ABSTRACT
In Sir Francis Varney and Fernand Wagner, James Malcolm Rymer and George William MacArthur Reynolds relentlessly ask their readers to recognize dangerous literary excesses even as they enjoy them. In 1845, Rymer tackled this popular masculine type in his wildly successful Edward Lloyd’s serial Varney, the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood. As Rymer exploits the Byronic vampire in his serial, he also instructively lampoons it and highlights its ugly violence. Rymer’s Varney clearly derives from John Polidori’s Ruthven, most notably in his ability to be revived by moonlight and in his remarkably captivating speechifying. Rymer and Reynolds, like Sir Walter Scott before them, suggest the romance as a crucial mode through which history can be more clearly seen and assessed. By literalizing the gruesome dangers of powerful Romantic mainstays as Byronic masculinity and the solitary Romantic genius—figuring them explicitly as bloodthirsty drains on society—Rymer and Reynolds attempt a quixotic rewriting of history.
