There were many books on vampires before Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'. Early anthropologists wrote accounts of the folkloric vampire -- a stumbling, bloated peasant, never venturing far from home, and easily neutralized with a sexton’s spade and a box of matches. The literary vampire became a highly mobile, svelte aristocratic rake with the appearance of the short tale 'The Vampyre' in 1819. However the body of literature surrounding the vampire myth was as broad and varied as European culture at the time. Below is a timeline of the vampire stories that preceded – and inevitably influenced - Bram Stoker’s classic tale. This is a timeline of the vampire stories that preceded – and inevitably influenced - Bram Stoker’s 'Dracula'.;xNLx;;xNLx;Image credits: Graveyard, CC0 via Pixabay (background); Cemetery, CC) via Pixabay (introduction).
In Joseph Pitton de Tournefort's 'Voyage to the Levant,' the French traveller details stories of superstitions about vampires in southern Europe, focusing on a case in Greece.
London Journal of 11 March reports on the inquiries into ‘vampyres’ at Madreyga in Hungary, thus introducing the word vampire into English. Reports and discussions continue in the English press throughout the 1730s.
In 1746, Dom Augustin Calmet's 'Treatise on Apparitions of Angels, Demons and Spirits and on the Revenants and Vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia' is published. It is a French synthesis of the reports and investigations in Hungary and elsewhere during the 1720s and 1730s.
Gottfried August Bürger, ‘Lenore’, a ballad about returning (un)dead soldier, is written.
Goethe's ‘The Bride of Corinth’ is published. It is a female vampire story set in early Christian era. It was translated into English in 1835.
Johann Ludwig Tieck's ‘Wake Not the Dead’ is first translated into English in 1823.
Robert Southey writes 'Thalaba the Destroyer'. It is widely considered the first poetic treatment of the vampire myth in English literature, including scholarly footnotes on Tournefort and Calmet.
Lord Byron pens ‘The Gaiour’. The Orientalist poem briefly uses the notion of the ‘curse’ of the vampire.
William Polidori writes ‘The Vampyre’, a short story about the vampire Lord Ruthven. The piece was published under Byron’s name and was the first to introduce the aristocratic vampire Lord into fiction. Publication prompts Byron to publish his own unfinished vampire tale as ‘A Fragment’ with his poem Mazeppa in 1819.
Cyprien Bérard writes 'Lord Ruthven, ou Les Vampires', a novel-length extension of Polidori's story. At least four versions of Polidori’s story are staged in Paris in this year.
