In the Preacher comic, a character tells of how he became a vampire in 1916 and had no freaking clue what had happened to him until he read Dracula several years later. These days, of course, you can grab anyone off the street and they’ll be able to give you the basics of the vampire myth: bloodsucking, immortality, sunlight, holy symbols, garlic, stake through the heart, spreading vampirism through bites. Assuming Preacher is correct here and an Irishman in 1916 had no idea what a vampire was, when did this change and what was the catalyst? Did Dracula become more popular and well-known, did the 1922 film Nosferatu have anything to do with it, or did it happen later (perhaps with all the Christopher Lee films)?
There is a point of time when common knowledge ain’t. John Polidori wrote The Vampyre in 1819 in that Summer when Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein. Sheridan Le Fanu wrote Carmilla in 1871 , about a lesbian vampire. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897. The first vampire movie, Nosferatu, came out in 1922.
I think 1916 is way too late for anyone in the English-speaking world to realistically be unaware of vampires. Aside from the references ouryL gives, there was Varney the Vampire, a very popular penny dreadful from about 1845, and the word “vampire” had already been popularly shortened to “vamp” to denote femmes fatale of the Theda Bara type.
If it had been 1816 I might believe it, but 1916? Nah.
Here’s a search on Project Gutenburg. On the first page are authors from the early 1800’s. 664 books show up on the search for vampire without looking for variations in spelling or different terms for vampire. You can probaly find earier works looking through all the books in the search. You may find them in online versions of rare books, ancient texts, and mideval beastiary texts. I think it goes way further back than the 1800’s.
When was the vampire bat officially given that name? Also, the genera name for the most common species of vampire bat is Desmodus, and that name seems to be widely associated with vampires. Can anyone tell me it’s derivation?
This is better researched online, as I know of no definative conclusion ever being reached on these boards. It comes down to it’s a lot of research needed to try to pinpoint when a vampire first was well known to the common people. It surely was spread as rumurs by the common person, more than by some small elite group. You have to decide on your own at what point it’s not a vampire myth.
Don’t bother going further if violence and sex is offensive, because vampires involve both and other nasty subjects. Here is a study by Rudgers University on vampires from many cultures or at least the web site says it is. "Dark Gift": The Truth Behind the Vampire and "Fallen Angel" Legends I tried to make the link copy and past, but the software adds the url mark up.
I leave further reseach and verification to you. I hope this helps you out.
And don’t forget the Sherlock Holmes short story called (I think) “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”. Not about a real vampire of course, but you couldn’t understand the story without having heard of them.
In addition, different stories changed the “common knowledge” of the vampire legend. Before Nosferatu, nobody figured vampires died in sunlight. One thing I like about Hellsing was that they didn’t burn in the daytime. Think about just how many movies wind up with the vampire cheezily getting killed because of the daylight. Well, you can blame F. W. Murnau and Max Schreck for that.
The Varny Vampire stories had them as ageless, and not something to stay dead. They cames back to life when the rays of the moon light touched the body. The sun wasn’t an issue. The stories also had a man brought back to life running around.
I think this indicates wide knowledge.
1850 – Vampire Polka by Four Eyes. This is an American Memories item.
Link to American Memories.
An interesting question. In 1839 Darwin was able to casually mention “vampire bats” in passing in the Voyage of the Beagle (or, more exactly, his Journal of Researches):
Darwin may have mentioned vampire bats, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the average Joe placed any significance on the word “vampire.” Could have just been like saying “bantam rooster” or “saw-whet owl” as far as they were concerned, just a meaningless (to them) modifier. I think it was Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” that finally got the vampire story out there.
As an example of a familiarity with the notion of vampire bats as bloodsuckers from the same period, a quick search of the The Times Digital Archive throws up a letter to the editor published on 21/12/1838 on the subject of the Russian navy, signed by “An Englishman”, which includes the passage:
Of course, the editor of The Times was hardly an “average Joe” either, but that’s irrelevant to the question Lumpy was raising.
The bat surely got named based on an analogy with some sort of vampire lore, in whatever form. Various websites vaguely attribute the name to “early explorers” in South America, without giving details. Given that pre-Stoker vampire stories do vary quite a bit in time and place, it’s hardly immediately obvious exactly what they might have had in mind when they thought of a “vampire”. And that’s why Lumpy’s question struck me as interesting. When was the bat so dubbed and by who? Evidently definitely before 1838, but it could have been much earlier.
As I understand it, part of what Stoker then does is reverse that earlier connection by grafting the notion of the vampire bat onto his fictional human vampire. But people were already readily familar with some concept of vampires. And indeed vampire bats.
Lots of interesting information, thanks guys.
What you’re saying here is that vampire bats got the name from vampires, and then Stoker linked vampires to bats? They weren’t linked before?
For the first step, that’s my guess. For the second, I’m no expert on vampire lore, have no cite offhand and am prepared to be corrected, but that’s my understanding.
By about 1851 I find metion of vampire bats in a Congressional record for an explorer. I starts to show up in other popular media about then in reference to the bat.
By about 1851 I find metion of vampire bats in a Congressional record for an explorer. I starts to show up in other popular media about then in reference to the bat. I also see reference to Peruvian Indians extracting silver by mixing the powdered rock water and mercury by stomping in it. The guy mentions some sufure from plursy and lung problems, but it seem a reletively good job to have. Ignorant wasn’r he? Every last inch of the processing area was saturated with mercury.
Somehow this ended up saving and switching me into edit, without my knowledge until I tride to submit. Weird.
You forgot to put a nuttiness warning on that link.
The word “vampire” isn’t used, but “Christabel” by Samuel Coleridge, is definitely vampire-themed. It came out in 1798 and was very popular.
It’s unfortunately quite common for people to think that only those things they are familiar with in the past must have been familiar to those people who lived in the past.
The concept of vampires has been fairly well known all over Europe and the new world for several centuries. All Dracula did was make one that became more famous that the others.
I was just writing about this last night. The reference you want is Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burials, and Death from 1990.
Although legendfs of vampire-like creatures go back probably to prehistory, the vampire thrust its way into the knowledge of Western Europe in something like its present form in the early 18th century, after the Peace of Passowaretz, when Austria got control of parts of Serbia and walachia. They sent in efficient Germanic administrrators who started reporting on the local beliefs and customs, among them vampires (the locals had a habit of exhuming the dead and putting stakes in their hearts, something that caught the Viennese eye). Books and reports started getting through to places like Germany, Paris, and London, and Barber calls what happened a “media event”. People began travelling out to see these outrageous goings on. The word “vampire” appeared in the Oxford English dictionary in 1734.
Later in the century you had vampires popping upo in ‘The Giaour" and in Goethe’s poem "The Bride of Cornith, but vampires really hit the big time after that legendary party in Switzerland where Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lord Byron, and John Polidori agreed to write horror stories. Mary Shelley gave us Frankenstein. Who remembers her husband-to-be’s lame attempt, but Byron started a vampire strory (that he never finished). It was Polidori who gave us “The Vampyre”, which featured the firstr cultured, titled vampire. Everyone thought Byron wrote it, which helped it saleability. It was phenomenally successful, and spawned stage editions and, ultimately, gave rise to an opera. After that, vampires became big stuff in Europe, although generally they were psychic vampires. The real buried-in-the-ground, stake-through-the-heart vampires developed through the century more slowly, through the penny dreadful “Varney the Vampire” and Sheridan le Fanu’s “Carmilla”, before finally blossoming into Bram Stoker’s “500 pound gorilla:” (as David Skal called it) that not only codified the “facts” about vampires, but actually invented many of them, “Dracula”.
Please note that this has aklmost nothing to do with Vlad Tepes. The poor(?) man had only a fleeting association with such blood drinkers until Stoker’s book.
For more details, see David Skal’s books Hollywood Gothic, The Monster Show, V is for Vampire, and Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Dracula and The Essential Dracula. And Montague Summers’ book on vampires, which should be taken with a ton of salt.