“The Poor Privilege of All”: Suicide in Varney the Vampire
G. V. Geer
Abstract
Varney the Vampire offers valuable insights into the popular press’s role in both reflecting and helping to shape the public’s changing attitudes toward suicide during the Victorian period. Varney models a secularized and compassionate approach to the topic of suicide. It harshly critiques superstitious beliefs around suicide, as well as practices such as the staking and crossroads burial of the bodies of those who had killed themselves (both were legally sanctioned penalties for the crime of suicide until the mid-nineteenth century). Furthermore, Varney offers what it sees as an ideal clerical response to suicide or suicidality: one of compassionate care rather than condemnation and exclusion. Varney insists that readers approach the fraught topic of suicide with compassion for human (and vampire) suffering, with respect for individual agency and choice in death, and with disdain for fear-driven prejudice and persecution of suicidal individuals. Its legacy lives on, as subsequent vampire texts have continued to approach the topic of suicide and self-harm in the compassionate spirit of Varney the Vampire.
Keywords
vampire; Varney the Vampire; suicide; self-harm; Victorian; penny dreadful
Date of Acceptance: 7 July 2025
Date of Publication: 10 July 2025
Double Blind Peer Reviewed
Recommended Citation:
Geer, G.V. 2025. “‘The Poor Privilege of All’: Suicide in Varney the Vampire.” Victorian Popular Fictions, 7.1: 53-66. ISSN: 2632-4253 (online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.46911/QMEY7006
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
