J. Harwood

In The Chaplet; an Elegant Literary Miscellany
London, J. Harwood, n.d. [1845].

First appearance. 8vo. Original sheepskin binding elaborately stamped in gilt and blind.

The first appearance of an anonymous vampire story that went unnoticed for nearly 180 years. It appeared once, in this London gift-book, and was never reprinted in the nineteenth century. The scholar Álvaro García Marín came across it in 2017. He presented it as a lost landmark of the genre in the Journal of Vampire Studies (2023) and made it the title story of his anthology The Vampire of Vourla and Other Greek Vampire Tales, 1819-1846 (Valancourt, 2024).

The story is a sailors' yarn, told aboard a British warship off Sicily by "Lawyer" Tom Gahan, a hard-drinking former lawyer's clerk turned marine, about his late master, Lieutenant Somers. García Marín argues that the story anticipates Dracula by half a century in several respects. The victim is lured to the vampire's isolated dwelling, silent servants ferry him there by night, and the victim wastes away while the doctors are baffled. Above all, the vampire appears to take the form of a bat and feeds at the neck. García Marín identifies this as the earliest known vampire-to-bat transformation in fiction, some forty years before the instance previously credited, in Karl May's In den Schluchten des Balkan (1885-86). The transformation is implied rather than shown, and is filtered through an unreliable, grog-fuddled narrator, which leaves the reader to make the connection between Heira and the bat - the work is also significant for being a rare early pre-Carmilla 19th-century depiction of an autonomous female vampire. The author has never been identified.

The Chaplet is undated. The plates in copies examined by García Marín carry imprint dates of 1 January 1845, and one is dated 1 November 1845. Anthony Hogg, however, has found the volume listed in the book trade as published between November and December 1844 ("Publication Date of 'The Vampire of Vourla'", Journal of Vampire Studies, 2023), so the first issue may date from late 1844.