EDWARD STANTON'S
DREAMS OF THE DEAD
A Brief Commentary
Edward Stanton seems to be a strange, virtually unknown man who wrote a book back in 1890 that I found to be kind of fascinating. The book in question is Dreams of the Dead by Edward Stanton. The following quote is printed on the title page:
"To die--to sleep--
To sleep! perchance to dream,--Ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause."
Based on title alone, I think the book comes across as some type of science fiction/horror story, and incidentally, I found this book because it's listed in a bibliography of "Vampire Novels" in Melton's Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead (1994).
Old works written in English that make reference to vampires are not abundant. It is hard to come by original copies because most of these now obscure texts were written and published in the 1800s. There is plenty of folklore that goes back much earlier than that, but I'm specifically referring to what would be considered "fictional" works. For example: John Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819), Tieck's "Wake Not the Dead" (1823), several works published in languages other than English, and "The Mysterious Stranger" which was translated from German and published anonymously in 1860. Outside of these well-known works, there isn't much else.
The title Dreams of the Dead, the author's name, and the fact that I found the book listed in Melton's list all fascinated me, so I decided to go about acquiring a copy of this particular item.
Melton's bibliography of vampire novels seems to include a number of texts that simply mention the "vampire" in passing. Stanton's book is one such "novel," and I put the word "novel" in quotes because the book reads more like a confession of real-life events than a fictional story. A friend of Stanton's named Edward S. Huntington wrote the introduction to the book and had this to say about it:
When the manuscript of this story was placed on my desk, and my eyes caught the sombre title, "Dreams of the Dead," I could not resist a cold chill, lest the author had brought to light some very occult phases of his life, which I hoped were buried in the oblivion of healthful forgetfulness; but not many pages had been turned, before I perceived that all fears were groundless,--that my life-long companion had launched no bark on the stormy sea of morbid reminiscence, but that he was recounting some very peculiar events of a psychic experience.
I have to admit that all my life I have been fascinated by books, especially old books of significance, and I believe that books like this can have a kind of essence of their own. The older a book is, the more fascinating the story regarding it's very existence can become. This particular book is a well-worn copy that has led what looks like a long, hard life. The hard cover is bound with blue cloth, and it has the title and authors name in what is now tarnished gold lettering. The pages are very yellowed and more than half of them are no longer attached to the binding. It looks like the spine was repaired at one point, and this doesn't surprise me because the book appears to have spent a few years in a library. Inside the back cover, checkout stamps cover the years 1926-1931. I would like to know what library owned it, but there isn't anything that identifies a particular library. Throughout the book there are the typical indications of a much read text: dark splotches of a liquid splashed across some pages (I'm guessing someone spilled a drink while reading), dog-eared pages, crumbs wedged in the crease of the spine. All clear signs that the book has had its share of readers.
After reading more than half of it myself, I can tell you that it is an incredibly bizarre and insightful view into the possibilities of what exists beyond our physical comprehension in this world. The metaphysics described in the book are truly fascinating, and it is in this context that "The Vampire" is mentioned--in what I guess I find to be a very plausible and disturbingly intriguing manner. Compared to today's endless clichés of what is considered relevant to the vampire and vampirism, Stanton's very brief mention strikes me as unique. I suppose at the time maybe the author was less bound by the contemporary mythologies that affect authors who write on the subject today.
Stanton makes reference to the vampire in Chapter 3, and then again in a footnote later in the book. These are the only two occurrences in the entire text. I'm including a digital copy of the third chapter on The Vampire Compendium CD-Rom that I would like to actually finish editing someday. Reading the chapter separately from the rest of the book somewhat diminishes the sense of strange singularity one gets from reading the preceding and following chapters, but I figure someone else may be as interested in this as I have been. If you can't get a copy of the actual book, at least you can read the part where Stanton mentions the vampire. And maybe someday I'll digitize the rest of the book as well...
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