When fiction is fatal – Byron and vampires

Vampires in Venice? In her new Gothic thriller, Dangerous, Essie Fox imagines what could happen if fiction appears to become fatal fact when Lord Byron is living in the water-bound city. Here she writes about the two incidents from Byron’s life that inspired her novel.

Most of us know of Bram Stoker‘s Dracula, published in 1897, as well as all the books and films that novel has inspired, and which are now a constant feature of the vampire horror genre. But not so many are aware of a story called The Vampyre published some 80 years before and now considered by most scholars to be the first vampiric novel published in the English language.

The villain of this story is the mysterious Lord Ruthven, one of the English upper classes who seduces fawning women at society events. However, the name of Ruthven in fiction was not entirely new, having already been used by Byron’s one time lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, when she wrote what was considered as her ‘fuck and publish’ novel: the sensational and melodramatic Glenarvon, in which she satirised the poet as a wild demonic rogue who often howled like a wolf in the middle of the night.

To a modern-day reader Glenarvon might be thought of as slow and somewhat turgid, but in its time the novel proved to be a great success; mainly due to the fact that the public was excited to know what Caroline Lamb might have written of the man she’d also famously named as “mad, bad, and dangerous”.

The Lord Ruthven who appears in Polidori‘s book was also based upon Lord Byron, but to know more of how and when let us travel back in time to 1816, and to the Villa Diodati overlooking Lake Geneva.

There, on a dark and stormy night, the infamous poet is living in exile (after being beset by debt and scandal back in England) while entertaining his new friend, the fellow poet Percy Shelley, along with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont. The small group is often joined by Byron’s personal physician, Doctor John Polidori.

Together they dine and sit around a blazing fire, drinking wine and opiates as rain thrashes against the windows and thunder rumbles in the skies, clouded with ash from the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Confined by the strange and unseasonably bad weather, they amuse themselves by reading from a fantasmagoria — in other words a compilation of short stories of ‘the dead.’ But growing bored with these tales, Byron suggests a competition in which they also attempt to write some horrors of their own.

Interpretation of Robertson's Fantasmagorie

What came of that idea was Mary Shelley’s classic novel that we know as Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, which had no doubt been inspired by the electrical storms that raged about the house.

But I’m quite sure Mary Shelley would also have been aware of scientific innovations going on at the time – in particular the horrible experiments conducted by Giovanni Aldini, where the corpse of a man who had been newly hung was subjected to the force of electrical shocks by applying metal rods that caused his body to convulse. The arms and legs were said to flail. The face contorted in grimaces. Even the eyelids opened wide. For anyone observing, it must have been truly alarming, appearing supernatural.

Polidori’s own idea for a story was based on a woman who walked about a house at dead of night, peeping at others through keyholes until, by some dark and eerie curse, she was punished, and her head was turned into a fleshless skull. This was deemed as laughable by everybody at the time, and so the story was abandoned. But what Lord Byron then came up with planted a seed that Polidori later expanded to create his novella, The Vampyre.

The few lines of a ‘fragment’ scribbled on a single page with reference to a vampire was immediately dismissed by Lord Byron as quite worthless.

However, three years later, when Polidori was no longer in the poet’s employment, the younger man sold his novel to the publisher Henry Colburn, who then printed the story in the New Monthly Magazine, after which it was acquired and produced as a book by Sherwood, Neely and Jones.

If only Polidori realised that his novel would go on to be a classic. For the doctor was consumed with a literary ambition, perhaps assuming his connection with Lord Byron was the key to open certain doors in the publishing world. However, such a gift also proved to be a curse when both publishers claimed that Byron was the author and placed the poet’s name beside the title of the story.

This was nothing more than an unscrupulous lie by which to help to sell more copies. Polidori may have told them of the story’s inspiration, but a few discarded lines do not make a finished book. However, no-one could deny that the demon of the title was based on Byron’s character, and it is true that at times Byron’s poems can be read as autobiographical.

Much like the poet, the imaginary Lord Ruthven is handsome, pale, and enigmatic. He travels widely in Europe and seduces many women, some of whom go on to die; one of them in Greece with a wound to her throat which the locals then insist is a vampire’s work.

Soon after this, Lord Ruthven is attacked on the road, and while dying of his wounds he makes his travelling companion, a younger man whose name is Aubrey and who might stand for Polidori, swear an oath not to speak a single word of his death for a year and a day.

When that time has elapsed and Aubrey returns to London, he is chilled to find Lord Ruthven not only still alive but also marrying his sister. The novel ends dramatically when “Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE.”

In 1819, when The Vampyre was first published and Byron heard of his name being linked with a book that he considered as being pedestrian and pompous, he was outraged and denied any involvement whatsover. And when it came to Polidori, he was ashamed to be thought of as a plagiarist and liar. Such a bitter disappointment must have surely influenced his tragic suicide at the age of 25.

This confusion of the truth now plays a part in my own novel, in which The Vampyre is published while Lord Byron lives in Venice, around the time when certain women with whom he is acquainted in my fictional world are found dead and drained of blood…

Dangerous by Essie Fox is published on 24 April, 2025.

When fiction is fatal – Byron and vampires

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