Mysterious death of horror author doctor
WHEN John Polidori returned to his father’s house in London on August 20, 1821, after being away for three weeks, the young doctor complained of “frequent loss of sight and a pain in his side”.
On the evening of August 24, his servant entered Polidori’s bedroom to find him in the “agonies of death”.
He was 25 when he died, and was buried in St Pancras churchyard in London.
Once the personal physician to the poet Lord Byron, Polidori is mostly known for being at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva and taking part in the ghost story competition that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.
But his short novel, The Vampyre, published in 1819, was a pioneering work of horror fiction, considered to be the first real, complete work of vampire fiction. It is even considered to have been a major influence on Bram Stoker’s famous Dracula novel.
John William Polidori was born in 1795, the son of an Italian immigrant.
Polidori studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and earnt his doctorate at the age of just 19, with a thesis on sleepwalking.
After his graduation in 1815, he seems to have devoted more time to literary pursuits than to practising medicine, and socialised with well-known literary figures.
When Byron went on a tour of Europe in 1816 to escape the scandal of his marital breakdown and mounting debts, he took Polidori with him as his personal physician.
He and Byron were invited to spend time over the summer of 1816 with poet Percy Shelley and his partner (later wife) Mary Godwin, also an aspiring writer.
The group decided to have a competition to see who could tell the best horror story.
Polidori took inspiration from a story by Byron, and wrote The Vampyre, about Lord Ruthven, a suave English noble risen from the dead who takes a tour of Europe with a man named Aubrey.
Published in 1819, it was
later attributed to Byron so it would sell more copies.
Polidori had to fight to have his authorship recognised and was still trying to assert his claims when he died.