Ironic Byronic Archetype

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Dear Bishop Manchester, I'm a university student with a great appreciation for your work and writings. As many of my studies deal with the supernatural, I would love to pose a few questions to you -- particularly regarding Lord Byron -- simply for my own knowledge. I am an ardent lover of Byron and even hope to visit his grave this January, but in my research of him I find many references that would suggest that he had some involvement with vampires, or that he himself was a vampire. I refer not only to his literature and the odd description of his habits provided by Dr. Polidori, but his personal diaries where he refers to the unquenchable thirst and being haunted by those who are neither living nor dead. I dare even site you as possible evidence to Byron’s involvement with vampires, as I understand many cultures believe that the living descendants of vampires have a special ability to hunt them. What, if any, was Byron’s involvement with actual vampires, in his home country or abroad, or what is your opinion on the theory that he had intercourse with these creatures, if he was not one himself? I thank you kindly for anything you have to say on the matter. With deepest respect, Jordan Andrea, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Lord Byron, parodied as Lord Ruthven by John William Polidori in The Vampyre (1819), fortuitously crystallised an archetypal image that is centuries strong; yet he abhorred the vampire almost to the same extent as do I.

John William Polidori (7 September 1795 - 24 August 1821) is credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. Polidori was the oldest son of Gaetano Polidori, an Italian political émigré, and Anna Maria Pierce, a governess. He had three brothers and four sisters and was one of the first pupils at Ampleforth College. Polidori began his schooling in 1804 shortly after the monks, in exile from France, settled in the lodge of Anne Fairfax's chaplain in the Ampleforth Valley. He went on from Ampleforth in 1810 to Edinburgh University, where he received his degree as a doctor of medicine on 1 August 1815 at the age of nineteen.

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In 1816, Dr Polidori entered Lord Byron's service as his personal physician, and accompanied Byron on a trip through Europe. At the Villa Diodati, a house Byron rented by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the pair met with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and her husband-to-be Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their companion Claire Clairmont.

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One night in June, after the company had read aloud from the Tales of the Dead, a collection of horror tales, Byron suggested that they each write a ghost story. Mary Shelley worked on a tale that would later evolve into Frankenstein. Byron wrote (and quickly abandoned) a fragment of a story, which Polidori used later as the basis for his own tale.
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Rather than use the crude, bestial vampire of folklore as a basis for his story, Polidori based his character on Byron. Polidori named the character "Lord Ruthven" as a joke. The name was originally used in Lady Caroline Lamb's novel Glenarvon, in which a thinly-disguised Byron figure was also named Lord Ruthven.

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Polidori's Lord Ruthven was not only the first vampire in English fiction, but was the first fictional vampire in the form we recognise today - an aristocratic fiend who preyed among high society.
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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. The poet even 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 him.

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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.
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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 1:10pm, 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."

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Polidori's fate has been to be remembered only as a footnote in Romantic history. Reprints of the diary he kept during his travels with Byron are available, but are rather hard to find for purchase on the internet.
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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.

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As well as being mid-wife to Frankenstein's monster, he was uncle to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti.

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Three films have depicted John Polidori and the genesis of the Frankenstein and The Vampyre stories in 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).

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I have written about Lord Byron extensively in my book Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know. I do not believe for a moment that the poet was involved with vampires or that he fell victim to one. In this work, however, I touch on the haunting of Lady Caroline Lamb at Brocket Hall. Some have suggested that Lady Caroline Lamb might have been a vampire, but having researched all the evidence about her life and death thoroughly, and having visited her almost forgotten tomb many times, I can find nothing to support this notion. There is an illustrated plan of the Byron vault at Hucknall Torkard plus a close-up photograph of his and his daughter's coffins (taken when the vault was opened for Byron's exhumation in 1938) in my book. The description I provide of the poet's body as it appeared seventy-one years ago and what occurred to it immediately after his death in 1824, leaves little room for any theory about vampirism taking root.

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