*DRAFT*

A particularly stormy summer holiday in June of 1816, found Mary Shelley, her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, her sister, Claire Clairmont, and friends, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori shut inside a mansion in Switzerland called Villa Diodati. During a three-day storm where they remained inside, Lord Byron proposed a challenge, to write a ghost story better than what they had been reading. This activity, thought of on a whim, gave birth to two works that heavily impacted the Victorian Vampire culture, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John Polidori’s The Vampyre.  

John Polidori’s The Vampyre was inspired by Lord Byron’s abandoned ghost story, which was later published as The Fragment, which followed a man with an illness traveling east. Polidori took this idea and created Lord Ruthven, the mysterious, charming, and seductive vampire in his tale which was based on Lord Byron himself. This blazed the way for more Byronic vampires, transforming vampires from an ugly monster to the sexy, brooding, misunderstood characters we see in many Victorian vampire novels.   

 While they didn’t know it yet, the impacts of the massive volcanic explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 had finally reached England, leaving them with a cold and dark summer, popularly coined the year without summer. The days were far darker than it usually had been, the temperatures cooled so drastically that the agriculture was suffering, and it rained and stormed like crazy. We can see the weather’s impact on them in Polidori’s The Vampyre. When Aubry sets off to travel through the woods, much to Ianthe’s dismay, Polidori makes it clear that it gets dark before he thought it would, “he did not perceive that day-light would soon end” (Polidori). He also writes that it began to storm “immediately the sun sets, night begins: and ere he had advanced far, the power of the storm was above” (Polidori). During this, is when Aubrey hears the screams of a woman, as "the thunders, for a moment silent" leading to the horrifying vampire attack.  The light seems to deter the vampire, as when he opened the door, "that gave light in the day, disturbed him; - he instantly rose, and leaving his prey, rushed through the door” (Polidori). By doing this, Polidori sets up a being who thrives in the unexpected darkness and who seems to have a weakness in the light.  

Polidori’s The Vampyre impacts the vampire tradition in a few ways. First, thanks to Polidori, and an unknowing Lord Byron, when we think of vampires, we often think of sexy, mysterious men with a tragic backstory rather than an ugly monster. We also find ourselves in a familiar setting when the vampire attacks, dark and stormy nights and harmed by the light.