Later, Flora's fiancé Charles Holland, his seafaring uncle Admiral Bell, and Bell's jovial assistant Jack Pringle also take residence with the Bannerworths. A family friend, Mr Marchdale, lives with the Bannerworths in early chapters. Initially the Bannerworths consist of Mrs Bannerworth and her adult children Henry, George, and Flora (George is never mentioned by name after the thirty-sixth chapter). The plot concerns the troubles that Sir Francis Varney inflicts upon the Bannerworths, a formerly wealthy family driven to ruin by their recently deceased father. Varney's adventures also occur in various locations including London, Bath, Winchester and Naples. While ostensibly set in the early eighteenth century, there are references to the Napoleonic Wars and other indicators that the story is contemporary to the time of its writing in the mid-nineteenth century. It was the first story to refer to sharpened teeth for a vampire, noting: "With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth".
It is the tale of the vampire Sir Francis Varney, and introduced many of the tropes present in vampire fiction recognizable to modern audiences. Altogether it totals nearly 667,000 words. The author was paid by the typeset line, so when the story was published in book form in 1847, it was of epic length: the original edition ran to 876 double-columned pages and 232 chapters.
It first appeared in 1845–1847 as a series of weekly cheap pamphlets of the kind then known as " penny dreadfuls". Varney the Vampire or, the Feast of Blood is a Victorian-era serialized gothic horror story variously attributed to James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest.
0 kommentar(er)
