I am John William Polidori. I was the son of Gaetano Polidori, a Tuscan man of letters and at one point secretary to the dramatist Vittorio Alfieri, who had emigrated to England where he married a Miss Pierce and settled in London as a teacher of Italian.
I was educated at Ampleforth College -- a Roman Catholic school -- and subsequently matriculated at the University of Edinburgh, where I studied medicine, writing a dissertation -- Dissertatio medica inauguralis, quaedam de morbo, oneirodynia dicto, complectens...-- on the highly romantic subject os sleep-walking and receiving my medical degree at the remarkably young age of 19. The next year, still not yet legally an adult, I accompanied Lord Byron on his excursion to Geneva. Byron dismissed me, on a professional basis, in September of 1816.
I left Switzerland for Italy in September 1816, where I traveled for nearly a year, returning to England the following spring, at which point I sought to practice medicine in Norwich. But I was unhappy in my profession and thought, instead, of turning to law. In the meantime, perhaps as my own response to the heady literary summer I had passed on the continent, I began a short, but productive literary career. My first works was an extension of my interest in psychology, "An essay on the source of positive pleasure". The following year came a volume of poems -- "Ximenes, the wreath; and other poems" -- the novel "Ernestus Berchtold", and the short story, "The Vampyre", which, unfortunately, was passed off as the production of Lord Byron when it was published in the New Monthly Magazine.
When I found the work being published under a separate imprint, I went to some lengths to claim the work as my own, but the scandal of imposture dogged me thereafter. My final work, "Sketches Illustrative of the Manners and Costumes of France, Switzerland, and Italy", was published in 1821 under the pseudonym of 'Richard Bridgens'. That August, as a result of contracting a gambling debt I could not honor, I committed suicide by drinking prussic acid. I was 25 years old at the time of my death.
I am also the uncle of Christina Georgina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Michael Rossetti. All three are well known for founding the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
This profile was made at Darkfaery Subculture Magazine
