Capital link to writer of landmark vampire story should be celebrated

The National

16-06-2025

Almost 80 years before Stoker's Dracula, Edinburgh medical graduate John William Polidori (1795-1821) wrote The Vampyre: A Tale (1819), said to be the first English-language vampire novel. Polidori's work, based on an abandoned scrap of a story by Lord Byron, was a huge hit because its authorship had initially been misattributed by the publisher (accidentally on purpose?) to the scandalous pop-star poet. Whatever the reason for its popularity, Polidori's tale speedily gave rise to stage adaptations in French and English and sparked the genre that today is still spinning money. Except in Edinburgh – which has never made capital of its connection with this huge literary 'first'.
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Dr John Polidori is influential for having shifted the vampire tale from lore to literature, introducing the aristocratic, salon-friendly vampire into the literary bloodstream.
He had graduated in Edinburgh in 1815 with a thesis on nightmare, in 1816 being employed as personal physician to the Anglo-Scottish poet Lord Byron during his Swiss stay by Lake Geneva. During this famous summer of incessant rain, Byron and his friends swapped ghost stories. What emerged were Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster and the first literary vampire, and discussion leading to both was influenced by the work of Edinburgh-trained medical men – Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) and Gorgie-born James Lind MD, FRS (1736-1812).
Polidori died very young – the consequence of a carriage accident or, some say, by suicide. Although their vampire tales were written almost 80 years apart, Polidori has a connection with Bram Stoker in that he was an uncle of the artistic Rossettis who became part of Bram Stoker's circle.
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A few years go, when researching for my dramatised lecture 'Vampire and Monster', I was fortunate in being able to able to identify, with the kind help of the University of British Columbia Library, the student lodgings in Edinburgh of John Polidori – even learning the name of his landlady. This flatted tenement, in the vicinity of St Cuthbert's Chapel of Ease, was demolished in 1947 in the face of much opposition, but in recent years has risen from the dead in the form of a tenement property built on the site in a similar style – over the historic trance which would have known the feet of Polidori, the diligent Anglo-Italian medical student whose inclination was rather toward literature and politics.
A Polidori plaque – or something more ambitious and attractive to visitors – should surely be placed in this southside location. This would accord with City of Edinburgh Council's recent decision to prioritise the transformation of The Causey into an urban oasis. At the very least, could the local graffiti be regularly cleaned off?
Carolyn Lincoln
Edinburgh
THE Donald, for once, has seriously undersold himself. His military parade – while surpassing the more muted affair held in London by a real king earlier in the day, and making a fair stab at the sort of roll-out of kit we associate with the likes of Russia, China and North Korea – fell well short of what he knows in his heart he truly deserves. Donald is no wannabe king, he is a wannabe Caesar.
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Should he survive another year and not meet his Brutus and co en route to Congress to deliver his State of the Union address, he will surely rework the event into the sort of triumphal procession truly befitting his magnificence. Amidst the tanks and the soldiers, probably by then 'goose-stepping' in the manner beloved of dictators, will be groups of chained 'illegals' en route to who knows where, and of course some tarred and feathered judges, senators and maybe even a state governor or two, 'pour encourager les autres'.
Maybe Congress will even vote him a triumphal arch for the occasion?
Michael Collie
Dunfermline
I WRITE in response to Susan FG Forde's letter concerning St Valery-en-Caux, and the capture of the 51st Highland Division. My father was there, he was a Lieutenant, and a Territorial, so part-time. He and his friends were shipped off from the Outer Hebrides to France; some had never even seen a train before.
They had armoured personnel carriers which bullets just went straight through, anti-tank weapons but no ammunition. He latterly had to use a German automatic weapon. They were told at one point by the French to hold a line, and that the French would reinforce behind them. When the Camerons fell back the French had gone. Eventually they ran out of ammunition, destroyed all their equipment and surrendered.
He spent five years in a German prison camp, and returned after the war to have the equivalent of five years' bed and breakfast deducted from what he was due from the Ministry of Defence.
Norman Robertson
via email