Famous After Death
John William Polidori
John William Polidori was an author and a doctor. He died aged only 25.
He was born on 7 September 1795 in London and received his degree as a doctor of medicine on 1 August 1815, aged just 19.
The following year, Dr. Polidori entered Lord Byron's service as his personal physician and accompanied him on a trip through Europe. Publisher John Murray offered Polidori 500 English pounds to keep a diary of their travels. Polidori's nephew William Michael Rossetti later edited them. At the Villa Diodati, a house Byron rented by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the pair met with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, her husband-to-be, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their companion (Mary's stepsister) Claire Clairmont.
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| Frontispiece from the original German version of Fantasmagoriana. |
One now famous June night they read aloud from Fantasmagoriana, a French collection of German horror tales. Byron suggested they each write a ghost story. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote 'A Fragment of a Ghost Story' and wrote down five ghost stories recounted by Matthew Gregory "Monk" Lewis, published posthumously as the Journal at Geneva (including ghost stories) and on return to England, 1816, the journal entries.
Mary Shelley worked on a story with her husband that would later become Frankenstein. Byron wrote but quickly abandoned, a fragment of a story, 'A Fragment', featuring a character called Augustus Darvell. Polidori later used this as the basis for his own story, 'The Vampyre', the first published modern vampire story.
Polidori's conversation with Percy Bysshe Shelley on 15 June 1816 is regarded as the origin of Frankenstein. They discussed 'the nature of the principle of life.' 'Shelley and I had a conversation about principles - whether man was to be thought merely an instrument.'
Dismissed by Byron, Polidori traveled in Italy and then returned to England. His story, 'The Vampyre', which featured the main character Lord Ruthven, was published in the April 1819 issue of New Monthly Magazine without his permission. Much to both his and Byron's annoyance, 'The Vampyre' was released as a new work by Byron. Byron's own vampire story 'Fragment of a Novel' or 'A Fragment' was published in 1819 in an attempt to clear up the confusion, but 'The Vampyre' continued to be attributed to him.
Polidori's long, Byron-influenced theological poem The Fall of the Angels was published anonymously in 1821.
Polidori, weighed down by depression and gambling debts, died in London on 24 August 1821. Despite strong evidence that he committed
suicide by means of prussic acid, the coroner concluded that he had died by natural causes.
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