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The (Gay) Origins of Vampires in British Literature

Thanks to the absolute joy that is Dracula Daily, I thought now might be a good time to talk about the origins of the vampire in British literature. I am a 19th century scholar who focuses on the Gothic, so while by no means an expert on vampires, I do have some understanding of how the genre came to be and boy, is it as wild and petty and as you'd hope it to be.

In order to understand how vampires came to be the aristocratic, blood sucking sex symbols they are today, let's first lay some ground work on how the tradition made it's way to Britain:

The vampire is a folkloric figure from Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, and Greece. In 1701, French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort was touring the island of Mykonos and recounted in his A Voyage to the Levant (1702) his experience witnessing the locals dig up the grave of a suspected Vrykolakas and cut the heart from its chest.

A century later, the Romantic poet Robert Southey cites de Tournefort's Voyage in his epic poem Thalaba the Destroyer (1801). The poem does not outright use the word "vampire" and the turning of the main character's love interest into a vampire is a minor plot point, but Southey's work draws a direct line of how the vampire tradition jumped from Greece to England.

Now here's where it gets interesting.

It involves (of course it does) everybody's favorite 19th century bad boy, Lord Byron.

Byron's poem The Giaour (rhymes with shower) is the first mention of a vampire in the English literary canon. His vampire falls more in line with the folkloric vampire as a blood drinking corpse than a debonair aristocrat. How Byron learned about vampires is not clear. He could have learned about them from Southey or de Tournefort, or encountered the legend during his own travels in Greece. Either way, Byron didn't really care for vampires. He thought they were dumb.

ENTER THE FAMOUS GHOST STORY NIGHT AT LAKE GENEVA

Scene: Mary and Percy Shelley. Mary's step sister Claire, Lord Byron, his doctor John Polidori, probably a ton of opium, and definitely a lot of sexual tension.

While most people know that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein during this time, it's also worth noting that Byron started writing what was called A Fragment, or a Fragment of a Novel which featured an aristocratic traveler/vampire. However, Byron got bored with it and decided to drop the whole thing.

Not so much for Dr. John Polidori. Polidori worshipped Byron. He wanted to be Byron. He most likely wanted to bed Byron and Byron had the gall to laugh and call him "Polly Dolly" and refuse to give him the time of day.

So Polidori got his revenge by taking over Byron' s fragment and turning it into The Vampyre (1819). The entire novel is a thinly veiled jab at Byron and his hedonistic living. To make matters worse, the public thought Byron wrote it which infuriated Polidori who just wanted to shame Byron who laughed the entire thing off and said he would never write anything so trashy.

Once again, you can blame Lord Byron for something. The aristocratic, seductive vampire is (indirectly) because of him.