Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
Polidori’s tale would inspire others. Thomas Peckett Prest, a prolific English writer who is best known today as the originator
of the character who later became Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, published in 1847
Varney the Vampire or The Feast of Blood
. This 868-page blockbuster seems to have been the first novel to introduce the idea that the vampire could change form into
a batlike creature and fly (the better to appear at the windows of young women’s bedrooms)—but he still had the aristocratic
background and the other characteristics of Lord Ruthven.
P
olidori left Norwich and moved to London, where he entered the literary world. He succeeded in finding a publisher for
Ximenes,
the play that John Murray had turned down, and found work reviewing books for one of the city’s many journals. In 1819 he
published the book that
he
claimed was the result of the challenge Lord Byron had thrown down to his friends on a stormy night in June 1816. This was
Ernestus Berchtold: The Modern Oedipus,
the title an obvious parallel to Mary’s
Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus
. In a preface to the novel, Polidori claimed, “The tale here presented to the public is the one I began at Coligny, when
Frankenstein was planned.”
Polidori’s novel included a supernatural spirit who makes short peripheral appearances, but its plot really revolves around
incest, as the subtitle implies. It too is a tale told primarily in the first person, by the title character. Ernestus, a
young man who was raised from infancy by a village pastor in Switzerland, relates that his mother died giving birth to twins—Ernestus
and a sister. The man who had apparently been their father died earlier of wounds he had suffered before they arrived in the
village. Ernestus grows to adulthood and falls in love with a wealthy young woman named Louisa Doni. Louisa’s brother, a Byron-like
figure named Olivieri, seduces Ernestus’s sister, causing her to flee. When Ernestus finds her, dying along with her newborn
infant, she tells him that the Doni family patriarch, Count Filiberto, has a dark secret: he can summon up an evil spirit
to do his bidding. Olivieri is soon punished: unexpectedly discovered to be the leader of a band of robbers, he is arrested
and dies in jail.
Nevertheless, Ernestus marries Louisa. To decorate their rooms in Count Filiberto’s palatial house, they hang a portrait of
the Count next to one of Ernestus’s mother. When the Count sees the latter image, he is violently disturbed. A few days later
he dies, followed shortly by Louisa herself, who had suffered from consumption. Ernestus finds a manuscript that Count Filiberto
had written in his last days, and this completes the book. In it, the count confesses that as a young man he and a friend
traveled to Asia in pursuit of wealth. Both he and his companion loved the same woman, Matilda. Count Filiberto learned from
a dying Arab the secret of summoning up an evil spirit who would grant his wishes. The spirit says, however, that each time
the count is granted a wish, some disaster will befall those close to him. Heedless of the danger, the count agrees to the
bargain and does become rich, although his friend dies. Returning home, he marries Matilda but becomes jealous because he
suspects that his friend has somehow returned from the dead and is seducing her. He chases a carriage in which he believes
they are fleeing, fires at it, and hears Matilda scream. He learns later that the man in the carriage with her was not her
lover, but her father. The count presumed that he had killed her, but on seeing the portrait of Ernestus’s mother, he recognized
it as Matilda. She had survived, only to die giving birth to the twins, of which the count was the father. The count realized
that his two children by a later wife have committed incest with Ernestus and his sister. Ernestus is left alone and despairing,
the self-portrait of Polidori, who frequently noted his own loneliness in his journal.
The copies of
Ernestus Berchtold
that went on sale were lonely too: only 199 were sold, and the publisher offered the rest to Polidori at a cut rate. Persevering,
Polidori wrote other works, but they too failed to find many readers. Finally, the brilliant but hapless Polidori turned to
yet another profession: the law. He was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in November 1820 and gave his mother’s maiden name, Pierce,
on the register. Pierce had a nice English sound which would be better for business than an Italian one. Rejecting his father’s
name may also, of course, have been Polidori’s way of asserting his independence.
In August 1821, Polidori went to the seaside resort of Brighton with a friend. Apparently they spent their time at the gambling
tables. Polidori was in desperate need of money, and had evidently forgotten what happened to the eager young men who played
at faro with Lord Ruthven: “In every town, he left the formerly affluent youth, torn from the circle he adorned, cursing,
in the solitude of a dungeon, the fate that had drawn him within the reach of this fiend.” Polidori had no better luck, and
when he returned to London, friends noticed that he seemed distracted and upset. He had lost far more money than he could
pay; his only recourse would have been to ask his father once again to lend him money. That was too humiliating, and Polidori
found another solution.
Polidori was living in his family’s London house. John Deagostini, his godfather, had an apartment upstairs and on the evening
of August 23, 1821, the two had dinner together. Deagostini recalled that the young man was acting strangely, but assumed
it was the aftereffects of the head injury Polidori had suffered two years earlier. Retiring to his room, Polidori asked Charlotte
Reed, a servant, to leave him a glass, explaining that he was ill; Reed assumed he intended to take medicine. Polidori told
her that he might sleep late, so that if he did not arise before noon, she should not worry. Nevertheless, Reed later testified,
she went to his room about ten minutes before twelve to open the shutters. (Not even the family servants respected him enough
to follow his instructions.) The sunlight revealed Polidori lying on his bed, seemingly “very ill.” Suspecting the worst,
Reed told Deagostini what she had seen, and he sent her for a doctor. Two of them arrived. The first found signs of life and
attempted to pump Polidori’s stomach, but it was too late. He died a few minutes later, just a month short of his twenty-sixth
birthday.
Deagostini later testified that one of the doctors drank some of the liquid left in the glass, to show that it was not poison.
However, there had been a considerable period of time when Deagostini was left alone with the body, and the family had an
interest in averting a coroner’s verdict of suicide since that would mean Polidori could not be buried in consecrated ground.
The coroner’s jury was sympathetic, ruling that Polidori had “departed this Life in a natural way by the visitation of God.”
The body was interred on the twenty-ninth of August, 1821, in Old St. Pancras Churchyard, the same burial ground where Mary
Wollstonecraft rested, and where Shelley and Mary had declared their love for each other.
Gaetano, his father, professed to be heartbroken. “I have been left miserable and unhappy for the rest of my life,” he wrote
a friend in December. “The idea of not seeing him again, of not hearing his voice any more, compared to those times when I
used to see and hear him, accompanies me continuously, and if I did not have other children who need my help, I do not know
what would have happened to me.” He survived his son by thirty-two years; his grandchildren recalled being told never to mention
John Polidori’s name in his presence.
Of the five people who agreed to write a ghost story in the summer of 1816, Polidori was the first to die. Byron received
the news from John Murray, who seems to have reached a different conclusion than the jury had about the cause of death. Byron
told a friend,
I was convinced something very unpleasant hung over me last night: I expected to hear that somebody I knew was dead—so it
turns out—poor Polidori is gone! When he was my physician, he was always talking of Prussic acid, oil of amber, blowing into
veins, suffocating by charcoal, and compounding poisons . . . he has prescribed a dose for himself . . . whose effect, Murray
says, was so instantaneous that he went off without a spasm or struggle. It seems that disappointment was the cause of this
rash act.
The journal in which Polidori recorded his anguish, his hopes, and his version of reality survived, but—as with so many other
documents in this story—in a form revised by other hands. Polidori’s sister Frances married Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian
exile who taught Italian at King’s College. They were the parents of several talented children, including the poet Christina,
the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Michael Rossetti, an art critic and editor. William published his
uncle’s journal in 1911, when he himself was in his eighties, but reported that years before his mother had removed all elements
from it that she did not think were appropriate to print. This left, needless to say, considerably less than modern readers
would hope for.
More than forty years after Polidori’s death, William Rossetti recorded a contact with his deceased uncle during a séance.
By the rules of this séance the spirit responded to questions by rapping on the table—once for yes, twice for no. For more
elaborate messages, the participants would go through the alphabet and when they reached the right letter the spirit would
rap. William Rossetti’s séance diary for November 25, 1865, recorded that a spirit gave his name as “Uncle John.” The person
conducting the séance had no uncle of that name. Rossetti spoke up:
I then said: “Is it my Uncle John?”—Yes. I asked for the surname, by the alphabet, but could not get it. Then: Is it an English
surname?—No.—Foreign?—Yes.—Spanish, German, etc., etc., Italian?—Yes.—I then called over five or six Italian names, coming
to Polidori.—Yes.—Will you tell me truly how you died?—Yes.—How?—Killed.—Who killed you?—I.—There was a celebrated poet with
whom you were connected: what was his name?—Bro. This was twice repeated, or something close to it the second time. At a third
attempt, “Byron.”—There was a certain book you wrote, attributed to Byron: can you give me its title?—Yes.—I tried to get
this title [
The Vampyre
] several times, but wholly failed.—Are you happy?—Two raps, meaning not exactly.”
I
am ashes where once
I
was fire,
And the bard in my bosom is dead;
What
I
loved
I
now merely admire,
And my heart is as grey as my head.
My life is not dated by years —
There are moments which act as a plough;
And there is not a furrow appears
But is deep in my soul as my brow.
Let the young and the brilliant aspire
To sing what
I
gaze on in vain;
For sorrow has torn from my lyre
The string which was worthy the strain.
— “To the Countess of Blessington,”
Lord Byron, 1823
I
N ALL THE BOOKS
that resulted from Byron’s challenge—
Frankenstein, The Vampyre,
and
Ernestus Berchtold,
the first victims are the innocents, those most loved by the protagonists. So it was in the lives of those who had received
his challenge, as well as those around them. Mary’s half-sister, then Shelley’s first wife, gentle souls who could not stand
up to the ruthless blows that life delivered them, had killed themselves. Next little Clara and Willmouse became victims of
their frenetic father’s inability to consider the needs of others before his own desires. All four of these deaths, in one
way or another, were caused by the two men who had inspired the character Victor Frankenstein: Godwin and Shelley.
Now, the man who sat for the portrait of the Vampyre was to claim his own.
A
llegra’s nursemaid Elise brought the child back to Byron’s house in Venice after she had spent the summer of 1818 with Claire
and the Shelleys. Byron was living a wilder, more dissolute life than ever. He was writing the first canto of a long poem,
Don
Juan
, which would be his most outrageous work, so far beyond the bounds of propriety that his closest friends urged him not to
publish it. Having seen, and been inspired by, Mozart’s opera
Don Giovanni,
Byron knew of the “catalog aria” in which Leporello ticks off the names of his master’s conquests. In similar fashion, Byron
replied to his friend Hobhouse, who had told him that a recent visitor to Venice had returned to England with the news that
Byron had taken a lover. Byron asked, “Which ‘piece’ does he mean?—since last year I have run the Gauntlet;—is it the Tarruscelli—the
Da Mosti—the Spineda . . .” and so on through the names of twenty-three mistresses “cum multis aliis” [with many others] that
he had during 1818, “and thrice as many to boot since 1817. . . . Some of them are Countesses—& some of them Cobblers wives—some
noble—some middling—some low—& all whores.”
Even Byron realized this was not a suitable atmosphere for little Allegra, so he again palmed her off on the Hoppners, who
in turn tried to interest other families in taking her. “She was not by any means an amiable child,” wrote Richard Hoppner,
“nor was Mrs. Hoppner or I particularly fond of her.” Isabella Hoppner wrote to Mary Shelley complaining that Allegra was
a backward and unlively creature who suffered in the Venice winter as her feet were always blocks of ice. She frequently wet
the bed. The Hoppners suggested that she be brought up in Switzerland where the climate would suit her better.
A wealthy English widow, learning of Allegra’s background, offered to adopt her if Byron would renounce his parental claim.
Claire learned about the proposal and wrote to him, “My first wish is that my child should be with myself—that cannot be at
present . . . next I should wish her to be with you—but that cannot be.” She had heard of his numerous mistresses. However,
she reminded him, there might come a time when he would choose to lead a “steady” life and “live so that Allegra may be with
you & both be happy & make you happy . . . therefore before you do any thing . . . think and do not throw away the greatest
treasure you have to strangers.” Byron turned down the widow’s offer.