About the Book
John Polidori (1795-1821) is a fascinating but always shadowy figure of Romanticism, an impetuous, sensitive writer of fierce talent. His encounter with Byron, Shelley and their circle has contributed both to his fame and notoriety on the one hand, and to his neglect on the other: he is too often known only at second-hand through the recollections of his famous friends.
That encounter with Byron, Shelley et al was the inspiration for his most celebrated work, the influential and still compelling tale of The Vampyre (1819). With this story, Polidori created a figure of seductive evil who continues to exert a powerful hold over literature and popular culture. The Vampyre alone would confirm Polidori's importance within the Gothic tradition. This collection also makes available many of the Polidori's lesser-known works, showing him to be a resourceful, sensitive writer whose literary career was cut short by his early death. Polidori's medical thesis on the subject of nightmares, his essay 'Upon the Source of Positive Pleasure' and his Gothic novel The Modern Oedipus (both included in full), his poetry, diaries and letters, illuminate the context in which The Vampyre was written and deepen our understanding of Romanticism and the Gothic. Many of these works have rarely, if ever, been republished since the nineteenth century.
Table of Contents:
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
Further Reading xx
The Vampyre:A Tale 1
from A Medical Inaugural Dissertation which deals with the disease called Oneirodynia,for the degree of
Medical Doctor,Edinburgh 1815 23
from On the Punishment of Death 31
from An Essay Upon the Source of Positive Pleasure 37
Ernestus Berchtold;or,The Modern Oedipus.A Tale 47
from Ximenes,The Wreath and Other Poems 151
from The Fall of the Angels:A Sacred Poem 159
from The Diary of Dr John William Polidori 163
from Letters of John Polidori 235
Appendix:Four Letters about Polidori 247
About the Author :
JOHN WILLIAM POLIDORI was born in 1795 into a distinguished Anglo-Italian family.He was educated at Ampleforth College and the University of Edinburgh, where in 1815 he was awarded a degree of doctor of medicine, at the age of nineteen.In 1816 Polidori entered Lord Byron's service as his personal physician, accompanying him on his travels through Europe.It was while staying with Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont at Byron's rented house by Lake Geneva, that Polidori began to write the famous work, The Vampyre.The novel was published in 1819, originally attributed to Byron.Polidori and Byron parted company later in 1816; for a time Polidori continued to travel through Europe alone, before returning to England in 1817.He settled in Norwich, where for some years he practised as a doctor and pursued his literary career, until a serious accident damaged his health and made it impossible for him to work.On 21 August 1821 he died at the family home in London after accidentally taking poison. Franklin Bishop is the author of Polidori! A Life of Dr. John Polidori (1991), Selected Works of John Polidori (1991), and numerous articles on Gothic and Romantic literary figures. A freelance journalist and writer, he is also a tutor for the University of Nottingham, Continuing Education Department.
Review :
Max Fincher, Times Literary Supplement, 17th February 2006
John William Polidori (1795-1821) is best remembered for 'The Vampyre' (1819), a short story written when Polidori joined Byron, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont in writing ghost-stories in the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816 - a competition which also produced Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818).The inspiration for 'The Vampyre' came from Byron's contributory fragment to the competition, 'Augustus Darvell'.But as Franklin Charles Bishop emphasizes, 'The Vampyre' is Polidori's own nightmarish creation.Bishop argues that Polidori transformed a crude, exotic image of the vampire in eighteenth-century folklore into a civilised aristocrat whose predatory blood-lust is invisible; his tale prepared the way for Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and countless film resurrections.
This edition also contains extracts from Polidori's journal for 1810, which Byron's publisher had commissioned from him, as well as a selection of letters from 1816-17, chosen because readers will be interested in the Byron connection.Four letters about Polidori, newly translated, are also included.Polidori is 'spirited', 'knowledgeable' and an 'honest, naive, and well-meaning young man' according to Louis de Brême, a patrician in Geneva.Another letter refers to Polidori's arrest by the Austrian police at the Milan opera after a fight with a grenadier.Extracts from his doctoral dissertation on sleepwalking add to our knowledge of the interest in the power of the imagination and memory in the period.His dissertation is complemented by selections from a philosophical essay on the pleasure of the imagination, Upon the Source of Positive Pleasure, (1818) written by Polidori while dangerously ill after a riding accident.
Familiarizing the reader with a range of Polidori's other writings is achieved at the expense of comprehensiveness.The inclusion of Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus (1819) Polidori's only novel, means less space for his only surviving play, Ximenes; or, The Modern Abraham, or his contribution toSketches Illustrative of the Manners and Customs of France, Switzerland and Italy (1821).The Sketches illuminate post-Napoleonic Europe and Polidori's talent for describing and evoking the character and landscape of the French, Italians and the Genovese, if not always generously.
