John William Polidori (7 September 1795 – 24 August 1821) was an English writer and physician of the Romantic era. He is most known for writing the first modern vampire story, The Vampyre, and for being Lord Byron's personal physician in 1816.
He graduated from the University of Edinburgh and received his degree as a doctor of medicine at the young age of 19. A year later, he would get the job offering of a lifetime; becoming the personal physician of the infamous poet and author Lord Byron.
While Polidori was skilled in medicine, he dreamed of becoming an author. Creating connections with Lord Byron and his social circle seemed like the perfect opportunity.
However, his relationship with Byron was mutually contentious, to say the least. Polidori viewed Byron as a snob, while Byron viewed Polidori as a prick. In the summer of 1816
, Byron and Polidori joined Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife-to-be Mary Shelley, and Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont at Villa Diodati in Geneva, Switzerland. Because of the constant rain, the quintet entertained themselves with literature, notably Fantasmagoriana. Inspired by the ghost story collection, Byron proposed a ghostwriting contest between them.
There are two sources of what Polidori wrote. One source is Mary Shelley's recollection of the contest as annotated in the 1831 edition of Frankenstein. According to her, Polidori's draft involved a woman whose head was reduced to a skull due to her spying through a keyhole and observing something dreadful. Shelley was not impressed and noted that Polidori blanked on how the story should end. The other source is Polidori's foreword to Ernestus Berchtold, which he claims is the novel that grew from his contest draft. There is no skull-headed lady in Ernestus Berchtold, but if both accounts are truthful,note then it is to be noted that Ernestus Berchtold does contain a woman, Julia Berchtold, spying through a hole in the wall on an occult ritual involving a wish-granting spirit. It frightens her, but it does not alter her physically.
Meanwhile, Byron wrote a draft about a vampire that did seem promising. Polidori turned it into a novella, The Vampyre, which Byron had no objection to. Both The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold are understood to have autobiographical elements from Polidori's stay in Switzerland, his post-Byron stay in Italy, and his return to England in 1817. This includes a traffic accident he had on September 20, 1817 in Norwich that due to brain trauma altered his personality.
In 1819, The Vampyre would be published in the New Monthly Magazine, possibly without Polidori's permission. Even worse, the short story was advertised as "A Tale by Lord Byron". The story became an instant hit thanks to the popularity of Byron and the public's love for Gothic Horror. Byron would publish his unfinished vampire short story A Fragment in an attempt to clear up confusion, but The Vampyre continued to be attributed to him.
Polidori made no money off the story and garnered little attention. Two years after the disastrous publication of The Vampyre and the poor reception of Ernestus Berchtold, weighed down with depression and gambling debts, Polidori would commit suicide in his father's London home by ingesting cyanide. He died at the age of 25, a month before his 26th birthday.
As of the 2000s, Polidori is getting the recognition for The Vampyre that was denied to him in his lifetime. On occasion, horror characters in modern fiction are named after him, such as in School for Vampires, Boktai, Mary Shelley's Frankenhole, and Vampires vs. the Bronx.
