John William Polidori
John William Polidori (7 September 1795-24 August 1821) was the son of
Gaetano Polidori, a Tuscan man of letters and at one point
secretary to the dramatist Vittorio Alfieri, who had
emigrated to England where he married a Miss Pierce and settled
in London as a teacher of Italian. John was educated at
Ampleforth, Yorkshire -- a Roman Catholic school -- and
subsequently matriculated at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied
medicine, writing a dissertation -- Dissertatio medica
inauguralis, quaedam de morbo, oneirodynia dicto,
complectens . . . -- on the highly romantic
subject of sleep-walking and receiving his medical degree at the
remarkably young age of 19. The next year, still not yet legally
an adult, he accompanied Lord
Byron on his excursion to Geneva. That Byron quickly
tired of his protege's immaturity is well known, but Polidori
was, indeed, quite young and inexperienced to be in such company.
Polidori left Switzerland for Italy in September 1816, where he traveled for
nearly a year, returning to England the following spring, at which point
he sought to practice medicine in Norwich. But he was unhappy in his
profession and thought, instead, of turning to law. In the meantime,
perhaps as his own response to the heady literary summer he had passed on the
continent, he began a short, but productive literary career. His first
work was an extension of his interest in psychology, An essay on the
source of positive pleasure (1818). The following year came a
volume of poems -- Ximenes, the wreath: and other poems -- the
novel Ernestus Berchtold, and the short story, "The Vampyre,"
which, unfortunately, was passed off as the production of Lord Byron when
it was published in the New Monthly Magazine. When he found the
work being published under a separate imprint, Polidori went to some
lengths to claim the work as his own, but the scandal of imposture dogged
him thereafter. His final work, Sketches Illustrative of the Manners
and Costumes of France, Switzerland, and Italy, was published in
1821
under the pseudonym of Richard Bridgens. That August, purportedly as the
result of contracting a gambling debt he could not honor, he committed
suicide by drinking prussic acid. He was 25 years old.
