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Octavo, contemporary quarter leather over marbled paper boards, hand-titled spine label "Byron's Tales"; marbled endpapers. Three works bound together: THE GIAOUR, Fifth Edition, With Considerable Additions, 1813; THE CORSAIR, 1st Edition, later issue, 1814; THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS, Third Edition, 1813. THE GIAOUR: [i-viii], [1], 2-66, half-title leaf intact; THE CORSAIR: [i]v], vi-xi, [xii:blank], [1], 2-100, half-title leaf intact; THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS: [1-iv], [1], 2-72, lacking half-title leaf. All titles bound without ads, & all titles were issued the same year as the first printings, THE CORSAIR is a later issue lacking the last four leaves which printed the poem "To A Lady Weeping", withdrawn because of the controversy the poem created on the very first day of publication of the first issue (although all issues of the first edition were available and issued to the public on the same day). Binding with overall general wear, chipping at spine head, front hinge cracked but holding; a very good copy. Fifth Edition, issued in early September 1813, comprising 1215 lines (the First Edition issued on the 5th of June 1813 consisted of only 684 lines). THE GIAOUR contains some of the earliest references to vampires in English Literature. Lord Byron alludes to the traditional folkloric conception of the vampire as a being damned to suck the blood and destroy the life of its nearest relations: But first, on earth as vampire sent, Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent: Then ghostly haunt thy native place, And suck the blood of all thy race; There from thy daughter, sister, wife, At midnight drain the stream of life; Yet loathe the banquet which perforce Must feed thy livid living corpse: Thy victims ere they yet expire Shall know thy demon for their sire, As cursing thee, thou cursing them, Thy flowers are withered on the stem. Wet with thine own best blood shall drip, Thy gnashing tooth and haggard lip; Then stalking to thy sullen grave - Go - and with Gouls and Afrits rave; Till these in horror shrink away From spectre more accursed than they! Byron's notes to these lines read here: "The Vampire superstition is still general in the Levant. Honest Tournefort tells a long story about these 'Vroucolachas', as he calls them. The Romaic term is 'Vardoulacha'. I recollect a whole family being terrified by the scream of a child, which they imagined must proceed from such a visitation. The Greeks never mention the word without horror. I find that 'Broucolokas' is an old legitimate Hellenic appellation the moderns, however, use the word I mention. The stories told in Hungary and Greece of these foul feeders are singular, and some of them most incredibly attested." and "The freshness of the face, and the wetness of the lip with blood, are the never-failing signs of a Vampire. The stories told in Hungary and Greece of these foul feeders are singular, and some of them most incredibly attested." One can see here Byron's interest in Vampires which would lead to the events in the rainy and dark summer days of June, 1816 at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, when Lord Byron, John Polidori, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin and Claire Clairmont (Mary's stepsister) turned to reading fantastical stories and then devising their own tales. Mary Godwin - soon to be Mary Shelley - wrote the first draft of what would become 'FRANKENSTEIN, or The Modern Prometheus'; Byron composed a fragmentary vampire story (later published as 'FRAGMENT OF A NOVEL') which inspired Polidori to write 'THE VAMPYRE'; the progenitor of the modern Romantic Vampire genre.
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