• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

With Dracula, Bram Stoker was determined to create a substantial work of literature that would make his name. In the dozen years before he started his first draft, he’d dashed off ten pieces of fiction, including another novel. As to their reception, a phrase comes to mind: It’s a good thing he kept his day job. As the secretary and business manager for Henry Irving, the foremost Shakespearean actor of the time and a world-class prima donna, Stoker had to squeeze writing into moments snatched between beck and call. He slowly built the character of Dracula, who, though he would become literature’s most enduring vampire, was not in fact the first. Three had come before, and Stoker culled important elements from their tales. Dracula’s seductive ways, for example, owed a debt to the lusty female vampire of Carmilla (1872), a Gothic novella written by fellow Irishman J. Sheridan Le Fanu. (Le Fanu was Stoker’s boss at a Dublin newspaper at the time of Carmilla’s release.) Dracula’s black cape, the wooden stake, and the notion that vampirism could be passed to others through blood exchange were details borrowed from James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood (1847), a 750,000-word saga that had originally appeared as a “penny dreadful” serial. Finally, the delicious casting of Dracula as a nobleman, a count, living in the midst of and feeding on members of high society descends from fiction’s very first vampire, Lord Ruthven, who appeared in John Polidori’s short story “The Vampyre” (1819).

The story behind Polidori’s story is far better than his final product. Twenty-year-old Dr. John Polidori, a British physician with literary aspirations, was sharing a lakeside villa near Geneva, Switzerland, with the poet Lord Byron, who’d fled London due to debt and allegations of an extramarital affair between him and his half sister. This was the summer of 1816. The two men had what one might call a give-and-take relationship: Byron freely took the opiates Polidori could legally obtain and, in return, gave the doctor the opportunity to orbit in literary circles. During several weeks in June, the gentlemen were joined by three invited guests: England’s leading poet, Percy Shelley, his young lover Mary Godwin, and her stepsister, Claire. Claire, as had and would several other women, was carrying Byron’s illegitimate child. The two immediately had a tiff, and Byron from then on would speak to Claire only in the presence of the others. Perhaps the pets in residence picked up on the tension. Percy recalled that “eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon” all moved freely about the house, “which every now and then resound[ed] with their unarbitrated quarrels.” Bad weather further tested everyone’s nerves. A series of fierce rainstorms kept the group housebound for days. One night Byron and company, desperate to fill time, resorted to reading aloud from a collection of French translations of old German horror stories, perhaps left behind by a previous renter. (As a contemporary analogy, I imagine a klatsch of socialites reading to each other from the lyric sheet of a rap CD.) The stories were horrifically bad. Byron felt that he and the others could surely do much better, and, as an amusement, issued a challenge: “We will each write a ghost story.” Now, the two people one would think most likely to produce something magnificent didn’t get very far: Byron and Shelley both had ideas, but quickly abandoned their efforts. But not eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin. An idea came to her in a dream, and she began working feverishly on what would two years later be published under her married name, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). As for the doctor in the group: “Poor Polidori,” Mary would later recall, “had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady.” It seems that Polidori fizzled not just creatively but socially, too. By summer’s end he and Byron had severed their relationship, igniting an enmity they would both carry through the rest of their lives. Polidori, still hoping to be