Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of The Vampyre

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of English at the University of Prince
Edward Island.

Gainsford’s painting of John William Polidori in 1816, reproduced on
this book’s attractive dust cover, portrays a young man cast in the
Byronic mold—dark, handsome, autocratic, faintly sardonic. Indeed,
Polidori had all the right antecedents: Anglo-Italian by birth, educated
at Ampleforth and Edinburgh, intelligent, well-read, a good
conversationalist. In short, the ideal travelling physician for Byron,
possibly a prospective Boswell. Yet five years later he was dead,
seemingly by suicide. Out of his considerable literary output, only his
Gothic tale “The Vampyre” is remembered. Published in 1819, it
became the precursor of all subsequent vampire stories, including
Dracula. So what went wrong?

MacDonald’s copiously documented biography provides the answer. In
his assessment of Polidori’s character, he is always evenhanded, but
still succeeds in retaining the reader’s sympathy for his subject. In
so doing, he also provides some illuminating vignettes that depict
Byron’s entourage in Europe, not least Byron himself, to whom, as
Polidori pathetically yet prophetically said, he was but “a star in
the halo of the moon, invisible.”