Introduction

In 1897, the Irish author Bram Stoker published a novel which has become the most famous of all vampire stories. The novel was, of course,Dracula. It is almost needless to note that Stoker did not invent the figure of the vampire. Indeed, belief in creatures which return from the grave to prey upon their living victims or which suck the blood and the life from human beings seems to have existed for millennia. The Edimmu in Sumerian mythology, the Strix in Ancient Greece and Rome, the Vetala in Hindu mythology all have attributes that link them to the vampire. Fast forward to Europe in the Middle Ages and there are plenty of stories of vampire-like creatures from England to Hungary. They continued to be recorded for several centuries and, even in the supposedly enlightened eighteenth century, reports of real-life vampires flooded out of Eastern Europe. The idea of vampirism seems to have been particularly strong in Slavic folklore and it was in Transylvania that Stoker chose to place the homeland of his own vampire.

The name ‘Dracula’ he took from a historical figure, Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, born in 1431. Vlad’s father had been given the honorary name of ‘Dracul’ (the Wallachian word for ‘dragon’) and Vlad was described as ‘Dracula’ or ‘son of the dragon’. Schooled in the brutal politics of Eastern Europe in the mediaeval era, Vlad Dracula was renowned for the bloodthirsty punishments he inflicted on his enemies. During several spells as ruler, which finally ended with his death in battle in 1476, he gained the nickname Vlad the Impaler because of his fondness for impaling those who opposed him on wooden stakes and leaving their bodies to terrorise any others who might think of taking up arms against him. One chronicler reports seeing twenty thousand men, women and children who had suffered this punishment. After his death, Vlad Dracula rapidly became a byword for cruelty and books describing his misdeeds with alluring titles likeThe Frightening and Truly Extraordinary Story of a Wicked Blood-drinking Tyrant Called Prince Dracula were published in the Balkans and further afield. Some scholars claim that Vlad Dracula has been unjustly stigmatised. His cruelties were no worse than those of many other mediaeval rulers whose reputations have not suffered as his has done. In Romania he is seen as a significant figure in the nation’s history who built a strong and independent state of Wallachia and defended it against the Turks. In the rest of the world he is fated to be remembered because, one day in the 1890s, Bram Stoker read of him in a history of Eastern Europe and decided to borrow his name for the vampiric anti-hero of a novel he was writing.

Stoker did not invent the vampire and nor was he the first writer to make use of the creature in his work. The literary vampire first makes an appearance in eighteenth-century poetry, originally in Germany and, towards the end of the century, in England. An obscure German poet, Heinrich August Ossenfelder, published ‘Der Vampir’ in 1748, a short poem which reflected interest at the time in a series of reports from Eastern Europe and the Balkans of vampire activity in the Austrian Empire. Ossenfelder seems to have introduced the vampire into European literature and other German poets, most notably Goethe in ‘The Bride of Corinth’, followed his example. In England, a vampire is a peripheral character in Robert Southey’sThalaba the Destroyer and Coleridge’s unfinishedChristabel can be interpreted as a vampire romance.

Romantic poets also had a role to play in the appearance of the vampire in prose fiction. In the summer of 1816, Byron and Shelley, together with Shelley’s soon-to-be wife Mary, were staying at the Villa Diodati in the Swiss village of Cologny. Conversation turned frequently to the supernatural and all three began to write stories on the subject. The only one that was finished was Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein. However, Byron did produce a fragment of a novel, which found its way into print (against the poet’s wishes) in 1819. What was published does suggest that Byron intended to write a vampire story and his personal physician John Polidori, who was also present at the Villa Diodati, took inspiration from what little had been written. Polidori created his own supernatural tale which was published asThe Vampyre in the same year. Confusingly, it first appeared under Byron’s name, presumably in order to increase its commercial appeal, but Polidori soon laid claim to it and his authorship was acknowledged in later editions.

Polidori followed romantic tradition by dying you