The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold; Or The Modern Oedipus 9781487577476

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The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus Collected Fiction of John William Polidori

In 1816, John William Polidori travelled to Geneva as Byron's personal physician; there he met Mary and Percy Shelley and took pan in the most famous house party in literary history. To pass the time in 'a wet, ungenial summer,' the travellers took to writing ghost stories. Byron wrote his Faustian drama Manfred (1817); Mary Shelley wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818). Polidori appropriated an unfinished story by Byron and turned it into The Vampyre (1819). Polidori's tale, with its nightmarish atmosphere and seductive, aristocratic villain, was a scandalous success; the fact that it was originally published, without Polidori's knowledge, under Byron's name, didn't hun. All the most famous vampires of popular culture, from Stoker's Dracula to Anne Rice's Lestat, descend from Polidori's Byronic prototype. Polidori also contributed an original novel to the ghost-story project: Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus (1819). Polidori's novel explores the incest theme common to such Romantic works as Manfred, Percy Shelley's Alastor, and M.G. Lewis's The Monk, and combines this Gothic material with a historical account of Napoleon's 1798 invasion of Switzerland, one of the key moments in the political evolution of Romanticism. This edition includes the extensive revisions Polidori made for a projected second edition of The Vampyre. Ernestus Berchtold is reprinted for the first time in the 17 4 years since its initial publication. The critical introductions and explanatory annotations place the two works in their biographical, historical, and literary contexts. Appendices include a new edition of the fragment by Byron on which The Vampyre was based, and a fragmentary tale by Polidori, never before published, which shows him exploring new literary directions after being fired by Byron and returning to England in disgrace. D . L. MA c DON AL D is assistant professor in the Depanment of English,

University of Calgary, author of Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of The Vampyre, and co-editor of The Writer and Human Rights and Flaws in the Pattern: Human Rights in Literature. KATHLEEN SCHERF is associate professor of English, University of New Brunswick.

Her scholarly edition of The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry appeared in 1992. She and D.L. Macdonald have fonhcoming an edition of Shelley's Frankenstein, and her student writing textbook will appear in 1994. She is the editor of Studies in Canadian Literature.

Edited and Introduced by D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf

The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus: Collected Fiction of John William Polidori

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

©

University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1994 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Reprinted in 2018 ISBN 0-8020-0506-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8020-7465-2 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Polidori, John William, 1795-1821 The vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold; or, The modern Oedipus ISBN 0-8020-0506-3 (bound) ISBN 978-0-8020-7465-2 (paper)

Macdonald, David Lorne, 19 5 5. II. Scherf, Kathleen, 1960. III. Title. IV. Title: Ernestus Berchtold. v. Title: The modern Oedipus. I.

823'.7

c93-095000-3

For our parents: George and Helga Scherf and Doreen Macdonald Zaharuk and Peter Zaharuk

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ix

Introduction Polidori and His Fiction 1 A Note on the Text: The Vampyre 21 A Note on the Text: Ernestus Berchto!d 26 Texts The Vampyre 33 Ernestus Berchtold 51

Apparatus The Vampyre: Pre-copy-text Variants 145 The Vampyre: Explanatory Annotations 15 3 Ernestus Berchtold: Explanatory Annotations 156 APPENDICES

Appendix A: A Fragment of a Tale by Byron 1 A Note on the Text 171 2 Text 172 Appendix B: Preliminaries for The Vampyre 1 A Note on the Text 177 2 Text 179

viii Contents Appendix C: 'A Story of Miss Anne and Miss Emma with the Dog Carlo' 1 A Note on the Text 187 2 Text 188 3 Variants 191 WORKS CITED 195

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following: - the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library, for permission to quote from the manuscript of Byron's fragment of a ghost story (18:16). - the Houghton Library, Harvard University, for permission to quote from manuscript marginalia in a copy of The Vampyre, by John William Polidori (1819), call number *EC 8.P7598.819va: by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. - John Murray (Publishers) Limited for permission to quote from Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (1973-82); and from the manuscript of Byron's fragment of a ghost story (1816). - Oxford University Press for permission to quote from George Gordon Noel Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (198o-