The Black Vampyre E-Book

Uriah Derick D'Arcy

• Herausgeber: Gothic World Literature Editions
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

WARNING! Contains moderate bloody violence against slavers and plantation owners!This pioneer vampire tale from 1819 spills revenge-cold blood as its narrator leads us through high gothic terror to radical outrage on the subject of slavery, reaching a blood-soaked conclusion dripping with 'biting' polemic vilifying the bankers who caused the economic recession of that same year.An anti-capitalist horror fable from 200 years ago, The Black Vampyre vilified the worst financial predation the capitalist world would ever see, decades before Karl Marx ― the enslavement of Africans in the New World.One dead man said no! And this is his story.The Black Vampyre; A Legend of St. Domingo tells the affrighting tale of a slave who is resurrected as a vampire after being killed by his owner; the slave seeks revenge by stealing the owner's son and marrying the owner's wife. The anonymous writer D'Arcy sets the story against the conditions that led to the Haitian Revolution.First published in chapbook form in New York in 1819, this emancipatory tale from literary New York in the 1810s arguably dates the birth of horror as know it!This edition features a new introduction as well as extensive notes and a guide to literary allusions.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title PageEpigraphOn the Spectacle and History of the Black VampyreA Note on the TextDedication To the Author of ‘Wall-Street’Introduction“The Black Vampyre”MoralVampyrism; A PoemNote from The Evening Post, August 14th, 1819Literary Allusions in “The Black Vampyre”Encyclopedia Entry for “The Black Vampyre”ReferencesCopyright

“Our bodies shall burst from their fetters, glorious as a curculio from its shell; — our minds shall soar like the car of the aeronaut, when its ligaments are cut; in a word O my brethren, we shall be free! — Our fetters discandied, and our chains dissolved, we shall stand liberated, — redeemed, — emancipated, — and disenthralled by the irresistible genius of UNIVERSAL EMANCIPATION!!!”

11

On the Spectacle and History of The Black Vampyre

by Panton Plasma PhD, PG Horr.

Welcome to the unchristian, erotic, anti-capitalist, lampooning, world of The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo.

Should you be trying to place that mysterious land of St Domingo on the map or in your mind, know this; the name ‘St. Domingo’ was even in 1819 a historical relic. Saint-Domingue was a former French colony on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, and had from 1804 been called by its historical and indigenous name — Haiti.

In 1791, enslaved Africans and some free people of colour in Saint-Domingue had taken part in the Vodou ceremony, Bois Caïman — and with it they planned a rebellion. This pushback against the French authority saw the abolition of slavery in the colony in 1793, and continued in various other forms and actions for a decade. Prominent during these revolts and actively engaged in the fight until his death in 1803, was the 12heroic figure of François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture. General Louverture, ‘the father of Haiti’ as he came to be known, is not mentioned at all in The Black Vampyre — though his rampaging and victorious figure remains perhaps uneasily in the background. The last French troops withdrew from the western portion of the island in late 1803, months after Toussaint Louverture, the inaugural President of Haiti had died — and the colony declared its independence as Haiti, the following year.

For reasons of their own, however, even the liberal New York press and the literati of the city — one of whom was the anonymous author of the book you now hold — insisted on calling Haiti by its old name, right into the 1820s. At least in the case of The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo, the use of the name of the former colony and the indigenous home of the Taíno people, adds a certain antique feel.

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FEW of the best-loved and popular novels of 1819 may still be enjoyed today. If that era belonged to anybody at all, it must have been Sir Walter Scott. 1819 alone saw the publication of Scott’s Ivanhoe, The Bride of Lammermoor and The Legend of Montrose; three voluminous prose works, indicative of the furious work rate of the poet, novelist and historian whose day job was as the Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire.

Novels of course were almost always serialised at 13this time, and were available alongside other popular print forms — ‘popular’ referring to volume of readership. These were shorter works; long-form poems, political journalism, short story and scandal sheets; and there was also at this time a huge magazine culutre which was growing fast and would reach its zenith in the coming decades, bringing fame — and even fortune — to some of America’s new literary talent.

The fortune was of course harder to come by. Edgar Allan Poe, who was 10 years old in 1819 when The Black Vampyre was published, was one of the first Americans to live by writing alone; but he, like every other writer at the time was hampered by the lack of an international copyright law, which meant that American publishers often made their money by producing unauthorised copies of British works rather than paying for new work by American writers.

One such early British ‘hit’ in North America was a poem called The Giaour (1813) by Lord Byron, and in it, we find some of the very earliest literary intimations upon and remarks concerning the figure of the vampire.

However — literary vampirism began in earnest on the year in question, 1819, when in April, in London The New Monthly Magazine published John Polidori’s Gothic fiction piece The Vampyre — the first significant piece of prose vampire literature in English. Polidori attributed the piece to Lord Byron (who partly inspired it) and it was first published in book form later in the same year.

Publishing in the United States in 1819 was a haphazard concern, to say the least. The Copyright Act 14of 1790 specifically noted that the law did not prohibit copying the works of foreign authors, an issue which had a significant effect on the nascent world of American letters. For readers, this meant plentiful editions of all their favourite British and European writers — and Byron was enormously popular in 1819 — and for publishers, it sometimes meant there was little incentive to publish homegrown talent.

Not that America was short of homegrown talent. In fact, sensational violence and Gothic ambience were already very much alive within the popular reading mind thanks to Charles Brockden Brown; and the subject of slavery was similarly popularised by writers such as Susanna Rowson, who wrote against it, and also, progressively enough, in favour of female education at the same time. Rowson’s novel Charlotte Temple, an example of the so-called ‘seduction novel’ — a genre which was popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and which presented the story of a virtuous, but helpless woman who is seduced by a man that will eventually betray her — was the most popular best-seller in American literature until Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published serially in 1851-1852.

In the meanwhile, literary culture in the United States grew in emulation of its established London and Edinburgh counterparts. This included the production of many small chapbooks, literary squibs and satires, countless small magazines and journals, all working to bolster a culture which comprised not largely of writers, but of critics, ‘bookmen and women’, and every other 15sort of human component required to generate and maintain a ‘scene’.

What this meant was that when a sensation such as Polidori’s The Vampyre hit New York, it almost immediately created not only pirated copies, but a small subculture cashing in on the phenomenon.

Enter The Black Vampyre — a short work with multiform intentions — a vampire story, yes, but also a literary pasquinade, and on top of that, a liberal political tract not only concerned with slavery, but one of several in a tradition which continues to this day, which likens humanity under capitalism, to a state akin to that of the undead.

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JUST like its progenitor, Polidori’s The Vampyre, The Black Vampyre opens with an extended quotation from Byron’s highly popular contemporary poem The Giaour. The earliest version of Byron’s poem was written between September 1812 and March 1813, and a version of 700 lines was published in June 1813. Several more editions were published before the end of 1813, each longer than the last, with the final edition running to 1,300 lines — almost twice as many as the version first published.

The Giaour is notable for several reasons and one of these is its inclusion of the theme of vampires and vampirism. The concept of the aristocratic and undead bloodsucker may be familiar to us now, but 200 years ago — it was fairly new. After telling how the poem’s 16hero, the eponymous giaour kills a harem master, the Ottoman narrator of Byron’s poem predicts that in punishment for his crime, the giaour will be condemned to become a vampire after his death and kill his own family by sucking their blood, to his own frightful torment as well as theirs.

Byron became acquainted with the concept of vampires while on his Grand Tour, and as well as kickstarting the cross-Atlantic vampire craze, the poem was an influence on the early work of Edgar Allan Poe, whose first major poem, Tamerlane, particularly emulates both the manner and style of The Giaour.

The quotation from The Giaour placed at the head of The Black Vampyre however represents something more — for it is as political as it is supernatural. This is because in Lord Byron’s poem the hero also takes up the cause of Greek independence, explicitly presenting the Greek situation through the metaphor of slavery.