“It was then asserted, that, in several places, dead persons had been known to leave their graves, and, by night, to revisit the habitations of their friends; whom, by suckosity, they drained of their blood as they slept. The person thus phlebotomised was sure to become a Vampyre in their turn.”
John Stagg “The Vampyre” (1810)
To celebrate Halloween this year, we've picked the well worn, yet eternally fascinating, subject of vampires. Using HathiTrust alongside Wikipedia,1 we explore the richness of the vampire trope in nineteenth-century Britain while also highlighting the depth of HathiTrust’s collections. Far too many vampires lurk in the volumes of HathiTrust to cover the topic comprehensively here, so we have narrowed our tour to a few significant nineteenth-century publications that trace the evolution of the spectral figure in Britain across a century of writing.
Vampire myths were common to Eastern and Southeastern Europe in the early 1700’s, and made their appearance in German poetry by midcentury. By the close of the eighteenth century, vampires had flown across the channel where they crept slowly yet stealthily into 19th century British literature on the wings of poetry. Gothic Romanticism and the vampire craze which later took hold in England were inspired, in part, by Gottfried Bürger’s poem “Lenore”, published in Germany in 1774. The poem tells the story of a young woman who is carried to her death on the back of a galloping horse, behind her fiance who has risen from the dead. While it contains no explicit reference to vampires (the mysterious rider is revealed to be Death - a skeleton with a scythe and an hourglass,)2 the poem is important to the development of vampire literature and the rise of British gothic romanticism.3 “Lenore” took off like wildfire in Europe4 and was soon translated into English and shared in literary parlors in the UK: No fewer than five translations of the text were published in 1796.5
While there are references to vampires in a few earlier poems, the first English poem explicitly based on the vampire theme is John Stagg’s 1810 publication “The Vampyre”, quoted in the epigraph above. The poem portrays a conversation between a husband and wife wherein the husband explains that his dearest deceased friend has been rising from the dead each night to feast on his blood. He has grown continuously weaker, and this night will be his last. He tells his wife that after his own death, he in turn will return to drink her blood unless a javelin is driven into his dead corpse. 
The poem contains many basic elements of the modern vampire story, yet the victim is a man rather than a young woman, and the vampires appear to harbor no ill will toward their victims as they prey on close friends and loved ones.
Lord Byron, a poet and major figure of nineteenth-century Romanticism, was essential to the development of British vampire literature, both as an author and an inspiration. In 1813, Byron published his epic poem, The Giaour, a hit that contributed to the poet’s rising stardom.6 While it is not a poem focused on vampires, it contains one of the earliest passages about vampires in English literature. The poem’s narrator predicts that the Giaour will be punished for a murder he committed by becoming a vampire after his death, condemned to suck the blood of his daughter, sister, and wife. In Byron’s poem, vampirism is a form of punishment inflicted on a man for committing a grave sin.
But Byron’s role in the rise of the vampiric figure in British literature was not limited to his own writing: He also inspired his young friend John Polodori to write the first work of English vampire fiction, The Vampyre, a short work based partly upon Byron himself,7 in which a vampire is newly portrayed as a debauched aristocrat.8 Like Frankenstein, this work emerged from an infamous night in 1816, when a group of young literati found themselves trapped indoors reading supernatural tales,9 and one proposed they each write a ghost story.10 The proposal prompted Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) to write her renowned novel and Byron to start, but never finish, a novel with a vampire theme; “A Fragment” of it was published. Polidori used Byron’s fragment as the basis of his own complete story.11 The Vampyre was published twice in 1819: in The New Monthly Magazine and as a single volume. Both publications incorrectly attributed authorship to Lord Byron. While Polidori immediately attempted to correct the mistake and claim authorship in letters to the editor of the New Monthly Magazine and to the publisher, the error in attribution likely contributed to the story’s immediate success.
Polidori named his vampire Lord Ruthven, a name previously used by one of Byron’s former lovers to parody him in an unflattering way in the novel, Glenarvon.12 The story is told from the perspective of Aubrey, a wealthy young gentleman who is traveling the continent with Lord Ruthven (Polidori had similarly accompanied Lord Byron on travels in Europe.)13 Aubrey slowly realizes that Lord Ruthven delights in tormenting others, seducing innocent young women whom he has no intent to marry. Ultimately, Ruthven victimizes the two women Aubrey values most: his sister and Ianthe, a young Greek woman with whom he has fallen in love. Ultimately, Aubrey is so distraught and broken by Ruthven’s malevolence that he has a stroke and dies.14 Lord Ruthven set the model for the modern vampire: he is charming, alluring, narcissistic, sadistic, and exceedingly dangerous.
The Vampyre was a huge success and ran through many editions and translations. In addition, numerous adaptations and derivative works were created across the UK, the Continent, and the United States.
After the introduction of vampires through poetry 
and then short fiction, they leapt almost immediately to the London stage. By August, 1820, an adaptation of Polidori’s tale was being performed at London’s Lyceum Theatre. The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles, a Romantic Drama, in Two Acts, by J.R. Planché, was an immediate success.15 Planché’s vampire, who is also named Lord Ruthven, is a charming and alluring nobleman who moves freely through society, as his friends are unaware of his condition. To survive, Ruthven must marry women in order to drink their blood.
Vampires first emerged in novel form during the Victorian era, as Varney the Vampire: or, The Feast of Blood published in 1847. The lengthy work (over 800 pages) proved so popular that it was later republished in 1853 in the form of Penny Dreadfuls16 (broken into small sections, sold for a penny each). It tells the story of Sir Francis Varney, who like Ruthven is a nobleman vampire, and it introduces the tropes of vampires with fangs, hypnotic powers over others, and superhuman strength.
We finally arrive at the most illustrious and quintessential vampire of all, Dracula, written by Bram Stoker and published in 1897. Unlike the vampires that came before him, Dracula is able to shapeshift into animals as well as a mist or fog; he does not cast a shadow nor has a reflection in a mirror, and he is repelled by garlic and religious items such as crucifixes and sacramental bread.
The novel’s first glimpse of the vampire references Bürger’s poem “Lenore”, published 123 years before:
As he spoke he smiled, and the lamplight fell on a hard-looking mouth, with very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, as white as ivory. One of my companions whispered to another the line from Burger's "Lenore":
"Denn die Todten reiten schnell" -
("For the dead travel fast")
Thus, we return to the start of our tour having witnessed the evolution of the vampire through nineteenth-century British literature, as accessible in HathiTrust. But we recognize that we have only just begun to sink our teeth into this meaty topic. Perhaps next year we’ll trace the trope of the female vampire as she lurked within the dark corners of nineteenth-century British literature. Until then, Happy Halloween!
Notes
1 Wikipedia was used to set context and serve as a jumping off point to discover materials in HathiTrust and additional online references.
2 Robertson, John G. A history of German literature (New York: G. P. Putnam's sons, 1902), 304.
3 Twitchell, James B. The living dead: a study of the vampire in Romantic literature
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981), 33.
4 Robertson, 304.
5 Emerson, Oliver Farrar The earliest English translations of Bürger's Lenore; a study in English and German romanticism (Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1915), 10.
6 Gilroy, John “The Giaour and Other Broken Tales,” Romantic Literature: Companion York Notes, https://www.yorknotes.com/undergraduate/english-literature/romantic-literature/study/critical-theories-and-debates/03030300_forms-of-ruin.
7 McKelvy, William “200 Years On, ‘The Vampyre’ Still Thrills,” Washington University Center for the Humanities, March 27, 2019 https://humanities.wustl.edu/features/william-mckelvy-the-vampyre-200.
8 Bliss, Dominic “How popular culture changed our view of the vampire,” National Geographic Online, October 30, 2022, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/how-popular-culture-changed-our-view-of-the-vampire.
9 Shelly, Mary Frankenstein, or, The modern Prometheus (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), viii.
10 Mitford, John “Extract of a Letter from Geneva” introduction to The Vampyre by John Polidori (London, Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1819), xiv-xvi.
11 McKelvy, https://humanities.wustl.edu/features/william-mckelvy-the-vampyre-200.
12 George, Sam “Older than Dracula: in search of the English vampire,” The Conversation, October 25, 2018 https://theconversation.com/older-than-dracula-in-search-of-the-english-vampire-105238.
13 Kane, Melissa Kane “John Polidori: Edinburgh University’s Tragic Romantic and the Influence of The Vampyre” Retrospect Journal, https://retrospectjournal.com/2020/11/08/john-polidori-edinburgh-universitys-tragic-romantic-and-the-influence-of-the-vampyre/.
14 Summers, Montague The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & co., ltd., 1928), 284-289.
15 Summers, 306-307.
16 Summers, 333.