Was there even a concept of vampire in Western Europe at this time? Or was it a mostly an Eastern European thing (or even a well-known concept anywhere in Europe)?
I'm also sure that Dracula popularized a specific image of a vampire, so if the concept predates Dracula, how would a pre-Dracula vampire have been described?
There was no colour upon her cheek, not even upon her lip; yet there was a stillness about her face that seemed almost as attaching as the life that once dwelt there:—upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein:—to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, "A Vampyre! a Vampyre!"
While Bram Stoker's 1897 masterpiece was very influential, there were already vampire tales in English before Dracula, and early reviews of sometimes contain hints of the earlier stories. Although there was room for a bit of confusion:
Were-wolf, Lycanthrope, Loup-garou--the name was familiar enough in Europe some centuries ago. The idea that a man can turn himself into a wolf begins early in recorded literature; we remember the story of Lycaon in Ovid's Metamorphoses and the noted wizard Moeris in Virgil's Ecologues, who by the aid of Pontic poisons hid himself in the woods, and could bring the ghosts of dead men from their sepulchres. What has Mr. Bram Stoker been reading? Has he got hold of Richard Verstegan, who ells us in 1605 that it was a common thing in England for certain savage men to change at night time into wolves, and traverse the country seeking whom they could devour? Or is his authority Mr. Baring-Gould, who, in 1865, published The Book of Were-Wolves, together with every kind of rationalistic and perhaps not very convincing explanation that some specimens of the human race were born with a thirst for human blood? I seem also to remember that Mr. G. W. M. Reynolds, who posed as a Chartist some twenty or thirty years ago, and varied the task of founding Reynold's Newspaper by addressing a crowd of homeless vagabonds on the iniquities of the income-tax, wrote a London Journal story on the were-wolf. At all events, history tells us that late in the sixteenth century a man called Gilles Garnier was arrested at Dôle, in France, on the charge of being a man-wolf, and that one of the means whereby human creatures could thus metamorphose themselves was a girdle of wolf-skin which they clasped around their loins. naturally enough, however, the superstition was only prevalent so long as wolves themselves existed in various countries. In England, for instance, James I can tell us in his Demonologie that the old legend is an absurd one, while as a matter of fact, it is not the wolf but the black cat, as a more familiar animal, which serves in our own country as the mystic instrument of witch-like juggleries.
General readers, however, would be more familiar with the vampire as presented in Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood (1845-1847), a popular penny-dreadful, or J. Sheridan le Fanu's Carmilla (1872). The first black vampire appeared in The Black Vampyre; A Legend of St. Domingo (1819), not long after Polidori's Lord Ruthven took the stage.
Of course, these figures vary widely in appearance, origin, and habits; and were informed by centuries of folklore (some of which was conveniently being compiled and presented to the populace in printed form, which aided codification). Many of the specific visual attributes of Dracula were not set until the stage play and films in the 20th century.
Agreed, a beautifully written potted history of the vampire throughout the ages.