Long before Edward Cullen, lead vampire of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, Lestat, star vampire of Ann Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, Barnabas Collin’s of Dark Shadows fame, or even Dracula, Varney walked the pages of Gothic Romances. While the others have met with continuing popular acclaim, poor Varney has been soundly trounced by critics almost since he crawled from his grave and into the pages of a popular serial. He was a vampire written for popular culture in a narrative (story) format, when poetry was the literary darling. Then Varney compounded his temerity of being in the wrong format by being meant for lower-class readers, affordable as a Penny-Dreadful in weekly installments.
Modern academic readers for the most part continue to bite Varney; the serial is now printed as a bound book, hence raising the expectations that it will meet the standards of a novel; it fails. It was not written with that particular set of standards in mind. It is an early hybrid reversing the modern norm of book being made into television show. In Varney the Vampyre’s case, it is a weekly soap opera made into a novel by a relatively unknown (but exceedingly popular) writer. But neither James Malom Rymer nor Thomas Peckett Prest had the name clout necessary to have the work become part of the literary cannon (list of must read poems and books). Varney the Vampyre gets assigned to either of these authors since the work was unattributed when published. The literary cannon is for high-brow authors who wrote vampire poetry, such as Keats or Byron.
Those rare modern readers who wander into the world of Varney the Vampyre also bring with them a set of expectations which Varney, the vampire, is unable to meet. There isn’t blood sucking in every chapter, and the anti-hero, Sir Frances Varney (the vampire), fails to win the fair maiden (Flora Bannerworth); she instead goes to the insipid, stupid – but faithful — stud. We have been trained by authors such as Stephanie Meyers to expect a quick and easy read, and Varney is neither. Not only is the language complex with a high vocabulary level and many of the language and sentence structures almost painful to read, it is full of slang terms and describes everyday items of 1845, such as coaches and types of alcohol, which are no longer commonly known (either the modernized version or the footnoted version make this issue marginally easier to deal with).
What the serial does is focus on the Gothic tone and the interpersonal issues every bit as much as on the vampire as it moves the vampire character further out of the cemetery, while being limited by the format of the romance. A romance, in this time period, must have a heroine. This has Flora Bannerworth, the traditional young blond virgin. It must have a hero, and here comes Charles Holland whom she met on vacation when he rescued her after she fell down a cliff. There must be an anti-hero, and here for the first time anywhere the anti-hero is a vampire. Varney is far more complex than the normal romantic villain. He doesn’t stride around twirling his mustache nor does he abduct her. Varney is capable of love and of loneliness, of caring about the damage his blood-sucking propensities cause, of admiring the courage of others, of recognizing and indulging in satire and humor, and of living up to his given word. Thus while his physical appearance is closer to that of a corpse than a nobleman, his character remains that of a noble man. In many ways, Varney raises questions of humanity by behaving more humanly than some of the wholly human characters.
In a twist on the normal progression, Varney kidnaps Charles, the hero, meeting the Romance’s need for the hero and heroine to be kept apart. Further twisting the traditional romance structure, it is Varney who eventually frees Charles allowing him to return to Flora even while putting his own undead existence at risk.
While the first two novels focus on the Bannerworths as much, or more, than on Varney, the vampire eventually becomes the focal point as he continues to search for love and companionship as, arguably, do our modern vampires. Unlike Edward or Lestat, Angel or Eric, Varney’s search is in vain, and he eventually ends his existence unlamented and unacknowledged by his readership, by throwing himself into a volcano.
Characteristic of the Victorian Vampire - Varney the Vampyre
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