Varney the Vampyre:

aschmidt126
2 days ago
4 min read

Sources & Influences

Vampire stories have always proven quite popular. In fact, Bram Stoker’s Dracula has never gone out of print – a rare feat for a novel! -- and has been adapted to film more than any other fictional text, over 40 times (Melton, Introduction). But have vampires always been popular? Actually, we find their stories so common today that it seems like they’ve been with us since forever. But that’s not the case.

The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan (1835) by Eugène Delacroix, Wikipedia — *The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan* (1835) by Eugène Delacroix, Wikipedia

Though Western references to beings with vampiric qualities appear in Biblical and Classical texts, scholars attribute the first literary vampire to Lord Byron’s Orientalist poem The Giaour (1813). The creature evolved more fully in The Vampyre (1819) by John William Polidori, the poet’s doctor. The mythos of the vampire developed with Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s gender transgressive Carmilla (1872) and of course, most famously, with Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Right in the middle of these appeared James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampyre (1845-1847), which drew on works that came before, and influenced those which followed.

Tinted version of the cover from one of the original publications, 1843. anonymous illustration, Internet Archive

That influence came from Varney’s immense popularity. According to Nick Groom, “the most popular vampire of the 1840s (and arguably of the entire [nineteenth] century) was Varney the Vampyre or, The Feast of Blood, a ‘Penny Dreadful’ or ‘Penny Blood’ published in 109 weekly parts from 1845, and then in 1847 as a collected 220-chapter book” (137). This seems a bold claim, especially in light of Dracula’s subsequent success, until we take into account the literally millions of readers drawn to the “Penny Bloods” during this period. “By any standards, Varney was a publishing sensation and a runaway success, generously illustrated with inventive offset layout” (Groom 137). Like most “Penny Bloods,” Rymer’s episodes typically appeared in eight-page editions. These featured two columns of text and boasted garish, attention-grabbing images.

Illustration from the 1847 edition, Internet Archive

Born in 1814, James Malcolm Rymer grew up in “a Cockney literary-artistic family…Rymer’s grandfather, father, and brothers were engravers and visual artists. His mother and paternal aunt also took part in creative pursuits” (Nesvet 22). Registered as a civil engineer in 1841, Rymer soon afterward began his literary career as a writer and editor at the Queen’s Magazine. After that publication failed, he joined Edward Lloyd’s publishing enterprise, which went on to become one of the most successful in Britain.

While with Lloyd, Rymer established his reputation with the psychological murder mystery Ada the Betrayed (1843). Then followed The String of Pearls; Or, The Barber of Fleet Street: A Domestic Romance (sometimes entitled The String of Pearls; or, The Sailor’s Gift, 1846-1847). This introduced the famous character Sweeney Todd and his tasty meat pies with a secret ingredient: human flesh. Rymer wrote quickly and collaboratively, one witness reporting that “he dictated two or three stories to his clerks at the same time” (qtd. in Nesvet 6).

A book page of Sweeney Todd, from the 1850 edition, Internet Archive

Later, Rymer later went on to write for and edit Reynold’s Miscellany, published by George W. M. Reynolds, himself author of such “Penny Blood” novels as Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf (1846–1847). Reynolds created to a novel even longer than Varney -- The Mysteries of London (1844–1848). This, together with its sequel The Mysteries of the Court of London (1848-1856), which he wrote almost exclusively, contains more than four million words and entertained audiences for over twelve years of serial publication.

Title Page to the First Edition of The Mysteries of London, Wikipedia — Title Page to the First Edition of *The Mysteries of London, Wikipedia*

Rymer’s novel, a 670,000-word extravaganza, follows Sir Francis Varney as he haunts and terrifies, falling in love and saving with one woman, and repeatedly trying to marry – and murder – others. The roots of his vampire origin remain obscure, but seem entangled with crime and greed, treason and suicide. Varney’s compulsion to drink the blood of innocents drives the action, though he differs from vampires who came before him in having an element of conscience.

Recognizing the evil of his actions, Varney’s temper and pride prevent him from stopping, even if he could. He does, though, have a soft spot for some, and a sense of honor that becomes a gentleman of his rank. All of this creates in Varney a relatively complex psychological profile, and causes him to act at times in unpredictable ways. Here, Rymer has created a sense of interiority in his villain, contributing something new to the genre that continued and developed to fruition in books/movies like Interview with a Vampire, the Twilight series, Only Lovers Left Alive, and Let the Right One In.

While people enjoy vampire stories for the thrills they engender, the undead also serve as a prescient metaphor for social conditions, according to J. Gordon Melton. The vampire has been used “to describe unbalanced elements in human relationships, from the ability of dictatorial states to suck the life out of large groups of people, to the ability of charismatic leaders to suck the life from followers, to the ability of unscrupulous individuals to suck the life from family and friends” (Melton, Introduction).

In fact, as Alexandra Warwick points out, “Marx’s description of capital in Das Kapital (1867) as ‘dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking on living labor,’ reflects the contemporary popularity of Varney, viewing the extraction of work products as a vampiric process fueling capitalist reproduction” (qtd. in Townsend 2.3).

Works Cited:

Groom, Nick. The Vampire: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.

Melton, J. Gordon, et al. “Introduction.” The Vampire Almanac: The Complete History. Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press, 2022.

Nesvet, Rebecca. James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family. New York: Routledge, 2025.

Townsend, Dale Townshend, Angela Wright, & Catherine Spooner. The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Volume 2: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Do you indulge in vampire stories simply for fun, or do you take them with “deadly” seriousness? Either way, we invite you to listen to the first episode of our audio play adaptation of Varney the Vampyre. The Tales from the Penny Bloods series premieres this week on Modesto’s KCBP-FM radio. California’s Central Valley residents can listen over the airwaves – what a quaint thought! – on 95.5 FM, and everyone else can follow the action online (kcbpradio.org).