Fiction

This is a collection of Literary Exhibitions created in fall, 2023, by students of James Madison University through the course ENG329: Haunted Victorians. Included in this Anthology are five ghost stories from the long Victorian period: all have been annotated by the student editors, and all have an accompanying gallery of images and an interpretive introduction essay (a "Catalog") composed by the editorial teams. Please join us for some ghostly meditations and explorations! 

Varney the Vampyre, or, the Feast of Blood: A Romance (1845-7) is one of the longest-running and most successful Victorian penny fiction serials, popularly termed "penny bloods." Written primarily by James Malcolm Rymer, the creator of penny fiction villain Sweeney Todd, as one of the top writers at Edward Lloyd's Salisbury Square penny fiction factory, Varney is an innovative, wide-ranging contribution to nineteenth-century British vampire lore.