A Brief Discussion concerning the evolution of the vampire from a literary figure in nineteenth-century supernatural fiction into a popular literary figure in 2016. Part 1

Part I

Concerning Beyond the Count

In large part, my deep fascination with the history and culture of the late 1800s stems from my utter love of nineteenth-century supernatural fiction and weird literature. And of course, the quintessential Victorian-era horror figure is the vampire.

When I came across Beyond the Count: The Literary Vampire of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, I was intrigued. Not only because of my fondness for nineteenth-century supernatural fiction, but because this work reproduces original translations of reports, articles and fiction from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries regarding so-called outbreaks of vampirism and related incidents.

This work is basically divided into two parts. The much smaller first part is a collection of published accounts from the 1700s, reporting episodes of the outbreak of vampirism, primarily from eastern Europe and Serbia. Also included were official government reports of how the situation was resolved and what steps were taken to investigate, contain and end the supposed outbreak. The first part, the true gem of the work for me, begins in 1732 with a London newspaper report translated from the original account. The subsequent reports of how government officials struggled to explain the visible effects of so-called vampirism in light of the new understanding of science and how they dealt with the situation were particularly interesting. In other words, how what previously was thought to be folklore became concerns of the government.

The second part presents fiction, plays, and poems that treat the vampire as villain or protagonist. Amongst these is Polidori's The Vampyre published in 1819. This work was the first instance in English where a vampire was the protagonist of the tale. Regarding this, in his thorough introduction to Children of the Night: Classic Vampire Stories, David Stuart Davies wrote: "The Vampyre remains an important work not just because it was the first vampire story in English fiction, but also because it provides many of the elements that became standard features in such tales: explicit sexual innuendoes, foreign settings, Gothic curses, passionate heroes and the unsettling necrophiliac attraction of the undead state."

The other tales in Beyond the Count, did not add substantially to the lore or further the development of the vampire as principal character. They were included, I believe, for the purpose of completeness, of providing as complete an inventory of such fiction as possible.

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The fervency and intensity in which these folk tales and popular beliefs about vampires were held, even by government officials and the military, made possible works like Polidori's The Vampyre and later Le Fanu's Carmilla, and ultimately Stoker's Dracula. These tales seized our imagination by the throat...

...and it has yet to let go.

 

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