Vampires and resurrection men: the perils and pleasures of the embodied past in 1840s sensational fiction
Hackenberg, S.
Victorian Studies 52(1): 63-75
2009
ISSN/ISBN: 0741-6245 PMID: 20533609 Document Number: 633730
This essay examines embodied representations of the past in two of the most popular penny serials of the 1840s, G.W.M. Reynolds's "The Mysteries of London" and James Malcolm Rymer's "Varney the Vampyre; or, The Feast of Blood." The cadaverous "Resurrection man" of "The Mysteries" and Sir Francis Varney the Vampire -- both villains figured as irrepressible, resurrected corpses -- corporealize the inescapable return of personal and political history. Functioning as shadowy doubles of their serials' virtuous heroes, these corpse-villains trouble melodramatic distinctions between virtue and vice, and their own deeply contradictory histories disrupt their novels' engagements with historical presence and historical agency.