BYRONIC HERO—willful, superior, misanthropic, aristocratic antihero: Victor is an exemplar; also includes the first literary vampires, which arose out of the same ghost story contest that inspired Frankenstein.
The Byronic Hero is a gloomy, brilliant antihero. Mary Shelley’s friend Lord Byron is the most famous model for the figure in his day (unless it was Napoleon); Victor Frankenstein is perhaps the most famous iteration in our own time (unless it’s Batman). The figure is embodied in Gothic villains from Manfred in The Castle of Otranto (1764) forward to Byron’s own play, Manfred (1817), and beyond. Sublime in his far-darting intellect and willed achievement, the figure appears in many of Byron’s extremely popular narrative poems, such as Don Juan (1818-1824) or “The Corsair” (1814). Drawing directly on contradictions in the original source–Lord Byron himself–both Victor and the Creature are Byronic Heroes, making Shelley’s novel a complex and intense interrogation of the figure.
The first vampire stories in English literature are inspired by the same “ghost story contest” that propelled Mary Shelley’s invention of Victor and his Creature. Notably, the vampire, too, is modeled on Byron, who instigated the contest. Lord Byron’s confessional (and then unpublished) fragment from the contest inspired John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), which was published under Byron’s byline, angering both authors. In frustration, Byron subsequently published his “Fragment” (1819) from the contest. Both stories, and the controversy, increased the fame of a monster new to Western Europe, leading, of course, to Dracula at the end of the 19th century. Vampires have had a range of versions since, some which diverge widely from the Byronic source material. But Dracula’s aristocratic bearing attests to the influence of the Byronic on the vampiric in English literature. The link between the vampire and Victor Frankenstein remains intense and vital.
References:
For more on monstrousness and class in Frankenstein, see RACE and POLITICAL.
See http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/vampires
For Byronic Heroes in sf, see Antihero: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/antiheroes
See also the strong, brief Norton Anthology description of the figure:
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_5/welcome.htm