the course of the book, Varney is presented with increasing sympathy as a victim of circumstances. He tries to save himself, but is unable to do so. He ultimately commits suicide by throwing himself into Mount Vesuvius, after having left a written account of his origin with a sympathetic priest. According to Varney, he was cursed with vampirism after he betrayed a royalist to Oliver Cromwell, and subsequently killed his own son accidentally in a fit of anger. He "dies" and is revived several times in the course of his career. This afforded the author a variety of origin stories. In one of these, a medical student named Dr. Chillingworth applies galvanism to Varney's hanged corpse and revives him. This sub-plot parallels the earlier story of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and film adaptations which introduce electricity as Dr. Frankenstein's means of creating the monster. Legacy Scholars including A. Asbjørn Jøn have suggested that Varney was a major influence on later vampire fiction, including Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker. Many of today's standard vampire tropes originated in Varney: Varney has fangs, leaves two puncture wounds on the necks of his victims, comes through a window to attack a sleeping maiden, has hypnotic powers, and has superhuman strength. Unlike later fictional vampires, he is able to go about in daylight and has no particular fear of either crosses or garlic. He can eat and drink in human fashion as a form of disguise, but he points out that human food and drink do not agree with him. This is also the first example of the "sympathetic vampire", a vampire who despises his condition but is nonetheless a slave to it. In popular culture The makers of Marvel Comics were influenced by this story. In the Marvel Universe, "Varnae" is the name of the first vampire, created by the people of Atlantis before it sank. In the sixth episode of the TV series Penny Dreadful (2014), Abraham Van Helsing gives a copy of Varney the Vampire to Victor Frankenstein, explaining that the story is more truth than fiction and that the mysterious creature the series' characters are pursuing is a vampire. Varney is one of the main characters in Strange Practice (2017) and its sequels by Vivian Shaw. The 2017 film The Man Who Invented Christmas shows Charles Dickens reading it at the time that he was developing the supernatural elements of his