tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/lord-byron-17950/articles
Lord Byron – The Conversation
2023-03-06T12:05:57Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/199056
2023-03-06T12:05:57Z
2023-03-06T12:05:57Z
Curious Kids: who was the first celebrity?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511998/original/file-20230223-26-6eqxt1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5607%2C3732&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/crowd-fans-taking-photographs-on-mobile-414112579">Brian A Jackson/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><strong>Who was the first celebrity? – Grace, aged eight, Belfast, Northern Ireland</strong> </p>
<p>To answer this question, we first need to think about what the people we think of as celebrities have in common. If we break down the formula for fame, we find three significant things: product, audience and industry. </p>
<p>All celebrities produce something. This could be a film, a television show, music or social media content. This product is then consumed and enjoyed by an audience. Often, this audience is called a fandom. </p>
<p>All celebrities exist within specific industries, such as Hollywood film or pop music. This industry creates a space for the celebrity to exist and ensures that their product reaches the correct audience. This could be through marketing, such as advertising posters and social media campaigns. </p>
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/curious-kids-36782">Curious Kids</a> is a series by <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk">The Conversation</a> that gives children the chance to have their questions about the world answered by experts. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to <a href="mailto:curiouskids@theconversation.com">curiouskids@theconversation.com</a> and make sure you include the asker’s first name, age and town or city. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we’ll do our very best.</em></p>
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<p>This formula for fame can help us work out who the first modern celebrity was. While figures like Cleopatra, Henry VIII or Albert Einstein are very famous, they don’t fit the model for a celebrity because they don’t produce a product that is sold to an audience for entertainment. </p>
<p>I study the history of celebrity. I think the first celebrity was <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/lord-byron">Lord Byron</a>, the English Romantic poet who lived from 1788 to 1824.</p>
<h2>Lord Byron’s rise to fame</h2>
<p>Lord Byron is one of the most celebrated <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-romantics">English Romantic poets</a>. The Romantic poets were a group of writers in the late 18th century and early 19th century who were interested in nature, beauty and the imagination.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/512010/original/file-20230223-14-8hmrhr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Image of oil painting of man in profile, head propped on hand, wearing red" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/512010/original/file-20230223-14-8hmrhr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/512010/original/file-20230223-14-8hmrhr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/512010/original/file-20230223-14-8hmrhr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/512010/original/file-20230223-14-8hmrhr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/512010/original/file-20230223-14-8hmrhr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=978&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/512010/original/file-20230223-14-8hmrhr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=978&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/512010/original/file-20230223-14-8hmrhr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=978&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A portrait of Lord Byron painted in 1813 by Richard Westall.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw00989/Lord-Byron?LinkID=mp00691&role=sit&rNo=0">© National Portrait Gallery, London</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
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<p>The story of Byron’s rise to stardom begins in his early twenties when he set off on a grand tour of the Mediterranean between 1809 and 1811. The grand tour was a traditional trip around Europe for young, upper-class men in Byron’s time and marked them becoming adults. It was a bit like the gap year that some teenagers today take before they go to university.</p>
<p>During his travels through countries such as Greece and Turkey, he began writing a poem called <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5131/5131-h/5131-h.htm">Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage</a>. It followed the story of a young man who is tired of life and seeks distraction and adventure abroad. The poem was thought to be partly autobiographical, meaning that some of it was based on the author’s own life. </p>
<p>Byron published the first two sections of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in March 1812. The poem was a hit. It sold out in three days and made Byron an overnight A-lister. </p>
<p>Much like a Hollywood star or a social media influencer, he was treated like a VIP. He was invited to the <a href="https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-4279;jsessionid=86BAF605F4ED03016D9DE35D136C19D3">most fashionable places</a>, and everywhere he went, people wanted to meet him. </p>
<p>The aristocrat <a href="https://www.chatsworth.org/news-media/news-blogs-press-releases/blogs-from-the-archives/lady-elizabeth-foster-like-bursting-cannons-boiling-water/">Lady Elizabeth Foster</a>, the Duchess of Devonshire, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=y3ntCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT26&lpg=PT26&dq=%22only+topic+of+almost+every+conversation%22+byron&source=bl&ots=iVWcgMOHib&sig=ACfU3U28a_SvYJ8lREIuZ6XtHWXFW4NP-Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjNjbHexrX9AhWMT8AKHQeOB6cQ6AF6BAgeEAM#v=onepage&q=%22only%20topic%20of%20almost%20every%20conversation%22%20byron&f=false">said that</a> Byron “is really the only topic of almost every conversation”. Readers couldn’t get enough of Byron’s tales of adventure and the mystique of the poet behind them. </p>
<h2>The first fandom</h2>
<p>Before <a href="https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/taylor-swift-oscar-nomination-2023">Swifties</a>, the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/aug/10/meaning-beyonce-dispatch-inside-the-beyhive">Beyhive</a> or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/sep/29/beatlemania-screamers-fandom-teenagers-hysteria">Beatlemania</a>, there was “<a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-349-27107-8">Byromania</a>”. This was a term coined at the time by Byron’s wife, <a href="https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Lord-Byron/">Annabella Milbanke</a>, to describe the frenzy for anything Byron-related. Readers of Byron’s poetry, known as Byromaniacs, paved the way for modern-day fandoms.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/512013/original/file-20230223-4058-bd4v3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Stipple engraving of man in profile" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/512013/original/file-20230223-4058-bd4v3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/512013/original/file-20230223-4058-bd4v3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/512013/original/file-20230223-4058-bd4v3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/512013/original/file-20230223-4058-bd4v3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/512013/original/file-20230223-4058-bd4v3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1073&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/512013/original/file-20230223-4058-bd4v3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1073&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/512013/original/file-20230223-4058-bd4v3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1073&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">An engraving of Lord Byron by Thomas Blood, published by James Asperne in 1814, after Richard Westall.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw35286/Lord-Byron?">© National Portrait Gallery, London</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
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<p>Byron was one of the first writers to receive <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/i-love-you-lord-byron-how-the-poet-s-postbag-bulged-with-female-admirers-letters-894522.html">fan mail</a>. Fans bought Byron merchandise, which ranged from printed portraits sold alongside his writings to novelty plates and jugs. </p>
<p>Readers would collect Byron-related writings and pictures and compile them in books to share with friends. This practice, known as <a href="https://fortelabs.com/blog/commonplace-books-creative-note-taking-through-history/">commonplacing</a>, was a bit like a modern-day fanzine or blog. </p>
<p>Byron’s followers also wrote fan fiction – creating a new story based on the original work. Readers wrote poems <a href="https://sunypress.edu/Books/B/Byromania-and-the-Birth-of-Celebrity-Culture">imitating Byron’s style</a> and alternative endings to his work, some of which were actually published. </p>
<h2>Popular culture</h2>
<p>Lord Byron become famous so quickly because more people than ever before were able to read his work. At the time he was writing, the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zm7qtfr">Industrial Revolution</a> was making books, newspapers and magazines cheaper and easier to print. The <a href="https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/celebrity">range of printed items</a> available to buy was widening, from pictures to poetry and cartoons. </p>
<p>What’s more, a greater number of people were <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/literacy">able to read</a>, meaning more people were buying books and magazines than ever before. These changes created the perfect conditions for a young poet’s rise to fame.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199056/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Harriet Fletcher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Before Swifties or the Beyhive, there were Byromaniacs – fans of the poet Lord Byron.
Harriet Fletcher, Lecturer in Media and Communication, Anglia Ruskin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/164202
2021-08-29T10:55:26Z
2021-08-29T10:55:26Z
‘Dark Souls’ videogame: Themes of ruin harken to images popularized by European Romantics two centuries ago
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417296/original/file-20210822-15-aikb0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C19%2C1573%2C823&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Dark Souls' is set in Lordran, a fantasy version of a mythologized medieval Europe.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Bandai Namco)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>September marks the 10th anniversary of “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1780AqAa20">Dark Souls</a>,” one of the most <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/11/22/dark-souls-inspired-the-design-of-sonys-playstation-4/?sh=4cae6a302311">important</a> and <a href="https://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-most-influential-games-of-the-21st-century-dar/1100-6466811/">influential</a> <a href="https://venturebeat.com/2016/05/27/dark-souls-iii-helps-push-digital-game-sales-to-6-2b-in-april/">video games</a> of the last few decades. </p>
<p>The game has generated a large and dedicated <a href="http://gamestudies.org/2004/articles/welsh">online player community</a> and has inspired a new genre of interactive storytelling — the “<a href="https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Soulslike_video_games">soulslike</a>.” These games are defined by high difficulty, explorative gameplay and a melancholic atmosphere.</p>
<p>As a fan of “Dark Souls,” I am struck by how it takes up similar themes present in the early 19th-century Romanticist texts that I study for my PhD work in early post-apocalyptic literature.</p>
<p>“Dark Souls,” as well as other soulslike games such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3O0FwX5DE8">“Mortal Shell</a>,” “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAO2urG23S4">Hollow Knight</a>,” and “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_054dUJzCE">Salt and Sanctuary</a>” explore apocalyptic themes that were <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691642871/romanticism-and-the-forms-of-ruin">just as popular two centuries ago</a>. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Dark Souls’ official trailer.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Dying embers</h2>
<p>“Dark Souls” takes place in Lordran, a dark-fantasy version of a mythologized medieval Europe. While its grandiose architecture suggests Lordran was once a mighty kingdom, the player’s quest begins at the end of the Age of Fire, when “<a href="https://youtu.be/vpAqgIe05So?t=183">there are only embers, and man sees not light, but only endless nights</a>.” This trope of the dying Earth is demonstrated in the sluggish, exhausted movement of many of the enemies and is reflected in the <a href="https://www.publicmedievalist.com/dark-souls-knight/">fragility of the onscreen character controlled by the player</a>.</p>
<p>An early example of this dying Earth trope can be seen in the work of <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lord-byron">Lord Byron</a>, a major figure in British Romanticism. </p>
<p>In his 1816 poem “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43825/darkness-56d222aeeee1b">Darkness</a>,” Byron imagines an Earth beneath an extinguished sun. The last denizens of the planet huddle for warmth around forests and dwellings “burnt for beacons,” and the final two survivors meet in a bitter encounter “beside the dying embers of an altar-place.” This use of fire as refuge prefigures the use of bonfires in “Dark Souls” as rare safe havens within an otherwise menacing world.</p>
<h2>‘The Last Man’</h2>
<p>Byron’s poem was one of many works by British Romantic authors and artists to capitalize on the popularity of French author Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s novel <a href="https://www.hfsbooks.com/books/the-last-man-cousin-de-grainville-clarke-clarke/"><em>Le Dernier Homme</em></a> (<em>The Last Man</em>). </p>
<p>Grainville’s “last man” character witnesses the slow decline and final end of the world. The novel is, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00397709.1963.10732769">as scholars</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/II.1.25">have recognized</a>, a literary expression of the social and ecological anxieties of the time. It also <a href="https://doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud.41.2.0314">significantly influenced the development</a> of science fiction and dystopian literature.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/cousin_de_grainville_jean-baptiste">Grainville, a priest</a> who was disgraced during the French Revolution, died before his only novel could be published in 1805. When the book was translated to English and published in England in 1806, Grainville was not credited as the author. Despite this, Grainville’s vision of an exhausted Earth that “bore the sad features of decay” influenced British Romantics such as Byron. </p>
<p>Grainville’s novel depicts a central figure that is eerily similar to one in “Dark Souls.” In <em>The Last Man</em>, the Spirit of the Earth is depicted as a humanoid character residing in a cavern among “millions of furnaces,” where he “maintained perpetual fires for the heat that held back the deadly cold.” In “Dark Souls,” Lord Gwyn sits within the Kiln of the First Flame, wherein he desperately tries to keep the world’s embers glowing awhile longer.</p>
<p>In both <em>The Last Man</em> and “Dark Souls,” the world is not a stable certainty but is instead a precarious and fragile thing. </p>
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<img alt="Oil painting of a broody sky, low red sun and a man on the right holding his arms up." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417662/original/file-20210824-19046-1t2o2o1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417662/original/file-20210824-19046-1t2o2o1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417662/original/file-20210824-19046-1t2o2o1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417662/original/file-20210824-19046-1t2o2o1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417662/original/file-20210824-19046-1t2o2o1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417662/original/file-20210824-19046-1t2o2o1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417662/original/file-20210824-19046-1t2o2o1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">‘The Last Man,’ by British painter John Martin, 1849.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-last-man-97626">(Walker Art Gallery)</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Crumbling ruins</h2>
<p>A declining kingdom leaves behind haunted ruins and decaying monuments. Players tread through and among such remains in “Dark Souls.”</p>
<p>The architecture of the game’s setting is inspired by real-world historical styles, including classical Roman and medieval Gothic architecture, and these influences lend to the surroundings a sense of times long past. </p>
<p>An obsession with ruins and ancient structures was prevalent too in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Similar to the ways in which <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/696/696-h/696-h.htm">early gothic British writers</a> gravitated <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/601/601-h/601-h.htm">towards narratives</a> set in <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3268/3268-h/3268-h.htm">spooky medieval castles</a>, an obsession with ruins and ancient structures was prevalent too in the work of the British Romantic writers. </p>
<p>In “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias">Ozymandias</a>,” Percy Shelley writes of a shattered monument in the desert, a “colossal Wreck” around which “the lone and level sands stretch far away.” In “<a href="http://www.john-keats.com/gedichte/the_fall_of_hyperion.htm">The Fall of Hyperion — A Dream</a>,” John Keats describes being transported in a dream to an “eternal domed monument” in which artifacts lie “in a mingled heap confused.” </p>
<p>In Mary Shelley’s dystopian novel <a href="https://broadviewpress.com/product/the-last-man/#tab-description"><em>The Last Man</em></a> (one of the many books, poems, paintings and plays to sport the same name following Grainville’s novel), she portrays the final specimen of humanity wandering alone through the “ruins of Rome.” </p>
<p>Readers of the Romantic period could not get enough of ancient ruins — much like gamers who routinely play “Dark Souls” and other soulslike games.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A knight in armour faces a sun-streaked sky and wall of ruins." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417663/original/file-20210824-14-19b4rdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417663/original/file-20210824-14-19b4rdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417663/original/file-20210824-14-19b4rdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417663/original/file-20210824-14-19b4rdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417663/original/file-20210824-14-19b4rdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417663/original/file-20210824-14-19b4rdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417663/original/file-20210824-14-19b4rdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">We share with the Romantic period a world of uncertainty. Here, a still from ‘Dark Souls.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Bandai Namco/Nintendo)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Uncertain times</h2>
<p>A question remains: Why would such apocalyptic themes prove to be so popular in two very different historical time periods? Put simply, we share with the Romantic period a world of uncertainty. </p>
<p>Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries saw dramatic changes: <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24780695">the French Revolution</a> upended the political status quo, while <a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2015.0018">new discoveries</a> in geology and paleontology made the notion of species extinction difficult to deny and disturbed the prevailing view of a relatively stable natural world. </p>
<p>We too face destabilizing forces today, from climate change to global pandemics to economic anxiety to rising political polarization. Such instability is certain to inspire images of declining empires and dying worlds.</p>
<p>But ruins and remnants do more than imply the end. They also remind us of that which once lived, just as a tomb is both “<a href="https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-06-18-an-obituary-for-the-architecture-of-dark-souls-eternally-dying-land">a container of the dead, and an affirmation and symbol of life</a>.” Ruins persist and, as Mary Shelley’s last man insists, affirm the “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18247/pg18247.html">human form divine</a>.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-mary-shelleys-the-last-man-is-a-prophecy-of-life-in-a-global-pandemic-136963">Guide to the Classics: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is a prophecy of life in a global pandemic</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Perhaps this is why a fascination with ancient ruins tends to accompany anxieties of dramatic societal change and ecological precarity.</p>
<p>Regardless, “Dark Souls” stands among the works of Byron, Grainville, Keats and <a href="https://lithub.com/the-treacherous-start-to-mary-and-percy-shelleys-marriage/">the Shelleys</a> as a masterful artistic expression of our fascination with ruin in its dual meaning: both as disastrous end and surviving remnant.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/164202/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Cameron receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. </span></em></p>
‘Dark Souls’ draws on the literary theme of the ‘last man’ that emerged from the work of French author Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville and those inspired by him.
Michael Cameron, PhD Candidate of English, Dalhousie University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/136963
2020-05-04T19:50:06Z
2020-05-04T19:50:06Z
Guide to the Classics: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is a prophecy of life in a global pandemic
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330278/original/file-20200424-126823-q9c8bl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3924%2C2812&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Mary Shelley is famous for one novel – her first, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18490.Frankenstein">Frankenstein</a> (1819). Its extraordinary career in adaptation began almost from the point of publication, and it has had a long afterlife as a keyword in our culture. Frankenstein speaks to us now in our fears of scientific overreach, our difficulties in recognising our shared humanity. </p>
<p>But her neglected later book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/966835.The_Last_Man">The Last Man</a> (1826) has the most to say to us in our present moment of crisis and global pandemic. </p>
<p>The Last Man is a novel of isolation: an isolation that reflected Shelley’s painful circumstances. The novel’s characters closely resemble the famous members of the <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/mary-shelley-frankenstein-and-the-villa-diodati">Shelley-Byron circle</a>, including Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, his friend Lord Byron, and Mary’s stepsister (Byron’s sometime lover), Claire Clairmont. </p>
<p>By the time Shelley came to write the novel, all of them – along with all but one of her children – were dead. Once part of the most significant social circle of second-generation Romantic poet-intellectuals, Shelley now found herself almost alone in the world. </p>
<p>As it kills off character after character, The Last Man recreates this history of loss along with its author’s crushing sense of loneliness. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330279/original/file-20200424-126800-ero353.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330279/original/file-20200424-126800-ero353.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330279/original/file-20200424-126800-ero353.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330279/original/file-20200424-126800-ero353.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330279/original/file-20200424-126800-ero353.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330279/original/file-20200424-126800-ero353.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330279/original/file-20200424-126800-ero353.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mary Shelley (kneeling far left), Edward John Trelawny, Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron at the funeral of Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1882, painted by Louis Édouard Fournier c1889.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Imagining extinction</h2>
<p>The novel was not a critical success. It came, unluckily, after <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/ksr.1989.4.1.1">two decades</a> of “last man” narratives. </p>
<p>Beginning in about 1805, these stories and poems came as a response to great cultural changes and new, unsettling discoveries that challenged how people thought about the place of the human race in the world. A new understanding of species extinction (the first recognised dinosaur was discovered <a href="https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/mary-anning-unsung-hero.html">around 1811</a>) made people fear humans could also be extinguished from the Earth. </p>
<p>Two catastrophically depopulating events – the horrifying bloodshed of the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14623528.2013.789180?src=recsys&journalCode=cjgr20">Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars</a> (1792-1815), and the rapid global cooling caused by the massive eruption of <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/04/160408-tambora-eruption-volcano-anniversary-indonesia-science/">Mount Tambora</a> in 1815 – made human extinction seem a horrifyingly imminent possibility. Meditations on ruined empires abounded. Many writers began to <a href="https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/eighteen-hundred-and-eleven-1812/">imagine</a> (or prophesy) the ruination of their own nations. </p>
<p>Unfortunately for Shelley, by 1826 what had once seemed a shocking imaginative response to unprecedented disaster had become a cliché. </p>
<p>A parodic poem like Thomas Hood’s <a href="https://romantic-circles.org/editions/mws/lastman/hood.htm">The Last Man</a> – also from 1826 – gives us an indication of the atmosphere in which Shelley published her own book. In Hood’s ballad, the last man is a hangman. Having executed his only companion, he now regrets he cannot hang himself:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For there is not another man alive,</p>
<p>In the world, to pull my legs!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this hostile atmosphere, critics missed that Shelley’s novel was very different to the rash of last man narratives before it. </p>
<p>Consider Byron’s apocalyptic poem <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43825/darkness-56d222aeeee1b">Darkness</a> (1816), with its vision of a world devoid of movement or life of any kind: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless –</p>
<p>A lump of death – a chaos of hard clay. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In contrast to this total death, Shelley asks her readers to imagine a world in which only humans are becoming extinct. Attacked by a new, unstoppable plague, the human population collapses within a few years. </p>
<p>In their absence other species flourish. A rapidly decreasing band of survivors watches as the world begins to return to a state of conspicuous natural beauty, a global garden of Eden. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330282/original/file-20200424-126804-1k59557.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330282/original/file-20200424-126804-1k59557.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330282/original/file-20200424-126804-1k59557.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330282/original/file-20200424-126804-1k59557.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330282/original/file-20200424-126804-1k59557.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330282/original/file-20200424-126804-1k59557.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330282/original/file-20200424-126804-1k59557.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mary Shelley imagined a world without humans could be a return of wild nature. Twilight in the Wilderness by Frederic Edwin Church, c1860.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is a new theme for fiction, one resembling films like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6644200/">A Quiet Place</a> and Alfonso Cuarón’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/">Children of Men</a>, or images of the depopulated Korean demilitarised zone and Chernobyl forest, those strange and beautiful landscapes where humans no longer dominate.</p>
<h2>A world in crisis</h2>
<p>Shelley was writing in a time of crisis – global famine following the Tambora eruption, and the first known cholera pandemic from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1817%E2%80%931824_cholera_pandemic">1817–1824</a>. Cholera spread throughout the Indian subcontinent and across Asia until its terrifying progress stopped in the Middle East. </p>
<p>It’s disturbing today to read Shelley ventriloquising the complacent response from England to early signs of disease in its colonies. At first, Englishmen see “no immediate necessity for an earnest caution”. Their greatest fears are for the economy. </p>
<p>As mass deaths occur throughout (in Shelley’s time) Britain’s colonies and trading partners, bankers and merchants are bankrupted. The “prosperity of the nation”, Shelley writes, “was now shaken by frequent and extensive losses”. </p>
<p>In one brilliant set-piece, Shelley shows us how racist assumptions blind a smugly superior population to the danger headed its way: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Can it be true, each asked the other with wonder and dismay, that whole countries are laid waste, whole nations annihilated, by these disorders in nature? The vast cities of America, the fertile plains of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustan">Hindostan</a>, the crowded abodes of the Chinese, are menaced with utter ruin. […] The air is empoisoned, and each human being inhales death even while in youth and health […] As yet western Europe was uninfected; would it always be so?</p>
<p>O, yes, it would – Countrymen, fear not! […] If perchance some stricken Asiatic come among us, plague dies with him, uncommunicated and innoxious. Let us weep for our brethren, though we can never experience his reverse. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Shelley quickly shows us this sense of racial superiority and immunity is unfounded: all people are united in their susceptibility to the fatal disease. </p>
<p>Eventually, the entire human population is engulfed: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot on its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Throughout the novel Shelley’s characters remain, ironically, optimistic. They don’t know they’re in a book called The Last Man, and – with the exception of narrator Lionel Verney – their chances of survival are non-existent. They cling to a naïve hope this disaster will create new, idyllic forms of life, a more equitable and compassionate relationship between classes and within families. </p>
<p>But this is a mirage. Rather than making an effort to rebuild civilisation, those spared in the plague’s first wave adopt a selfish, hedonistic approach to life. </p>
<p>The “occupations of life were gone,” writes Shelley, “but the amusements remained; enjoyment might be protracted to the verge of the grave”. </p>
<h2>No god in hopelessness</h2>
<p>Shelley’s depopulated world quickly becomes a godless one. In Thomas Campbell’s poem <a href="https://romantic-circles.org/editions/mws/lastman/campb.htm">The Last Man</a> (1823) the sole surviving human defies a “darkening Universe” to: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>quench his Immortality</p>
<p>Or shake his trust in God.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As they realise “the species of man must perish”, the victims of Shelley’s plague become bestial. Going against the grain of <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-ideas-of-kant-121881">Enlightenment individualism</a>, Shelley insists humanity is contingent on community. When the “vessel of society is wrecked” individual survivors give up all hope. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-ideas-of-kant-121881">Explainer: the ideas of Kant</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Shelley’s novel asks us to imagine a world in which humans become extinct and the world seems better for it, causing the last survivor to question his right to existence. </p>
<p>Ultimately, Shelley’s novel <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=4x9UCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA245&lpg=PA245&dq=Apocalypse+not+quite:+Romanticism+and+the+post-human+world&source=bl&ots=351UGMefZH&sig=ACfU3U3PNe0qZl0tyVDUuijJTpcaMSt0yQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiI9vTr-pjpAhV0yTgGHdtoBVAQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=Apocalypse%20not%20quite%3A%20Romanticism%20and%20the%20post-human%20world&f=false">insists on two things</a>: firstly, our humanity is defined not by art, or faith, or politics, but by the basis of our communities, our fellow-feeling and compassion. </p>
<p>Secondly, we belong to just one of many species on Earth, and we must learn to think of the natural world as existing not merely for the uses of humanity, but for its own sake. </p>
<p>We humans, Shelley’s novel makes clear, are expendable.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/136963/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Olivia Murphy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
What would happen if plague destroyed all of humanity? Mary Shelley’s 1826 book suggests Earth would be better off.
Olivia Murphy, Postdoctoral research fellow in English, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/114382
2019-03-29T12:27:05Z
2019-03-29T12:27:05Z
Vampire’s rebirth: from monstrous undead creature to sexy and romantic Byronic seducer in one ghost story
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266523/original/file-20190329-71006-1y0070f.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C11%2C1597%2C1281&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Nightmare by John Henry Fuseli.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Detroit Institute of Arts</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Victorian physician John Polidori took the vampire out of the forests of eastern Europe, gave him an aristocratic lineage and placed him into the drawing rooms of Romantic-era England. His tale <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-vampyre-by-john-polidori#">The Vampyre</a>, published 200 years ago – on April 1 1819, was the first sustained fictional treatment of the vampire and completely recast the folklore and mythology on which it drew. The vampire figure abandoned its peasant roots and left its calling card in polite society in London. </p>
<p>The story emerged out of the same storytelling contest at the Villa Diodati that gave birth to that other archetype of the Gothic heritage, Frankenstein’s monster. Present at this gathering were Polidori (then Byron’s physician) as well as Mary Godwin, the author of Frankenstein, Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister, Mary’s soon-to-be husband Percy Shelley, and – crucially – Lord Byron. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/fantasmagoriana-the-german-book-of-ghost-stories-that-inspired-frankenstein-105236">Fantasmagoriana: the German book of ghost stories that inspired Frankenstein</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Byron’s contribution to the contest was an inconclusive fragment about a mysterious man, <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/fragment-of-a-novel-from-mazeppa-by-lord-george-byron">Augustus Darvell</a>, characterised by “a cureless disquiet”. Polidori took this fragment and turned it into the sensational tale of the vampire Lord Ruthven, preying on the vulnerable women of society.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266516/original/file-20190329-71003-1tasxui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266516/original/file-20190329-71003-1tasxui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=739&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266516/original/file-20190329-71003-1tasxui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=739&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266516/original/file-20190329-71003-1tasxui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=739&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266516/original/file-20190329-71003-1tasxui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266516/original/file-20190329-71003-1tasxui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266516/original/file-20190329-71003-1tasxui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John William Polidori, by F.G. Gainsford.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Portrait Gallery</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After its magazine debut the story was published in book form and went through seven English printings in 1819 alone. It was adapted for the stage the following year by melodramatic playwright <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=flzKFymvfj0C&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=.+R.+Planch%C3%A9%E2%80%99s+The+Vampyre+(1820)&source=bl&ots=pOPwgl5oUd&sig=ACfU3U1j-_9XzxuIKmWjCXjPSWpnLoEM_g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi0_rXm4qXhAhU5SxUIHW#v=onepage&q=.%20R.%20Planch%C3%A9%E2%80%99s%20The%20Vampyre%20(1820)&f=false">James Robinson Planché</a>, one of a growing number of vampire theatricals inspired by Polidori, such as those by Charles Nodier and others. </p>
<p>It was then expanded into a two-volume French novel by Cyprien Bérard, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14533129-the-vampire-lord-ruthwen">Lord Ruthwen ou les vampires</a>. By 1830 it had been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. </p>
<p>Despite all these imitations and adaptations, “Poor Polidori”, as Mary Shelley liked to call him, has all but been forgotten and his lively tale has often been dismissed as a crude narrative, written under the influence of a greater, more subtle talent, Byron. And yet it was Polidori not Byron who succeeded in founding the entire modern tradition of vampire fiction. </p>
<h2>Peasant to patrician</h2>
<p>The vampire prior to this had been a blood-gorged, animalistic monster of the Slavic peasantry. In his study of the origins of Vampire lore, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nq6gm">Vampires, Burials and Death</a>, American scholar Paul Barber described the traditional image of the undead bloodsucker thus: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>with long fingernails and a stubbly beard […] his face ruddy and swollen. He would wear informal attire — a linen shroud – and would look for all the world like a dishevelled peasant.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Polidori transformed the East European peasant vampire of old into a pale-faced, dead-eyed, licentious English aristocrat. This deceiving, dashing and cursed creature was in possession of “irresistible powers of seduction”, haunting the drawing rooms of Western society undetected. In the hands of Polidori, under the influence of Byron, vampires transitioned from dishevelled peasants into alluring, seductive aristocrats in the 19th century.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266517/original/file-20190329-70993-yzgxzm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266517/original/file-20190329-70993-yzgxzm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266517/original/file-20190329-70993-yzgxzm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266517/original/file-20190329-70993-yzgxzm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266517/original/file-20190329-70993-yzgxzm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266517/original/file-20190329-70993-yzgxzm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266517/original/file-20190329-70993-yzgxzm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron by Richard Westall.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Portrait Gallery</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This elevation in social status is not all. Polidori’s The Vampyre is responsible for a number of groundbreaking innovations. He established links to the aristocracy – where there had never before been an urban vampire, let alone one as educated and high in social rank. He also introduced the notion of the vampire as sexual predator, showing his readers, for the first time, the vampire as rake or libertine – a real “lady killer”. As he <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6087/6087-h/6087-h.htm">wrote in his novella</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The guardians hastened to protect Miss Aubrey; but when they arrived, it was too late. Lord Ruthven had disappeared and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Mad and bad</h2>
<p>Lord Ruthven is a satirical portrait of Byron as a seducer of women in polite society. “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know” – as the aristocratic writer Lady Caroline Lamb described the lover who had spurned her. This is the image we have of the vampire. Lamb cast Byron as the dark and duplicitous Gothic seducer, Lord Ruthven in her 1816 novel Glenarvon. In turn, Polidori took the name Lord Ruthven in order to create the first literary vampire.</p>
<p>Lord Ruthven spawned a series of saturnine or demonic lovers in turn, from the Brontës’ Mr Rochester to the more sexy incarnations of Dracula and the contemporary paranormal romances of mortal women seduced by brooding bad and dangerous vampires.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266461/original/file-20190328-139352-akexc9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266461/original/file-20190328-139352-akexc9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=640&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266461/original/file-20190328-139352-akexc9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=640&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266461/original/file-20190328-139352-akexc9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=640&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266461/original/file-20190328-139352-akexc9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266461/original/file-20190328-139352-akexc9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266461/original/file-20190328-139352-akexc9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Edward Cullen, the vampire from the Twilight novels, as played by Robert Pattison.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goldcrest Pictures</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Polidori’s vampire, despite being something of a blank canvas, is sexualised and mesmeric, providing a template not only for Count Dracula but for the “Byronic hero” that features in Gothic romance from pre-Victorian times down to present-day paranormal romances such as Twilight. Edward Cullen – played by Robert Pattison, continuing the tradition of British actors playing vampires from Christopher Lee to Gary Oldman – is a reproduction of this earlier archetype. He’s something of a consumerist fantasy – as <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Twilight.html?id=3WVTPwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">expensive as diamonds, marble or crystal</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>His skin white […] literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface. He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculptured incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare […] a perfect statue carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Cullen’s aristocratic charm and anachronistic way of speaking (“I endeavoured to secure your hand” he tells Bella) indicate he is a relic of earlier models of vampiric masculinity, further evidence of the long-reaching legacy of Polidori’s vampire. </p>
<p>As Catherine Spooner, Professor of Gothic Literature at Lancaster University, has argued in a <a href="http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781784993627/">collection of essays</a> about Vampires – Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead which I co-edited in 2012: “Over a period of about 200 years vampires have changed from the grotty living corpses of folklore to witty, sexy, super achievers.” </p>
<p>Polidori <a href="https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/13248870">died in London in August 1821</a>, weighed down by depression and gambling debts. It is said that he committed suicide by means of cyanide but that, to protect his family’s name, the coroner gave a verdict of death by natural causes. Sadly he wasn’t to know the fame his creation would achieve as the star of hundreds of books, plays and films – and millions of nightmares.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/114382/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sam George has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is the convener of the Open Graves, Open Minds research group who have organised the Polidori Bi-Centenary Vampyre Symposium 2019, 6-7 April 2019, Keats House, Hampstead, UK <a href="http://www.opengravesopenminds.com/polidori-symposium-2019/">http://www.opengravesopenminds.com/polidori-symposium-2019/</a></span></em></p>
Written in the same house party as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Polidori’s creature was based on the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” Lord Byron.
Sam George, Senior Lecturer in Literature, University of Hertfordshire
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/105236
2018-10-29T11:49:01Z
2018-10-29T11:49:01Z
Fantasmagoriana: the German book of ghost stories that inspired Frankenstein
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242705/original/file-20181029-76413-65m8ga.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Frontispiece from the original German version of Fantasmagoriana.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Schnorr von Carolsfeld</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The story of how Frankenstein was born is well known, and largely relies on the account given by Mary Shelley in her preface to the <a href="https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro">1831 edition</a> to her novel. She and her (soon-to-be) husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, were summering on the shores of Lake Geneva and close by Lord Byron and his personal physician John Polidori. It was 1816 – the so-called “<a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/1816-the-year-without-summer-excerpt/">year without a summer</a>” and the inclement weather kept the party indoors, reading ghost stories as a pastime. </p>
<p>In one of the most <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/mary-shelley-frankenstein-and-the-villa-diodati">famous propositions in literary history</a>, Lord Byron suggested that each of them should try their hand at writing a supernatural tale. Ironically, it was the two novice writers, Mary Shelley and Polidori, whose works have endured. Almost out of nothing, the pair invented modern horror. Polidori’s story, The Vampyre, <a href="https://theconversation.com/older-than-dracula-in-search-of-the-english-vampire-105238">would inspire Bram Stoker</a> 80 years later to write Dracula, while the 18-year-old Shelley wrote Frankenstein – which also has a good claim to be the first science fiction novel.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/older-than-dracula-in-search-of-the-english-vampire-105238">Older than Dracula: in search of the English vampire</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The book the Shelleys, Byron, and Polidori were reading during their trip was called <a href="http://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=1214">Fantasmagoriana</a>. It was an anthology of eight stories of the supernatural published in Paris in 1812 but translated from the German. No indication of authors or of original sources was given and readers were invited to think of stories as of embellished versions of real supernatural cases. The title joyfully played with this ambiguity, evoking the kind of shows, popular at the time, which were known as <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/phantasmagoria-creating-the-ghosts-of-the-enlightenment/">phantasmagorias</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242519/original/file-20181026-7050-925rrh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242519/original/file-20181026-7050-925rrh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242519/original/file-20181026-7050-925rrh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242519/original/file-20181026-7050-925rrh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242519/original/file-20181026-7050-925rrh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242519/original/file-20181026-7050-925rrh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242519/original/file-20181026-7050-925rrh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Victorian depiction of a phantasmagoria, or magic lantern show.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">William Heath (1794–1840)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Based on the magic lantern (an ancestor of cinema), these shows enabled audiences to see ghosts floating in the air, devils appearing and disappearing, young girls transforming into skeletons. In the end, the impresario came upon the stage, explaining it was all a trick. But in Paris, around 1798-99, such shows had been briefly shut down by the police, when rumours had spread that the phantasmagoria could bring the king, Louis XVI, <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/phantasmagoria-creating-the-ghosts-of-the-enlightenment/">back from the dead</a>. The book read by our holidaying writers proposed a similar gallery of horrors. As Mary Shelley recalled:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There was the History of the Inconstant Lover, who […] found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted. There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race, whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house […] he advanced to the couch of the blooming youths, cradled in healthy sleep.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s worth looking into the <a href="http://mentalfloss.com/article/87949/read-ghost-story-anthology-inspired-three-classic-scary-stories">influence of such stories</a> on Frankenstein. At some point in Shelley’s novel, Victor Frankenstein dreams to hold in his arms the “pale ghost” of his bride to be, which may remind us of the story Shelley referred to as <a href="http://www.romtext.org.uk/frankenstein-and-fantasmagoriana-story-4-la-morte-fiancee/">History of the Inconstant Lover</a> (in truth, La Morte Fiancée or The Corpse Bride, by <a href="http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100447843">Friedrich August Schulze</a>). </p>
<p>Frankenstein’s “Creature” is a gigantic being who causes the extermination of an entire family – a plot device that may have been inspired by what she calls “<a href="http://www.romtext.org.uk/fantasmagoriana-2/">tale of the sinful founder of his race</a>” who “bestows the kiss of death” on his descendants (actually a story called <a href="https://archive.org/stream/talesofdead00utte#page/n17/mode/2up">Le Portraits de Famille</a> – or The Family Portraits, by <a href="http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=apel_johann_august">Johann August Apel</a>). </p>
<p>But if we read Frankenstein with Fantasmagoriana in mind, we see that the influence of those stories is definitely more profound than a simple inspiration.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242521/original/file-20181026-7062-1vx3sfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242521/original/file-20181026-7062-1vx3sfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242521/original/file-20181026-7062-1vx3sfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242521/original/file-20181026-7062-1vx3sfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242521/original/file-20181026-7062-1vx3sfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242521/original/file-20181026-7062-1vx3sfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242521/original/file-20181026-7062-1vx3sfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Illustration from the 1922 edition of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Cornhill Publishing Company</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While trying to describe in the <a href="https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro">preface to the book</a>: “How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea,” Shelley describes her mental processes as a phantasmagorical show. Imagination, in her words, is a screen onto which stories project impressions. At night, in her bed, Shelley sees “with shut eyes, but acute mental vision” the central scene of her novel to be – the idea of the novel comes first as an image, not as a plot. </p>
<p>It is an image she knows perfectly not to be true – but which is nonetheless frightening: like the ghosts of phantasmagoria shows or of Fantasmagoriana, which were explained to be tricks of the mind, but still left the imperceptible feeling of the uncanny. In Les Portrais de Famille, Shelley read of a ghost “advanc(ing) to the couch of the blooming youths, cradled in healthy sleep” – half asleep she imagines a man in bed, beholding “the horrid thing” he created “stand(ing) at his bedside, opening his curtains”. The story read, in other words, mirrors and anticipates the story to be written. </p>
<p>At her bedside, Shelley too is visited by a ghost – in this case, the ghost of the novel: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105236/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fabio Camilletti's research on Fantasmagoriana is funded by the British Academy through a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant.</span></em></p>
The story of how Mary Shelley dreamed up Frankenstein is famous. Less well-known, however, is the reading material that inspired her to write.
Fabio Camilletti, Head of Italian Studies, University of Warwick
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/105238
2018-10-25T15:55:30Z
2018-10-25T15:55:30Z
Older than Dracula: in search of the English vampire
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242277/original/file-20181025-71032-1t7uont.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Premature Burial.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Antoine Wiertz (1854)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The story of Count Dracula as many of us know it was created by Bram Stoker, an Irishman, in 1897. But most of the action takes place in England, from the moment the Transylvanian vampire arrives on a shipwrecked vessel in Whitby, North Yorkshire, with plans to make his lair in the spookily named Carfax estate, west of the river in London. </p>
<p>But Dracula wasn’t the first vampire in English literature, let alone the first to stalk England. The vampire first made its way into English literature in John Polidori’s 1819 short story “<a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-vampyre-by-john-polidor">The Vampyre</a>”. Polidori’s vampire, Lord Ruthven, is inspired by a thinly disguised portrait of the predatory English poet, Lord Byron, in <a href="https://thegothicwanderer.wordpress.com/2013/07/10/lady-caroline-lambs-glenarvon-and-the-byronic-vampire/">Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon</a> (1816). So the first fictional vampire was actually a satanic English Lord.</p>
<p>It is nearly 200 years since this Romantic/Byronic archetype for a vampire emerged – but what do we know about English belief in vampires outside of fiction? <a href="http://researchprofiles.herts.ac.uk/portal/en/projects/open-graves-open-minds-vampires-and-the-undead-in-modern-culture(f33cf31d-ae78-44e5-b8a7-88dc6a1a7a0f).html">New research</a> at the University of Hertfordshire has uncovered and reappraised a number of vampire myths – and they are not all confined to the realms of fiction. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.historicmysteries.com/croglin-grange-vampire/">Croglin Vampire</a> reputedly first appeared in Cumberland to a Miss Fisher in the 1750s. Its story is retold by <a href="https://talesofmytery.blogspot.com/2013/12/augustus-hare-vampire-of-croglin-grange.html">Dr Augustus Hare</a>, a clergyman, in his Memorials of a Quiet Life in 1871. According to this legend, the vampire scratches at the window before disappearing into an ancient vault. The vault is later discovered to be full of coffins that have been broken open and their contents, horribly mangled and distorted, are scattered over the floor. One coffin only remains intact, but the lid has been loosened. There, shrivelled and mummified – but quite intact – lies the Croglin Vampire.</p>
<p>Elsewhere in Cumbria, the natives of Renwick, were <a href="http://www.strangehistory.net/2016/06/18/the-renwick-cockatrice/">once known as “bats”</a> due to the monstrous creature that is said to have flown out of the foundations of a rebuilt church there in 1733. The existence of vampire bats, which sucked blood wouldn’t be <a href="http://www.nsrl.ttu.edu/about/Outreach/Exhibits/Vampire%20Bat%20exhibit.pdf">confirmed until 1832</a>, when Charles Darwin sketched one feeding off a horse on his voyage to South America in The Beagle. The creature in Renwick has been referred to as a “cockatrice” – a mythical creature with a serpent’s head and tail and the feet and wings of a cockerel – by <a href="https://www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk/renwick-cockatrice">Cumbrian County History</a>. But it’s the myth of the vampire bat that has prevailed in the surrounding villages and is recorded in conversations in local archives and <a href="http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/21st-november-1952/19/crack-a-christ-luck.">journals</a> </p>
<p>What picture emerges then in this history of the English vampire? The Croglin Vampire has never been verified – but it has an afterlife in the 20th century, appearing as The British Vampire in 1977 in an <a href="http://vaultofevil.proboards.com/thread/814/daniel-farson-hamlyn-book-horror">anthology of horror</a> by Daniel Farson, who turns out to be Stoker’s great-grandnephew. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242308/original/file-20181025-71032-1swjmhe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242308/original/file-20181025-71032-1swjmhe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242308/original/file-20181025-71032-1swjmhe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242308/original/file-20181025-71032-1swjmhe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242308/original/file-20181025-71032-1swjmhe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242308/original/file-20181025-71032-1swjmhe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242308/original/file-20181025-71032-1swjmhe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Nightmare.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Henry Fuseli (1781)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Nightmare in Buckinghamshire</h2>
<p>But there is one case that has no connection to fiction, the little-known Buckinghamshire Vampire, recorded by William of Newburgh in the 12th century. Historical records show that St Hugh, the Bishop of Lincoln, was called upon to deal with the terrifying revenant and learned to his astonishment, after contacting other theologians, that similar attacks had happened elsewhere in England.</p>
<p>St Hugh was told that no peace would be had until the corpse was dug up and burned, but it was decided that an absolution – a declaration of forgiveness, by the church, absolving one from sin – would be a more seemly way to disable the vampire. When the tomb was opened the body was found to have not decomposed. The absolution was laid inside on the corpse’s chest by the Archdeacon and the vampire was never again seen wandering from his grave.</p>
<p>The Buckinghamshire revenant did not have a “vampire” burial – but such practices are evidence of a longstanding belief in vampires in Britain. Astonishingly, the medieval remains of the what are thought to be the first English vampires have been found in the Yorkshire village of <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/archaeology-scientists-find-medieval-remains-english-vampires-yorkshire-wharram-percy-a7663121.html">Wharram Percy</a>. The bones of over 100 “vampire” corpses have now been uncovered buried deep in village pits. The bones were excavated more than half a century ago and date back to before the 14th century. They were at first thought to be the result of cannibalism during a famine or a massacre in the village but on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/03/medieval-villagers-mutilated-the-dead-to-stop-them-rising-study-finds">further inspection in 2017</a> the burned and broken skeletons were linked instead to deliberate mutilations perpetrated to prevent the dead returning to harm the living – beliefs common in folklore at the time. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242281/original/file-20181025-71042-1u7icnb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242281/original/file-20181025-71042-1u7icnb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242281/original/file-20181025-71042-1u7icnb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242281/original/file-20181025-71042-1u7icnb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242281/original/file-20181025-71042-1u7icnb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242281/original/file-20181025-71042-1u7icnb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242281/original/file-20181025-71042-1u7icnb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Vampire graves’ have been found at the abandoned village of Wharram Percy in Yorkshire.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Allison via Alchemipedia</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Vile bodies</h2>
<p>The inhabitants of Wharram Percy showed widespread belief in the undead returning as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/03/medieval-villagers-mutilated-the-dead-to-stop-them-rising-study-finds">revenants or reanimated corpses</a> and so fought back against the risk of vampire attacks by deliberately mutilating their own dead, burning bones and dismembering corpses, including those of women, children and teenagers, in an attempt to stave off what they believed could be a plague of vampires. This once flourishing village was completely deserted in the aftermath. </p>
<p>Just recently at an ancient Roman site in Italy the severed skull of a ten-year-old child was discovered with a large rock inserted in the mouth to prevent biting and bloodsucking. Then skull belongs to a suspected <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181012093005.htm">15th-century revenant</a> which they are calling locally the “Vampire of Lugano”. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1051690638574522374"}"></div></p>
<p>There has been a wealth of other stories from the UK and other parts of Western Europe – but, despite this, thanks to the Dracula legend, most people still assume such practises and beliefs belong to remote parts of Eastern Europe. But our research is continuing to examine “vampire burials” in the UK and is making connections to local myths and their legacy in English literature, many years before the Byronic fiend Count Dracula arrived in Yorkshire carrying his own supply of Transylvanian soil.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105238/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sam George has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council </span></em></p>
New research is uncovering medieval legends about the undead in Britain.
Sam George, Senior Lecturer in Literature, University of Hertfordshire
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/84319
2017-09-28T10:53:06Z
2017-09-28T10:53:06Z
David Bowie, a latter-day Romantic, was a modern-day Lord Byron
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187829/original/file-20170927-24154-1ydjitw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jean-Luc via Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Before he <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-38533901">died in January 2016</a>, David Bowie was universally regarded as one of the seminal rock stars of the modern age. He sold <a href="http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/2017/08/david-bowie-has-been-streamed-more-that.html">millions of records</a>, won <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2017/02/12/david-bowie-grammy-awards-blackstar/97827398/">countless awards</a>, and influenced numberless followers. </p>
<p>Almost without fail, <a href="https://theconversation.com/david-bowie-innovator-extraordinaire-52998">tributes after his death</a> lauded Bowie as a pioneer, particularly when it came to questioning ideas about gender and identity. But although Bowie’s willingness to challenge norms and boldness in doing so are undeniable, his position as a pioneer is more questionable. </p>
<p>Bowie is, in fact, directly linked to the Romantics, the writers and intellectuals who challenged similar norms some 200 years ago. And this link reveals not only the weight of Bowie’s work, but also the continuing influence of Romantic thought today. </p>
<p>My favourite version of David Bowie is the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/gallery/2016/aug/25/david-bowie-tour-thin-white-duke-photos">Thin White Duke</a> of 1975 and 1976. As skinny as a thread and with a laser-cut profile, the Duke wore his snowy shirt and black waistcoat with an icy hauteur that inspired both my fascination and my envy. </p>
<p>But it wasn’t until recently that I realised that the Thin White Duke has roots that go deeper than David Bowie’s <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/bowies-last-single-said-to-be-a-tribute-to-kabbalah/">fascination with cocaine and kabbalah</a> (his 1976 album Station to Station makes direct use of kabbalistic words and concepts). He is also a direct descendant of English Romanticism’s most alluring poet, <a href="https://theconversation.com/love-letters-from-joyces-dirty-missive-to-keatss-paeans-37500">Lord Byron</a>. </p>
<p>Like Byron, Bowie lived and worked in a time of enormous social and intellectual upheaval. And also like Byron, he embraced that upheaval eagerly, becoming its best-known symbol. </p>
<p>Byron travelled to then-mysterious lands in the early 1800s, bringing back stories of exotic scenes and events. He wove this strangeness into tales whose fictional heroes – boldly and successfully defying moral and social expectations, embracing personal morality and liberty – seemed based on himself. Childe Harold, The Giaour, The Corsair were all poems whose eponymous heroes were taken as versions of Byron himself.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KYJgK13Wong?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Bowie picked up on precisely these elements of Byronism when he adopted the persona of <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/ziggy-stardust-how-bowie-created-the-alter-ego-that-changed-rock-20160616">Ziggy Stardust</a>, alien liberator and 1970s counterculture personified, but who shared the physical characteristics of David Bowie.</p>
<p>Bowie’s connection to Byron runs deeper still. Both explored the question of identity in their works, while in their real lives suggesting that identity might be nothing more than a surface. They happily created themselves as brands, delighting in making fans puzzle over what was real and what was not, who was singing or speaking. </p>
<p>For this, both men earned accusations that their work was shallow. In fact, such frankness confronts the very deepest questions about how to define identity. Do people have a single “self”? What even is self, really? What if identity is really just a series of masks, donned at the appropriate moments?</p>
<p>The more I considered Bowie, the more I realised that he wasn’t linked just to Byron. Bowie is a prime example of how all of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism">Romanticism</a> continues to influence our culture. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187003/original/file-20170921-8199-1j24xzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187003/original/file-20170921-8199-1j24xzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187003/original/file-20170921-8199-1j24xzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187003/original/file-20170921-8199-1j24xzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187003/original/file-20170921-8199-1j24xzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=988&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187003/original/file-20170921-8199-1j24xzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=988&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187003/original/file-20170921-8199-1j24xzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=988&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Byron - lord of the romance.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/lord-byron-1800s-252139615?src=_xA6yoE78G8wBIjoW4JexA-1-4">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Bowie’s cross-dressing and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/jan/22/popandrock.davidbowie">his announcement</a> that he was “gay, and I always have been” were brave statements in England in the early 1970s. (The parents of Bowie’s guitarist Mick Ronson were publicly harassed simply because of their son’s association.) </p>
<p>But 150 years earlier, John Keats confused the gender boundaries of his time, and had his work dismissed with contempt and his career destroyed because <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1C0HDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=keats+and+effeminate&source=bl&ots=N2GD7sTBpP&sig=sg9rPYotsv9wOG71mH-SyouKaA4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQ_-De-rXWAhVFKMAKHYUBBj4Q6AEIPTAH#v=onepage&q=keats%20and%20effeminate&f=false">critics thought</a> his poetry was effeminate. Bowie tapped into the same fear that Keats embodied, and his gender questioning links to concerns that lurk in the corners of many Romantic books and poems.</p>
<h2>Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes</h2>
<p>What’s more, while Bowie can be seen as rock ’n’ roll’s master of apocalypse and dystopia (his <a href="http://www.davidbowie.com/album/diamond-dogs-0">Diamond Dogs</a> album opens with an image of a world full of “fleas the size of rats sucking on rats the size of cats” and doesn’t get much more positive from there), that vision can trace its roots back to <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/blke/hd_blke.htm">William Blake’s highly symbolic</a> and post-apocalyptic poetic visions, detailed in works such as Jerusalem and The Four Zoas.</p>
<p>In fact, a great deal of Bowie’s work links back to the genre of so-called “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/Sublime-Conclusions-Last-Man-Narratives-from-Apocalypse-to-Death-of-God/Weninger/p/book/9781910887219">last-man narratives</a>”, which envisioned the end of the world through the eyes of a last survivor and were very popular in the Romantic period. The songs “Space Oddity” and “Ashes to Ashes”, for instance, are the spiritual children of <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/ksr.1989.4.1.1">Mary Shelley’s The Last Man</a> and <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/alastor-by-p-b-shelley">Percy Shelley’s Alastor</a>. These connections to Romanticism show that Bowie’s work can’t be dismissed as “just” pop music. </p>
<p>Furthermore, Bowie’s work shows that Romanticism still has an influence on the contemporary world. The Romantic Era, that grand and distant epoch, is not remote history, but a continuing influence on how we understand our own world. Bowie demonstrates that in some cases we are still Romantics, wrestling with the same questions that writers and thinkers grappled with more than a century ago: Who am I? How many “selves” do I have? Am I sure if I’m a boy or a girl? What will become of my world, of <em>the</em> world? </p>
<p>In an intellectual game of Chinese Whispers, these same Romantic questions and concerns appear in Bowie’s songs, and sometimes in our own minds, just in different words. In this way, it turns out, the Thin White Duke’s slender thread ties the present to the past, knots Bowie to Romanticism, and shows that Romanticism is knitted into our contemporary selves.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84319/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emily Bernhard Jackson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The singer had Romantic notions in common with the poet – as well as with William Blake, Mary Shelley, and John Keats.
Emily Bernhard Jackson, Lecturer in English, University of Exeter
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/52521
2015-12-29T08:36:17Z
2015-12-29T08:36:17Z
Mathematical winters: Ada Lovelace, 200 years on
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106855/original/image-20151222-27863-13c1rl1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C255%2C942%2C726&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ada Lovelace circa 1842, daguerreotype by Antoine Claudet.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reproduced by permission of G C Bond</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Christmas 1840, cold and crisp. The fashionable and wealthy Lovelace family are learning to skate, the four year-old Byron (junior, the grandson of Lord Byron) pushing a chair along the ice to keep his balance. Driven inside by the cold, his mother retires to her study and her lessons in advanced calculus. She writes to her tutor: “This is very mathematical weather. When one cannot exercise one’s muscles out of doors, one is peculiarly inclined to exercise one’s brains in-doors.” Then she plunges into a detailed discussion of the convergence of series. </p>
<p>Her name is Ada, Countess of Lovelace. Her teacher was Augustus De Morgan, one of the foremost mathematicians of the day. She is studying the material he taught his advanced class at the then all-male University College London: he writes of her power of thinking as “utterly out of the common way”, capable of grasping the “real difficulties of first principles”.</p>
<p>This grounding in advanced mathematics was essential for Ada Lovelace’s most famous work, a <a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html">paper</a> published in 1843, which translated and considerably extended a work by please by <a href="http://www.britannica.com/biography/Luigi-Federico-Menabrea">Luigi Menabrea</a> about a general-purpose mechanical computer designed by <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/babbage_charles.shtml">Charles Babbage</a>, his unbuilt analytical engine. The substantial appendices written by Ada Lovelace contain an account of the principles of the machine and a table often described as “the first computer programme”. Lovelace presents the machine, not in terms of ironmongery, but as what we would now call an “abstract machine”, describing the functions of memory, CPU, registers, loops and so on.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106531/original/image-20151217-8104-z6qlan.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106531/original/image-20151217-8104-z6qlan.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106531/original/image-20151217-8104-z6qlan.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106531/original/image-20151217-8104-z6qlan.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106531/original/image-20151217-8104-z6qlan.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106531/original/image-20151217-8104-z6qlan.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106531/original/image-20151217-8104-z6qlan.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106531/original/image-20151217-8104-z6qlan.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Diagram for the computation of Bernoulli numbers, Ada Lovelace 1842.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What is truly remarkable to the modern computer scientist is her high-level view. She understands the complexity of programming, the difficulty of checking correctness and the need for programme optimisation. She reflects on the power of abstraction, how the machine might “weave algebraical patterns”, how it might work with quantities other than number and its potential for creativity. In what Turing later described as “<a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/#LadLovObj">Lady Lovelace’s objection</a>” to whether machines can think, she observed that: “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” </p>
<p>Ada, Countess of Lovelace, was born Ada Byron on 10 December 1815, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron and his wife Annabella (nee Milbanke), and died after a long and painful illness in 1852. In 1833 she married William King, who was created Earl of Lovelace in 1838. Although her parents separated when she was a few months old and she never knew her famous father, his notoriety as “mad, bad and dangerous to know” has often overshadowed accounts of her life.</p>
<p>From an early age, Lovelace showed a passion and a talent for mathematics and science. Her mother was a noted educational reformer and organised her own daughter’s education on the principles of <a href="http://www.britannica.com/biography/Johann-Heinrich-Pestalozzi">Pestalozzi</a>. This involved the study of mathematics, French and music accompanied by childhood visits to factories and workshops. This later helped Lovelace grasp the mechanical principles of Babbage’s calculating machines, which she first encountered in her teens. </p>
<p>In later life, Lovelace continued to pursue her mathematical interests. She contributed to her husband’s writings on crops and husbandry, proposing a quadratic, rather than a linear, model to relate growth of plants to quantity of sunlight. She followed the latest scientific trends, like photography and mesmerism, and even suggested that collecting amateur photographs of mesmeric phenomena would aid scientific understanding – an early example of crowdsourcing. She wanted to understand the workings of the mind and wrote about whether there might be mathematical laws underlying the operations of the brain, a “calculus of the nervous system”. </p>
<p>Lovelace’s name lives on through the Ada programming language as well as initiatives for women in science, including the annual “Ada Lovelace Day” in mid-October. She has become a controversial figure, generating both wild enthusiasm and, in turn, a backlash of hostility, to extravagant claims that she <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eWBpjlLMdQ4C&">foresaw quantum mechanics</a>, <a href="http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/9/191176-innovators-assemble/fulltext">invented the CD, or brought about Silicon Valley</a>. </p>
<p>But there is no need to exaggerate – in her 200th year we should celebrate an extraordinary individual, who defied the constraints of her time and gave a remarkable and farseeing account of the principles, potential and challenges of computation.</p>
<p>We know so much about Ada Lovelace and her world because of a large archive of family papers held at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The wonderful insights they offer into her relations with her family and children, her variety of interests and her sometimes intense feelings, have perhaps obscured their contribution to the history of science and mathematics. But Lovelace offers much further potential for true collaboration between the humanities and the sciences to understand the scientific and cultural context for the emergence of modern ideas of computation.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/52521/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ursula Martin is employed by the University of Oxford, and receives funding from the .UK Engineering and Physical Science Council as a Senior Research Fellow, and the EU under a Horizon 2020 European Research Infrastructure project.
</span></em></p>
This extraordinary individual defied the constraints of her time and gave a remarkable and farseeing account of computation.
Ursula Martin, Professor of Computer Science, University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/43304
2015-06-18T11:32:48Z
2015-06-18T11:32:48Z
Walter Scott war journalism from the Waterloo battlefield
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85423/original/image-20150617-23226-64pq7a.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Field of Waterloo by Joseph Turner (c.1817)</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://historicphotoimage.com/store/index.php/artists/turner/joseph-turner-the-field-of-waterloo-giclee-art-reproduction-on-stretched-canvas.html">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo on June 18 1815, it came as a great relief to all those in Britain who had feared a French invasion. Among them was the celebrated 19th-century writer Walter Scott, who articulated his fears in <a href="http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/novels/antiquary.html">The Antiquary</a>, his third novel, which was published the following year (though there <a href="http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/24/101024928/">has been</a> speculation that he might have quietly supported the French revolution in his younger years). </p>
<p>The revolution, the Napoleonic wars and Waterloo were undoubtedly the great historical events of Scott’s lifetime. As a writer who had immersed himself in moments of conflict and their effect on history, the 43-year-old Scott was excited by the concluding battle and was <a href="https://theconversation.com/as-soon-as-waterloo-was-over-poets-flocked-to-the-battlefield-43211">one of a number</a> of writers who went to visit the battlefield. As his biographer JG Lockhart <a href="http://lordbyron.cath.lib.vt.edu/contents.php?doc=JoLockh.Scott.Contents">notes</a>, “he grasped at the ideas of seeing probably the last shadows of real warfare that his own age would afford”. As Scott <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Paul_s_letters_to_his_kinsfolk.html?id=jEpeAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">put it himself</a>, this was such an event “as only occurs once in five hundred years”.</p>
<h2>Scott sets forth</h2>
<p>Though he was anxious to set out as early as possible, other commitments meant that he could not begin his journey until July 27 1815. During his visit he collected objects from the battlefield, several of which can still be seen at <a href="http://www.scottsabbotsford.com">his home at Abbotsford</a> in the Scottish borders. These included buttons, bullets and cuirasses (leather body armour), as well as a book of popular songs owned by a French soldier and carrying the signs of battle. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85425/original/image-20150617-23223-6woadt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Scott portrait by Henry Raeburn (1823)</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?client=safari&channel=mac_bm&hl=en&authuser=0&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1435&bih=763&q=walter+scott&oq=walter+scott&gs_l=img.3..0l10.491031.492430.1.492950.12.8.2.1.1.0.127.612.3j3.6.0....0...1ac.1.64.img..3.17.1367.N1co5jsXBxI#q=walter+scott&channel=mac_bm&hl=en&authuser=0&tbm=isch&tbs=sur:fc&imgrc=EwVoDcABLKSWrM%253A%3BbSqTDPjoVfZSOM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fupload.wikimedia.org%252Fwikipedia%252Fcommons%252Fthumb%252Fc%252Fc1%252FHenry_Raeburn_-_Portrait_of_Sir_Walter_Scott_and_his_dogs.jpg%252F496px-Henry_Raeburn_-_Portrait_of_Sir_Walter_Scott_and_his_dogs.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fcommons.wikimedia.org%252Fwiki%252FFile%253AHenry_Raeburn_-_Portrait_of_Sir_Walter_Scott_and_his_dogs.jpg%3B496%3B600">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He also sent daily letters to his wife Charlotte in the persona of “Paul”, ostensibly addressed to an imaginary group of correspondents, most likely as a device to be able to express himself more clearly. The letters outlined the situation that he found in France, the political events and social circumstances that had led up to Waterloo, and what the future might hold for both France and Europe. These formed the basis of the book <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Paul_s_letters_to_his_kinsfolk.html?id=jEpeAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Paul’s Letters to His Kinsfolk</a>, published the following year. This was one of the earliest and most interesting accounts of France just after the battle, not to mention an important early example of war journalism. </p>
<p>Perhaps foremost among the emotions Scott describes is a sense of France in limbo. He <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Paul_s_letters_to_his_kinsfolk.html?id=jEpeAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">notes that</a> the war might be “ended to all useful and essential purposes, [but] could not in some places be said to be actually finished”. He expresses repeatedly a sense of sympathy for the plight of the ordinary French people. His landlady, for example, seemed “ready to burst into tears at every question we put to her”. </p>
<p>He also recognises the dangers posed by so many soldiers released from the duties of war, worrying that they will “beg, borrow, starve and steal” until new conflicts arise. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>what will become of these men, and what of the thousands who, in similar circumstances, are now restored to civil life, with all the wild habits and ungoverned passions which war and license have so long fostered. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Scott also wrote letters from France as himself, which are at times poignant. In a letter to the Duke of Buccleuch, for example, <a href="http://lordbyron.cath.lib.vt.edu/contents.php?doc=JoLockh.Scott.Contents">he describes</a> the whole of France as “melancholy” and reiterates the sorrow of the women generally. <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Paul_s_letters_to_his_kinsfolk.html?id=jEpeAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Elsewhere</a> he “beheld the ocean of humanity in a most glorious state of confusion – fields of battle where the slain were hardly buried – immense armies crossing each other in every direction …”</p>
<h2>Scott and Byron</h2>
<p>In London on his way home, Scott met the romantic poet <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/byron_lord.shtml">Lord Byron</a>, for whom Napoleon was a hero. “Waterloo did not delight him”, <a href="http://lordbyron.cath.lib.vt.edu/contents.php?doc=JoLockh.Scott.Contents">Lockhart reports</a>. In his artistic response to Napoleon’s defeat, <a href="http://www.gradesaver.com/lord-byrons-poems/study-guide/summary-childe-harolds-pilgrimage-canto-iii">Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III</a>, Byron wrote that all the suffering caused by years of war was pointless if Napoleon was to be defeated. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85427/original/image-20150617-23232-12nmmlk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Distraught: Byron.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lord_Byron_coloured_drawing.png">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like Byron, Scott recognised Napoleon’s greatness, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Paul_s_letters_to_his_kinsfolk.html?id=jEpeAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">commenting on</a> his “inexpressible feelings of awe” at standing on the spot where he “who appeared to hold Fortune chained to his footstool” had been defeated. Yet where Byron’s main response to the events was despair, Scott’s was compassion. For him the suffering that had ravaged Europe was the inevitable and terrible consequence of revolution, rebellion and radicalism. On a very human level, it horrified him.</p>
<p>Scott’s poetic response to the battle, <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/walter_scott/2563/">The Field of Waterloo</a>, published on October 23 1815, brings many of these sentiments together. As one might expect, it is clearly in praise of the victorious British general Wellington and the bravery of the British troops, but it is in general elegiac. It opens with a description of a calm country scene, only to look back at the bloodshed this landscape has witnessed only weeks before.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Look forth, once more, with soften’d heart,<br>
Ere from the field of fame we part;<br>
Triumph and Sorrow border near,<br>
And joy oft melts into a tear … </p>
<p>Or see‘st how manlier grief, suppress’d,<br>
Is labouring in a father’s breast,<br>
With no enquiry vain pursue<br>
The cause, but think on Waterloo! </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The first edition sold 6,000 copies at a shilling each, the profits from which went to the fund raised for the relief of the widows and children of the soldiers slain in battle. In a <a href="https://archive.org/details/lettersofsirwalt00scotrich">letter to a friend</a>, Scott says he was induced to write it “to give something to the fund more handsome than usual for the poor fellows and their relatives who suffered”. </p>
<p>Scott only felt able to express his admiration and compassion for Napoleon years later in his monumental <a href="http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/prose/napoleon.html">Life of Napoleon Buonaparte</a>, published in 1827. At the time of Waterloo, his thoughts were only for the victims, living and dead, that passed before his eyes.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43304/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alison has received grants from the AHRC, Carnegie Trust for Scotland and from a private donation.</span></em></p>
When word reached the Scottish writer of Napoleon’s famous defeat, he promptly travelled to the continent to bear witness to the carnage first-hand
Alison Lumsden, Professor of English and Scottish Literature, University of Aberdeen
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.