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" The Vampyre" is a short work of prose fiction written in 1819 by John William Polidori, taken from the story told by Lord Byron as part of a contest among Polidori, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley. The same contest produced the novel Frankenstein.
"The Vampyre" is often viewed as the progenitor of the romanticism vampire genre of fantasy fiction. The work is described by Christopher Frayling as "the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre."
This romance is short-lived: Ianthe is killed, her throat torn open by an attacker who injures Aubrey and leaves behind an unusual dagger. The whole town believes it to be the work of an evil vampire. Aubrey falls ill, but is found and nursed back to health by Ruthven. Although suspicious of the man, Aubrey feels obliged to Ruthven and rejoins him in his travels. The pair are attacked by bandits on the road and Ruthven is mortally wounded. On his deathbed, Ruthven makes Aubrey swear an oath that he will not speak of Ruthven or his death for a year and a day, and once Aubrey agrees, Lord Ruthven dies laughing. Amongst Ruthven's belongings Aubrey discovers a sheath which matches the dagger found by Ianthe's body.
Aubrey returns to London and is amazed when Ruthven appears shortly thereafter, alive and well. Ruthven reminds Aubrey of his oath and although Aubrey wants to warn others of Ruthven's character he feels unable to break his oath. Helpless to protect his sister from Ruthven, Aubrey has a nervous breakdown. Upon recovering, Aubrey learns that Ruthven has inherited an earldom and is engaged to his sister, and they are due to be married on the day that his oath will end. Unable to delay the wedding, Aubrey has a stroke. That night, his oath expires, and Aubrey relates the entire story before dying. But it is too late: Ruthven has disappeared, leaving his new wife dead and drained of blood.
The tale was first published in book form by Sherwood, Neely, and Jones in London, Paternoster-Row, in 1819 in octavo as The Vampyre; A Tale in 84 pages. The notation on the cover noted that it was: "Entered at Stationers' Hall, March 27, 1819". Once again, the author was given as Lord Byron on the title page. After Polidori protested, later printings removed Byron's name from the title page but did not replace it with Polidori's.
The story was an immediate popular success, partly because of the Byron attribution and partly because it exploited the gothic fiction horror predilections of the public. Polidori transformed the vampire from a character in folklore into the form that is recognized today—an aristocratic fiend who preys among high society. Due to this influential aspect, Jan Čapek argued that "Ruthven’s excesses in Polidori’s tale reveal the landscape of modern, increasingly capitalistic class society to be laden with anxiety concerning the continuing power of the aristocracy, as though untouched by the social shifts in the wake of the industrial revolution." (2025). 9783030823016, Springer Nature. ISBN 9783030823016
The story has its genesis in the summer of 1816, the Year Without a Summer, when Europe and parts of North America underwent a severe climate abnormality. Lord Byron and his young physician John Polidori were staying at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva and were visited by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Claire Clairmont. Kept indoors by the "incessant rain" of that "wet, ungenial summer",
over three days in June the five turned to telling fantastical tales, and then writing their own. Fueled by ghost stories such as the Fantasmagoriana, William Beckford's Vathek, and quantities of laudanum, Mary Shelley
produced what would become Frankenstein. Polidori was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron's, "Fragment of a Novel" (1816), also known as "A Fragment" and "The Burial: A Fragment", and in "two or three idle mornings" produced "The Vampyre".
While most scholars pursue Polidori's proximity to Byron as a decisive factor, Jan Čapek warns against a "Byromaniacal" reading of the tale, arguing that "such an infection of the discussion about Polidori with the germ of Byron’s controversial persona is somewhat paradoxical, considering that the resulting debate oscillates somewhere between a sense that Polidori’s conception itself reflects his own sense of the debilitating domination of Byron’s genius and a
sense that Polidori attempted to take control in defence against such domination and wrote the tale in an attempt to satirize the effects of Byron’s proximity and to assert his own worth." (2025). 9783030823016, Springer Nature. ISBN 9783030823016
That influence has extended into the current era as the text is seen as "canonical" and – together with Bram Stoker's Dracula and others – is "often even cited as almost folkloric sources on vampirism". An adaptation appeared in 1820 with Cyprien Bérard's novel Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires, falsely attributed to Charles Nodier, who himself then wrote his own dramatic version, Le Vampire, a play which had enormous success and sparked a "vampire craze" across Europe. This includes adaptations by Heinrich Marschner (see Der Vampyr) and Peter Josef von Lindpaintner (see Der Vampyr), both published in the same year. Nikolai Gogol, Alexandre Dumas and Aleksey Tolstoy all produced vampire tales, and themes in Polidori's tale would continue to influence Bram Stoker's Dracula and eventually the whole vampire genre. Dumas makes explicit reference to Lord Ruthven in The Count of Monte Cristo, going so far as to state that his character "The Comtesse G..." had been personally acquainted with Lord Ruthven.
In 1819, , an American novella by Uriah D'Arcy, was published, taking advantage of The Vampyres popularity.
Earlier adaptations of Polidori's story include the 1945 film The Vampire's Ghost starring John Abbott as the Lord Ruthven character "Webb Fallon", with the setting changed from England and Greece to Africa. Also, , based on the opera Der Vampyr by Heinrich Marschner and the Polidori story, was filmed and broadcast on BBC 2 on December 2, 1992, with the Lord Ruthven character's name changed to "Ripley", who is frozen in the late eighteenth century but revives in modern times and becomes a successful businessman.
In 1988, American playwright Tim Kelly created a drawing room adaptation of The Vampyre for the stage, popular among community theatres and high school drama clubs.
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