The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo

By Uriah Derick D'Arcy

WARNING! Contains moderate bloody violence against slavers and plantation owners!This pioneer vampire tale from 1819 spills revenge-cold blood as its narrator leads us through high gothic terror to radical outrage on the subject of slavery, reaching a blood-soaked conclusion dripping with 'biting' polemic vilifying the bankers who caused the economic recession of that same year.An anti-capitalist horror fable from 200 years ago, The Black Vampyre vilified the worst financial predation the capitalist world would ever see, decades before Karl Marx ― the enslavement of Africans in the New World.One dead man said no! And this is his story.The Black Vampyre; A Legend of St. Domingo tells the affrighting tale of a slave who is resurrected as a vampire after being killed by his owner; the slave seeks revenge by stealing the owner's son and marrying the owner's wife. The anonymous writer D'Arcy sets the story against the conditions that led to the Haitian Revolution.First published in chapbook form in New York in 1819, this emancipatory tale from literary New York in the 1810s arguably dates the birth of horror as know it!This edition features a new introduction as well as extensive notes and a guide to literary allusions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gothic World Literature Editions
• Release date: Oct 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781914090066

Book preview

CONTENTS

Title Page

Epigraph

On the Spectacle and History of the Black Vampyre

A Note on the Text

Dedication To the Author of ‘Wall-Street’

Introduction

The Black Vampyre

Moral

Vampyrism; A Poem

Note from The Evening Post, August 14th, 1819

Literary Allusions in The Black Vampyre

Encyclopedia Entry for The Black Vampyre

References

Copyright

Our bodies shall burst from their fetters, glorious as a curculio from its shell; — our minds shall soar like the car of the aeronaut, when its ligaments are cut; in a word O my brethren, we shall be free! — Our fetters discandied, and our chains dissolved, we shall stand liberated, — redeemed, — emancipated, — and disenthralled by the irresistible genius of UNIVERSAL EMANCIPATION!!!

On the Spectacle and History of The Black Vampyre

by Panton Plasma PhD, PG Horr.

Welcome to the unchristian, erotic, anti-capitalist, lampooning, world of The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo.

Should you be trying to place that mysterious land of St Domingo on the map or in your mind, know this; the name ‘St. Domingo’ was even in 1819 a historical relic. Saint-Domingue was a former French colony on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, and had from 1804 been called by its historical and indigenous name — Haiti.

In 1791, enslaved Africans and some free people of colour in Saint-Domingue had taken part in the Vodou ceremony, Bois Caïman — and with it they planned a rebellion. This pushback against the French authority saw the abolition of slavery in the colony in 1793, and continued in various other forms and actions for a decade. Prominent during these revolts and actively engaged in the fight until his death in 1803, was the heroic figure of François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture. General Louverture, ‘the father of Haiti’ as he came to be known, is not mentioned at all in The Black Vampyre — though his rampaging and victorious figure remains perhaps uneasily in the background. The last French troops withdrew from the western portion of the island in late 1803, months after Toussaint Louverture, the inaugural President of Haiti had died — and the colony declared its independence as Haiti, the following year.

For reasons of their own, however, even the liberal New York press and the literati of the city — one of whom was the anonymous author of the book you now hold — insisted on calling Haiti by its old name, right into the 1820s. At least in the case of The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo, the use of the name of the former colony and the indigenous home of the Taíno people, adds a certain antique feel.

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FEW of the best-loved and popular novels of 1819 may still be enjoyed today. If that era belonged to anybody at all, it must have been Sir Walter Scott. 1819 alone saw the publication of Scott’s Ivanhoe, The Bride of Lammermoor and The Legend of Montrose; three voluminous prose works, indicative of the furious work rate of the poet, novelist and historian whose day job was as the Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire.

Novels of course were almost always serialised at this time, and were available alongside other popular print forms — ‘popular’ referring to volume of readership. These were shorter works; long-form poems, political journalism, short story and scandal sheets; and there was also at this time a huge magazine culutre which was growing fast and would reach its zenith in the coming decades, bringing fame — and even fortune — to some of America’s new literary talent.

The fortune was of course harder to come by. Edgar Allan Poe, who was 10 years old in 1819 when The Black Vampyre was published, was one of the first Americans to live by writing alone; but he, like every other writer at the time was hampered by the lack of an international copyright law, which meant that American publishers often made their money by producing unauthorised copies of British works rather than paying for new work by American writers.

One such early British ‘hit’ in North America was a poem called The Giaour (1813) by Lord Byron, and in it, we find some of the very earliest literary intimations upon and remarks concerning the figure of the vampire.

However — literary vampirism began in earnest on the year in question, 1819, when in April, in London The New Monthly Magazine published John Polidori’s Gothic fiction piece The Vampyre — the first significant piece of prose vampire literature in English. Polidori attributed the piece to Lord Byron (who partly inspired it) and it was first published in book form later in the same year.

Publishing in the United States in 1819 was a haphazard concern, to say the least. The Copyright Act of 1790 specifically noted that the law did not prohibit copying the works of foreign authors, an issue which had a significant effect on the nascent world of American letters. For readers, this meant plentiful editions of all their favourite British and European writers — and Byron was enormously popular in 1819 — and for publishers, it sometimes meant there was little incentive to publish homegrown talent.

Not that America was short of homegrown talent. In fact, sensational violence and Gothic ambience were already very much alive within the popular reading mind thanks