Author: Polidori, John William
Biography:
POLIDORI, John William (1795-1821: ODNB)
The second of eight children of the Italian immigrant writer and translator Gaetano Fedele Polidori and his English wife Anna Maria Pierce, who had married at St. Anne’s, Soho, on 2 Feb. 1793, he was born in London on 7 Sept. 1795 and baptised at St. George’s, Hanover Square, on 17 Nov. He attended the recently founded Roman Catholic Ampleforth College (1804-11) and went from there to the University of Edinburgh for the MD degree (1815). He was thus still very young when he was appointed personal physician to Lord Byron (q.v.) early in 1816 and travelled with him to the Villa Diodati at Geneva, where the party spent the summer along with their close neighbours Percy Shelley (q.v.), Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Claire Clairmont. Polidori kept a diary irregularly from Apr. to Dec. that year; it was published from an expurgated transcription in 1911 and constitutes the only eye-witness record of the story-telling contest that produced Frankenstein and Polidori’s Vampyre (fraudulently attributed to Byron when it was published in 1819). Byron dismissed Polidori in Sept. 1816. He travelled for a time in Italy serving occasionally as physician to British visitors. On his return to England in 1817 he set up practice in Norwich with the help of a friend from his Edinburgh days, William Taylor (1765-1836), and resumed his literary work. He published periodical essays and revised a tragedy that he had written at Edinburgh as Ximenes, The Wreath, and Other Poems in 1819, the same year in which his two gothic fictions Ernestus Berchtold and The Vampyre appeared. The last work to appear was a Miltonic but not orthodox Fall of the Angels published anonymously in 1821. Polidori, who never married, was contemplating a change of career from medicine and literature to law in 1821 when he was found dying at his father’s house in Great Pulteney St., London, on 24 Aug. A coroner’s inquest ruled that it had been a “natural death” and although suicide has always been suspected it is by no means a certainty. He was buried on 29 Aug. in Old St. Pancras churchyard. A second edition of his final work appeared later that year with an appendix giving the family’s version of the circumstances of his death. (ODNB 28 Oct. 2023; ancestry.com 28 Oct. 2023; Henry R. Viets, British Medical Journal 30 Dec. 1961, 1773-5)
Other Names:
- J. W. Polidori