A Short History of Vampires

NICK GROOM: My name's Nick Groom and I'm professor in English

at the University of Exeter.

This is a series of short talks about the novel Dracula

by Bram Stoker.

I'm going to start by having a look at the long history

of vampires.

Now, bloodsucking demons have been a feature of civilizations

throughout the world for centuries.

In fact, there are stories of such creatures going back

to biblical times.

They turn up in ancient Rome, for example,

and in medieval Britain.

But the vampire, as we recognize it today,

is actually a fairly recent phenomenon.

They were discovered, if you like,

on the borders of the Austria Hungarian empire in the 1720's.

And there were a series of outbreaks of vampirism

in which earlier Eastern European folk culture

and superstitions came face to face

with modern scientific thinking.

These outbreaks, which involved the dead, apparently,

rising from their graves and preying on the living,

were, first of all, dealt with by locals who dug up corpses.

Found the bodies to be swimming in blood, to be undecomposed,

and therefore they were staked and decapitated.

And these outbreaks were then investigated

by the authorities, who sent medical researchers

and forensic scientists to actually find out what

was happening in these states.

And they came up with all sorts of answers.

Perhaps it was mass delusion, perhaps it was to do with diet.

In terms of creating nightmares, perhaps it

was the ingestion of drugs.

Some people actually thought that there really

were vampires.

And this meant that across Europe,

in the middle of the 18th century,

there were dozens of articles, and treatises,

and books published on this phenomenon.

It started to affect debates in theology,

because if vampires did exist then

they were evidence of an afterlife, although a rather

dark and sinister afterlife.

It also affected philosophy, in terms of how reliable

was eyewitness testimony.

And so there were literally decades of debate

before vampires were actually recognized

by writers, first of all by poets, and then by prose rises.

Now Bram Stoker certainly knew about this research.

He spent some years researching vampires and researching

Eastern European folk beliefs before he actually

wrote Dracula.

And so Dracula does actually include

much of this information.

For example, in how you actually deal with a vampire,

as they say, by staking it and by decapitating it.

Or in little details, such as the she vampire,

whose jaws are churning as she approaches Jonathan Harker.

That detail actually relates to a belief

in what's called manducation, which

is that vampires can be heard underneath the ground,

eating their own grave clothes.

So what Bram Stoker is doing, he's

really situating his novel in relation

to that recent history of scientific investigation

into the vampire.

So we have a clear scientific context for vampires.

That was how they were being discussed for decades.

And it's then later that the writers get hold of them.

And in a sense, writers make vampires safe,

because they put them in the realm of fiction.

In Britain, this starts with poets, such as Simon Taylor

Coleridge, using a she vampire in Christabel.

Robert Southey has an Islamic vampire

in Thalaba the Destroyer.

And you can see elements in poems, such as La Belle Dame

Sans Merci by Keats.

But the first prose story written

about a vampire in English is by Doctor John Polidori,

who is the physician the Lord Byron.

And this story was inspired when Polidori and Byron met

the Shelleys and also Eau Claire Clairemont

at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland.

They'd gone there in 1816, the year without a summer,

to escape the terrible weather in Britain.

But in fact, there was awful weather

across the whole of the planet, because of a volcanic explosion

the year before.

That put a lot of dust into the atmosphere.

So they have these long evenings with thunderstorms playing

across the lake and decided to have a ghost story competition.

And it's out of that the vampire was born.

Now what John Polidori, as they say a doctor,

does with a vampire, he takes elements of the East

European tradition and of the scientific investigation

into vampires.

But he moves them up the social scale.

He bases his vampire, Lord Ruthven, on Byron.

So he turns him into this predatory male aristocrat

who is particularly seeking out young girls.

That then becomes one of the motifs by which the vampire is

recognized.

That they are upper class, cultured, educated, wealthy,

and predatory as well.

So you see that in later 19th century vampire stories,

such as Varney the Vampire, which is a long, sort of,

serial, effectively a soap opera.

And very popular at the time.

But it's slightly incongruous that we

tend to think of vampires, because

of Dracula and Polidori's story, as being predominately male.

Because the real 19th century fascination

was with female vampires, with the femme fatale,

with these women who were powerful and bewitching

and rejuvenated themselves through the blood

of their male victims.

So in a sense, they embody those 19th century fears

of powerful women.

It's the other side, it's the dark side

if you like, of Queen Victoria, having a queen on the throne.

And so it's difficult to underestimate

the popularity of vampire stories

throughout the 19th century.

And really, once you see Dracula as the culmination,

as the climax of a fashion, of a craze

for writing about vampires.

And of course, Bram Stoker is extraordinary successful

in bringing together so many elements

and really crystallizing the vampire.

And taking it on into the 20th and 21st centuries.