6 stories mention John William Polidori on DeadlyCurious.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's mother Frances was John William Polidori's younger sister. She preserved her brother's papers after his 1821 suicide. Her son William Michael edited the diary for publication in 1911 — almost a century after the Lake Geneva summer that had produced *The Vampyre*.
Read the story →Byron, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori spent the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati. The five would all be dead, scattered, or estranged within six years. Two of them died of poisoning. One drowned. Two lived on into old age in substantial unhappiness.
Read the story →Dante Gabriel Rossetti's mother Frances was the sister of John Polidori — the physician who wrote *The Vampyre* at Lord Byron's Geneva villa in 1816 and committed suicide three years later. The Polidori family preserved his suppressed Geneva diary through three generations until Rossetti's brother William Michael edited it for publication in 1911.
Read the story →Henry Colburn was the early-19th-century London publisher who specialised in commercially difficult books — silver-fork novels, exiled-author memoirs, controversial political diaries. He published Mary Shelley's *The Last Man* in 1826 when no other London house would touch it, serialised Disraeli's early novels, and went bankrupt twice while doing so.
Read the story →The literary aristocratic vampire — the seductive, immortal, blood-drinking nobleman of every subsequent vampire story — was invented by John Polidori in 1819 on a rainy Lake Geneva holiday. It took seventy-eight years to reach Bram Stoker. The intermediate steps are mostly forgotten.
Read the story →John Polidori was twenty-five. He had written the first English vampire novel, been disowned by Byron, and lost a libel suit. He drank prussic acid on a Wednesday.
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