Talk:John William Polidori

Copyright violation - what to do?
The original post of this article was almost entriely copied from the short biography from Polidori's alma matter Ampleforth College here. Unfortunately, much of this information remains. There is no copyright notice on Ampleforth's bio of Polidori and this is probably harmless. I discovered this trying to figure out what the phrase "being mid-wife to Frankenstein's monster" meant - and as you can see below the added language seperated the information about Polidori being a catylist for Mary Shelley's book; thus the phrase seems out of place now. It also explains the reference to "Prior" which has no context.

Below I have color coded the violation as: red indicates copyright language that is still in article; strike-out indicates copyright language removed over time; purple indicates language derived from the copyrighted language (possibly suspect); and black indicates language added by other editors that is not directly a derivative of the copyrighted language. I removed wikilinks from copied text and for non-existent articles.  John William Polidori (September 7, 1795 - August 24, 1821) is credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. John Polidori, the son of an Italian political émigré, 1 Polidori was the oldest son of Gaetano Polidori, an Italian political émigré, and Anna Maria Pierce, a governess. He had three brothers and four sisters.

He was one of the first students pupils at Ampleforth College. He began his schooling in 1804 shortly after the monks, in exile from France, settled in the lodge of Anne Fairfax's chaplain in the Ampleforth Valley. He went on from Ampleforth in 1810 to the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote a thesis on Sleepwalking and received his degree as a doctor of medicine on 1 August 1815 at the age of 19. qualified as a doctor, and in 1816 entered Lord Byron's service as his personal physician. 1

In 1816 Dr. Polidori entered Lord Byron's service as his personal physician, and accompanied Byron on a trip through Europe. At the Villa Diodati, a house Byron rented by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the pair met with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and her husband-to-be Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their companion Claire Clairmont. It was in this capacity that he was staying on the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1817; Byron's next door neighbours were the poet Shelley and his nineteen-year old wife Mary. 1

One night in June, after the company had read aloud from the Tales of the Dead, a collection of horror tales, Byron suggested that they each write a ghost story. Mary Shelley worked on a tale that would later evolve into Frankenstein. Byron wrote (and quickly abandoned) a fragment of a story, which Polidori used later as the basis for his own tale. It was a wet summer and to while away the time, Byron proposed that the party write ghost stories: the result was Frankenstein. Some of the medical and scientific ideas for Mary's novel were undoubtedly discussed with Polidori, though in her 1831 Introduction, she plays down the role of "poor Polidori". 1

Rather than use the crude, bestial vampire of folklore as a basis for his story, Polidori based his character on Byron. Polidori named the character "Lord Ruthven" as a joke. The name was originally used in Lady Caroline Lamb's novel Glenarvon, in which a thinly-disguised Byron figure was also named Lord Ruthven. Polidori had however produced his own story, The Vampire which was to play an influential part in the development of the vampire legend, culminating in Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Polidori's Lord Ruthven was not only the first vampire in English fiction, but was the first fictional vampire in the form we recognize today &mdash; an aristocratic fiend who preyed among high society.

Polidori's story, The Vampyre, was published in the April 1819 issue of New Monthly Magazine. Much to both his and Byron's chagrin, The Vampyre was released as a new work by Byron. Byron even released his own Fragment of a Novel in an attempt to clear up the mess, but, for better or worse, The Vampyre continued to be attributed to him.

Cruelly Dismissed by Byron, Polidori returned to England, and in 1820 wrote to the Prior at Ampleforth; his letter is lost, but Prior Burgess' reply makes it clear that he considered Polidori, with his scandalous literary acquaintances, an unsuitable case for the monastic profession.

In 1821, after writing an ambitious sacred poem, The Fall of the Angels, Polidori, suffering from depression, died in mysterious circumstances on August 24, 1821 at approximately 1:10 PM, probably by self-administered poison, though the coroner's verdict was that he had "departed this Life in a natural way by the visitation of God".

He was a talented but troubled young man with serious ambitions to be a writer, though his Polidori's fate has been to be remembered only as a footnote in Romantic history. He might be better known had his sister not destroyed the journals he had been

Reprints of the diary he keeping during his travels with Byron. kept during his travels with Byron are available, but are rather hard to find for purchase on the internet, and no etext version is yet available.

Polidori's diary, titled The Diary of John Polidori and edited by William Michael Rossetti, was first published in 1911 by Elkin Mathews (London). A reprint of this book, The diary of Dr. John William Polidori, 1816, relating to Byron, Shelley, etc was published by Folcroft Library Editions (Folcroft, Pa.) in 1975. Another reprint by the same title was printed by Norwood Editions (Norwood, Pa.) in 1978.

As well as being mid-wife to Frankenstein's monster, he was uncle to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti.

Here at Ampleforth we are proud of the literary associations he brought us and remember him in The Polidori Lecture, given each year on some aspects of the Romantic Movement.

Three films have depicted John Polidori and the genesis of the Frankenstein and Vampyre stories in 1816: Gothic directed by Ken Russell (1986), Haunted Summer directed by Ivan Passer (1988) and Remando al viento (English title: Rowing with the Wind) directed by Gonzalo Suárez (1988). He also appears as a minor and unsympathetic character in the Tim Powers horror novel The Stress of Her Regard (1989), in which Polidori does not write about vampires but becomes directly involved with them.


 * 1 Although some text appears derived - I did not mark it all purple since facts have only limited ways of being expressed. However, the overall structure follows that of the original text

Have re-edited article to remove copyvio and introduce new credits - hopefully a start to improving article, which still needs more work. --mervyn 08:12, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Thx - I didn't know enough about him to do it myself -- Trödel 13:04, 27 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Have added additional citations from Polidori's own journal, edited by his nephew. Cleaned up citations from 2009 edition of the journal. Added reference/citation to additional material from the memoirs of his nephew Dante Gabriel Rossetti, edited by William M Rossetti:

User:MunchkynMunchkyn (talk) 01:49, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Birthday
Polidori's birthday is given as 7 September in the first paragraph and 7 July underneath his picture. Which is correct?

Clouseau (talk) 21:36, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

The first or one of the first?
The introduction says 'The Vampyre' is 'one of the first' vampire stories in English. The Biography section says it's 'the first'. Which is correct? Tlhslobus (talk) 06:07, 1 November 2012 (UTC)
 * The truth is more blurry. There had been revenant style vampire stories for centuries, but Byron invented the idea of vampires living in society; he started a novel on the theme, but tired of writing in prose. Polidori copied the idea and plot from Byron, and wrote "The Vampyre" based on it; this was then published, and so became the first published modern vampire story. &#8209;&#8209; xensyria T 10:56, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Category: People with bipolar disorder
I have not read anything to suggest he had this. (From what I've read, he seems to have had depression without any manic states.) Does anyone know where this idea came from? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.76.111.244 (talk) 21:49, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

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