The Vampyre, a Tale
By John William Polidori
Aubrey meets the mysterious Lord Ruthven at a social event when he comes to London. After briefly getting to know Ruthven, Aubrey agrees to travel around Europe with him but leaves him shortly after they reach Rome when he learns that Ruthven seduced the daughter of a mutual acquaintance. Aubrey travels to Greece alone, where he falls in love with an innkeeper’s daughter, Ianthe. She tells him about the legends of the vampire, which are very popular in the area.
This romance is short-lived as Ianthe is unfortunately killed, found with her throat torn open. The whole town believes it to be the work of the evil vampire. Aubrey does not make the connection that this coincidentally happens shortly after Lord Ruthven comes to the area. Aubrey makes up with Ruthven and rejoins him in his travels, which becomes his undoing. The pair are attacked by bandits on the road, and Ruthven is mortally wounded. On his deathbed, Ruthven makes Aubrey swear an oath that he will not speak of Ruthven or his death for a year and a day, and once Aubrey agrees, Lord Ruthven dies laughing.
Aubrey returns to London and is amazed when Ruthven appears shortly after that, alive and well and living under a new identity. Ruthven reminds Aubrey of his oath and then seduces Aubrey’s sister. Helpless to protect his sister, Aubrey has a nervous breakdown. Upon recovering, Aubrey learns that Ruthven is engaged to his sister, and they are due to be married on the day his oath ends. He writes a letter to his sister explaining everything in case something happens to him before he can warn her in person. Aubrey does die, and his letter does not arrive in time. Ruthven marries Aubrey’s sister and kills her on their wedding night; she is found drained of blood, with Ruthven long gone into the night.
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John William Polidori
John William Polidori (7 September 1795 – 24 August 1821) was a British writer and physician.
Biography.
He is known for his associations with the Romantic movement and is credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. His most successful work was the short story “The Vampyre” (1819), the first published modern vampire story. Although the story was at first erroneously credited to Lord Byron, both Byron and Polidori affirmed that the author was Polidori. John William Polidori was born on September 7, 1795, in Westminster. He was the oldest son of Gaetano Polidori, an Italian political émigré scholar, and his wife, Anna Maria Pierce, an English governess. He had three brothers and four sisters. His sister, Frances Polidori, married the exiled Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti. Thus, posthumously, Polidori became Maria Francesca Rossetti’s uncle, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, and Christina Georgina Rossetti. William Michael Rossetti published Polidori’s journal in 1911.
Polidori was one of the earliest pupils at the recently established Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire from 1804. In 1810, he went to the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote a sleepwalking thesis and received his medical doctorate on 1 August 1815, at 19. In 1816, which became known as the Year Without a Summer, Polidori entered Lord Byron’s service as his physician and accompanied him on a trip through Europe. Publisher John Murray offered Polidori 500 English pounds to keep a diary of their travels, which Polidori’s nephew William Michael Rossetti later edited. At the Villa Diodati, a house Byron rented by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the pair met Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, her husband-to-be, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their companion (Mary’s stepsister) Claire Clairmont. One night in June, after the company had read aloud from Fantasmagoriana, a French collection of German horror tales, Byron suggested they each write a ghost story. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “A Fragment of a Ghost Story” and wrote down five ghost stories recounted by Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis, published posthumously as the Journal at Geneva (including ghost stories) and on return to England, 1816, the journal entries beginning on 18 August 1816. Mary Shelley worked on a tale that would later evolve into Frankenstein. Byron wrote (and quickly abandoned) a fragment of a story, “A Fragment,” featuring the main character Augustus Darvell, which Polidori used later as the basis for his tale, “The Vampyre,” the first published modern vampire story in English.
John William Polidori
