Uncle Rory
Potential
I have always loved Vampires - Dracula, Lestat, Louis, Armand, Angel, Spike etc. etc. So I was surprised to find that Dracula was not the first Vampire in English Literature. And more surprisingly, both the first English literature vampire and Frankenstein were concieved at the same time in the same place.
From Wilkepedia -
The story has its genesis in the summer of 1816, the Year Without a Summer, when Europe and parts of North America underwent a severe climate abnormality. Lord Byron and his young physician John Polidori were staying at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva and were visited by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont. Kept indoors by the "incessant rain" of that "wet, ungenial summer",over three days in June the five turned to telling fantastical stories, and then writing their own. Fueled by ghost stories such as the Fantasmagoriana, William Beckford's Vathek and quantities of laudanum, Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Polidori was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron's and in "two or three idle mornings" produced "The Vampyre".
For anyone interested here is the link to the text of "The Vampyre" by John William Polidori.
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/vampy10h.htm
From Wilkepedia -
The story has its genesis in the summer of 1816, the Year Without a Summer, when Europe and parts of North America underwent a severe climate abnormality. Lord Byron and his young physician John Polidori were staying at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva and were visited by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont. Kept indoors by the "incessant rain" of that "wet, ungenial summer",over three days in June the five turned to telling fantastical stories, and then writing their own. Fueled by ghost stories such as the Fantasmagoriana, William Beckford's Vathek and quantities of laudanum, Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Polidori was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron's and in "two or three idle mornings" produced "The Vampyre".
For anyone interested here is the link to the text of "The Vampyre" by John William Polidori.
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/vampy10h.htm
