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Something of a footnote in the history of 18th and 19th century Gothic Romance writing, the Cumbrian poet John Stagg (1770-1823), has a reputation as one of the earliest British exponents of the vampire tale. Grammar-school educated in the village of Burgh-by-Sands,on Cumberland’s Solway Coast, Stagg was bound for a career in the church until a youthful accident led to him damaging his sight. Subsequently, Stagg found favour as a fiddle-player at Cumbrian ‘merry neets’, was employed as a librarian, and pursued a literary career as ‘the Blin’ Bard’, as he was known in the Cumbrian vernacular. In 1810, having already produced some volumes of verse, but cognisant of what, in a‘Prefatory Apology’, he disapprovingly termed ‘romance mania’, Stagg determined to bow topublic taste, by publishing The Minstrel of the North; or, Cumbrian Legends; being a poetical miscellany of legendary, Gothic, and romantic tales. One verse-tale, ‘The Vampyre’, has an implicit homoerotic subtext; the creature described has an aversion to light, and is destroyed by being impaled with a stake, themes associated with later and more influential vampire stories. Coleridge’s unfinished narrative ballad Christabel, would not appear until 1816, and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, seen as establishing the genre’s abiding tropes, first appeared in1819. My talk, drawing upon Stagg’s published works, and the research of local historian John Dench, who challenges many of the facts in Stagg’s admittedly sketchy biography, will show how the poet, despite his misgivings, came to embrace and enlarge Gothic Romance writing.
