World legends are filled with vampire-like creatures; they appear in such sagas as Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and Le Morte d'Arthur. We have treatises and reports about vampires written in the early 1600s. The first use of the word vampire, or vampyre, appeared in the English papers in 1732 in a report of the story of Arnold Paole. What is generally considered the first fictional work is a poem The Vampire or Der Vampir by Heinrich August Ossenfelder, published in 1748.
Wake Not The Dead by Johann Ludwig Tieck, written about 1800, may be the first modern vampire story, about a man who loves his dead wife so much he has a necromancer return her to life, only to discover she has become a vampire. It loses out to John Polidori's The Vampyre as the first vampire story in English, because it wasn't translated until 1823.
In 1816, there was a gathering at the Villa Diodati, near Geneva, Switzerland. Among the guests were famous poets and writers, including Lord Byron. At Lord Byron's suggestion, the guests made up ghosts stories. One of the guests was Mary Shelly, whose story became the classic Frankenstein . Lord Byron wrote a fragment of a story about a man who makes his traveling companion swear to conceal his death and to undertake certain actions. It was never finished. Dr. John Polidori, who was a traveling companion of Lord Byron, took Lord Bryon's fragment of a story and turned it into The Vampyre , which was published in The New Monthly Magazine in April 1, 1819 and mistakenly attributed to Lord Byron. Polidori created Lord Ruthven, who was intentionally modeled after Lord Byron, a handsome and charismatic nobleman. In doing so, he raised the character of the vampire from that of a night flying demon or the peasant in moldy grave clothes to a foreign nobleman, a romantic figure and a seducer of young women. Critics agree that Lord Ruthven is the prototype for all that followed, including Bram Stoker's Dracula and even Anne Rice's Lestat.
Varney the Vampyre is considered the first vampire novel written in English. James Malcolm Rymer is credited with writing the 109 installments of the penny dreadful, 220 chapters in all. Penny dreadfuls, also called Penny Bloods and Blood and Thunders, were 8 page booklets that sold for a penny. They were the soap operas of the day. You could compare Varney to Dark Shadows, each episode packed with excitement and adventure. It began in 1845 and ran for two years. Varney is very much a product of its
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