I’m currently reading Varney the Vampyre; or The Feast of Blood, by James Malcolm Rymer which, if you’re not familiar with it, at first sounds like a humorous “take” on Stoker’s Dracula. But surprise! Varney’s work predated Stoker’s by about 50 years.
It appeared as a “penny dreadful” in the Victorian era, but Wiki says the mention of Napoleonic wars puts that in doubt.
No matter. It is a very enjoyable read, and it does feature some humorous characters whose dialogue is surprisingly funny and helps provide some comic relief.
This isn’t my first enounter with Varney, having been assigned the novel as a choice back in my college days, but I chose Dickens’ Nicholas Nickelby instead. By the way, if Rymer’s style reminds you of Dickens, well, there you go. The author breaks away from the dialogue to speak to us about goings on which are elemental to the story, but aren’t included as part of the dialogue, much like Dickens does.
So if you don’t mind reading literature in the Gothic style, using antiquated words such as ejaculated rather than exclaimed, this is a totally enjoyable book. Best of all, it’s on Kindle’s free download list.
I know y’all don’t usually do book reports, but I find this is therapeutic for me.
The question is not about when it was published. It was serialized from 1845 to 1847 and then released in book form in 1847.
The question is when the story is supposed to be set. The story was written and published one chapter a week for three years and continuity was pretty slipshod. The story was supposed to be set around 1713 but the author sometimes slipped up and mentioned historical events that happened after that date.
I’ve got it and read a fair amount (although not all of it). The time it’s supposed to be taking place in isn’t clearly identified. In fact, it’s incredibly loose. In my opinion, you shouldn’t look at it as a novel. It was released in cheap weekly editions by poorly=paid writers and draftsmen and nobody cared about consistency (at times, Varney apparently isn’t really a vampyre, but is only pretending to be one – despite the fact that he is roused from death by exposure to moonlight in an early chapter).
In other words, this is more like a run of comic books than a concise and consistent novel. Imagine if someone had transcribed the first 200 issues of Superman and bound them as a book. That’ll give you the idea.
I gave up on Varney when it started pulling the tricks of any open-ended serial drama, like Lost – they drop one mystery and introduce a bunch of new characters and introduce new plot lines without resolving the old ones, and it’s pretty clear that they’re just stringing the readers along so they’ll keep buying the rag in the hopes that their questions will eventually get answered.
One interesting thing is how you can see that some of our “ancient” vampire mythology is in place (returning to the coffin, being killed by a stake through the heart), while others are completely absent (not being visible in a mirror, not being able to cross running water) and others are different (Vampyres don’t dissolve in sunlight. On the other hand, although they bcan be killed, they are revived by moonlight) Stoker clearly read Varney and borrowed from it, but he’s the one who came up with a lot of those “ancient” traditions and codified them.
You’re misreading what I said – Stoker invented many of the “ancient” vampire traditions, which is true. I didn’t imply that Stoker invented all of them.
You are correct that the idea of the vampire expiring in sunlight first appeared in Nosferatu (although there’s more to it than just sunlight – the Harker-clone’s wife sacrifices herself to delay the vampire’s going, which is areguably part of the mix). But Nosferatu got bad distribution and was technically a copyright violation, and Stoker’s widow tried to get every copy destroyed. So just because the idea appeared there didn’t make it a well-known trope. For years afterwards vampires were destroyed by stakes (mainly), fire, and acid. In Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr the vampire gets staked (with a metal stake) in full daylight. It wasn’t until 1943’s Son of Dracula that another vampire died by being exposed to sunlight. The next year, John Carradine as Dracula got similarly destroyed by sunlight in House of Frankenstein. Both films had stories by Curt Siodmak, who has contributed mightily to our trove of pseudo-“ancient” lore (he invented the poem about the werewolf, and wrote the first film about a werewolf being killed by a silver bullet – although he didn’t invent that idea). I suspect that he had seen Nosferatu and remembered the death-by-sunlight scene, and thought it would make a more socially acceptable way of destroying the vampire than staking him. (It left few bloody bits to be swept up afterwards).