Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Gothic Novel in Diaries, Letters and Newspaper Cuttings
The story of Dracula (1897) is told through a doctor’s diary and the letters and writings of the different characters. A love story that ends in tragedy: after the strange case of Lucy, treated by Dr Seward, a tale of mystery and terror begins.
Author: Bram Stoker (1847–1912)
Title: Dracula (1897)
Format: English paperback (Penguin Classics), 560 pages, edited and introduced by Maurice Hindle
Scope: Epistolary Gothic horror novel
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/014143984X (ASIN 014143984X)
Lucy’s Illness
The explanations for Lucy’s strange illness make no sense at all; one has to turn to imagination and believe in blood-sucking bats or vampires, and a doctor’s scepticism stands in the way. But the story goes on, and readers are hooked by a terrifying tale full of unknowns that are slowly resolved as the investigation proceeds.
The heath near the town and the ’Bloofer Lady’ become an attraction for the neighbourhood children, who venture out every night to see the mysterious lady. They are so young that their accounts of what happened after their outings are vague, and most adults doubt them.
Harker and Mina
These myths and stories from popular culture involve Jonathan Harker, a solicitor working for Count Dracula, and Mina, his fiancée and Lucy’s inseparable friend. It is Mina who types up the letters and accounts and assembles a body of evidence, press articles, cuttings, telegrams and so on, which leads to the solution of the mystery and gives credibility to a story full of fantastic elements.
Bram Stoker and the Lyceum
Abraham "Bram" Stoker was born in Dublin in 1847, worked as a civil servant and an unpaid theatre critic, and in 1878 became business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London for the great actor Henry Irving, a post he held for almost thirty years. Many readers have seen something of the commanding, overpowering Irving in the Count. Stoker wrote novels in his spare time; Dracula was the one that made his name, though it brought him far less money than its later fame would suggest.
Whitby and Wallachia
Stoker never visited Transylvania. He researched it in libraries, notably in Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, where he spent a holiday in 1890 and came across the name of Vlad III of Wallachia, known as Dracula, in a book about the region. He also drew on travel writing about Transylvanian folklore. Whitby itself appears in the novel’s most famous episode: a Russian ship, the Demeter, runs aground in a storm with its captain lashed dead to the wheel, and a great dog leaps ashore and runs up the steps towards the ruined abbey.
The Vampire Hunters
The group that forms around Van Helsing is the heart of the second half: Dr John Seward, who runs an asylum where the patient Renfield eats flies and spiders and waits for his "Master"; Arthur Holmwood, Lucy’s fiancé; the Texan Quincey Morris; and Jonathan and Mina Harker. They fight with an odd mixture of modern technology, typewriters, phonograph cylinders, railway timetables and blood transfusions, and ancient weapons: garlic, crucifixes, the consecrated Host and the wooden stake. That clash between the modern world and something very old is part of what made the book feel new.
Before and After
Stoker had predecessors, notably John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), but Dracula fixed the vampire in the popular imagination. F.W. Murnau’s unauthorised film Nosferatu (1922) led Stoker’s widow to sue, and Bela Lugosi’s 1931 performance defined the Count for generations. Maurice Hindle’s Penguin edition offers a reliable text with helpful notes.
Van Helsing
Van Helsing, Dr Seward’s old teacher, follows the clues and sets out on a journey from London to Transylvania to destroy the source of all the evil. It is a disturbing story of horror and mystery: the legend of Count Dracula, as fresh today as when it first appeared.
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