denying his part in the story, Galignani bruised it creating his facsimile, and no doubt even I am manipulating it in repeating the story. Such is the slippery nature of truth itself. Over time, however, half-truths become hauntingly compelling. Thus, in such a bestseller as Tom Holland's Lord of the Dead, Byron's reputed vampirism is finding its way into popular culture. Thus, too, Galignani's clever facsimile seems to be more often taken as an original now than in the nineteenth century. Something within us makes us long to believe the fantastic."
.

.