When looking at vampire literature it is common to go back to 1819 and Polidori’s the Vampyre but, whilst this is recognised as the first English language prose, there were English poems and prose in other languages before it. This short excerpt from Louis-Sébastien Mercier has been identified by Blackcoat Press as coming from his 1768 volume Songes Philosophiques and has been translated by the late, great Brian Stableford. It doesn’t mention the word vampire and is a dream sequence (brought on by consumption of black pudding). However, we can recognise some aspects that would be identified as a vampire in years to come (in this case living vampires).
The narrator recalls a dream of a strange land run by a chief known as a Sansudourph, ruling over lesser chiefs called Sansuminadourphs. They all subsist on human blood, though the Sansudourph may drink it pure, whilst the others must mix it with goat’s blood. The populace is taxed both for blood and the sweat off their brows. The dream sequence takes in a scene where a child is brought as tribute and the Sansudourph drinks straight from her body through a siphon. Following this her heart is removed, but the executioner (who removed it) was obliged to make her live again. This act is left hanging, unseen and unsolved, as the dream moves on.
The narrator then visits a family who, due to illness, had not paid their blood tithe for some time. The tax was loaned by their Sansuminadourph draining a slave, instead of the father, and they were obliged to pay the debt. Unfortunately, as the father was dying they took the rent from all his children, leaving one to “perpetuate the race and the rent of blood.”
The dream then ends but we get the idea of blood farming in the general narrative and, whilst the v word is absent, the Sansudourph is surely a living vampire. I have linked the volume I have seen this in. It is only a few pages but there are may other good bits of 19th and early 20th century literature in the volume.
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