Long before modern medicine could name the invisible terrors ravaging Victorian Britain, the public found a face for contagion: the vampire.

A new exhibition at the University of Leeds’s Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery, Quite Shameless: Cultural Reflections on the Vampire, explores how this supernatural predator became a stand-in for the period’s deepest anxieties about disease, contagion and contaminated air. The exhibition brings together manuscripts, books, prints, medical objects and theatrical materials, including items from the Bram Stoker collection.

Throughout the 19th century, rapid industrialisation brought huge numbers of people into British cities, where poverty, overcrowding and fragile infrastructure triggered devastating outbreaks of disease. As such, people were deeply concerned with questions of health and sanitation. However, knowledge of germ theory was not fully established until the end of the century and, in the meantime, people believed disease was spread by bad smells known as “miasma”.

In the summer of 1838, London experienced a heatwave that resulted in the “great stink”. The Thames was heavily polluted with rotting food, human waste and corpses of humans and animals. As temperatures soared, the river levels fell, leaving its contents to bake in the sun. The resulting cholera and typhoid epidemics were attributed to the terrible smell........

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