CHAPTER THREE
FOR DECADES TO COME, 1816 would be known as the Year Without a Summer. In the previous April, Mount Tambora had erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, filling the atmosphere with ash and blocking enough of the sun’s rays to trigger temporary climate change around the world. In Boston some 15 months later, snow fell in July. In Europe, an incessant cold rain blanketed much of the Continent, confining a small circle of English poets and intellectuals inside the Villa Diodati, their rented lodgings on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Lord Byron, 28, and Dr. John Polidori, 20, Byron’s personal physician and traveling companion, had been joined by Percy Bysshe Shelley and his lover, 18-year-old Mary Godwin, along with her half sister, Claire Claremont, who was secretly carrying Byron’s child. Throughout the long, storm-swept June nights, they passed the time with conversation and books. By the glow of the hearth and the flicker of candlelight, Mary later recalled, the friends discussed ghosts and vampires and the “nature of the principle of life.” “Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated,” she remembered, for “galvanism had given token of such things.” Recent Italian experiments in galvanism, or applied electricity, purportedly showed that supplying current to a corpse could prompt it to behave in strange ways: clenching its fists, for instance, blowing out candles, or sitting up in its coffin.
On the night of June 16, as violent thunderstorms cracked overhead, Byron read from a volume of ghost stories called Fantasmagoria. One tale in the collection told of a “reanimated” dead girl whose body, when her grave was opened a year after her death, showed no signs of corruption.
That spooky evening gave rise to the world’s most famous ghost story contest. Perhaps the electricity in the air sparked to life the conceptions that eventually gave birth to the two most influential reanimated corpses in literature: Frankenstein’s monster and the vampire.
ENTER THE VAMPYRE
Lord Byron drafted the original sketch for what became “The Vampyre.” It would be the story of a mysterious nobleman who traveled to Greece, where his death would reveal, among other things, that he had been a vampire all along. That was as far as the great poet progressed before setting the tale aside.
Doctor Polidori then picked it up. He discarded his original idea about a skull-headed lady peeping through a keyhole and fleshed out Byron’s idea instead. As a writer, the doctor was not without talent; as a human being, he was touchy, petulant, envious, quick to take offense—and ultimately self-destructive. He and Lord Byron had quarreled endlessly, so as Polidori continued to create the vampire of his tale, Lord Ruthven, he modeled him on the now-hated figure of the poet. Thus did Polidori’s jaundiced view of a former friend become the prototype of the literary vampire—which, in turn, has given rise to popular depictions of the vampire today.
The most lionized poet of his time, Lord Byron at first glance made a good model for a vampire. Dark and irresistibly handsome, he was, according to one former lover, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Even his friends, such as the dashing naval officer Edward John Trelawny, acknowledged he was “prouder than Lucifer” and flashed the “smile of a Mephistopheles.” Byron stayed up all night, slept most of the day, and once used a human skull as a drinking bowl. He ate sparingly because he could not exercise; a lame leg, he said, made strenuous activity extremely painful. After Trelawny eventually saw the poet’s corpse, he noticed that, beneath the magnificent torso, “both his feet were clubbed, and his legs withered to the knee—the form and features of an Apollo, with the feet and legs of a sylvan satyr.”
But it was Byron’s character that caused the most controversy. Much has been made of the Byronic hero—the man who lives by his own code outside the conventions of society, the figure that novelist Charlotte Brontë called the “corsair.” But to Polidori, Lord Byron resembled nothing so much as Lord Ruthven in the opening scenes of “The Vampyre” he may have been the talk of the ballrooms, but he was also cold, arrogant, haughty, cruel, and predacious—“a man entirely absorbed in himself.”
Aubrey, the story’s narrator, accompanies Ruthven on a tour of Europe but grows disenchanted with him after witnessing his voracious sexual appetites and his cruel treatment of women. Ruthven has a cold, gray eye, while his skin exhibits a hue “which never gained a warmer tint, either from the blush of modesty, or from the strong emotion of passion.” Furthermore, all those to whom he gave money “inevitably found that there was a curse upon it, for they were all either led to the scaffold, or sunk to the lowest and most abject misery.”
In Greece, Aubrey falls in love with Ianthe, a beautiful girl who is attacked in a remote place one night and killed by a vampire. Regaining consciousness after wrestling with the fiend, Aubrey beholds Ruthven sitting there. After further adventures in Greece, bandits ambush the two men, and Ruthven is killed—or perhaps not, for the moonlight seems to revive him.
Ruthven next appears in London at an engagement party for Aubrey’s sister. Because he must feed at least once a year on the “life of a lovely female to prolong his existence for the ensuing months,” Ruthven preys upon Aubrey’s sister, which so enrages the young man that he dies of a stroke. In the closing line of the story, evil has emerged triumphant: “Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!”
Soon after being published—under Byron’s name, which Polidori had not approved—in the April 1, 1819, issue of the New Monthly Magazine, “The Vampyre” was released as a book and became a best seller. Its initial connection with Byron was undoubtedly the reason; in Germany, for example, the poet Goethe supposedly pronounced it the greatest of all Byron’s works.
Whether in England or on the Continent, the saga of the rapacious Ruthven was soon in readers’ hands everywhere. Within a year, it had been mounted on the stage as well. French writer Cyprien Bérard churned out a sequel, Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires(1820), which was attributed to the multitalented librarian and master of the literary fantasy, Charles Nodier. Though he had nothing to do with its genesis, Nodier proceeded to give Polidori’s tale a second life as a play, Le Vampire, though he switched the locale from Greece to Scotland. The play’s success incited a run on vampires in Paris, moving one critic to lament, “There is not a theatre in Paris without its Vampire!”
Several seasons later, the fad was still going strong: An English correspondent declared that the vampire was being received with “rapturous applause at almost all the spectacles from the Odeon to the Porte St. Martin…. Where are the descendants of the Encyclopedists and the worshippers of the goddess Reason,” he asked, when Parisians were mad for “apparitions nocturnes” and “cadavres mobiles?”
A young theater innovator named James Planché brought a version of the French play back to London. The Vampire, or the Bride of the Isles, opened in August 1820 at the Lyceum; it was given an incongruous Scottish setting, Planché wrote despairingly, only because the producer had “set his heart on Scotch music and dresses—the latter, by the way, were in stock.” Sensationalism, then as now, ruled the pens of copywriters; the playbill stated that vampires “are Spirits, deprived of all Hope of Futurity, by the Crimes committed in their Mortal State” but nevertheless are allowed to exert “Supernatural Powers of Fascination.” They cannot be destroyed, it asserted, if they kill one female each year—“whom they are first compelled to marry.” (That proviso clearly didn’t stick.) Planché, who invented a “vampire trap” that allowed the fiend to vanish and reappear onstage in startling fashion, got it right on his second attempt a few years later, when he set a revised version of The Vampire in Wallachia, using Magyar costumes.
The literary vampire had been loosed upon the world, but Polidori did not live to see its success. He died in August 1821, only 26 years old, and was buried in the consecrated ground of London’s St. Pancras churchyard. The truth of his demise—that he had poisoned himself in despair over gambling debts—was covered up, for in 1821, an Anglo-Saxon law grimly matching Polidori’s fevered imagination still remained on the books: It stipulated that a suicide must be buried at a crossroads, with a stake through his heart. The law was repealed two years later.
Two others who shared those hours in the Villa Diodati that stormy summer of 1816 soon followed Polidori to the grave. In July 1822, Percy Shelley drowned in a sailing accident off the coast of Italy. His body was cremated on a makeshift pyre on the beach where it had washed up—a consummation common among the pagan Greeks the poet had so admired.
Not long after the torch was applied, eyewitness Trelawny recalled, the carcass cracked open; where the skull rested on the red-hot iron bars, the “brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time.” When the flames subsided, there remained only ashes, some bone fragments—and Shelley’s heart, somehow undamaged. “In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace,” Trelawny recalled, “my hand was severely burnt….”
Less than two years later, in April 1824, Lord Byron died in Greece, where he had journeyed to fight in the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Turks. Byron apparently succumbed to a fever—if he wasn’t in fact bled to death by overzealous physicians—in swampy Missolinghi, just south of the Albanian border.
Mary Shelley would die of a brain tumor in 1851, at the age of 53. As her son sifted through her effects, he found not only locks of her dead children’s hair but also a copy of Percy Shelley’s Adonais, an elegy for the poet John Keats, who had likewise died young (though of tuberculosis). One page of the elegy was folded around a silk bag, which, when opened, contained some ashes—and a desiccated human heart.
BY HOOK OR BY CROOK
Such descriptions and mementos were not unusual in the 19th century, an era of fascination with death. People would hold picnics in such imposing cemeteries as Père Lachaise in Paris—before visiting the morgue, one hopes. Until a halt was put to the practice in 1905, thousands of people filed through the viewing gallery of that Paris morgue each year, gaping at the ever-changing display of corpses in much the same way they gazed into the new department-store windows a few blocks away. It was a social occasion, a place to take one’s girl.
A deep tremor of unease, however, often rattled this apparent aplomb. Young David Copperfield senses it in Dickens’s novel of that name: So frightened is David by the biblical story of Lazarus returning from the dead that the adults are “obliged to take me out of bed, and show me the quiet churchyard out of the bedroom window, with the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon.”
Such a tranquil aspect, though, can mask a restless graveyard. Horrible things might be going on down there. Stories of bodies found in their coffins arched, contorted, turned prone, their shrouds ripped, or otherwise wrenched into positions of inconceivable agony fed one of the morbid phobias of the age: the obsessive terror of premature burial.
By the 19th century, it was widely believed that many people fell into catalepsies or comas—one doctor posited a “death trance”—in which their vital functions were somehow suspended without incurring death. Such people appeared quite dead, of course—the ear could detect no heartbeat, the finger felt no pulse, the mirror held below their nostrils betrayed not a trace of breath—and so they were promptly buried. Yet, they still might revive in the grave, a thought so horrible that most people could not bear to imagine it.
So before being committed to the coffin, in an age before embalming was widespread, bodies were subjected to actual tortures—fingers were dislocated, feet were burned—to provoke a response. Sometimes they were just parked someplace and left—the Duke of Wellington remained unburied for two months—until the sure signs of decomposition began to show. Nevertheless, instances piled on instances of last-minute revivals at the graveyard gate, of corpses sitting up in their coffins and looking wonderingly about them. At a time when graves were often only 18 inches deep—and sometimes only six or eight—it was not hard to believe that someone might claw his way out and appear, like Madeline Usher in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a bloody, haggard, shrouded figure returned from the dead.
Those with a morbid dread of premature burial could obtain all kinds of ingenious survival devices with which to outfit one’s final home. Pipes leading aboveground might be fixed to the coffin so that its inmate would not suffocate should he awaken. Or “Bateson’s Belfry”—a bell attached to the coffin—could be installed, with its cord thoughtfully placed in the corpse’s hand so that he might give it a pull and ring for assistance. An inexpensive measure was to enclose a shovel and crowbar inside the coffin.
Some people opted to have their hearts cut out—the theory being that whatever can’t revive you on the operating table certainly won’t wake you in the grave. Chopin, for example, was so terrified of premature burial that he had his heart removed; it was preserved in alcohol (rumored to be cognac) and interred in the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw.
The idea of premature burial prefigured the larger idea of reanimated corpses, and for that reason, it was inevitably invoked as an explanation for vampirism. Premature burial was also seized upon as the rationale for why some bodies found in graves were better preserved than others: They had somehow remained alive down there. The atrocious concept also came in handy for explaining the blood found in coffins: The victim, buried alive, had understandably severed his veins and arteries in a frantic attempt to claw his way out, finally exsanguinating himself. Indeed, the whole vampire legend might be based on dim memories of living people who had actually returned from the grave. That seemed the rational explanation, for as an 1847 article in Blackwoods magazine put it, “no ghastlier terror can there be than the accredited apprehension of Vampirism.”
It didn’t help matters, though, if the bodies were missing altogether.
“As the dark nights of the late autumn came on,” wrote Victorian author Thomas Frost of the early years of the 19th century, “the fears of the timid and nervous were doubled, and persons who lived in lonely places, or in the ill-lighted parts of towns, became afraid to leave their houses after nightfall.” They were afraid not of goblins, but of body snatchers.
With the growth of medical schools, and in an era before refrigeration, came the need for a constant supply of fresh corpses for dissection. In England, the bodies of executed criminals had traditionally filled this need. After the British penal code was reformed at the turn of the 19th century, however, drastically curtailing capital punishment, that source effectively dried up. The anatomists then quietly circulated word that they would pay for fresh corpses, no questions asked. Body snatchers, known by the grimly ironic sobriquet of “resurrectionists,” met the new demand.
Bribing cemetery watchmen and wielding quiet wooden spades, they worked in the dead of night. They dug only at the head of a grave and left most of the dirt intact. Using a crowbar, they would snap off the coffin lid, drag out the corpse by hook or rope, strip it of its cerements, sack it, carry it to a waiting hackney coach, and trundle it to the dissecting rooms. Ghoulish, yes, but the work was profitable: A leading resurrectionist once received £144 for 12 subjects in a single night. One body snatcher, when he in turn entered the graveyard (hopefully for good), left his family nearly £6,000.
The fresher the corpse, the better the pay. This led to burking — the murderous practice of clapping a pitch plaster over a victim’s nose and mouth, ensuring a speedy death that left few or no signs of the violence responsible. It also produced the freshest corpse possible. Burking was named for William Burke, an Irish ne’er-do-well who, between 1827 and 1828, with his accomplice William Hare, murdered 16 people in Scotland and sold their bodies to an esteemed Edinburgh anatomist, Dr. Robert Knox. The doctor escaped prosecution, Hare turned King’s evidence, and Burke was hanged for the crimes in 1829. In a pitiless twist of lex talionis, Burke’s body was then dissected at the University of Edinburgh, and his skin was made into pocketbooks and other macabre trophies. His skeleton still hangs in the college’s medical school today.
Horrors such as these led to the 1832 Anatomy Act, which expanded the legal options for obtaining cadavers. Body snatching remained a problem, though a lessening one, throughout the century.
In Canada, meanwhile, resurrectionists didn’t even have to dirty their hands; they simply filched corpses from mausoleums in winter, where they had been stacked up to await the spring thaw. In the United States, body snatchers were equally contemptuous of propriety: After a corpse was stolen from the grave next to that of Ohio congressman John Scott Harrison in 1878—as the son of President William Henry Harrison and the father of President Benjamin Harrison, John lay in a sealed and guarded brick vault—a vigorous search was launched for the missing body. The seekers never found the ordinary citizen, but to their shock, they discovered a loftier cadaver instead: Congressman John Harrison’s body had been suspended from a rope beneath a trap door inside the Medical College of Ohio. Soon afterward, a letter writer to the Zanesville (Ohio) Daily Courier opined:
…our ghouls are no imaginary demons. They walk about among us in broadcloth and kid gloves; physicians and surgeons, with lawyers to defend them, when caught at their obscene work; nice young men, who clerk in stores during the day, take their girls to places of amusement in the evening, and then replenish their depleted pockets by invading the cemeteries, putting hooks through the jaws of our deceased friends, sacking and carting away the bodies, and selling them to Professors of Anatomy for $25.00 a piece!
Grave robbing, though, is as old as burial itself. Long before there were professors of anatomy, there were folk healers. In an 1880 issue of the London Daily Mail, there appeared a notice about a “strange and horrible Wendish superstition, which has been handed down from the Pagan ancestors of the Prussians.” The Wends were Slavs living among the Germans of Thuringia, where grave robbing was punishable by life imprisonment:
It is commonly believed among the poorer peasantry of Wendish extraction that several paramount medicinal virtues and magical charms are seated in the heart or liver of a dead maiden or infant of tender years, and that these organs, brewed with certain herbs into a beverage, will cure diseases or inspire the passion of love in their consumers. The practical result of this barbarous belief is the constantly recurrent violation of the grave’s sanctity, and the mutilation of the corpses secretly disinterred from the consecrated ground in which they have been laid to rest. Last week two graves in the new cemetery of Weissensee were broken open during the night, and the coffins contained in them forced, and the bodies of an unmarried girl and a male infant discovered next morning by the guardians of the burial-ground, mangled in the most revolting manner, the cavity of the chest in both cases having been completely emptied of its contents.
BURY ME DEEP
In the mid-1840s, those disinclined to pay 12 pence for each new installment of Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son could opt for a far cheaper (in all senses of that word) reading experience. The penny dreadful had arrived, and with it a series of luridly compelling titles: Wagner the Were-Wolf; The Skeleton Clutch, or the Goblet of Gore; Sawney Bean, the Man-Eater of Midlothian; The Maniac Father, or the Victim of Seduction; and so on, all vying to dethrone the penny-dreadful king: the 220 chapters on 868 double-columned pages of Varney the Vampyre; or, The Feast of Blood, once described by literary critic James Twitchell as among the “most redundant, exorbitant, digressive, thrilling, tedious, and fantastic works ever written.”
From the outset, Varney is vampire-as-stage-villain. As he bends over the sleeping “fair Flora” Bannerworth, his face is “perfectly white—perfectly bloodless”:
The eyes look like polished tin; the lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful eyes is the teeth—the fearful looking teeth—projecting like those of some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like…He drags her head to the bed’s edge. He forces it back by the long hair still entwined in his grasp. With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth—a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows. The girl has swooned, and the vampyre is at his hideous repast!
On it goes like that—episode piled upon unbelievable episode—as the cadaverous, polite, and exceedingly well-spoken Sir Francis Varney preys on Sir Marmaduke Bannerworth’s family at Bannerworth Hall or is chased over the countryside by enraged mobs. But Varney cannot be killed. Whenever he is cornered or on the verge of expiring, a few moonbeams suffice to revive him—leading to yet more hairbreadth escapes from other ravening mobs: “How frightful is the existence of Varney the Vampyre!”
How confusing, too: At one juncture, Varney is said to have lived in the reign of King Henry IV (1399–1413). Another tale mentions that he died during the Commonwealth (1649–1660), having betrayed a royalist to Oliver Cromwell. Yet a third reveals that Varney was originally hanged as a felon, then revived by galvanism, like Frankenstein’s monster. Or perhaps it was all of the above. From chapter to hastily penned chapter, the author or authors of the Varney yarns could not be troubled to get their story straight. And readers didn’t seem to care.
Where Lord Ruthven had been entirely unsympathetic, Varney becomes the first literary vampire to betray the stirrings of conscience. “I thought that I had steeled my heart against all gentle impulses,” he laments after turning a young girl into a vampire, “that I had crushed—aye, completely crushed dove-eyed pity in my heart, but it is not so, and still sufficient of my once human feelings clings to me to make me grieve for thee, Clara Crofton, thou victim.”
Finally—mercifully—Varney commits suicide. “You will say that you accompanied Varney the Vampyre to the crater of Mount Vesuvius,” he tells his Italian guide, “and that, tired and disgusted with a life of horror, he flung himself in to prevent the possibility of a reanimation of his remains.”
At one point before his final immolation, the narrator muses on this “strange gift of renewable existence,” fed by blood and moonlight (and food, for Varney can eat regular meals, and sunlight, for he is often abroad by day). “Who shall say that, walking the streets of giant London at this day, there may not be some such existences? Horrible thought that…”—and there we might have the seed of Dracula.
Bram Stoker clearly copied a thing or two from Varney the Vampyre, though in his hands, the story elements became less melodramatic and more chilling. Varney in Feast of Blood has fangs, crawls down castle walls, transforms himself into a bat, and possesses mesmerizing serpent eyes. He turns young Clara Crofton into a vampire, after which she must be staked and destroyed for preying on children. Unlike Béla Lugosi’s Dracula, however, who claims, “I never drink—wine,” Varney enjoys a good glass of claret, “for it looks like blood and may not be it.”
Stoker, a man of the theater, glimpsed the dramatic potential in such details. But he probably never saw a performance of The Vampire (1852), yet another play loosely based on Polidori’s work, because the production fared not so well with some highly placed critics: No less an arbiter than Queen Victoria described it in her diary as “very trashy.”
Meanwhile, vampirism had been slipping its moorings in literature and drama. Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), had described the “vampire middle classes” who bled the workers dry. In 1849, when Karl Marx moved to London, he began working on Das Kapital, in which he would proclaim that “capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”
And then there was Emily Brontë’s moody masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, while Varney was still on the lam from vindictive mobs. This tale of the tempestuous but doomed love affair between Catherine and Heathcliff, set against the wild, windy splendor of the Yorkshire moors, plays tantalizingly with the vampire motif. Is Catherine, who died of childbirth before the story opens, a ghost or a vampire? She apparently haunts Lockwood, the narrator, as he sleeps in her former bedroom. But when Lockwood rubs the specter’s wrist against some broken window glass, he draws very real blood.
Or does Catherine turn Heathcliff into a vampire? At one point she tells him, “I’ll not lie there by myself: they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won’t rest till you are with me. I never will.” And as he lies dying, Heathcliff turns a bloodless hue, “his teeth visible, now and then, in a kind of smile.”
After Heathcliff ’s death, the nurse, Nelly Dean, speaks with Lockwood:
“Is he a ghoul, or a vampire?” I mused. I had read of such hideous, incarnate demons. And then I set myself to reflect how I had tended him in infancy; and watched him grow to youth; and followed him almost through his whole course; and what absurd nonsense it was to yield to that sense of horror.
The locals, for their part, do yield to that horror: “But the country folks, if you asked them, would swear on their Bible that he walks. There are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the moor, and even within this house.”
Emily Brontë knew about vampires, but in many ways, her tale is more effective for not being a vampire tale. What might have happened if Bram Stoker had not been a man of the theater, and had preferred the eerie figures of Wuthering Heights instead?
GATHERINGS FROM GRAVEYARDS
As the Victorians were reading their ghost and vampire stories, many doctors were convinced that the dead were literally killing the living.
In a scene from Bleak House by Charles Dickens, a burial takes place in an ancient London churchyard, one “pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed…here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two, here sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption; an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside, a shameful testimony to future ages how civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together.” Gazing at this cemetery, Lady Dedlock, a character in the story, can only exclaim, “Is this place of abomination consecrated ground?”
In the century from 1741 to 1839, when crusading doctor George Alfred Walker published his Gatherings from Grave Yards, more than two million people died and were buried in London alone. Walker’s book is a compendium of mortuary horrors: The ancient graveyards were so saturated with the dead that coffins were piled on generations of coffins. In 1845, one gravedigger reported that he unavoidably “severed heads, arms, legs, or whatever came in my way” whenever he had to dig a new grave. “I have been up to my knees in human flesh by jumping on the bodies so as to cram them into the least possible space,” he continued. He dug as many as 45 graves in one day, burying “2,017 bodies, besides stillborns” in a single year.
A visitor to another cemetery described its hideous “bone house,” into which had been dumped the partially decayed remains from such smashed coffins:
[Y]ou may see human heads, covered with hair; and here, in this “consecrated ground,” are human bones with flesh still adhering to them. On the north side, a man was digging a grave; he was quite drunk, so indeed were all the grave diggers we saw. We looked into this grave, but the stench was abominable. We remained, however, long enough to see that a child’s coffin, which had stopped the man’s progress, had been cut, longitudinally, right in half; and there lay the child, which had been buried in it, wrapped in its shroud….
Walker rightly calculated that such scenes would infuriate people, but he also insisted that they masked a serious menace to public health. It wasn’t simply that graveyards fouled wells, or that rats dragged bones about, or that indescribable insects—“body bugs”—hatched in clouds and settled on passersby. No, graveyards were also “hot-beds of miasmata,” sources of “mephitic vapors” widely believed to be extremely poisonous.
Official reports overflowed with accounts of gravediggers expiring on the spot after sinking their picks into some corrupted corpse and releasing its noxious gases. Such exhalations accumulated so thickly in the vaults of ancient churches that they extinguished lighted candles or, paradoxically, caught fire and burned for days. They were blamed for complaints ranging from headaches and convulsions to asphyxiation. “Although such remarkable effects are not produced upon people in general,” wrote Walker, the same vapors, emanating from thousands of corpses, still mixed with the air and were breathed in by the city’s inhabitants. “Thus the very putrefactions of the dead become part of the fluids of the living.”
What was worse, those putrefactions were believed to carry the seeds of malignant disease. The opening of a single corpse, Walker claimed, had brought an epidemic to a vast area in France. When typhus, smallpox, or cholera struck, graveyards were blamed as the centers of infection. Typhus—actually carried by lice—was widely attributed to cadaverous vapors, while a French physician traced an outbreak of smallpox to emanations from dead bodies. In Bleak House, smallpox lurking in graveyard exhalations and deposited as “witch-ointment slimy to the touch” on cemetery gates and walls scars the once-beautiful Esther and kills Lady Dedlock.
As English readers were gulping down the adventures of Varney the Vampyre in 1848, a more dreaded monster was again stalking the land. In Dickens’s day, no disease was quite so feared as cholera. “The speed with which cholera killed was profoundly alarming,” declared historian William H. McNeill. A person might be hale and hearty at one moment, but then his bowels emptied without warning and never stopped—even as the diarrhea carried out pieces of intestinal lining.
“[R]adical dehydration,” McNeill continued, “meant that a victim shrank into a wizened caricature of his former self within a few hours, while ruptured capillaries discolored the skin, turning it black and blue. The effect was to make mortality uniquely visible: patterns of bodily decay were exacerbated…as in a time-lapse motion picture….” It was a startling and horrible transformation: You grew old in a day. Your eyes dulled, and you were forced into a fetal position, knees drawn up to your chin. If you died that way, you were buried that way, locked in rigor mortis.
Cholera ravaged town and country indiscriminately. At one point during the 1848–1849 outbreak, the disease was killing a thousand people a day in England. During an earlier outbreak, between 1831 and 1832, more than 50,000 people had died in the British Isles. In some places during that epidemic, cholera victims were buried so soon—sometimes within ten minutes of being declared dead—that premature burial was widely believed to be commonplace. These were the stories that Bram Stoker’s mother had told him about her childhood in cholera-ravaged County Sligo. In his story “Some Terrible Letters from Scotland,” Edinburgh writer James Hogg arranges for one character to escape being buried alive during the 1832 outbreak; another Hogg creation reports horrifying dreams of the cholera dead trailing about the kirkyard “wi’ their white withered faces an’ their glazed een [eyes].” That character’s sisters then die of the illness after being infected by their mother. But they return from the grave to escort their mother on a vengeful “dance of death” back to the churchyard for good, for the “plague of Cholera was a breath of hell, they who died of it got no rest in their graves, so that it behoved all, but parents in particular, to keep out of its influences till the vapour of death passed over.”
Indeed, it was widely assumed to be vapor until an 1854 outbreak in London, when Dr. John Snow proved that cholera came not from air but from water: Water contaminated by human waste carrying a toxic intestinal bacterium had leaked from a faulty cesspool, infecting a Soho water pump.
In some places, however, graveyard effluvium—Dickens’s “witch-ointment slimy to the touch”—might be seen as having curative properties. If there were ever such a thing as grave mold coating the grass and trees in cemeteries, folklore would give it a ritual value. In the north of England, it so happens, a young tuberculosis patient “was at last restored to health by eating butter made from the milk of cows fed in kirkyards, a sovereign remedy for consumption brought on through being witch-ridden.”
Consumption, aka tuberculosis, didn’t kill quickly, as did cholera or bubonic plague. Instead, it was the archetypal “wasting disease,” steadily and remorselessly consuming its victims, draining them of vitality and life. If it was “galloping consumption,” this happened in a matter of months; more often, it was a question of years. Yet, by the time the first rattling coughs appeared, accompanied by bloody sputum, it was almost too late. You lost flesh. You bled energy. You were being eaten from within by an invisible demon, or you were being hag-ridden at night—that is, you had become the prey of witches or vampires. No other explanation sprang readily to hand, especially when a bloody froth might bubble from your lips as you slept.
“The emaciated figure strikes one with terror,” states a 1799 description of a tuberculosis patient, “the forehead covered with drops of sweat; the cheeks painted with a livid crimson, the eyes sunk; the little fat that raised them in their orbits entirely wasted; the pulse quick and tremulous; the nails long, bending over the ends of the fingers; the palms of the hand dry and painfully hot to the touch; the breath offensive, quick and laborious, and the cough so incessant as to scarce allow the wretched sufferer time to tell his complaints.”
The stubbornly rational blamed tuberculosis on bad air—mal aria—or cold, damp climates. Those consumptives who could afford it decamped to the magic mountains, with their thin air, or to the warm south—the Mediterranean, say, or the American Southwest desert, with its dry climate. But among the poor, forced to share beds in stifling rooms in unsanitary houses, tuberculosis—already frightfully contagious—reached epidemic proportions.
Yet, as Dickens noted in Nicholas Nickleby, tuberculosis was also a disease “in which the struggle between soul and body is so gradual, quiet, and solemn, and the result so sure, that day by day, and grain by grain, the mortal part wastes and withers away, so that the spirit grows light and sanguine with its lightening load.” Languid periods might be followed by an upsurge in energy, a sharpening of appetite, or even an unparalleled sexual ardor. And because consumption was believed to fuel the fire of creativity, making it burn brightest just before the dark, it became the Romantic death par excellence, and spirited away innumerable poets, painters, and musicians—among them Balzac, Keats, Chopin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the Brontë sisters. As they were “consumed,” they grew emaciated, their cheeks hollowed, their skin turned pallid and translucent, and their eyes appeared luminous—the “consumptive look” that so impressed itself on the literature of the age.
Bram Stoker’s depiction of the fading Lucy Westenra in Dracula has often been diagnosed as a description of anemia, but it might also depict a case of tuberculosis: “I do not understand Lucy’s fading away as she is doing,” the character Mina notes. “She eats well and sleeps well, and enjoys fresh air; but all the time the roses in her cheeks are fading, and she gets weaker and more languid day by day; at night I hear her gasping as if for air.” Dr. Seward gazes upon her with equal futility: “There on the bed…lay poor Lucy, more horribly white and wan-looking than ever. Even the lips were white, and the gums seemed to have shrunken back from the teeth, as we sometimes see in a corpse after a prolonged illness.”
The title character of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia,” to take another example, is described as slender, “even emaciated,” with skin like the “purest ivory,” a sensual mouth, raven-black hair, and eyes so extraordinary they were “large and luminous orbs.” She suffers from a wasting disease and broods continually on death and dissolution. She pens a poem, “The Conqueror Worm,” in which even “…the seraphs sob at vermin fangs / In human gore imbued.” After her death, the narrator again marries, only to find that his light-haired, blue-eyed bride also sickens and dies—and is resurrected as the very same emaciated, raven-haired Ligeia he once loved.
For eons, the affliction was inexplicable. Consumption was contagious, clearly, and it had something to do with the air—that much was known. But not until 1882, when Robert Koch discovered Tuberculosis bacillus (he ultimately won a Nobel Prize for his work), did people recognize that the culprit wasn’t the air but rather the suspended droplets it carried—the effluvia of coughs and sneezes.
ONE FOREVER
In Dublin, he became known as the “Invisible Prince,” a glitteringly handsome writer who had once moved through society with such quiet assurance that he nearly stood for Parliament. But that was before his wife’s death under mysterious circumstances, and his virtual disappearance. After that, recalled the poet Alfred Perceval Graves, Sheridan Le Fanu could be glimpsed only “at odd hours of the evening, when he might occasionally be seen stealing, like the ghost of his former self, between his newspaper office and his home in Merrion Square; sometimes, too, he was to be encountered in an old out-of-the-way bookshop poring over some rare black letter [tome in] Astrology or Demonology.”
Le Fanu is remembered today as one of the supreme masters of the ghost story. Even the noted M. R. James, his peer in that uncanny art, admired the way the brilliant if reclusive Irishman handled his material. James admitted, however, that if Le Fanu had one flaw, it lay in his predilection for “the Vampire-idea.” Certainly Carmilla, published in 1872, the year before Le Fanu died at 58, is among the most exquisitely rendered—and influential—vampire stories ever written.
Laura, its narrator, is a child living with her father in a lonely castle buried deep in the forests of Styria, a province of southern Austria. One night a beautiful lady visits her in her bedroom and seems to bite her on the chest, but this is dismissed as a dream. Years later, however, a carriage full of strange people overturns in the moonlight nearby and leaves one of its occupants, an injured young woman, in the care of the castle. Her name is Carmilla, and Laura recognizes her as the toothsome visitor from her childhood dream.
The two are about the same age, so they become—seemingly—the best of friends. Yet in breathless, erotically charged passages, Carmilla is clearly making more than a pass at Laura:
Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You’re mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one forever.”
Carmilla sleeps most of the day, never needs to eat, and is absent much of the night. Odder still, Laura and her father discover an old family portrait from her Hungarian mother’s side of one “Mircalla, Countess Karnstein,” dated 1698. The woman in the painting is a dead ringer for their guest, down to the mole on her neck.
Meanwhile, Laura’s midnight visitor has resumed her predations, thus leaving the girl wasting dangerously away. Young ladies everywhere in the forest are falling prey to “the malady,” and the story of one of them, who dies from the disease, bears an eerie resemblance to Laura’s: This girl lives in a distant castle, which likewise has an eldritch visitor, “perfidious and beautiful,” named Millarca. Both Millarca and Mircalla are discovered to be anagrams of Carmilla, now clearly understood to be a vampire. Carmilla disappears but is eventually traced to a ruined crypt in a ruined chapel in the ruined village of Karnstein. When the crypt is opened, there the countess lies:
Her eyes were open; no cadaverous smell exhaled from the coffin. The two medical men, one officially present…[detected] a faint but appreciable respiration, and a corresponding action of the heart. The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed.
These are damning proofs of vampirism. Carmilla/Mircalla/Millarca is staked—not without a bloodcurdling scream—and then decapitated.
In its mastery of tone and suspense, Carmilla couldn’t be more different from Varney the Vampyre. Its influence has been subtler but no less enduring. More 20th-century vampire films, for example, owe something to Carmilla than to any other story besides Dracula. Bram Stoker, as we have seen, held Carmilla in such high regard that he initially planned to set his novel, too, in the forests of Styria—an homage to his fellow countryman.
BALKAN DREAMS
Only a mountain range away from those forests is what was once called Carniola but is today known as Slovenia. There, in 1734, three Englishmen journeyed through the wintry forest on very bad roads. An hour before sunset they rode into Ljubljana, where at the Black Horse, a garrulous innkeeper regaled them through the long winter’s night with tales of bears and stags and wild boars—and other creatures as well:
We must not omit observing here, that our landlord seemed to pay some regard to what Baron Valvasor has related of the Vampyres, said to infest some parts of this country. These Vampyres are supposed to be the bodies of deceased persons, animated by evil spirits, which come out of the graves, in the night time, suck the blood of many of the living, and thereby destroy them. Such a notion will, probably, be looked upon as fabulous and exploded, by many people in England; however, it is not only countenanced by Baron Valvasor, and many Carnioleze noblemen, gentlemen, &c. as we were informed, but likewise actually embraced by some writers of good authority….
It might be a comparatively crude account, but it typified many similar ones that came from travelers to eastern Europe and the Balkans. The Romantic writers fed off such depictions, because so few had ever been there. Lord Byron was an exception, having visited Albania in October 1809. The first two cantos of his 1812 piece, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, helped fix the Balkans as a place of rugged and primitive isolation in western Europeans’ minds. Shortly before returning there to die, Byron remarked that “I have…a personal dislike to ‘Vampires,’ and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to divulge their secrets.”
Those secrets are carried on a buried stream of peasant superstition flowing out of eastern Europe. The vampires there, however, never would have been admitted to a drawing room. They would not have been caught dead in the crypts of castles. English and Irish writers, in creating the literary vampire, had tidied them up a bit.