There is something gloriously appropriate about this quotation from John Polidori.

He gazed upon the mirth around him, as if he could not participate therein.

It describes Lord Ruthven, the vampire at the centre of Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’. But I can’t help wondering whether it also unintentionally describes Polidori himself, at least in the way literary history has tended to remember him.

Polidori was there at the Villa Diodati in 1816, when Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and he gathered together during that famously unseasonable summer. We tend to remember the event through the great works that emerged from it: ‘Frankenstein‘, Byron’s ‘Fragment of a Novel‘, and, less frequently, Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre‘.

Polidori was not simply the young doctor who happened to be in the room when literary history happened.

He was a writer, too.

And The Vampyre was enormously important. Published in 1819, it helped turn the vampire from a creature of folklore into something much closer to the figure who would eventually become one of Gothic fiction’s great inhabitants: aristocratic, urbane, seductive, and more at home in respectable society than Bram Stoker’s creation could ever be. 

It’s always worth remembering that Ruthven predates Dracula by over 75 years.

Lord Ruthven is frightening precisely because he doesn’t need to lurk in a crypt. He can stand in the drawing room, raise a glass, charm the company, and remain entirely apart from it.

Perhaps that is why this quotation caught my eye for Polidori.

He has his own strange place in the mythology of that house party. He was there, but has often been pushed to the edge of the picture. Byron and Shelley are the famous poets; Mary Shelley became the author of Frankenstein; Polidori became, too often, the footnote.

Except that the footnote wrote The Vampyre. Despite the fact that people seemed keen to ascribe it to Lord Byron.

And without Ruthven, the literary vampire would be a rather different creature.

Sometimes the person standing at the edge of the picture is worth looking at twice.

Over to you: which literary figures – authors or characters – do you think are too much in the shadow of others?