John Polidari and the Vampires (by Simon Strickland-Scott)
Mary Wollstoncraft died tragically within days of giving birth to her daughter, also called Mary, in 1797. The younger Mary was raised by her father, William Godwin along with her step-mother (another Mary) and step-sister Clare Clermont. The early loss of her mother affected Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin deeply and she spent many hours at her mother’s graveside at St. Pancras Church (now St. Pancras Old Church). William Godwin was a radical who today is known as the ‘father of anarchism’. As such he attracted other radical thinkers of the day, including a young poet called Percy Bysshe Shelley who visited the Godwin home. Shelley and Mary fell in love and, in the face of Godwin’s disapproval of Shelley, Mary’s mother’s grave became their regular rendezvous place. Mary’s step-sister Clare meanwhile had what today we might call an on-off relationship with Shelley’s close friend, the poet, Lord Byron.
In July 1814 Mary and Percy eloped to France, taking Clare with them (though the two step- sisters did not get on). Shelley had abandoned his pregnant wife for this adventure and Mary, who was still only sixteen, passed herself off as ‘Mrs. Shelley’ throughout the trip. Eventually by 1816, they had travelled on to Geneva, Switzerland, where they met up with Byron who was renting the Villa Diodati, a large lake-side house, and so began one of history’s most legacy laden accidents.
The fifth person at the Villa was John William Polidari. Polidari was Byron’s personal physician. Some say this was a polite euphemism for drug dealer as Byron was an enthusiastic user of laudanum. Polidari had been born in 1795, the son of an Italian asylum seeker and he had graduated in medicine from Edinburgh University.
The summer of 1816 was unseasonal with heavy rain across central Europe keeping the inhabitants of the Villa Diodati indoors for several days. The small party entertained themselves first by reading ghost stories to each other. These came from Fantasmagoriana an anthology of German stories edited and translated (into French) by Jean Baptiste Eyries.
Then, following a suggestion from Byron, in a nineteenth century version of creepypasta, the group organised their own ghost story writing competition. This was of course the context in which Mary Shelley wrote the first draft of Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus, credited with being the first novel of the science fiction genre. Byron’s contribution to the event was later published as Fragment of a Novel and contained the kernel of an idea that Polidari would use for his own entry. It is not known what Percy Shelley or Clare Clermont wrote, if anything.
Although less well known than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but arguably, ultimately as influential, was Polidari’s entry; The Vampyre, a story based on East European folklore. It is credited as the first appearance in Western literature of the vampire entity and thus the beginning of a horror sub-genre that has become a major force in modern pop culture from Dracula to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Twilight and so many other titles of books, films, games and television shows.
The Vampyre is about an immortal English nobleman called Lord Ruthven who travels around Europe seducing and murdering women for their blood. It has been noted that the seducing part of this process bears an uncanny similarity to Byron’s behaviour and that he probably provided the model for Polidari’s Ruthven. The story is narrated by Ruthven’s companion Aubrey who reveals his suspicions to his sister just prior to his death. The story was first published in 1819 in the New Monthly Magazine and later in book form. Authorship was initially attributed to Byron because the publishers felt his name would ensure more interest and sales. However following protests, not least from Byron himself who felt an injustice on the part of his friend, Polidari’s name began to appear as the author in later editions.
Despite the early success of his work, Polidari’s life was not going well. Returning to England he was still contesting the authorship of his work. In addition among several vices, Polidari had a weakness for gambling and accumulated large debts as a result. Debt and depression took their toll and Polidari died in August 1821 aged only 25 of a suspected suicide. Given the shame and indeed sin attached to suicide at the time, it seems that Polidari’s connections ensured a rather improbable verdict of natural causes from the coroner. This enabled the dead man’s body to receive a Christian burial in consecrated ground and so he was duly laid to rest at St. Pancras Church very close to where Mary Wollstonecraft lay.
However, not unlike the fictional vampires who moved from their places of burial, John Polidari would not rest in his grave for long. In 1866, as a result of the building of St. Pancras Station and the Midland Railway which sliced through the graveyard, thousands of bodies were disinterred and gravestones moved; among these was Polidari’s.
Polidari was survived by his younger sister, Frances who married into another family of Italian asylum seekers, the Rossettis. Along with her husband Gabriele, Francis had four children. The oldest of these, Maria, became a nun, the other three made history as the founding members or associates of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Maria’s brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the leading figure in the Pre-Raphaelite movement which was founded in Gower Street, Bloomsbury in 1848. He was named in honour of the Italian writer Dante Alighieri most known for the Divine Comedy, a three part poem written in the Tuscan vernacular (and thus laying the foundation for standard modern Italian). The three parts; take the reader through hell, purgatory and heaven with the first part Inferno, remaining the best known today. It is somewhat ironic that Dante Gabriel should have been named after someone who, like his uncle was known for his interest in death, the afterlife and the dark side. As we shall see this would be one of several coincidences linking Polidari’s Vampyre to his Pre-Raphaelite family.
Dante Gabriel was assisted in his artistic endeavours by his brother William. The Pre-Raphaelites were a strictly male-only fraternity but women played such an influential role that they have separately been dubbed the ‘Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood’. William and Dante’s sister Christina remains to this day a famous poet in her own right while her mother, Frances modelled for Dante.
Another of Dante’s models was the tragic Elizabeth ‘Lizzy’ Siddal. Siddal, a milliner, was plucked from relative obscurity and introduced to the Pre-Raphaelites where she became one of their regular models. Most famously she posed for John Everett Millais’ painting Ophelia. A poet and artist herself, Siddal became the lover and, eventually the wife, of Dante Gabriel. Although the Pre-Raphaelites painted in a traditional style and their subject matter was often based on Christian themes, their own lifestyles were less traditional and often in stark contrast to the moral virtues expressed through their subjects. The relationship between Dante and Lizzy was tempestuous to say the least; rocked by Dante’s unfaithfulness and Lizzy’s addiction to laudanum (the drug of choice among artists at the time). After suffering a miscarriage and falling into deep depression Lizzy died of an overdose in 1862.
Overcome with guilt and grief Dante placed a recently completed unpublished book of his poetry in Lizzy’s coffin. Seven years after Lizzy’s death and burial at Highgate Cemetery, Dante was inspired to retrieve his poetry by his literary agent Charles Augustus Howell.
Lizzy was thus exhumed and the book of poems retrieved. Howell reported back to a distraught Dante that even years after her death Lizzy’s body had not decomposed, indeed it remained pristine and her hair had even grown. Howell had a notorious reputation as a liar but in this case his motives may have been altruistic, seeking to reassure and give some comfort to his friend. However the story of Lizzy’s ‘undead’ state became an urban legend in its day, believed by some to confirm the folk tales about vampires. In the decades following, Lizzy Siddal’s exhumation continued to fascinate and inspire. It has been suggested that Lizzy became the main influence behind Bram Stoker’s character Lucy Westenra in Dracula. Highgate cemetery became an established vampire ’hub’ up to the 1960’s when Hammer Films’ Taste the Blood of Dracula was partly filmed there, leading, after its release in 1970, to a moral panic which culminated in a real life vampire hunt the same year.
One final Pre-Raphaelite coincidental connection to vampires was Edward Burne-Jones, a member of the group famous for, among other things, stain glass window designs. Burne-Jones’ son, Phillip was also an artist and his most well-known work was called … The Vampire.
So, John Polidari’s short life introduced the vampire to Western society and his family inadvertently added some ‘real life’ drama to the mythos. All this beginning in the same context that Mary Shelley gave us Frankenstein.
This blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It was made by New Unity and Simon Strickland-Scott. Find out more: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
