Was the vampire invented in English literature from #metoo sexual abuse? Or maybe the trees?
The famous oft-told story of Mary Shelley’s invention of Frankenstein, from the introduction of the 1931 edition, credits the introduction of the vampire in English literature to John Polidori, in his story of The Vampyre. But was the source and invention of a vampire character as a nobleman who drains his victims of life from Polidori, or should the credit go to Lord Byron himself?
It has long been suggested in the literary world that Polidori based the main character of Lord Ruthven in his story on his complicated, but brief, relationship with Byron, hinting at an unsatisfied sexual relationship between them and Byron’s lordly dismissive treatment of Polidori. The introduction to Frankenstein says that Byron’s contribution to the famous competition between himself, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley and Polidori at Lake Geneva to each write a Gothic scare tale was a fragment of a story later appended to his Maseppa (by publisher John Murray without Byron’s permission), while Polidori struggled with a lame story about a voyeuristic peeping tom spying on a lady ghost through a keyhole, but then somehow miraculously came up with the rich and haunting, The Vampyre. It was a tale of a young man traveling with an older man who dies and mysteriously reappears again, while those they encounter die, drained of life. In the fragment of Byron’s story, called either simply “The Fragment” or “the Burial”, the main character is named Augustus Darvell. In Polidori’s version he is Lord Ruthven.
John Polidori, a few years following that summer in Geneva, committed suicide, possibly in some part a result of the dispute over credit for The Vampyre and a general despondency over the trajectory of his life. He drank cyanide in August of 1821. At least, that’s the generally accepted explanation of his early death, though the verdict of an inquest only stated the cause as “Died by the visitation of God”, with a glass of water by his bedside.
When The Vampyre was first published, the writing was attributed to Lord Byron and Polidori was dismissed. Was this entirely due to a prejudice from Byron’s fame? Or was there something in the story that indicated to those familiar with him that the story was actually from Byron? Let us give credit to John Polidori for writing the first published vampire tale, which surely inspired Bram Stoker’s later more famous vampire, but how much of it was Byron and where did it really come from?
The story was first published on April 1, 1819 (April Fool’s Day) by Henry Colburn in the New Monthly Magazine with the authorship as “A Tale by Lord Byron”. Polidori complained at the attribution, and Byron himself insisted that he was not the author. Polidori acknowledged that some elements of the story came from Byron, but insisted that the form and writing of it was his.
Was the credit given at first to Lord Byron deliberate by Henry Colburn? Polidori, in a letter to the publisher the day after the story’s appearance with Byron credited, claimed that the story had been sent to the publisher by a third party, a “lady”, and fellow traveler, presumably meaning Mary Godwin. Did the communication confuse or miss-identify the authorship? Perhaps in referencing that the story elements were originated by Bryon, Colburn assumed that the credit should be his. Or did the publisher just blithely believe the notorious famous name would attract more readers? When Polidori ultimately tried to settle with the publisher, rather than the £300 expected for a Lord Bryon piece, he was offered £30.
Perhaps Colburn believed the story was indeed by Bryon because of the character of Lord Ruthven. Colburn had previously published Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel of Glenarvon with a character also named Lord Ruthven, which was undoubtedly a thinly-clothed Byron, as a bit of revenge from their notorious liaison.
Colburn had previously published Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel of Glenarvon with a character also named Lord Ruthven, which was undoubtedly a thinly-clothed Byron, as a bit of revenge from their notorious liaison.
Why would Polidori name his character the same as Lady Lamb? Would he deliberately intend to poke Byron in the eye, and in the process doom himself to obscurity? Did he think it would sensationalize the story and thereby garner more attention? When Byron discovered his own fragment of a story published without his permission, he complained bitterly to John Murray at its revelation. Murray later would notoriously burn Byron’s autobiographical diaries as being too salacious. Would we have found there the answer to why he would begin a story, but so quickly abandon it, allowing Polidori to pick it up and run with it? We may never know directly from the Lord poet himself.
Who was Lord Ruthven? This mysterious noble who drains his young companions of their vitality is said in many scholarly references to be inspired by Lord Byron himself, but is someone else really the inspiration?
Henry Edward Yelverton was a British peer and the 19th Baron Grey de Ruthyn. The title of Baron Grey de Ruthyn belonged to the Earl of Kent until it passed to the Earl of Sussex in 1717. The 18th Baron, the 3rd Earl of Sussex died in 1799 with no male heirs. The Grey de Ruthyn title then passed to a 19-year-old Henry, son of the Earl’s daughter, Lady Barbara Yelverton and her husband, Edward Gould. Henry took his mother’s name and the Grey de Ruthyn barony, but could not inherit the title of Earl of Sussex through his mother.
The Yelverton family was from Nottinghamshire and Henry, on inheriting his birthright, leased the estate of Newstead Abbey through Byron’s mother while Byron was at school at Harrow. On visits to the family estate with its resident tenant, at sixteen, Byron formed a friendship with the Lord Ruthyn (called formally Lord Grey with the Ruthyn left more obscure) in his twenties, and enjoyed hunting on the estate, but soon came a sudden and severe break between them, and with it a dark secret.
Lord Grey de Ruthyn and Newstead Abbey
The Newstead Abbey estate was leased to “Lord Grey” beginning in January 1803 until the young Byron was to come of age. In the summer of that first year, Byron stayed at the estate he’d inherited while Yelverton was traveling abroad. When Yelverton returned, Byron stayed on and didn’t return to Harrow for the fall term. He and Yelverton spent days and nights on “shooting expeditions”. Then, without explanation, the young Byron suddenly broke off their friendship and left Newstead Abbey. The reason for the break was so severe and drenched with bitterness that Byron wouldn’t reveal it even to his confidante, his half-sister, Augusta Leigh.
He wrote to her, “I am not reconciled to Lord Grey, and I never will. He was once my Greatest Friend, my reasons for ceasing that Friendship are such as I cannot explain, not even to you, my Dear Sister, (although were they to be made known to anybody, you would be the first) but they will ever remain hidden in my own breast.”
Byron’s mother, Catherine Gordon, widowed and perhaps thinking of a titled re-marriage herself, was intent on making a reconciliation between them, but Byron wrote again to his half-sister complaining about his already difficult relations with his mother, “all our disputes have been lately heightened by my one with that object of my cordial, deliberate detestation, Lord Grey de Ruthyn.” Byron’s later apologetic letters to Grey and Grey’s inability to understand his young friend’s breaking-off of their relationship it has been suggested might point to a sexual relationship encounter that Byron later regretted. They were never reconciled and in April 1808, Lord Grey left Newstead at the end of his lease.
A year later, in June of 1809, when Yelverton married an Anna Maria Kelham of Warwick, Byron wrote from Europe to his mother: “So Lord G— is married to a rustic. Well done! If I wed, I will bring home a Sultana, with half a dozen cities for a dowry, and reconcile you to an Ottoman daughter-in-law, with a bushel of pearls not larger than ostrich eggs, or smaller than walnuts.” The resentment was deep and long lasting.
Was Henry Yelverton the inspiration for Lord Ruthven? There was an actual Lord Ruthven from Wales, but he had no connection at all to any of the participants in this mystery. Why would Lady Caroline Lamb and John Polodori both name their character for a real person they didn’t know if they were intending on a thinly disguised literary rebuke to someone they both knew and had been left bitter. One might imagine that the dig was a double stroke. Bryon’s bitterness over whatever happened to sour him on Yelverton, was perhaps something he carried with him deeply, and in intimate relations with others he would complain about the older Lord who had taken advantage of him, and the naming of the vampire character who sucks the life out of people a joke by Bryon, known by Henry Colburn, and those of his circle, a secret so unmentionable it dare not be spoken. Henry Yelverton, Lord Grey de Ruthyn died in 1810, dead for six years by the summer of 1816, so he could not complain of slander as a fictional vampire in a fantastical story if he was framed as Lord Ruthven, so fair game.
Byron was at this very same time romantically infatuated with a series of girls in his boyhood days. His cousin Mary Chaworth, whom he spent many hours at the nearby Annesley Hall, who was the “beau ideal” of womenhood in his youthful fancy, that he would later say he found “anything but angelic” when she rejected him as “that lame boy”. His encounters with women left him disillusioned but romantic. Could his behaviors with men though his future life be the result of a molestation in his youth by a trusted friend? The answers, like so many interpretations of the lives of the romantics may need be divined between the lines.
Or could it have been the trees?
Visitors to Newstead Abbey up until the 1970s could have noted and remarked on the massive tree stumps which lined the drives. The stumps were obviously of great oaks cut almost to the ground. The guides of the time would tell that the trees were cut down by Byron’s tenant while he was away and sold for lumber. The stumps are long gone now, though visible in some aerial photographs of the estate and on old map diagrams. But the current caretakers, when asked, have no knowledge of them.
Did Yelverton, while renting the estate inherited by Byron have his trees cut down and sold, which Byron discovered on his return from a trip away? Or was this a later tenant? This is not entirely clear and the trees themselves have been removed from history like a vague memory. Would the joke on Byron be that he was so upset over trees? But why would this be a secret he wouldn’t reveal. If it was of a sexual nature, he wasn’t so reticent to mention these things to Murray and Hobhouse and others, so why so secret with Yelverton?
Is the first vampire in English literature about a young man being taken advantage by an older one, or is it a cosmic joke on the private rantings of the poetic Lord of Childe Harold over some intensely silly (to others) slight?
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