Now here is one I shall be listening to later today.
There Byron, his personal physician Polidori, Mary and Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont had whiled away the weeks of miserable weather by telling ghost stories, famously giving rise to Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'. Emerging soon after, 'The Vampyre' thrilled readers with its aristocratic Lord Ruthven who glutted his thirst with the blood of his victims, his status an abrupt change from the stories of peasant vampires of eastern and central Europe that had spread in the 18th Century with the expansion of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
The connection with Lord Byron gave the novella a boost, and soon 'The Vampyre' spawned West End plays, penny dreadfuls such as 'Varney the Vampire', Bram Stoker’s 'Dracula', F.W Murnau's film 'Nosferatu A Symphony of Horror', and countless others.
With Nick Groom, Professor of Literature in English at the University of Macau, Samantha George, Associate Professor of Research in Literature at the University of Hertfordshire, and Martyn Rady, Professor Emeritus of Central European History at University College London
Producer: Simon Tillotson"
Location; Radio 4
Picture; The cover page from a reprint of the British penny dreadful series Varney the Vampire, 1845
*Polidori's The Vampyre .......... one to listen to In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00162xz
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