Varney the Vampire first appeared in 1845-47 as a series of weekly cheap pamphlets of the kind then known as "penny dreadfuls". The story was published in book form in 1847. It is of epic length: the original edition ran to 876 double-columned pages and 232 chapters. Altogether it totals nearly 667,000 words. Despite its inconsistencies, Varney the Vampire is more or less a cohesive whole. It is the tale of the vampire Sir Francis Varney and introduced many of the tropes present in vampire fiction recognizable to modern audiences.