![]() Its story is retold by Dr Augustus Hare, a clergyman, in his Memorials of a Quiet Life in 1871. The Croglin Vampire reputedly first appeared in Cumberland to a Miss Fisher in the 1750s. It is nearly 200 years since this Romantic/Byronic archetype for a vampire emerged – but what do we know about English belief in vampires outside of fiction? New research at the University of Hertfordshire has uncovered and reappraised a number of vampire myths – and they are not all confined to the realms of fiction. So the first fictional vampire was actually a satanic English Lord. ![]() Polidori’s vampire, Lord Ruthven, is inspired by a thinly disguised portrait of the predatory English poet, Lord Byron, in Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon (1816). The vampire first made its way into English literature in John Polidori’s 1819 short story “ The Vampyre”. But most of the action takes place in England, from the moment the Transylvanian vampire arrives on a shipwrecked vessel in Whitby, North Yorkshire, with plans to make his lair in the spookily named Carfax estate, west of the river in London.īut Dracula wasn’t the first vampire in English literature, let alone the first to stalk England. The story of Count Dracula as many of us know it was created by Bram Stoker, an Irishman, in 1897. ![]()
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