The First Vampire Story in All Its Gory

For this special Halloween month I took a deep dive into the first vampire stories, including The Vampyre and The Fragment, and uncovered many things!

From the controversy in who actually created the story, to the oddities in its publishing, and finally to the author, Dr John William Polidori’s, death.

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Sources:

Polidori’s diary and letters https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55017/55017-h/55017-h.htm

In depth look at Polidori and the Vampyre with citations: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/41127663.pdf

Polidori’s death: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1970869/?page=1

Polidori Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Polidori

Tha Vampyre Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vampyre

Burial practices of the 19th century https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/death-dying/dying-and-death/burying/

Article from The University of Queensland Aus: https://stories.uq.edu.au/contact-magazine/2023/polidoris-the-vampyre/index.html

Fantasmagoriana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasmagoriana

Polidori’s other works https://www.amazon.in/dp/1839675675
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_the_Angels

Frankenstine third editon: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UQc52fOn3hUC&pg=PA7&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Lord Byron’s Fragment: https://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Byron/fragment.html

The Vampyre: https://www.public.asu.edu/~cajsa/thevampyre1816/complete_text_vampyre.pdf

Polidori’s name, however, is not mentioned (in the book): https://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/2013/01/16/first-edition-of-the-vampyre-reveals-clues-about-history-of-book-and-its-popularity/

Mary Shelley’s quote about “Poor Pollidori” https://lithub.com/on-the-very-scary-rise-of-the-first-literary-vampire/

Pollidori’s life with Byron (no citations shown) https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-poet-the-physician-and-the-birth-of-the-modern-vampire/

Fragment of a ghost story https://www.simple-poetry.com/poems/fragment-of-a-ghost-story-45278234191

Adaptations: https://literature.fandom.com/wiki/The_Vampyre

First vampire stories: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/01/12/books-first-vampire-in-literature

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