by Frances Thomas

John William Polidori, the young doctor who was employed by Lord Byron for a brief but crucial period in both of their lives, usually comes in for a bad press.  ‘Pollydolly’, Byron called him contemptuously, and this is how he’s usually remembered.

Yet he was a clever and handsome young man, the golden boy of a family drenched in literature, wrote poetry and plays, and was the youngest graduate ever from the medical department of Edinburgh University. What went wrong? Well, some of it was due to temperament – Polidori was vain and impulsive and like most of the rest of his family, he lacked a crucial element for dealing with the glamorous Byron, a sense of humour.  What is less well known about him, though, is that he was uncle to another family of literary and gifted children, the Rossettis.

John Polidori was the eldest son of Gaetano Polidori, a Tuscan native, an austere and serious man, who set up a publishing business in England.

John’s mother was Anna Maria Pierce,  of whom I know little except that after her children were born, she did that nineteenth-century-lady thing of retiring to bed with mysterious illnesses for the rest of her life. Their eldest daughter and John’s favourite sister was Frances, a quiet calm girl, who eventually worked as a governess. The other girls were Eliza (‘only partly amiable’ says her nephew, William Rossetti who acted as the chronicler of his family); Margaret, who was given to rolling on the floor with hysterical fits; Philip (‘weak minded and odd’) who stayed at home, unable to work; Charlotte, another calm one, who became a successful governess; and Henry, an unsuccessful lawyer.

After he’d graduated, Polidori looked around for a career. He was anxious to develop his literary rather than his medical  career, and when he heard that Lord Byron, the most famous writer of the age, was looking for a personal physician to accompany him on a European tour, he was delighted, in spite of his family’s misgivings Though quite why Byron, still a young and healthy man, needed a personal physician, isn’t clear – perhaps it was vanity, like the huge coach, a  copy of Napoleon’s, which he had made for him and never paid for.

At first the two men got on well -Polidori wrote to his sister Frances, ‘I am very pleased with Lord Byron. I am with him on the footing of an equal, everything alike.’ Soon, however, the cracks began to show. Byron could not resist teasing and tormenting his young doctor – Polidori was only 21 at the time, and his home, though cultured, was sheltered,  whereas Byron at 28, had run though most of the gamut of human experience, and had a wicked tongue as well.

Later that summer – it was 1816, the famous year without a summer, when the world was affected by a disastrous volcanic eruption –  Polidori found himself staying with Byron in the rented Villa Diodati, on Lake Geneva, with Percy Shelley, Mary (still Mary Godwin then) and Claire Clairmont visiting daily.  Relations between the noble lord and his physician continued to fluctuate – sometimes it was Polidori’s own lack of tact and discretion that caused the arguments, such as the time he invited a group of his friends to lunch at the villa, without consulting Byron.  He was never quite sure whether he was a fellow guest or an employee, and this made for an uncomfortable atmosphere.

Because of the bad weather, the little group were forced to spend most of their days and evenings indoors, but this enabled them to engage in intense and fascinating discussions. Byron, recognising his poetic genius, was drawn to Shelley. Polidori, though his writing by now ran to reams of poetry and plays, could not hold a candle to these two. He seems to have been attracted to Mary Godwin – at 19, she was closer to him in age, and kinder in manner.  Many of the discussions between them centred around the new and exciting beliefs in magnetism as a source of life – electrical experiments could cause the limbs of dead animals to twitch, and this led to speculation about the nature of life itself. At Edinburgh University, Polidori had written a paper on somnambulism, which was believed to be caused by some sort of magnetic possession. These were also the days of highly charged gothic romances; The Monk, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho had fascinated a generation of young readers and would still be fascinating the Rossetti children years later.

It was out of this atmosphere that one evening, as the five of them sat round the fire, someone suggested that each write a ghost story. Claire Clairmont didn’t attempt one, both Byron and Shelley started, but lost interest, and only Mary and Polidori persisted. It might have been Byron who wrote a few notes on a vampire story, but it was Polidori who completed it. Interest in vampires had been aroused from the mid-eighteenth century, when stories of gross blood-sucking creatures had filtered in from remote middle European countries. Polidori wrote of a pale and mysterious aristocrat, Lord Ruthven who both repelled and attracted: ‘Those who felt this sensation of awe could not explain whence it arose; some attributed it to the dead grey eye, which fixing upon the object’s face, did not seem to penetrate.’

Very much a Byronic anti-hero, Lord Ruthven secretly pursues his horrible ways. A young man, Aubrey, is attracted to him and follows him in his travels; but when he discovers the beastly Lord sucking the blood from a beautiful girl, is made to swear an oath that he will not tell of this for a year and a day. He thinks Lord Ruthven has died in an accident, but of course he’d survived, and because of his oath, Aubrey can’t stop Ruthven  marrying his beautiful sister. And so the story ends, ‘Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!’  Polidori considered his tale ‘a mere trifle’ and seems to have left it among assorted papers in the villa, whereas Mary went on refining her story, until it was published in 1820.

Soon after this, Polidori left Byron’s employment for good, though they remained on amiable terms when they encountered each other in their travels. Polidori travelled in Italy for a while, but had to leave Milan when he got involved in a quarrel when he accused a soldier of blocking his view at the opera with his tall hat.  Back in England, he continued to churn out his plays and poems (it has to be said, remarks William Rossetti, his honest nephew, that his poetry was not good). But in 1817, he had an accident that changed his life. Falling from his horse, he sustained a severe concussion, and afterwards both his speech and behaviour seemed to be affected.

In 1819, an editor published The Vampyre under Byron’s name and it was a huge success, though Polidori, despite later laying claim to the story, made almost no money from it.

His health continued to deteriorate and in 1821, he was found dead in his room.  A coroner’s inquest returned a verdict of ‘died by the visitation of God’, though his family believed he had committed suicide by taking prussic acid.  But surely a medical man who wanted to kill himself could use a kinder method than prussic acid, though it could have been used in small doses as a remedy,  and the damage from the previous accident might have caused a brain haemorrhage.  His father was devastated and would not allow his son’s name to be spoken before him, and his favourite sister Frances was also deeply upset at his death. She took the rather fine portrait of him that had been painted before he went to Italy and it hung in the Rossetti house for many years.

Polidori had also been commissioned by John Murray, Byron’s publisher, to keep a diary of his time with Lord Byron, and eventually this found its way into the keeping of the deeply religious maiden aunts, Charlotte and Margaret.  For many years the diary was kept in a drawer unread, but when Aunt Margaret finally read it, she was horrified. She went on to copy out bits of the diary, leaving out the shocking parts and destroyed the original.   William had a chance to see it before it was destroyed, and remembered one censored anecdote: Polidori described how he and Byron entered a hotel room together and Lord Byron ‘fell like a thunderbolt upon the chambermaid’.

Frances hadn’t done with Italians. Soon she met an exile from Sicily, a poet himself and a patriot, Gabriele Rossetti. Unlike austere Polidori, Gabriele was garrulous and excitable – he’s believed to be the origin of the comical but lovable figure of Professor Pesca in The Woman in White.   The Rossettis had four children, Gabriel Charles Dante, Gabriel to his family, known later as Dante Gabriel, born in 1828; Maria, born 1827; William, born 1829. Christina, the youngest child in this little brood, arrived in 1830. Under the watchful eye of Uncle John’s portrait in the living room, the little Rossettis grew up in their dark London house.

They were an exceptional  family: Gabriel proved early on to be immensely gifted, both as artist and poet; Maria was a clever girl who accumulated vast stores of knowledge; William, though he lacked his brother’s brilliance, loved poetry and stories; Christina was lively and  temperamental. At first, she didn’t seem in any way outstanding, but once she started to write poems, the flow couldn’t be stopped. Calm Mrs Rossetti held everything together, and Papa Rossetti worked on his interminable studies of Dante.  Grandfather Polidori was a strong influence in the family; William hinted that Christina was in many ways closer to him than she was to her own father.  And being a publisher, he was able to ensure that the two grandchildren who wrote poetry could be published poets before they were twenty – Gabriel’s poem Sir Hugh the Heron was printed in 1843, Christina’s first book of poems in 1848. It was a world steeped in poetry for them.

For the women of the family at least, they were also steeped in religion, a severe Tractarian version of Anglicanism. This suited Maria, but for Christina, it led to bouts of despair and unhealthy self-examination; and a breakdown in her teens seemed to colour the rest of her life with melancholy, a melancholy perhaps inherited from elements in the Polidori family.

We don’t know whether they read Uncle John’s The Vampyre, but the ideas seem to have taken hold, especially on Christina. Later, having mostly recovered from her breakdown, she wrote her most famous poem, the strange Goblin Market, the story of two loving sisters and their clash  with dangerous male goblins.  Laura gives into the temptation to eat the forbidden fruit and as a punishment, falls into a trance…

But when the moon waxed bright
…Her hair grew thin and gray;
She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn
To swift decay and burn
Her fire away.

In Polidori’s tale, Aubrey too falls into a deathly trance  when trapped by his oath not to reveal Lord Ruthven’s proclivities:

… His incoherence became at last so great that he was confined to his chamber. There he would often lie for days incapable of being roused. He had become emaciated, his eyes had attained a glassy lustre.

It’s by a kind of reversed vampirism that Lizzie saves her sister by allowing her to suck the poisoned juices, which by now have lost their power, from her body. There’s been a good deal of speculation about what could have planted these ideas into the mind of their devout and virtuous author, but isn’t hard to imagine that the idea had been formed, if only subconsciously in Christina’s mind, by reading Uncle John’s book.

Christina went on to write many more books of poetry and devotional studies. At one point her name was even put forward to be Poet Laureate, but in those days it was impossible to consider a woman for such a post.  Maria, Christina’s much loved elder sister, became a nun, and her book about Dante, A Shadow of Dante was highly respected. William and Gabriel were founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, William went on to be a critic and Gabriel became  equally famous for his painting and his poetry. And it was the Rossetti brothers who were in part responsible for popularising the works of Shelley, who’d become neglected immediately after his death.

But the influence of those evenings at the Villa Diodati, and the works of the two young people, have gone on to colour gothic and horror fiction to this day. Mary’s book has spawned countless films and commentaries, with androids now taking over the roles of the artificially created beings, leading to speculation over the nature of life itself. And Polidori’s little tale – only 20 pages in the edition I have – by introducing the world to the concept of the glamorous vampire is still producing spin-offs, from Anne Rice to the strange designer vampires of the Twilight series; not a bad legacy for nineteen-year-old Mary and twenty-one-year-old John.

 

 

Frances Thomas was born in Wales during the war, lived most of her life in London, and now lives in mid-Wales. She went to London University and is married to Richard Rathbone, a professor of African history. She’s written many books for young people, as well as a couple of adult novels, a biography of Christina Rossetti, and recently poetry. She has won the Welsh Books Council Tir na nOg prize and Scottish Arts Council award for her children’s books.

www.francesthomas.org