Varney the Vampire Illustrated

Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood is a Victorian era serialized gothic horror story variously attributed to James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest. It first appeared in 1845–1847 as a series of weekly cheap pamphlets of the kind then known as "penny dreadfuls". The author was paid by the typeset line[1] so when the story was published in book form in 1847, it was of epic length: the original edition ran to 876 double-columned pages [2] and 232 chapters.[3] Altogether it totals nearly 667,000 words.[4]

Despite its inconsistencies, Varney the Vampire is more or less a cohesive whole. It is the tale of the vampire Sir Francis Varney, and introduced many of the tropes present in vampire fiction recognizable to modern audiences.[5] It was the first story to refer to sharpened teeth for a vampire, noting “With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth