Before Dracula: How the Vampire Entered Literature

Count Dracula is so famous that it is easy to forget he was a latecomer. By the time Bram Stoker's novel appeared in 1897, the vampire had already been a poet's subject for 150 years, a stage hit, an opera villain, a penny-dreadful serial and a countess in a Styrian castle. Here is how the village corpse of the 1720s reports became the vampire of literature.

The poets come first

The vampire stories from Serbia caused a sensation in the German-speaking world, and the poets noticed. Heinrich August Ossenfelder's short poem Der Vampir of 1748, written to accompany an article in a scientific journal, is credited with introducing the vampire into creative literature. Gottfried August Bürger's ballad Lenore (1773) followed with a dead lover who returns at night, and Goethe's The Bride of Corinth (1797) with a dead bride who comes back to seek her betrothed. In English, Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) contains what is considered the first mention of vampires in English literature, and Byron's The Giaour (1813) alludes to the folk vampire too.

A ghost-story contest by Lake Geneva

In June 1816, bad weather kept Lord Byron, his doctor John William Polidori, and Percy and Mary Shelley indoors at the Villa Diodati near Geneva. They passed the evenings telling and writing tales of the supernatural. Mary Shelley's contribution became Frankenstein. Byron began a story about a mysterious aristocrat and abandoned it, and Polidori turned the idea into The Vampyre.

It appeared on 1 April 1819 in The New Monthly Magazine, billed as "A Tale by Lord Byron", which it was not. Its vampire, Lord Ruthven, is a cold, charming nobleman who moves through high society and preys on it, and he set the pattern for the aristocratic vampire. Ruthven took his name from a Byron-like character in Lady Caroline Lamb's novel Glenarvon. The story was a hit: stage versions followed in Paris and London in 1820, and Heinrich Marschner's opera Der Vampyr, based on a German play adapted from Polidori, premiered in Leipzig on 29 March 1828.

Varney the Vampire: fangs and a feast of blood

From 1845 to 1847, readers could follow Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood in weekly penny dreadfuls, cheap pamphlets for a mass audience. The author was paid by the line, and it shows: the book edition ran to 876 double-column pages, nearly 667,000 words. Varney is usually credited to James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Peckett Prest, and he gave the vampire much of its later toolkit: fangs that leave two puncture wounds, an entrance through a window to attack a sleeping young woman, and superhuman strength. He is also often called the first sympathetic vampire, a monster who hates what he is.

Carmilla: the vampire countess

Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla was serialised in The Dark Blue in 1871 and 1872 and collected in his book In a Glass Darkly in 1872. It is set in 19th-century Styria, in today's Austria, where a lonely young woman named Laura receives an unexpected guest. Carmilla is really Countess Mircalla Karnstein, and her names, Carmilla and Millarca, are anagrams of her real one. Critics often read the story as one of attraction between two women, and Carmilla became the literary prototype of the female vampire. She came 25 years before Dracula.

Dracula, 1897

Bram Stoker's Dracula was published in May 1897, probably on the 26th, and is told entirely through letters, diaries and newspaper cuttings. Stoker filled over a hundred pages with notes, and he took the name Dracula from William Wilkinson's 1820 history of Wallachia and Moldavia, which explained in a footnote that the word meant devil. Whether he knew much more about the historical Vlad III is still debated. His Count can walk by day, though his powers are weaker, and his arrival in England is unforgettable: the ship Demeter runs aground at Whitby with its dead captain tied to the wheel.

Nosferatu and the deadly sun

In 1922 F. W. Murnau's silent film Nosferatu told the Dracula story without permission, renaming the Count as Count Orlok. Stoker's widow, Florence, sued, and a court ordered all copies of the film destroyed. Some prints survived, luckily for film history, because Nosferatu also introduced a new rule: it was the first film to show a vampire dying in sunlight. You can see which other rules are old and which are new in Vampire Weaknesses in Folklore.

Timeline of the literary vampire

The six vampire bloodlines of the Mortvane quiz borrow from all of them. Lord Ruthven and Carmilla live on in The Velvet Aristocrat, Stoker's planning Count in The Shadow Strategist and the vampire of noble blood in The Crimson Heir. Take the vampire quiz and see which one you are.