Poor Polidori. That's the title of D. L. MacDonald's (critical) biography of the sometime author and physician we turn our attentions to on this damp, grey and windy night. And a fitting title it seems to have been when one considers a few of his woes.

For not only did the text of "The Vampyre" (which he appears to have left behind him in Switzerland in the autumn of 1816) get submitted to the New Monthly in London without his knowledge or consent, but, when it was eventually published it was described (by the magazine's proprietor, Henry Colburn) as "A Tale by Lord Byron". Ouch.

Add in Polidori's subsequent career failures, his dismissal (from his physician duties) by nasty Byron, and it's not entirely surprising that he opted for a romantic exit from this cruel world – taking his own life at the tender age of 26.

Yet the last laugh (or morbid chuckle) remains his. While many of Byron's other hangers-on are remembered only for their (sometimes literal…ooer) connections to his Lordship, Polidori's contribution to the genesis and development of the modern vampire mythos has ensured him a modest literary immortality.

Prior to Lord Ruthven's appearance, traditional (Serbian/Hungarian) vampires tended to be "bloated, shaggy, foul-smelling corpses who preyed on their immediate neighbours and relatives".¹ Not only that, but these grotesque revenants "were composed entirely of peasants".² Quick! Pass me my lavender-soaked handkerchief!

Polidori's transformation of the vampire from "bestial ghoul to glamorous aristocrat"³ established a template which blew away all competitors. Bram Stoker, Universal Pictures and Hammer (et al) would later finesse this model, thus helping to ensure its almost complete dominance, but Polidori's misattributed tale was (pretty much) where it all started.

With that I invite you to grab your flagons of blood-red wine and get chatting. My own contributions may be less fast and frequent than usual, owing to the fact that I'm currently laid up in bed with a bastardly cold. Offers of sympathy and understanding are encouraged. Sniff.

1. Polidori, John The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre (OUP, 2008), p. xii. [back]
2. Ibid. [back]
3. Ibid. xix. [back]

By way of buildup to next Monday's (miss it and you'll die crying) John Polidori Vampyre-fest, I hereby present a post on a strangely neglected topic. Namely, "Mathematics and the Undead".

Like many parents of glamorous (i.e. brown & damp) 70s Ireland my folks were doorstepped by one of the then ubiquitous (and aggressively persuasive) roving World Book salesmen. The end result of this exchange was a shelf full of sober volumes that told us more than we ever wanted to know about American state capitals and the intricacies of the US political system. Thrilling. The modest spoonful of sugar that helped this medicine go down came in the form of "Childcraft" – World Book's attempt to edutain and entercate the youth of planet earth.

Volume 13 in the series was Mathemagic, a typically sneaky example of the lengths adult educators often go to in their quest to groovify the ungroovy. Though most of its pages left me searching for "magic" that palpably wasn't there, a section called "Multiplying Vampires" kept me gripped and appalled.

"To stay alive", Mathemagic told us "a vampire has to bite about one person a week". After this (it continued) "the person bitten becomes a vampire too!". Note the exclamation mark used to punctuate that sinister piece of lore. In the original text it's a big round jolly one. The kind Enid Blyton might have used to cap a sentence like "Noddy had never tasted such smashing jam!". I'm looking at it right now. It's fantastically inappropriate.

Perhaps realising the unsettling oddness of its tone, "Multiplying Vampires" then shifts toward reassurance:

Many people believe there really are such creatures as vampires. But there aren't, of course. And you can use multiplication to prove to your friends that there's no such thing as a vampire.

Good ol' multiplication. There then follows a tedious passage that describes how vamps would create other vamps who would, in turn, create yet more vamps (and so on), before we're abruptly asked:

Do you see what is happening?

My response to this question, back in 1979, was something along the lines of "Yes I do see what is happening. The world is becoming progressively more well stocked with vampires. I'm scared. Make it stop."

But it doesn't stop:

At the end of the fifth week there would be two times sixteen, or thirty-two vampires, and so on. And, as this keeps on, the number of bloodthirsty vampires grows by leaps and bounds.

Waaah! And on we go. Tenth week? 1,024 vampires. Fifteenth week? 32,768 vampires. Twentieth week?

…there would be 1,048,536 vampires. That's right – more than a million vampires!

The gleeful italics and exclamation mark once again rubbed the stinky turd of fear firmly in our small anxious faces. By week 32 we're up to 4,294,967,286 vampires and we've sobbed ourselves into a hysterical puddle.

But wait a minute!

Go on…

There are only about four billion people in the whole world!¹

So that means…

…if there ever had been just one vampire, every person in the world would have been turned into a vampire in just thirty-two weeks! And because you know very well that you and your friends aren't vampires, you know there never was such a thing as a vampire. See?

The inevitable result of reading the words "because you know very well that you and your friends aren't vampires" was, of course, to start me suspecting the complete opposite – that all my friends were vampires. Far from offering crumbs of rational comfort, "Multiplying Vampires" ends up reading like juvenile propaganda slipped into the education system by actual vampires keen to keep pesky kids from sticking their grubby noses into their various global plots and schemes.

As if to practically admit to this suspicion the final double-page spread shows hordes of the undead lining up to enter an extravagant Gothic manor. Their HQ, no doubt, for "Operation Suck Childrens' Faces Off".

Look at the evil bastards. Laughing and leering it up thanks to the "Mathemagic" that proved they couldn't exist.

There's a lesson in there somewhere.

1. Betraying its age here. [back]

For the eight session of our Dreadful Thoughts story club we're heading way back to the Villa Diodati – summer residence of Byron & Co. and scene of a spooky story competition that helped produce not only Frankenstein, but John Polidori's seminal "The Vampyre" (1819).

To set the scene here follows a brief summary of Polidori's brief life:

John Polidori (1795-1821) was the son of a distinguished Italian scholar and translator. He received his medical degree from Edinburgh in 1815 at the unusually early age of 19, and displayed his fascination with the stranger aspects of science in his thesis on somnambulism. In 1816 he became Lord Byron's personal physician and travelling companion, [returning] to England in 1817 but [failing] to establish himself as a writer or a physician. He committed suicide in his father's house in 1821.¹

Told you it was brief.

Failed careers and (prussic acid assisted) suicide aside, Polidori's "The Vampyre" can still lay claim to being (in Christopher Frayling's words) "probably the most influential horror story of all time"² and "the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre."

A fine and formative place, then, to start our cycle of classic monster discussions.

Go. Read (over the weekend). Come back here and chat. Details as follows.

Story: "The Vampyre" (html), (pdf), (Project Gutenberg page).

Meeting: Monday, 29th September, 9 p.m.

1. Polidori, John The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre (OUP, 2008), p. 255. [back]
2. Ibid. p. 257. [back]