Varney

Varney is the central vampire of James Malcolm Rymer’s 1845 serial Varney the Vampire, one of the decisive figures in the formation of modern literary vampire mythology. He belongs to a transitional moment: older tales imagined life-sucking beings as ugly, demonic, or culturally specific predators, while Varney helped establish the recognizable modern vampire as a recurring, individualized character with sharpened teeth, a dramatic personal history, inner conflict, and a fate that can be understood as tragic rather than merely monstrous.

Identity and Literary Origins

Varney first appeared in 1845, when James Malcolm Rymer published the opening instalment of Varney the Vampire. The work is sometimes attributed jointly to Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest, but that co-authorship is presented as doubtful; the British Library lists Rymer alone as the author. Varney was issued in pamphlet form as a Penny Dreadful, a format shaped by commercial pressure as much as by narrative ambition. Because the author was paid by the line, the story expanded enormously: when collected as a single book in 1847, it exceeded 650,000 words, and modern reissues still run to more than 800 pages.

Varney’s importance lies partly in the specific features he brought together. The serial is identified as the first vampire story to introduce elements now familiar from modern depictions, including sharpened, fang-like teeth. Earlier traditions had certainly imagined revenants and blood-drinking creatures, but Varney helped turn those scattered motifs into a more coherent literary type: a nocturnal predator who could return across episodes, command attention as a named personality, and carry a sustained narrative rather than appear only as a local superstition.

The character also belongs to a longer history of stories that explained unexplained death through supernatural agency. Accounts of child mortality, tuberculosis, premature burial, blood around a corpse’s mouth, and unusual preservation after death could be converted into narratives of life being stolen by the dead. Varney’s literary form therefore stands at the point where inherited fears about the corpse and the returning dead were being reorganized into the more elegant and psychologically legible figure of the vampire.

Narrative Function and Gothic Inheritance

Varney’s story incorporates motifs from other influential works. One episode reanimates him through galvanism, apparently echoing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its association between electricity, scientific experimentation, and the boundary between life and death. The device places Varney within a Gothic tradition fascinated by bodies that are neither securely alive nor securely dead, while also showing how the expanding vampire genre borrowed freely from adjacent forms of horror.

His appearance in a long serial allowed the character to develop in ways unavailable to the brief revenant tales that preceded him. The repeated pamphlet structure encouraged accumulation: Varney could be placed in successive predicaments, display different aspects of his condition, and become more than the single act of attack that defined many traditional monsters. The serial’s vast length is not merely a publishing curiosity; it helped create the narrative space in which a vampire could acquire contradiction, history, and emotional recognizability.

Varney also helped prepare the way for later vampires who were not simply embodiments of evil. The book’s account of him emphasizes that he did not choose to become a creature of the night. His violence remains real, and his murderous tendencies are not erased, but the narrative repeatedly frames his existence as an imposed condition against which he struggles. That tension between predation and unwillingness became one of the genre’s most durable ways of making the monster compelling.

Inner Conflict and Moral Ambivalence

Across the epic fable, Varney becomes increasingly sympathetic despite the harm he causes. His defining conflict is between animal instinct and conscious resistance: he is driven toward killing, yet fights against the impulses that make him a vampire. This does not transform him into an innocent figure. Instead, it produces a morally divided character whose suffering cannot cancel the consequences of his actions, but whose actions cannot be reduced to uncomplicated appetite either.

That ambivalence marks a significant change in the vampire’s narrative role. The traditional life-sucking creature exists primarily as an explanation for loss or as an enemy to be expelled. Varney retains the threat of that older monster, but the story makes the vampire’s own condition part of the horror. The question is no longer only how the living can defeat the undead; it is also what it means for a sentient being to endure an existence organized around desires he cannot safely obey.

Varney’s sympathy is therefore produced through contradiction rather than redemption by declaration. He remains murderous, yet he resists his nature. He is a predator, yet he is also trapped by predation. The resulting figure anticipates later portrayals in which vampires become protagonists, antiheroes, or emotionally legible outsiders rather than exclusively antagonistic forces.

Ending and Escape from Immortality

Varney ultimately kills himself in order to escape his eternal fate. His suicide gives the serial’s sprawling adventures a terminal shape: immortality, often presented as the vampire’s power, becomes the condition from which he must be liberated. The ending treats endless existence not as an unquestioned gift but as a sentence, particularly when eternity requires repeated violence and the continual surrender of moral agency.

This conclusion also distinguishes Varney from the fantasy of the invulnerable vampire. He does not simply triumph through supernatural endurance, nor does the narrative leave his condition suspended indefinitely for future adventures. His final act is an attempt to end the cycle that links his continued existence to murderous compulsion. The character’s death thus functions as both escape and judgment: it acknowledges the horror of what he has become while granting significance to his desire not to remain that way forever.

Significance in Vampire Fiction

Varney occupies a crucial position between earlier folkloric creatures and the fully developed vampire characters of later nineteenth-century literature. Lamia could shift from bereaved mythic mother to child-killing demon and seductress; Astryiah belonged to a culturally specific tradition of a female vampire who drew blood through her hair; and the Vrykolakas combined features associated with the Werewolf and the vampire. Varney, by contrast, helped consolidate the genre around a named, recurring, fang-bearing figure whose psychology mattered as much as his supernatural appetite.

His influence is especially visible in the developments that followed. Carmilla, published in 1872, refined the image of the nocturnal vampire into an emotionally and physically predatory figure who slept by day and fed with increasing selectivity and elegance. Count Dracula, published in 1897, then presented the vampire as a fully rounded personality with deliberate plans and a moral character of his own. Varney did not create every later convention, but he helped make such elaboration possible by showing that a vampire could carry a long narrative, possess motives, resist himself, and reach a tragic ending.

The broader history of the vampire confirms the flexibility Varney helped establish. Later works have imagined vampires as beautiful or grotesque, erotic or comic, openly integrated into society or hidden within it, villains or sympathetic outsiders. Modern portrayals can make them almost anything the genre requires. Varney’s lasting contribution is the precedent for treating vampirism not only as a supernatural threat but as a condition imposed upon a character whose violence, resistance, and longing for release can all occupy the same story.