In the earlier half of the twentieth century, the eccentric scholar Montague Summers argued that the series’ author was Thomas Peskett Prest. The tangled story of Varney‘s authorship is recounted in Chrsitopher Frayling’s book Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. Exactly who wrote it was, for more than a hundred years, a mystery: it was published anonymously, credited simply to “the author of Grace Rivers or, The Merchant’s Daughter.” One of the “penny dreadfuls” of the Victorian era, Varney the Vampire was serialised over 109 instalments during the mid-1840s before being published as a novel in 1847. Its full title is Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood: A Romance of Exciting Interest. Yet, it has been only intermittently reprinted, it has never been adapted for stage or screen outside of a low-budget YouTube production, and is today seldom read even by fans of horror. It is significant as the first novel-length work of vampire fiction in English, and its name will be immediately familiar to anyone who has performed even the most cursory research into the genre’s beginnings. The remainder of the four is something of a black sheep. Predating either of them is John Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” a short story from 1819 that defined the archetype of the Byronic bloodsucker no anthology of classic vampire fiction is complete without it. Another is Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, serialised from 1871 to 1872, which continues to inspire writers and filmmakers today. One, of course, is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897. When it comes to the vampire fiction of nineteenth-century Britain, four works in particular are sure to be mentioned during any in-depth discussion.
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