Earlier in the month, I posted about “Varney the Vampyre,” perhaps the most notorious of the Victorian penny dreadfuls, and how I was seriously thinking about tackling the 1166-page tome that is the collected serial for the month of October. (Those weekly installments do add up!)
I also mentioned how impossible it was for decades to track down a copy of the novel, especially before the internet, and then after, once it was possible, how ridiculously expensive even the reprints had become. I had access to only a few chapters in ghost story anthologies and volumes of 19th century popular British fiction in my own library.
Then I found a cheaply-printed paperback (issued by Wordsworth Editions, based in the U.K.), perhaps 15 years ago, at the Strand Book Store in New York, and was thrilled to purchase it. However, the text is so closely printed, and in such a small font, that you’d have to have the eyes of an eagle to read it. Nevertheless I took up the challenge, hoping that my aquiline nose counts for something.
In the meantime, I searched on eBay and came across some library discards of the two-volume Dover reprint from 2015 (previously issued in 1972). I placed my order, and they arrived quickly and in remarkably satisfactory shape, as if no one had even read them! Of course, they’ve been laminated and there are the usual library markings, but I can deal with that.
This edition is on good paper and has all the illustrations, though, admittedly, the reproduction is not always of the finest quality, with parts of the individual letters murky or even missing. Also, the layout is in two columns on each page, in the manner of those Sherlock Holmes Strand reprints. Even so, having now switched over from the Wordsworth Editions, I have to say, it is surprisingly readable, even in bed, late at night, under drooping eyelids. Add in the fact that both volumes combined cost me less than $20, and I am as happy as a vampire in a blood bank.
Over the decades, whenever I mention “Varney” to anyone, they nearly always respond with a disbelieving laugh, as if they’re not sure they’ve heard me correctly. “VARNEY THE VAMPYRE???” So it was a comfort to me, when I brought it up over coffee last week, that my former newspaper editor, now retired, knew just what I was talking about. Then again, he also knew what I was talking about when I brought up “Killdozer.”
In terms of actual content, as I mentioned before, the lurid incident and overheated exclamations can pile up awfully fast. Also the sentimentality. But really, taking any page at random, it’s not much worse than your average Victorian novel. That’s not to say, cumulatively, “Varney” is going to add up to “Great Expectations” or “Vanity Fair!”
Collectively, “Varney” is credited with being the first complete vampire novel in the English language, predating “Dracula” by 50 years. Having read the first number of chapters, all I have to say is, Bram Stoker has some splainin’ to do! All the conventions are in place, the author (speculated to be James Malcolm Rymer) apparently having done much of the legwork in exhuming the disparate elements from European folklore and assimilating them into what would become the groundwork for the genre. Furthermore, based on what I’ve read so far, it appears he even established the prototype for at least the Lucy segment of Stoker’s (admittedly superior) novel.
If you missed my previous “Varney” post, on October 2, here’s the link.
Looking forward to plenty of dark and stormy nights with this unabridged “Varney the Vampyre!”
