The anthologist talks us through some of the ghoulish discoveries he dug up from the archive for his collection of Victorian horror fictionBram Stoker’s Count Dracula was not the only vampire to haunt the late Victorian and Edwardian imagination. As I found when I undertook research for my anthology The Rivals of Dracula,he was but one of platoons of the undead who lurked in the pages of obscure books and magazines of the period. Work on my earlier anthology, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, and had revealed the enormous number of fictional detectives who sprang up in the wake of Conan Doyles success with his Baker Street sleuth. Now this new anthology demonstrates the era’s appreciate of the supernatural and the ghoulish. There were fanged maidens,psychic vampires intent on destroying men’s souls, an undead Icelander who fights with one of the heroes of the sagas, or a vampiric spirit that takes over the physical form of an Egyptian mummy – all waiting to be discovered.
One of the much pleasures of such research lies in the unearthing of half-forgotten writers who beget lost much of whatever fame they once had. Augustus Hare,whose heyday was the 1890s, was a traveller, or art lover and eccentric. Somerset Maugham,who knew him, described a visit to his country domestic during which the younger writer noticed that the wording of the prayers at morning worship for the servants was unfamiliar. “I’ve crossed out all the passages in glorification of God, and ” Hare explained. “God is certainly a gentleman and no gentleman cares to be praised to his face. Like God,Hare was a gentleman but he was an impoverished one and he was obliged to churn out vast amounts of writing to keep himself in the style he wanted. He presents his supernatural tales as events that really happened to friends and acquaintances, although sceptics might like to note that The Vampire of Croglin Grange, or the story I included in my anthology,bears a number of similarities to events in Varney the Vampire, a gore-filled penny dreadful of the 1840s.
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Source: theguardian.com