Rather than the only source of inspiration for Stoker’s Count Dracula, Vlad Dracula was merely one of many behind the most well-known vampire in popular culture. Stoker had several models to draw from while writing Drac-ula, ranging from historical persons to fictional characters. The most direct inspiration for the 1897 novel was likely Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871 novella Carmilla. Le Fanu, an Irish author of gothic tales, set his vampire story in the province of Styria in Austria, a region in Eastern Europe west of Transylvania. Styria was also the original setting of Stoker’s Dracula, leading most scholars to believe that Le Fanu’s novella was the primary source for Stoker as he drafted his first and most famous novel. However, like the historical Vlad Dracula, Le Fanu’s fictional Carmilla is just another piece of a massive puzzle if one is determined to put together a comprehensive history of Dracula in particular and vampires in general.
Tales of vampires or vampire-like creatures are a global phenomenon dating to ancient times. Nearly every culture in the world has its own vampires. Mesopotamian mythology tells the story of Lilitu, who lived off the blood of babies. She would later become Lilith in Hebrew demonology, who, along with her daughters, took men, women, and children as their victims. The ancient Greeks included the legend of Lamia in their extensive mythology. There were also lamiae, demons that appeared to suitors as lovely ladies only to devour young men after seducing them.6 In India, the fanged goddess Kali is a blood-drinker who symbolizes death and destruction. Lesser deities in Hindu mythology include the vetala, hostile spirits stuck between death and the afterlife who take possession of corpses and attack the living. The Jiang Shi is a Chinese mythical creature that sucks the life force from its victims; they are forced to hop around because their bodies are stiff from rigor mortis. Japanese myths tell of vampire cats that have the ability to appear as their human victims. Other vampire legends from around the world are the Bruxsa of Portugal, Cihuateteo of Mexico, the Aswang in the Philippines, and the Asanbosam and Sasabonsam of Ghana and Togo in Western Africa, to name a few. This list is not exhaustive. A comprehensive history would require a book unto itself, and several have been written to date with this exact aim.7
Despite the existence of vampire legends around the globe, no region of the world can boast a higher concentration of early vampire folklore than Eastern Europe. Romania, Moravia, Croatia, and Serbia are not only the regional homelands of the historical Vlad Dracula and the fictional Count Dracula; they also make up the region that gave birth to Western vampire lore from the medieval period to the modern day. Thus, their ubiquitous presence in classic vampire stories of the Western world is not coincidental.
Before becoming a pop-culture icon, the vampire gained notoriety as a folk-story villain. Naturally, these stories first circulated via oral traditions that were limited to local populations. However, it did not take long for those oral folk histories to find their way into print, the medium that would make mass dissemination of these legends possible. It is interesting to note that although vampire legends can be found in ancient texts, it was actually the spread of the printing press following the medieval period that gave birth to the modern vampire.
The first documented book-length study on vampires was written by the Greek scholar, theologian, and physician Leo Allatius in 1645. De Graecorum hodie quirundam opinationibus (On Certain Modern Opinions among the Greeks) focused almost exclusively on the vrykolakas, Greek vampires that shared many characteristics with the vampires of Eastern European regional folklore. Another early study is Phillip Rohr’s De Masticatione Mortuorum (On the Chewing of the Dead), published in 1679 in Germany. Both seventeenth-century studies are notable for their scholarly take on folklore and for their role in promoting the belief that vampires were in fact real manstations of evil. They also laid the groundwork for similar works that followed in the eighteenth century, namely Cardinal Giuseppe Davanzati’s Dissertazione sopre I Vampiri (A Dissertation on Vampires), published in 1744 in Italy, and French Benedictine monk Agustin Calmet’s Dissertations sur les Apparitions des Angel, des Demons, et des Esprits, et sur les revenants, et Vampires de Hundrie, de Boheme, de Moravia, et de Silesie (A Dissertation on Apparitions, Angels, Demons, Spirits, Revenants, and Vampires from Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia), published in 1746.
Vampires were not only gracing the pages of scholarly works during this time; they were also allegedly making themselves visible to government officials and rural peasants. There were several vampire scares in Eastern Europe during the early eighteenth century, and reports of these occurrences can be credited with the vampire’s rise to fame in the Western world shortly thereafter. Two purported outbreaks of vampire activity in Medwegya, Serbia—in 1727 and then again in 1731—are of particular importance, especially since the same man was believed responsible for both episodes. The first series of sightings came shortly after the death of Arnold Paole, a local soldier who once boasted of being bitten by a vampire during his military service. Several villagers died shortly after Paole’s death, and locals settled the disturbance by driving a wooden stake through the dead soldier’s corpse. The problem was dispatched rather quickly and did not cause any stir outside of the village until 1731 when a new crop of reports sprouted in the same neighborhood. These new vampire attacks were blamed on recently deceased villagers who had allegedly been bitten by Paole in 1727. This time, the residents of Medw-egya went to greater extents to quell the disturbances. Austrian officials were called upon, and a full commission led by military surgeon Johann Fluck-inger was appointed to investigate the occurrence. A quick, three-week investigation ended with a report published in late January 1732. The Visum et Repertum (Seen and Reported) quickly became a bestseller in Germany and was translated and reprinted throughout Europe. The same publication can also be credited for the first appearance of the term “vampire” in England and France as the Fluckinger report was reprinted or quoted later that year by several well-known and respectable periodicals in Western Europe such as England’s London Journal, France’s Mercure de France, and Holland’s Le Glaneur historique.
Mass printing allowed regional folk stories and reports of “real” vampire sightings to spread like a virus throughout eighteenth-century Europe. Scholar Erik Butler succinctly describes European vampire mania in Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature in Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732-1933: “For about twenty years in the early half of the eighteenth century, parts of Europe caught vampire fever” (28). Within one year of the publication of the Fluckinger commission’s Visum et Repertum, at least 20 publications about vampires appeared in Germany alone. “Vampire” soon became a household word in England and France. The Eastern vampire made his official Western debut in 1732, and his seduction of audiences in Germany, France, and Britain would only continue to grow over the next few centuries. Although the vampire was said to prolong its existence by consuming the blood of its victims, it was actually print culture that imbued the vampire with immortality.
Oral folkloric traditions served the purpose of perpetuating regional vampire myths in Eastern Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, the vampire did not reach a mass audience until accounts found their way into Western European publications. The report produced by the Fluckinger commission epitomizes how this worked. The Paole case was picked up and translated by several Western European periodicals. Those publications, in turn, begat additional written pieces that appeared in even more publications.
For example, the May 20, 1732, issue of the Country Journal: or, The Craftsman (a weekly newspaper published in London from 1726 to 1752) opens with a lengthy piece that includes not only a short overview of the Paole (here presented with the Anglicized spelling “Paul”) case, but also an extensive discussion regarding the possibility of such an extraordinary event that “at first sight seems to be impossible and even ridiculous.” The piece, written by Caleb D’Anvers (the pseudonym of the newspaper’s founding editor, Nicholas Am-hurst), demonstrates the ways that vampires could appeal to a mass audience with different sensibilities. The article opens with a fictionalized letter from
Vienna, in which is enclosed an excerpt from the Fluckinger commission’s report. These items are followed by a “transcription” of a dispute between a “Doctor of Physick” and a beautiful young lady described as “a great Admirer of strange and wonderful Occurrences” The gist of the dispute is predictable: the doctor presents a logical, scientific refutation denying the possibility that vampires exist, while the lady sides with superstition. Their heated debate is quelled by the following rational explanation offered by the author, who is also in attendance at the gathering:
I must agree with the learned Doctor that an inanimated Corpse cannot possibly perform any vital Functions; and yet I am firmly persuaded, with the young Lady, that there are Vampyres, or dead Bodies, which afflict and torment the Living. . . . I must desire you to reflect the Account, now before us, comes from the Eastern Part of the World, which hath been always remarkable for writing in the allegorical Style. Besides, it deserves our Consideration that the States of Hungary are, at present, under the Subjection of the Turks, or the Germans, and governed by Them with a pretty hard Rein; which obliges Them to couch all their Complaints under Types, Figures and Parables. I believe you will make no Doubt that this Relation of the Vampyres is a Piece of that Kind and contains a secret Satire upon the Administration of those Countries. . . . (Country Journal: or, The Craftsman, May 20, 1732, p. 1; reprinted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography 42-43)
What follows is a lengthy justification of the author’s interpretation of the vampire as an allegorical critique of government corruption, in which both specific and general examples are cited to support his argument. The author’s interpretation is predictable given the forum; the Craftsman was a political publication noted for being one of the leading anti-Walpole periodicals of the time.8
The piece in the Craftsman is important to the history of the vampire in literature and culture and provides a bridge between the historical and fictional roots of Dracula for several reasons. First, it is one of the first vampire appearances in a well-known English periodical. Second, although Vlad Dracula is never mentioned in this piece (why would he be?), the eighteenth-century writer is correct to note that the region in question is one that has a long history of political strife (one that dates back to the medieval period and thus to the historical reigns of the Dracul family). Third, this piece demonstrates how the vampire quickly became a popular topic of discussion in literary and political circles, regardless of whether or not people believed in them. The article presents several different points of view that span the range of opinions and approaches to vampirism—superstitious, scientific, and political. In fact, it is important to note that although the vampires noted in early accounts came from all walks of life, nineteenth-century vampires are almost always depicted as aristocrats. Throughout the nineteenth century, vampires frequently became a symbol of a corrupt aristocracy. Karl Marx famously invokes the vampire metaphor three times in the first volume of his classic work Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), writing that “capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Friedrich Engels, Marx’s contemporary and coauthor on The Communist Manifesto (1848), also found the metaphor useful when describing the “vampire property-holding class” in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).9 These examples prove that D’Anvers was not the only writer who thought that political vampires were the scariest and most threatening monsters of his day.
The fourth and final point in this series is that the D’Anvers article answers a question that crosses the minds of many readers when considering the broader historical context that defines the eighteenth century: how did the vampire, a supernatural creature, manage to rise to fame during the Age of Enlightenment? The D’Anvers piece explains how the vampire found a welcoming invitation into the homes and hearts of eighteenth-century citizens, whose increasing participation in political debates found the bloodsucker a fitting allegorical figure through which to criticize government corruption and abuses of power. Here it is important to keep in mind that the major political event of the latter half of the eighteenth century was the French Revolution— one of the bloodiest events of modern history—at a time when it was common to see hundreds of people tortured and executed in public. In this way, the sight of hundreds of heads severed by the guillotine during the Reign of Terror in late-eighteenth-century Paris has something in common with the forest of impaled bodies during the reign of Vlad Dracula in medieval Wallachia.
The reasons cited above all explain how the vampire found legitimacy during a historical time that is noted for eschewing superstition in favor of reason. However, the rise of the vampire is tied not only to the scientific and political movements of the eighteenth century, but also to the period’s aesthetic movements. Eighteenth-century sightings, reports, and discussions could not have come at a better time. By the middle of the century, the novel was coming into its own as a literary genre. By the end of the century, the gothic novel was one of the most popular forms of entertainment, and its themes found their way into poems and dramas as well. The popularity of the gothic, combined with the public’s fascination with reports of supernatural occurrences, set the stage for the vampire’s ascendancy from folkloric bogeyman to cultural icon.
Although not always the focus of the work, the vampire motif can be found in several nineteenth-century literary productions. Limiting oneself to just a brief survey list will provide countless hours of entertainment for today’s fan of vampire stories. For example, those interested in poetry of the Romantic and Victorian periods will enjoy Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “The Bride of Corinth” (1797), Robert Southey’s Thalaba, the Destroyer (1801), John Stagg’s “The Vampyre” (1810), Lord Byron’s The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale (1813) and Manfred (1816), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christa-bel (1816), John Keats’s Lamia (1820), Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862), Vasile Alecsandri’s “The Vampyre” (1886), Arthur Symons’s “The Vampire,” written in 1894 and included in his collection Lesbia and Other Poems (1920), and Rudyard Kipling’s “The Vampire,” written in 1897 and published in his collection Poems and Ballads (1899). While some purists may frown at the inclusion of some of these poems in the list because the works do not deal exclusively with vampires, all of the aforementioned poems include at least a vampiric subtext that should be counted in the history of the vampire in literary culture.
Nineteenth-century vampire or vampire-inspired prose examples abound as well: Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” (1838), William Gilbert’s “The Last Lords of Gardonal” (1867), Eliza Lynn Linton’s “The Fate of Madame Cabanel” (1880), Phil Robinson’s “The Man-Eating Tree” (1881) and “The Last of the Vampires” (1893), Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock’s “The True Story of a Vampire” (1894), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Parasite” (1894), H. G. Wells’s “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1894), Augustus Hare’s “The Vampire of Croglin Grange” (1896), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Good Lady Duncayne” (1896).10 Readers who are dedicated to reading the complete vampire canon will no doubt be interested in James Malcolm Ryner’s Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, a serialized penny dreadful published over the course of two years (1845-47). Rymer’s lengthy text—totaling 220 chapters and more than 600,000 words—was one of the most well-known vampire texts in the second half of the nineteenth century. The list above is not complete; there were many more stories and poems (many more that are now lost to modern audiences). Nevertheless, the sheer number of texts demonstrates the wide reach that vampires possessed in the century following their introduction to Western Europe. Together, all of these texts paved the way for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, its subsequent popularity in the twentieth century, and the popularity of the vampire today. However, in the sea of vampire stories listed here, none inspired Stoker’s Dracula as much as John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871).
Polidori’s short novella (it clocks in at approximately 30 pages in modern printings) is credited as being the first English-language vampire story. Until its publication in 1819, English-speaking audiences knew vampires only through stories in periodicals and passing references in poems. Polidori’s The Vampyre effectively launched the vampire’s literary prominence. No longer relegated to haunt from the shadows, the undead was now the centerpiece in fictional prose. The story follows Aubrey, a young English aristocrat, as he embarks on a tour of the Continent, a customary rite of passage for young men of means in the nineteenth century. Aubrey is fascinated by his traveling companion Lord Ruthven (renamed Lord Strongmore in later editions), whose liberal lifestyle, irresistible personality, and seductive powers prove disastrous to all who find themselves lured by his charms. Aubrey and Ruthven spend considerable time in Athens, where Aubrey falls in love with lanthe and first encounters tales of vampires through local legends. Unfortunately, Aubrey’s lesson comes through too many losses. He is unable to figure out that Ruthven is responsible for the death of lanthe. He finally figures it out when he returns to England, only to learn that his sister has fallen victim to the same vampire, now using “the earl of Marsden” as his pseudonym.
Polidori’s plot is a simple one that might leave today’s readers unimpressed. However, the story had significant success during the Romantic period, and it went through several editions and translations. Polidori’s tale was also staged several times over the next 30 years, as dramatic adaptation was a common practice for sensational hits throughout the nineteenth century. The dramatist James Robinson Planche’s adaptation The Vampyre; or, The Bride of the Greek Isles made a successful stage debut in 1820 and continued to be produced into the 1850s. The famous melodramatic actor Thomas Potter Cooke played the vampire approximately 300 times over the course of his career, making Lord Ruthven the most famous vampire in England until he lost that title to Count Dracula at the end of the century. Not limiting himself to the genre of romantic melodrama, Planche reworked the story for another stage production as Giovanni the Vampire!!! or, How Shall We Get Rid of Him? a burletta that premiered at the Adelphi Theatre in 1821. Dramatic adaptations of Polidori’s story soon traveled to France through Charles Nodier’s melodrama Le Vampire (1820) and to Germany a few years later in Heinrich Marschner’s opera Der Vampyr (1828).
Although The Vampyre entertained audiences for decades, Polidori did not personally enjoy the popularity of his production for long. He committed suicide in 1821, at the age of 25. Although he managed to publish a few more texts (the longest being the short novel Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus, also published in 1819), The Vampyre remains his most significant literary production. His diary is his next greatest contribution to the literary world, specifically because the focus of the work is his experience as Lord Byron’s personal physician during the Romantic poet’s time in Switzerland during the summer of 1816, where he famously spent the majority of his time with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (who would later marry Shelley). The trio’s time at the rented Villa Diodati has become the most famous (or, more accurately, infamous) house party in literary history, because it was during a ghost-story competition among these writers that Mary began her famous novel Frankenstein and Byron briefly outlined and then abandoned the plot of a vampire story. Polidori picked up the fragment where Byron left off, developing it into his own tale of terror. However, although the finished product was definitely Polidori’s, The Vampyre never shook its beginnings as Byron’s bogeyman. Today, it is largely understood that Polidori modeled Lord Ruthven on Lord Byron, infusing his literary vampire with the charisma and mystery that made Byron a celebrity in his day. Lord Ruthven’s characterization as a sexual predator is also modeled after Byron and his many sexual liaisons, which not only caused trouble for his lovers, but also forced the poet into a self-imposed exile from England once rumors of an incestuous relationship with his half-sister caused his marriage to fall apart. Polidori infused his vampire story with sexual undertones that mirrored Byron’s reputation. These sexual themes continued to be developed throughout the nineteenth century and remain a staple of vampire novels and films today.
The other major influence on Stoker’s Dracula emerged 50 years after Poli-dori introduced English audiences to his sexy vampire. Seduction carries the reader of Le Fanu’s Carmilla through the novella. In fact, it is largely considered to be the first lesbian vampire tale (although it is unclear whether Le Fanu intended same-sex eroticism to be the centerpiece of his tale). Set in a solitary forest castle in Styria, the story is a coming-of-age narrative told from the perspective of Laura, a lonely teenager who longs for a friend. One day, a young woman of Laura’s age is suddenly left in the family’s care. The two young women immediately hit it off; however, it soon becomes clear that Carmilla is no ordinary girl. Before long, Laura begins to have disturbing dreams of being bitten. The reader eventually learns that Carmilla is the newest name taken by the vampire Mircalla, the Countess Karnstein, who takes the form of a large cat in order to stalk her prey. She is eventually found out and defeated once the group is joined by Baron Vordenburg, a vampire expert and obvious literary model for Stoker’s Professor Abraham Van Helsing. The vampire countess is defeated but is never forgotten by those who survive. The story ends with Laura remembering Carmilla, first as the beautiful girl whom she met in the forest, then as the monstrous fiend whose hideous face she saw as the vampire was vanquished. Laura admits to the reader that she sometimes thinks of the possibility that Carmilla might still be alive, an ending that suggests that she would welcome the vampire’s return. Carmilla is notable for its similarities to Stoker’s novel. From the setting to the characters to the seductive allure of its shape-shifting, aristocratic villain, Carmilla doubtless directly influenced Dracula more than did any other text.
Stoker inherited all of the historical, political, and fictional incarnations of the vampire from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The influence of each can be seen throughout his famous novel. It is important to keep these vampire predecessors in mind whenever studying Stoker’s Dracula and the incarnations of the same text that followed into the next century, as no vampire—not even Count Dracula himself—exists independently of the specters that came before.
World History
