The Bibliothecary

Years ago I discovered Varney the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood, a penny dreadful from the Victorian age, the first full-length vampire novel in English (I've never discovered whether there were any vampire novels in other languages that predate it). My discovery was a three volume Arno Press edition, a facsimile of the original 1847 edition with a plethora of illustrations throughout the text. The tiny print layed out in double columns on each page seemed daunting at first, but what the hell, I was game. Somewhere around volume 2, I just couldn't bear it any longer. The text was just illegible in places and the print-size was giving me a headache. Reading Varney in this way became a chore. Later I discovered the novel online and was able to finish it, but I still missed the pleasure of the book form, still the best way to read any long text.

Happily Zittaw Press has published a new complete edition of Varney, edited by Curt Herr.  And Zittaw has a podcast about it here. I wrote this review for the Phila Inq back in December, but in their change of book review editors (and by the looks of their new review policies), it never ran and it is unlikely it will at this point. So here it is.

Varney the Vampire: or, the Feast of Blood
Zittaw Press

By James Malcolm Rymer

Edited with an introduction by Curt Herr

Zittaw Press, 828 pp

Reviewed by Edward Pettit

Before Dracula, there was another Victorian gentleman vampire, preying upon the rosy-cheeked young women of England. James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire: or, the Feast of Blood was published in serial installments in 1845, more than half a century before Bram Stoker wrote his most famous vampire novel. There had been fictional vampires before Rymer’s, most notably John Polidori’s Lord Ruthven in his short story, “The Vampyre,” modeled on Polidori’s sometime traveling companion, the poet Lord Byron. While both Dracula and Ruthven have been acknowledged as major influences on the development of the vampire in literature, film and other popular culture manifestations, Rymer’s Sir Frances Varney has been underappreciated by scholars and virtually unknown to the reading public.

Zittaw Press, a small company devoted to republishing neglected gothic classics in affordable paperback editions, has just released a new edition of Varney the Vampire. At over 800 pages, with an introduction and several appendices (the book weighs 4 pounds), this is the definitive version of Rymer’s book. Varney was originally published as a “penny dreadful,” a fictional serial printed on cheap paper in weekly installments with subjects that ranged from the prurient to the grotesque. With murder, mayhem and sensationalism galore, the penny dreadfuls were one of the forerunners of our popular literature.

The penny dreadful Varney ran to 237 chapters (over 700 pages in the Zittaw edition) and was so successful that original copies are extraordinarily rare. According to one scholar, Varney was “read literally into dust.” Two previous editions have been mere photocopies of the penny dreadful edition, which was barely edited itself. Double columned with typographical errors and faded text, some words are printed upside down and occasionally sentences are even incomplete.

"A Romance of Exciting Interest" Front Wrapper from 1853 editionYears ago, I had tried to read one of these previous editions and could barely decipher the tiny, cramped print. So Zittaw’s clean text is a welcome improvement. Although it is a pity that they only reprint a few of the illustrations. Each penny dreadful installment had lavish pictures and ornamental letters. But to include them all would have ballooned this volume to gargantuan size. My fantasy text of Varney would include the clean text as done by Zittaw, but also reproductions of all the illustrations within the text as they originally appeared. This could only be achieved in a multivolume edition or even a facsimile series of the 237 parts of the original penny dreadful (and the price for such a version would limit it to collectors). Wishful thinking indeed.

 

To call it a novel is a bit of a misnomer, as well, for these kinds of serials do not adhere to the trim, inherently concise ways of the novel. Dreadfuls were written so quickly and by diverse hands (it is suspected that Rymer, although the primary author, was not the only author of Varney) that it was impossible to keep out inconsistencies of plot or characterization. In Varney, the time period of the story shifts and even names sometimes change. But this kind of small chaos in form is perfectly apt for the story. As the vampire wreaks havoc on women, families and the class system of staid, refined Victorian society, the tumult of the plot bleeds into the very structure of the book with storylines careening into all sorts of unknown territories. Varney takes on various disguises. He is nearly destroyed more than once, but always revivified by the power of moonlight (and fresh blood). Rymer pulls out all the gothic conventions and his vampire revels in their gruesome glory.

The book, as a whole, is picaresque in nature, containing several storylines that the new editor, Curt Herr, helpfully breaks down into “sagas” in a table of contents. Varney walks among the living as a refined aristocrat and over the course of the book begins to regret his “malignant destiny,” finding no solace in his power. He is not the static evil incarnate that Stoker later imagined in his Dracula. Varney has a richly detailed history (not all of it consistent) that helps flesh out his character. Nor is he quite like the manifestations of more recent vampires (Lestat and Buffy's friends and foes), although he does undergo something akin to a modern existential crisis. He is tormented by his bestial condition. Unlike the passionately romantic scenes of Dracula in which the vampire passionately bites his victims’ necks, or lets them feed from his own bosom, Varney is violently erotic, attacking his prey with a wolf-like fury, tearing into their flesh with his enormous fangs.

Varney is an immensely enjoyable novel, packed with action and doomed romance. Rymer’s prose is furious and lurid. For the uninitiated reader, the prose style may take a little getting used to. The short, choppy sentences, ripe with clichéd imagery, seemed silly at first, but after a few pages, I was sucked into Rymer’s penny dreadful realm and found myself racing along its pages, the pace quick and suspenseful. Varney the Vampire is a feast.