Tracking the vampire through art, culture, science and folklore in a new Leeds exhibition

Drawing on the University of Leeds’ rich collections, a new exhibition follows the bloody trail of the vampire through artistic movements and cultural moments from ancient times to the present, reflecting the terrors and obsessions of each age that summons it. Opening in Treasures of the Brotherton on Tuesday 27 October, Quite Shameless: Cultural Reflections on the Vampire features handwritten manuscripts and first editions of Gothic literature, but also looks to ancient folklore, science, medicine, theatre and contemporary cultural anxieties to piece together a picture of a truly immortal fiend.

In a celebrated letter written after the publication of Dracula, Bram Stoker jokes, “Lord forgive me, I am now quite shameless!” This and other unique items from Leeds’ impressive holdings of Stoker correspondence and manuscripts pinpoint the zenith of the literary vampire. The author’s expansive fund of inspiration is seen in source material ranging from books on Hungary and Transylvania to Sabine Baring-Gould’s 1865 Book of Were-Wolves, documenting canine teeth, pointed nails, transformations, wolves and eerie blue flames. Animal skulls from the University of Leeds School of Dentistry Museum show further sources for the vampire’s most distinctive attribute.

Telegrams, railway timetables and wax phonograph cylinders represent the modern technology folded into, and often driving, the plot of Dracula; and books on mesmerism and a collection of Victorian pocket watches show the influence of the craze on his psychic domination of his victims.

Lesser-known works on show from the decadent era show the ascent of the vampire in connection with queerness and forbidden attraction, appearing in increasingly sensationalist stories – and lurid artwork and bindings. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 Carmilla introduced readers to a seductive female vampire who continues to be a transgressive touchstone, and it’s presented here with the original letter in which Le Fanu coined the phrase ‘a pleasing terror’.

Playbills, photographs and scrapbooks from Hamilton Deane’s play, which arrived at Leeds Grand Theatre in 1927, pursue Dracula in his successful transition to the stage; and costume and set designs from the Northern Ballet archive document the company’s triumphant 1996 production.

Reaching further back, Quite Shameless finds the shadow of the vampire lurking in Leeds’ collections of literature and folklore long before Dracula set sail for Whitby. Byron’s unfinished Fragment of a Novel is often thought to mark the birth of the literary vampire; its original manuscript, presumed to be the poet’s contribution to the infamous ghost story writing competition at the Villa Diodati in 1816, is one of the exhibition’s greatest treasures.

That stormy night on the shores of Lake Geneva is also invoked by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel, which the Romantic gathering read as part of their inspiration for the contest. Apparently it caused Percy Bysshe Shelley to retire for an early night ‘with cold drops of perspiration trickling down his face’. Luckily his young wife-to-be Mary was made of sterner stuff: her entry to the competition was the germ of Frankenstein, which loosed another unforgettable monster from its pages into literary, then popular culture. Visitors can see a signed edition of the novel, as well as a manuscript for Byron’s poem Mazeppa, with its related themes of pain, cruelty and melancholy, written in Mary’s hand.

Yet another influential text with its origins in that night, Polidori’s The Vampyre turns Byron’s Fragment into a modern tale of desire, secrecy and social ruin. Byron’s role in shaping the vampire as a seductive, aristocratic figure is examined through the first edition of the story, its dark, beguiling Lord Ruthven a thinly-veiled portrait of the ‘mad, bad and dangerous-to-know’ poet. Letters from his wife and his daughter Ada Lovelace, and a series of printed portraits, crystallise the ‘Byronic’ image.

Closer to home, the exhibition considers the vampire in Yorkshire, where stories emerge from the pages of ancient manuscripts – and from the soil itself, with gruesome finds from an archaeological dig at Wharram Percy providing evidence of medieval fears of the dead walking again.

Plucked from the University’s remarkable collections of medieval manuscripts, terrifying animated skeletons and corpses show a longstanding fascination with the returning dead, while the social commentary of the danse macabre moves to a changing tune down the centuries. Byland Abbey is the source of some gory medieval revenant stories, discovered and transcribed by M.R. James; and William of Newburgh’s testimonies of corpses returning from graves, troubling households, spreading fear and requiring ritual remedies, show the vampire emerging from documentary, not fiction.

It continues to haunt reality in 19th-century illustrations of cholera epidemics and London’s “Great Stink”. The preoccupations with mortality, and morality, that pressed so keenly on the Victorians find ravishingly beautiful expression in one of John Bingley Garland’s ‘Blood’ découpages from the mid-19th century. Part of the merchant-politician’s bizarre wedding gift to his daughter, collaged fragments of handwriting and William Blake prints are overlaid with painted drips of blood and Gothic ornamentation in an intense vision of sacrifice, redemption and purification.

Reading vampires beside histories of health shows how societies give disease a face, and how those faces can frighten and exclude. The Victorian spectre of the perverse and deadly vampire rises again in a moral panic of infection and deviant desire during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, which activist materials from Feminist Archive North sought to combat.

Exhibitions Curator (Cultural Collections) Dr RJ Wade comments:

“This exhibition is the result of an exciting exchange of ideas, bringing together material from 14 different subject collections in collaboration with 14 stakeholders. Their expertise spans digital humanities, folklore, classics, film and East Asian studies, inclusive learning, local history, events programming and goth culture. Together, we have quite shamelessly created an exhibition that is unmistakably rooted in Leeds, drawing on collections of international significance.”

Literary Archivist and co-curator Sarah Prescott comments:

“The vampire is unlike other monsters: it frightens and fascinates us. This exhibition explores how this came to be through some of the exceptional letters, manuscripts and books in our collections.

“As we’ve worked on Quite Shameless, we’ve discovered just how long stories of the returning dead have captured imaginations, and how the figure of the vampire has been used to reflect society’s fears, anxieties and hidden desires.

“We hope the exhibition has something for the enthusiast and newcomer alike – and anyone who can understand the ‘pleasing terror’ of a scary story.”

One of the stakeholders, Dr Emily Middleton from the School of English at the University of Leeds, has been supporting a volunteer research project on the Bram Stoker letters in Cultural Collections ahead of the exhibition: “Very few of Stoker’s letters ever mentioned Dracula, but recently students and volunteers working with Cultural Collections have found at least seventeen letters written to Stoker by friends who read the book, from the wife of the Bishop of Ripon who saw it as a ‘painfully, hideously true’ allegory of sin, to former Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone who congratulated Stoker on its success.

“Within the 3000 letters we have in the collection of Stoker’s correspondence, we are beginning to uncover an author who was deeply rooted in political, theatrical and literary circles, and future research will map the extent of Stoker’s networks, showing how his social life intersected with his most famous work’s interest in social issues, modern technology, and the literary history of the vampire.”

Quite Shameless: Cultural Reflections on the Vampire runs in Treasures of the Brotherton in the Parkinson Building, University of Leeds, from Tuesday 27 October 2026 – Saturday 29 May 2027. Admission is free and open to all, with no booking required, and the gallery is open from 10am – 5pm, Tuesday – Saturday. All are welcome to attend the opening event from 5.30pm on Tuesday 27 October.

Main image: Credit Daily Sketch photograph reproduced by permission of the Dracula Society, courtesy of The City of Westminster Archives Centre