ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the sudden incursion of vampires into Western European culture in the eighteenth century and the even more sudden appearance of the vampire as an important and very specific character type in popular melodrama. For whatever reason, a vampire mania gripped the West, particularly the French. In response to the translation and wide distribution of the Fluckinger report, English journalists, poets, and pamphleteers, including Charles Forman, Oliver Goldsmith, and Robert Burns, would add fuel to a growing British preoccupation with vampires. Lamb's Clarence de Ruthven is not a vampire, as such – at the time, vampires were known only as unquiet dead who spread death and disease – but he is a diabolical manipulator who uses an almost supernatural seductive power to leach emotional energy from his victims. Alexandre Dumas reports in his memoirs that he met Charles Nodier in 1823 at a performance of Le Vampire, which Dumas loved.
