Varney the Vampyre by James Malcolm Rymer
"Varney the Vampyre: Or, The Feast of Blood" is a significant work in the genre of Victorian "penny dreadfuls," serialized in the 1840s and widely considered a precursor to modern vampire literature. Authored predominantly by James Malcolm Rymer, this lengthy narrative stretches nearly 900 pages and is characterized by its episodic structure and sensationalist themes, appealing to the working-class audience of the time. The central figure, Sir Frances Varney, is depicted as a vampire with ambiguous origins, shifting between identities as a nobleman, a cursed courtier, and a contemporary criminal. While the text touches on various vampire myths, it presents them in a fragmented and often inconsistent manner, differing from the more cohesive portrayal found in Bram Stoker's "Dracula." A notable storyline involves the Bannerworth family, particularly focusing on Flora Bannerworth, who becomes the target of Varney's nocturnal assaults. Despite moments of energetic narrative, the plot meanders for hundreds of pages without substantial resolution. Ultimately, Varney's journey concludes with his self-destruction in the crater of Mount Vesuvius, symbolizing an end to his tumultuous existence. The novel remains a curious exploration of early vampire lore and its cultural impact.
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Varney the Vampyre
First published: 1847
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Fantasy—superbeing
Time of work: The eighteenth century
Locale: England and Italy
The Plot
Varney the Vampyre: Or, The Feast of Blood was one of a long series of “penny dreadfuls” published in serial form in England during the 1840’s. Like such works as G. W. M. Reynolds’ Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf (1847), Varney the Vampyre was published in eight-page installments selling for a penny or two each and was the product of “house” writers. Modern scholarship has established James Malcolm Rymer as the probable author of a majority of the work. Lurid, rambling, sensationalistic, and often inconsistent in plot and character, penny dreadfuls were among the first attempts at a “mass market” literature aimed specifically at working-class men and women.
The story of Varney the Vampyre, meandering through nearly nine hundred pages of eye-straining, double-columned print, emerges as a pastiche of episodic adventures. The episodes are given nominal coherence by the character of Sir Frances Varney. Varney’s origins are as murky as the plotline: At various points in the long narrative he is identified as a fifteenth century English nobleman; as a Restoration courtier, cursed to live the life of a vampire for killing his own son; and as nothing more than a contemporary criminal, not at all supernatural, who somehow was revived after being hanged. The primary questions of vampirism, such as how vampires are created, how they behave, and how they can be destroyed, receive sparse and problematic treatment. Bits and pieces of vampire lore are scattered throughout the narrative, but only in a haphazard, nonessential fashion that would quickly frustrate any reader of Bram Stoker’s famous Dracula (1897).
In the most interesting of the several major plotlines, for some five hundred pages Varney is involved with the aristocratic Bannerworth family of Bannerworth Hall. Here, the book comes alive with a crude but undeniable narrative energy, particularly in the opening chapters, as the beautiful Flora Bannerworth is victimized by a mysterious nocturnal assailant and various males of her family and acquaintance rally to protect her. Another hundred chapters pass without any real resolution, however, and readers are not displeased to say good-bye to the Bannerworths when the scene finally changes to London in chapter 127. In the brief concluding chapter, readers learn that Varney, weary of his demoniac existence, has traveled to Italy and thrown himself into the crater of Mount Vesuvius, thereby ensuring “the total destruction of Varney, the Vampyre.”