Vampires: An Essay Collection

A Study of Lord Ruthven

The year is 1819, Queen Victoria's reign is but a glimmer on the horizon, her and her prince consort, Albert, have only just been born. George III, "An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King", in the words of Percy Shelley, sits on the same throne he's occupied since a collection of colonies sewed descension and reaped revenge, thus ensuring freedom from tyrannical taxation. Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and the Bride of Lammermoore have been published to great success. John Polidori's brilliant mind has just birthed The Vampyre and its central antagonist, Lord Ruthven; an antagonist who should, by all accounts, have faded in England's collective conscious like so many, bloodthirsty fiends of the Georgian era. But somehow Ruthven became a sensation, outliving his author and outgrowing Polidori's meager fame. Why?

Lord Ruthven, a noted nobleman both lascivious and listless, later described by Polidori's hero, Aubrey, as being, "dreadfully vicious...possess[ing] irresistible powers of seduction [rendering] his licentious habits more dangerous to society," became the backbone of the modern vampire mythos, failing to surpass only Shelley's Frankenstein in literary importance. Ruthven's fame is the rare sort, born not from awe, but a mingling of dread, affinity, and fear.

Much like the 20th century movie-going audiences who saw themselves in the tortured countenance of Louis de Pointe du Lac and Dracula, the Georgian nobility saw themselves in Ruthven. The upper crust of English society, comprised of bankers, politicians, heiresses, and royalty, were viewed by the lower classes as leeches, preying on the poor, providing for the prevalent. But the growing interest in science, owing in part to Shelley's Frankenstein published the year prior, was beginning to stir up fears of social revolution and a new-moneyed middle class supplanting old-moneyed aristocracy. A fear blatantly mirrored in Polidori's novel of man versus monster. In The Vampyre, Aubrey, a young doctor fascinated with human nature and bereft at Ruthven's unfeeling gaze, challenges the lord's honor by accusing him of vampirism. Ruthven, in contrast, is an emotionally distant aristocrat who distributes his ample earnings to the poor for social gain- his patronage proving disastrous- thereby reflecting the negative perception of Georgian nobility. For the wealthy upper class, it was like looking at a portrait of themselves, one so dramatized it was impossible to look away. Some part of them must have chalked Ruthven's monstrousness up to folklore, but one need look no further than Polidori's vampire metaphor to glean otherwise. In Polidori's narrative, the typical vampire motifs of 'otherness', 'sexual promiscuity', and 'the macabre' are at play, as they are in all vampire-centric stories, but underlying these themes is the concept of noble versus needy.

The first indication readers receive of Ruthven's vampirism is subtle. By the time Aubrey begins describing Ruthven's glass-eyed stare and licentious habits the reader has discerned that Ruthven is far more sinister than he appears, but the earliest clue given, is actually his name. Ruthven, a typically Scottish name, has two opposing meanings, "red place" and "compassionate friend". The first definition is quite fitting, as anywhere Ruthven ventures becomes a "red place" as he drains his victims of life, leaving behind a bloody scene. The second definition illustrates the duality of not only Ruthven's name, but his character, as he successfully dupes Aubrey into believing he is a "compassionate friend," before betraying him. All this to say, Ruthven- a caricature of English nobility- is a two-faced fiend who preys on penniless victims (like Aubrey, his sister, and the unfortunate Ianthe) to satiate his monstrous greed making it easy to see how the blood hungry vampire is a not-so-subtle metaphor of wealthy pariahs eager to drain the dependent destitute of their life blood: money.