John William Polidori - The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori

Medwin, in his Conversations with Lord Byron , gives the following account of how the poet received the news of Dr. Polidori's death. "I was convinced" (said Byron) "something very unpleasant hung over me last night: I expected to hear that somebody I knew was dead. So it turns out—poor Polidori is gone. When he was my physician he was always talking of prussic acid, oil of amber, blowing into veins, suffocating by charcoal, and compounding poisons; but for a different purpose to what the Pontic monarch did, for he has prescribed a dose for himself that would have killed fifty Mithridates—a dose whose effect, Murray says, was so instantaneous that he went off without a spasm or struggle. It seems that disappointment was the cause of this rash act."—The evidence of the servant at the inquest shows that death did not come so very suddenly; and in my own family I always heard the poison spoken of as simply prussic acid.

This is all that I need say at present to explain who Dr. Polidori was; but I must add a few words regarding his Diary.

The day when the young doctor obtained the post of travelling physician to the famous poet and man of fashion, Lord Byron, about to leave England for the Continent, must, no doubt, have been regarded by him and by some of his family as a supremely auspicious one, although in fact it turned out the reverse. The article on Polidori written in The Dictionary of National Biography by my valued friend, the late Dr. Garnett, speaks of him as "physician and secretary to Lord Byron"; but I never heard that he undertook or performed any secretarial work worth speaking of, and I decidedly believe that he did not. The same statement occurs in the inscription on his likeness in the National Portrait Gallery. Polidori's father had foreseen, in the Byronic scheme, disappointment as only too likely, and he opposed the project, but without success. To be the daily companion and intimate of so great a man as Byron, to visit foreign scenes in his society, to travel into his own father's native land, which he regarded with a feeling of enthusiasm, and with whose language he was naturally well acquainted, to be thus launched upon a career promising the utmost development and satisfaction to his literary as well as professional enterprise—all this may have seemed like the realization of a dream almost too good to be true. To crown all, Mr. Murray, Byron's publisher, had offered Polidori no less a sum than £500 (or 500 guineas) for an account of his forthcoming tour. Polidori therefore began to keep a Diary, heading it Journal of a Journey through Flanders etc., from April 24, 1816, to ______; and the blank was eventually filled in with the date "December 28, 1816"; it should rather stand "December 30." Portions of the Diary are written with some detail, and a perceptible aim at literary effect—Murray's £500 being manifestly in view; in other instances the jottings are slight, and merely enough for guiding the memory. On this footing the Journal goes on up to June 30, 1816. It was then dropped, as Polidori notes "through neglect and dissipation," for he saw a great deal of company. On September 5 he wrote up some summarized reminiscences; and from September 16, the day when he parted company with Byron at Cologny, near Geneva, and proceeded to journey through Italy on his own account, he continued with some regularity up to December 30, when he was sojourning in Pisa. That is the latest day of which any record remains; but it is known from other evidence that Dr. Polidori continued in Italy up to April 14, 1817: he then left Venice in company with the new Earl of Guilford and his mother—being their travelling physician. Whether the Journal is in any fair degree interesting or brightly written is a question which the reader will settle for himself; as a document relevant to the life of two illustrious poets, it certainly merits some degree of attention.

My own first acquaintance with the Diary of Dr. Polidori dates back to 1869, when I was preparing the Memoir of Shelley which preludes my edition of his poems, published in 1870; I then availed myself of the Shelleian information contained in the Diary, and even gave two or three verbatim extracts from it. The MS. book was at that time the property of a sister of his, Miss Charlotte Lydia Polidori, a lady of advanced age. I regret to say that my aunt, on receiving the MS. back from me, took it into her head to read it through—a thing which I fancy she had never before done, or certainly had not done for very many years, and that she found in it some few passages which she held to be "improper," and, with the severe virtue so characteristic of an English maiden aunt, she determined that those passages should no longer exist. I can remember one about Byron and a chambermaid at Ostend, and another, later on, about Polidori himself. My aunt therefore took the trouble of copying out the whole Diary, minus the peccant passages, and she then ruthlessly destroyed the original MS. After her death—which occurred in January 1890, when she had attained the age of eighty-seven years—her transcript came into my possession. Its authority is only a shade less safe than that of the original, and it is from the transcript that I have had to work in compiling my present volume.

I will now refer in some detail to the matter of Dr. Polidori's romantic tale, The Vampyre ; not only because this matter is of some literary interest in itself, but more especially because the account of it given in The Dictionary of National Biography treats Polidori, in this regard, with no indulgence, and I believe (however unintentionally on the part of the late Dr. Garnett) with less than justice. He says: "In April 1819 he [Polidori] published in The New Monthly Magazine , and also in pamphlet-form, the celebrated story of The Vampyre , which he attributed to Byron. The ascription was fictitious. Byron had in fact, in June 1816, begun to write at Geneva a story with this title, in emulation of Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein ; but dropped it before reaching the superstition which it was to have illustrated. He sent the fragment to Murray upon the appearance of Polidori's fabrication, and it is inserted in his works. He further protested in a carelessly good-natured disclaimer addressed to Galignani's Messenger ."

The facts of the case appear to be as follows. As we shall see in the Diary, Polidori began, near Geneva, a tale which (according to Mrs. Shelley) was about a "skull-headed lady," and he was clearly aware that Byron had commenced a story about a vampyre. After quitting Byron, Polidori, in conversation with the Countess of Breuss, mentioned in his Journal, spoke (unless we are to discredit his own account) of the subject of the great poet's tale; the Countess questioned whether anything could be made of such a theme, and Polidori then tried his hand at carrying it out. He left the MS. with the Countess, and thought little or no more about it. After his departure from that neighbourhood some person who was travelling there (one might perhaps infer a lady) obtained the MS. either from the Countess of Breuss or from some person acquainted with the Countess: this would, I suppose, be the Madame Gatelier who is named in the Journal along with the Countess. The traveller then forwarded the tale to the Publisher, Colburn, telling him—and this statement was printed by Colburn as an Extract of a Letter from Geneva —that certain tales were "undertaken by Lord B[yron], the physician [Polidori], and Miss M. W. Godwin," and that the writer received from her female friend "the outline of each of these stories." She did not say that the completed Vampyre was the production of Byron; but Colburn inferred this, and in the magazine he attributed it to Byron, printing his name as author.