Before the Count: British Vampire Tales, 1732-1897

Before the Count offers a corrective to the history of the literary vampire presenting a collection of other vampire tales written before Dracula. Some of the poems, plays, and stories included here are indeed melodramatic and perhaps even histrionic, but they offer important insight into the development of the vampire mythos in England from its literary beginning until the publication of Bram Stoker's novel. In so doing, it offers both scholars and students the opportunity to study the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary vampire in a more complete context. Included in this edition are excerpts from the early British newspaper accounts of vampires, the English translation of Dom Augustin Calment's book, and Lord Byron's "Fragment" in order to illustrate the genesis of John Polidori's The Vampyre a well as J. R. Planché's 1820 revision of the French play Le Vampire by Peirre Carmouche, Charles Nodier, and Achilles de Jouffroy, itself a revision of Polidori's story; Johann Wolfgang Goethe's The Bride of Corinth, Dion Boucicault's The Phantom, George Blink's The Vampire Bride and Rudyard Kipling's The Vampire.