This article explores the evolution of Victorian vampires alongside the metaphorical notion of texts consuming their predecessors. Looking at James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it argues that later vampires were created through the consumption of earlier conventions, thus offering a unique contribution to scholarship by focusing on the rules of vampirism.

Read Playing Vampire Games: Rules and Play in Varney the Vampire and Dracula

This essay examines the bestselling popular novelist James Malcolm Rymer’s engagement with the idea of vegetarianism, a dietary system that in the 1840s was garnering unprecedented interest as an ideology, a community-shaping practice, and an ethos. Firstly, Rymer was surely aware of the vegetarian movement. Secondly, Rymer’s two most famous and enduring penny fiction serials, Varney, the Vampyre (1845-6) and The String of Pearls (1846-7) demonstrate an interest in dietary preference as ethics by representing their monsters as vegetarian-like vampires. In Varney, the eponymous vampyre appears a model of dietary restraint and of toleration for the different dietary ethics of others, but he consumes human bodies in a different way: on the marriage market. In Rymer’s two masterworks of penny fiction, vegetarian ethics as filtered through the vampire tradition produces a social critique of Britain’s human economy.

Read ‘And then we be cannibals … or vampires’: From Vampires to Vegetarianism in J.M. Rymer’s Penny Bloods