tales from the penny dreadfuls
May. 12th, 2007 06:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)
I picked up a book called The Vampire Omnibus in the library discard pile a while back, for 40 cents. Edited by Peter Haining, it’s (obviously) an anthology of vampire tales, but it includes a few I haven’t come across before. There are a couple of 19th century stories originally published in the so-called “penny dreadfuls” – which I suppose could be considered the forerunners of the later pulp magazines. Elizabeth Grey’s The Skeleton Count, or The Vampire Mistress dates from 1828. It’s all very breathless and overheated and in literary terms it’s pretty crude, but it’s interesting as an example of the vampire story before it became formulaic. A man makes a pact with the powers of darkness and gains immortality, but the price he pays is that each night he is transformed into a skeleton. His dabblings in necromancy also involve raising a village girl from the dead, the girl then becoming a vampire. It’s entertaining enough.
The other story from the “penny dreadfuls” is a very early instalment of the saga of Varney the Vampire, which Haining credits to James Malcolm Rymer. Like The Skeleton Count it incorporates a number of features that later disappeared from the vampire story, such as the ability of the vampire to draw vitality from moonlight.
Has anyone read any other stories taken from the penny dreadfuls?
x-posted to my personal journal
dfordoom)I picked up a book called The Vampire Omnibus in the library discard pile a while back, for 40 cents. Edited by Peter Haining, it’s (obviously) an anthology of vampire tales, but it includes a few I haven’t come across before. There are a couple of 19th century stories originally published in the so-called “penny dreadfuls” – which I suppose could be considered the forerunners of the later pulp magazines. Elizabeth Grey’s The Skeleton Count, or The Vampire Mistress dates from 1828. It’s all very breathless and overheated and in literary terms it’s pretty crude, but it’s interesting as an example of the vampire story before it became formulaic. A man makes a pact with the powers of darkness and gains immortality, but the price he pays is that each night he is transformed into a skeleton. His dabblings in necromancy also involve raising a village girl from the dead, the girl then becoming a vampire. It’s entertaining enough.
The other story from the “penny dreadfuls” is a very early instalment of the saga of Varney the Vampire, which Haining credits to James Malcolm Rymer. Like The Skeleton Count it incorporates a number of features that later disappeared from the vampire story, such as the ability of the vampire to draw vitality from moonlight.
Has anyone read any other stories taken from the penny dreadfuls?
x-posted to my personal journal
