The Pre-Raphaelite Painter Whose Uncle Wrote The Vampyre and Whose Mother Preserved the Diary

John William Polidori had died of self-administered prussic acid at his London lodgings in August 1821, aged 25. He left behind a suppressed Geneva diary covering the 1816 Lake Geneva summer he had spent as Lord Byron’s personal physician — the same summer that produced Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and the foundational works of European Romantic horror. The diary remained in the possession of his eldest sister Frances Polidori for the next forty-nine years.

Frances had been 21 at her brother’s death. She married the exiled Italian Romantic poet Gabriele Rossetti in 1826 and they had four children in seven years at their London house on Charlotte Street: Maria (1827), Dante Gabriel (1828), William Michael (1829), and Christina (1830). All four became significant figures in mid-Victorian English literary and artistic life — Dante Gabriel as the principal painter of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Christina as one of the most accomplished English religious lyric poets, William Michael as a senior art critic and editor, and Maria as an Anglican religious sister and Dante translator.

Their uncle Polidori was the family’s substantial Romantic-period skeleton.

The preserved diary

The Geneva diary Frances had inherited was a substantially blunt personal record. Polidori wrote about Byron’s intimate relationships (the most famously about his sister-in-law Augusta Leigh, whose presence at Geneva had been the precipitating cause of Byron’s expatriation), about Polidori’s own jealous and humiliating subordinate position in the Byronic household, and about the creative-competitive evening that had produced The Vampyre. The diary was not publishable in the form Polidori had left it.

Frances kept it. It passed at her 1886 death to her son William Michael Rossetti, the most assiduous of the Rossetti children at archival preservation; William Michael had been the literary executor for substantially the entire family by the 1880s and had edited Dante Gabriel’s and Christina’s posthumous works. William Michael held the diary for another 25 years.

In 1911, William Michael condensed the diary — removing the most personally damaging passages about Augusta Leigh and Byron and abbreviating Polidori’s most self-pitying material — and published it as The Diary of John William Polidori (Elkin Mathews, London, 1911). The Rossetti edition has remained the standard published text. The full original Polidori manuscript is now lost; what survives is what William Michael chose to print.

What the Rossettis took from him

Dante Gabriel had been aware of his uncle Polidori as a presence in the family literary memory throughout his life. His 1850s and 1860s painting of Lady Lilith and the late series of femme-fatale subjects in the 1870s carry the Polidorian aristocratic-vampiric iconography forward into Victorian painting. His sister Christina’s 1862 Goblin Market carries the same atmospheric inheritance into Victorian religious lyric.

The line from Polidori 1819 to Stoker’s Dracula of 1897 ran through the Rossetti household at Charlotte Street as one of its preserving channels. The 1911 William Michael edition closed the family loop and fixed the Polidori-Byronic origin of the modern vampire in the European literary record.