Before the Count offers a corrective to the history of the literary vampire presenting a collection of other vampire tales written before Dracula. Some of the poems, plays, and stories included here are indeed melodramatic and perhaps even histrionic, but they offer important insight into the development of the vampire mythos in England from its literary beginning until the publication of Bram Stoker's novel. In so doing, it offers both scholars and students the opportunity to study the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary vampire in a more complete context. Included in this edition are excerpts from the early British newspaper accounts of vampires, the English translation of Dom Augustin Calment's book, and Lord Byron's "Fragment" in order to illustrate the genesis of John Polidori's The Vampyre a well as J. R. Planché's 1820 revision of the French play Le Vampire by Peirre Carmouche, Charles Nodier, and Achilles de Jouffroy, itself a revision of Polidori's story; Johann Wolfgang Goethe's The Bride of Corinth, Dion Boucicault's The Phantom, George Blink's The Vampire Bride and Rudyard Kipling's The Vampire.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very curious collection...,
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This review is from: Before the Count: British Vampire Tales, 1732-1897 (Paperback)
It's a very curious collection: containing articles published in British magazines, I think it was two short stories, a few plays and two poems. More diverse in material type than I had expected. Typical was the inclusion of Polidori's "The Vampyre," noticiably absent was Cooleridge's poem "Christabel." With the book's wonderful diversity in material type, I was disappointed that "Christabel" wasn't included. However, the plays are very melodramatic and a pleasure to read, and I'm glad it didn't just reprint everything that was already present in other collections.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Extremely weak collection, very short, very few "tales",
By The Shrink "kungfuman" (atlanta GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Before the Count: British Vampire Tales, 1732-1897 (Paperback)
A warning to fans of gothic-era vampire literature. This is a very small, thin book. A major portion of the book is consumed, first, by a long introduction, and second, by a historical catalog of the short lived vampire panic in England. While historically interesting, I do not feel that articles on the vampire panic qualify as "tales". The rest of the book is dedicated to fragments of plays and poems which feature vampires in them. So, if you are looking for a compilation of vampire short stories or novellas from 1700's to 1800's, you should keep looking. However, if you have scraped the bottom of the barrel of all existing vampire fiction from that era or if you have an academic interest you may find a few things of interest here.
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