Long before Buffy, long before Dark Shadows, and even before Dracula, there was Varney the Vampyre. In the absence of television, radio and film, the cheapest of cheap paperbacks, the penny dreadful, provided mass culture with this icon of evil and delicious, shuddering horror. In the mid-19th Century, this was as exciting as literature got. Varney ran into three serials, and a reprinted novel of over 200 chapters. Sir Francis Varney, accursed and repentant aristocratic vampire, joined fellow pop-culture characters Sweeney Todd and Spring-Heeled Jack as imaginative fodder for young and old alike, raising questions in the minds of elitists and reformers as to the advisability of the newly widespread literacy.
