Nicolas Robles
Badajoz, Spain

He thought, in fine, that the dreams of poets were the realities of life.
—Polidori, The Vampire

Some have regarded John William Polidori as the inventor of the vampire ghost story style. Born in 1795 in the City of Westminster, he was the son of Gaetano Polidori, who had come to England in 1790 and settled in Highgate, where he worked as an Italian teacher and translator.

In 1811, Polidori enrolled in medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Before graduating, he took a year to write a thesis on somnambulism, or, as he termed it, oneirodynia. The term strictly means nightmare, a compound of the Greek oneiros (dream) and odyne (pain). But William Cullen, the great nosologist of the XVIII century, had widened it to include somnambulism. ¹ Erasmus Darwin, a student of Cullen’s, thought nightmare and somnambulism were related phenomena, both contingents on ‘the abolition of all voluntary power during sleep.² Somnambulism was not a usual subject for a medical thesis but was accepted as such because Polidori’s uncle Luigi had submitted to the Royal College of Physicians a report of a case of somnambulism he had treated in 1793.

After graduation, Polidori considered entering medical practice in London or in Norwich. But it so happened at that time that Lord Byron, already a well-known poet, was behaving so oddly that Lady Byron worried he might have become insane. He was merely drinking too heavily, as well as dieting obsessively and using laxatives to excess, particularly magnesia. He was treated by Sir William Knighton, who in 1816 recommended him to Byron as a personal doctor to accompany him on his proposed journey through Belgium and up the Rhine.  

The summer that Byron and the Shelleys spent in Villa Diodati, Geneva, is best remembered for the ghost-story project they embarked upon to relieve the boredom of that particularly bad weather. Mary Shelley, with whom Polidori fell hopelessly and unsuccessfully in love, wrote the famous novel  “Frankenstein .” Lord Byron wrote “Fragment of a Novel,” which he quickly abandoned but which later inspired Polidori to write “The Vampyre.” The Vampyre was published without Polidori’s  permission and appeared signed by Lord Byron in Henry Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine on April Fool’s Day, 1819. Polidori had not authorized the publication and tried to solve the mess by publishing his own original work in the same journal.

The relationship of Polidori with Byron, who ridiculed his writings, subsequently deteriorated until the latter fired him. After his sacking by Byron, Polidori traveled around  Italy before returning to London. He went to Norwich and tried to establish himself there as both a doctor and a writer. He wrote other plays (including romans, non-fiction books, and poems), but none of these works were successful, and Polidori became more and more disgusted with the literary world. In August 1821, he spent about three weeks in Brighton. Suffering from severe depression and encumbered by heavy gambling debts, he returned to London and ended his life by taking prussic acid. It was officially reported that he had died a natural death; and he was buried in Old St. Pancras Churchyard in Camden, London, marking a tragic end to his life.

References

1. William Cullen. The Works of William Cullen … Containing his Physiology, Nosology, and First Lines of the Practice of Physic: with Numerous Extracts from his Manuscript Papers, and from his Treatise of the Materia Medica ed John Thomson (Edinburgh: Blackwood 1827) 1: 319-20.  Available at https://archive.org/details/worksofwilliamcu02culluoft
2. Erasmus Darwin. Zoonomia or The Laws of Organic Life 2nd American ed (Boston: Thomas and Andrews 1803) 1:155, I.xviii.3