Transylvania and Romania in Scholarly Editions
of Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Thèse
Cristina Artenie
Doctorat en littérature d’expression anglaise
Philosophiae Doctor (Ph.D.)
Québec, Canada
© Cristina Artenie, 2015
Résumé
À partir des années 1970, le roman Dracula de Bram Stoker (1897) a connu une série
inattendue d’éditions critiques, qui ont contribué en même temps à la canonisation d’une
œuvre de fiction considérée auparavant comme dédaignable et à la perpétuation des points
de vue du roman sur la Transylvanie et la Roumanie. En général, les éditeurs suivent le
principe selon lequel les annotations doivent permettre au public d’aujourd’hui d’avoir une
expérience de lecture similaire à celle des premiers lecteurs et aussi proche de l’intention de
l’auteur que possible. Dans le cas de Dracula, cela présuppose que beaucoup des choix
idéologiques de Stoker restent inexpliqués et indisputés, tandis que ses représentations des
peuples et des lieux “lointains” sont soutenues par l’usage que font les éditeurs des notes de
travail du romancier. Stoker a pris note, en les modifiant, des centaines de citations de
différentes sources qu’il a ensuite incorporées dans le texte du roman. Les éditeurs de
Dracula se fient à ces notes, sans prendre en compte les changements opérés par le
romancier, les passages qu’il a utilisés mais qui n’apparaissent pas dans les notes, ou le fait
que les sources sont souvent biaisées ou simplement érronées. Ainsi, les éditions critiques
du roman de Stoker préservent et même contribuent au processus d’altérisation commencé
par l’auteur de Dracula. L’analyse du discours d’altérisation est directement liée à la
discussion du contexte historique du roman, c’est-à-dire le statut néo-colonial de la
Roumanie, abordé dans la deuxième partie de cette étude. Les faits qui y sont mis en valeur
montrent que ce que Stoker savait et ceux qu’il connaissait ont influencé ses choix
d’endroits, de personnages et d’intrigue. L’implication de la Grande Bretagne dans
l’économie et la politique de la region, avant et après la Guerre de Crimée, attestée par la
iii
présence des aventuriers coloniaux britaniques et par celle de la marine militaire anglaise
sur le Danube, n’a guère était étudiée par les historiens. Le même peut être dit de
l’implication de Londres au sein de la Commission Européenne du Danube. La présente
étude pourrait aussi être utile aux spécialistes du postcolonialisme, de la mondialisation ou
à ceux qui s’intéressent aux transformations apportées par le capitalisme dans le Bas
Danube et à l’intégration des principautés roumains dans le marché économique mondial.
Stoker a trouvé ses sources parmi les écrits des voyageurs en Transylvanie et Roumanie qui
se préoccupaient des avantages économiques offerts par ces pays. Leurs écrits ont d’abord
stimulé et ensuite soutenu l’implication de la Grande Bretagne dans l’économie de la
région. La présente thèse va au-delà d’une autre frontière, en passant des études littéraires à
l’anthropologie. Les anthropologues culturels peuvent trouver utile la discussion du temps
et de la différence dans le roman de Stoker et dans les annotations des éditeurs. Dans les
deux cas, il s’agit de la collection et de la manipulation des données concernant une région
européenne « lointaine ». La (non)existence des croyances aux vampires est une situation
qui peut fournir un aperçu des pratiques traditionnelles mais aussi, ce qui est plus
important, des conséquences profondes du travail anthropologique du dix-neuvième siècle.
Bien qu’elle soit un examen des éditions les plus richement annotées du roman de Bram
Stoker, la présente étude est interdisciplinaire. Elle utilise des théories et des conceptes de
plusieurs domaines, tout en attirant l’attention sur les liens complexes entre la culture,
l’histoire, la politique et l’économie. Ce que cette étude montre surtout, c’est le lien étroit
entre l’objet littéraire et le contexte dans lequel il a été produit.
iv
Abstract
Since the 1970s, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) has gone through an unexpectedly long
series of scholarly editions, which has contributed both to the canonisation of a work of
fiction previously considered undeserving and to the perpetuation of the novel’s views on
Transylvania and Romania. As a rule, editors follow the principle according to which their
annotations should allow today’s audience a reading experience similar to that of the
original reader and as close to the author’s intention as possible. In Dracula’s case, this
means that much of Stoker’s ideological choices remain unexplained and unchallenged,
while his representations of “remote” people and places are supported by the editors’ use of
the writer’s working notes. Stoker took down, in altered form, hundreds of quotes from
several sources that he incorporated into the text of the novel. The editors of Dracula rely
heavily on these notes, without taking into account the changes brought by the novelist, the
passages that he used but do not appear in the notes, and the fact that the sources were often
biased or simply wrong. Thus, the many scholarly editions of Stoker’s novel preserve and
even enhance its original process of othering. The analysis of the othering discourse is
closely linked to the discussion of the historical context of the novel, that is, to the neocolonial status of Romania, examined in the second part of this study. The information
unearthed here shows that who and what Stoker knew influenced his choice of place, plot
and character, which can provide a new line of inquiry for both literary critics and
historians. The involvement of Great Britain in the economy and politics of the region,
v
before and after the Crimean War, attested by the presence of British colonial adventurers
and by that of the British navy on the river Danube, has only been marginally studied by
historians, and the same is true about the study of the British involvement in the European
Commission of the Danube. The present study can be equally useful to scholars engaged
with postcolonialism, globalisation, and the transformations brought about by capitalism in
the Lower Danube region and by the integration of the Romanian principalities into the
world market economy. Stoker’s sources were travellers to Transylvania and Romania who
were preoccupied with the economic advantages those countries had to offer. Their writings
both stimulated and, later, supported the British involvement in the economy of the region.
This dissertation crosses yet another boundary, from literary studies into anthropology.
Cultural anthropologists can find useful the discussion of time and difference in Stoker’s
novel and in the annotations of the editors, both of which involve the collection and
manipulation of data from a “remote” European region. In the case of Dracula, the
(non)existence of vampire beliefs is an interesting case study which provides insight into
the practice but, more importantly, into the far-reaching consequences of nineteenthcentury anthropological work. Although an examination of the most heavily annotated
scholarly editions of Bram Stoker’s vampire novel, the present study is interdisciplinary. It
employs theories and concepts from several fields, thus bringing to the fore the intricate
links between culture, history, politics and economy. What this study shows, more
importantly, is the close link between the literary object and the context in which it was
produced.
vi
Table of Contents
Résumé.................................................................................................................................. iii
Abstract ................................................................................................................................... v
Table of Contents ................................................................................................................. vii
List of figures .........................................................................................................................ix
Note on Quotations ................................................................................................................xi
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1
Part I Dracula and Editorial Theory ...................................................................................... 17
Chapter 1 Footnotes, Endnotes, Lateral Notes ..................................................................... 19
1.1 The Editor as Mediator ............................................................................................... 28
1.2 The Politics of Annotation .......................................................................................... 33
1.3 Types of Annotation ................................................................................................... 40
Chapter 2 The Fight for a Masterpiece ................................................................................. 47
2.1 Leonard Wolf: The Annotated Dracula (1975) .......................................................... 48
2.2 Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu: The Essential Dracula (1979) ..................... 52
2.3 Leonard Wolf: The Essential Dracula (1993) ............................................................ 54
2.4 Clive Leatherdale: Dracula Unearthed (1998) ........................................................... 57
2.5 Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller: Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula
(2008) ................................................................................................................................ 60
2.6 Leslie S. Klinger: The New Annotated Dracula (2008).............................................. 62
2.7 Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal: Dracula by Bram Stoker (1997) ......................... 64
2.8 Glennis Byron: Dracula by Bram Stoker (1998)........................................................ 68
2.9 John Paul Riquelme: Dracula: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism (2002) ..... 71
2.10 A.N. Wilson: Dracula by Bram Stoker (1983) ......................................................... 76
2.11 Maud Ellmann: Dracula by Bram Stoker (1996) ..................................................... 78
2.12 Roger Luckhurst: Dracula by Bram Stoker (2011) .................................................. 79
Chapter 3 The Editors of Dracula and the Places of the Imagination .................................. 81
3.1 The Extratextual Myth ................................................................................................ 82
3.2 Hunters and Enthusiasts .............................................................................................. 90
3.3 Places of the Imagination ............................................................................................ 99
vii
Part II The Historical Context of Dracula ......................................................................... 107
Chapter 4 Who Stoker Knew ............................................................................................. 108
4.1 Crimea and After ...................................................................................................... 111
4.2 Wars of Independence .............................................................................................. 119
4.3 Friends of James Knowles........................................................................................ 131
Chapter 5 What Stoker Knew............................................................................................. 145
5.1 On the British Danube .............................................................................................. 149
5.2 Learning about Romania .......................................................................................... 161
5.3 The Historical Dracula ............................................................................................. 176
Chapter 6 Dracula, the Other.............................................................................................. 185
6.1 The Contemporary Dracula ...................................................................................... 186
6.2 Dracula’s Daughter and the Finnish Connection ..................................................... 196
6.3 The Right Kind of Blood and the Wrong Kind of Marriage .................................... 207
Part III Dracula, Transylvania and Romania ..................................................................... 218
Chapter 7 Othering: Place .................................................................................................. 219
7.1 The Lay of the Land ................................................................................................. 222
7.2 Landscapes ............................................................................................................... 240
7.3 Cityscapes................................................................................................................. 252
Chapter 8 Othering: Time .................................................................................................. 263
8.1 The Time of the Other .............................................................................................. 265
8.2 The Burden of History.............................................................................................. 278
8.3 The Unbearable Lightness of Ahistoricity ............................................................... 293
Chapter 9 Othering: People ................................................................................................ 309
9.1 Exotic Transylvania.................................................................................................. 311
9.2 The Whirlpool of Races ........................................................................................... 327
9.3 Nosferatu .................................................................................................................. 338
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 354
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 367
viii
List of figures
Figure 7.1. Map of Romanian provinces in the fifteenth century………………… 226
Figure 7.2. Map of historical Romanian provinces……………………………...... 227
Figure 7.3. Map of Romanian provinces today…………………………………… 227
Figure 7.4. Map of the Romanian Carpathians……………………………………. 244
ix
Note on Quotations
Several scholarly editions have been used in this study, but all quotations from Stoker’s
novel, identified with the title in italics between brackets (Dracula) followed by the page
number, come from Glennis Byron’s edition (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1998). Of
all editions discussed here, hers is the only one published in Canada and the one I started
working with years ago. Whenever an explanatory note or any other contribution of the
editors themselves is mentioned, it is identified with the name(s) of the editor(s) between
brackets. This is also true of the Notes for Dracula, quoted as Bram Stoker’s Notes when
the source is Stoker, but identified with the names of the editors (Eighteen-Bisang and
Miller) when the quotation reproduces a commentary on Stoker’s text. If two or more
works of the same author are quoted, the title is also mentioned after the author’s name. To
avoid repetitions, the name of Dracula is omitted from such titles. Quotations from other
works by the editors are always identified with the name and title. The editions themselves
are mentioned only by the name of the editor.
xi
Introduction
One of Stoker’s biographers recently acknowledged that, when he “began to write a
biography of Bram Stoker in the mid-1990s, [he] did not expect to be still engaged with the
subject almost two decades later. . . . New commentators entering the field suggest fresh
possibilities, while the frequent unearthing of new material is constantly altering seemingly
fixed perspectives” (Murray, “The Facts and Fictions” 72). The same can be said of the
perspectives on the novel’s aesthetic value. In their much debated introductions to the first
Oxford University Press editions of Dracula, both A.N. Wilson and Maud Ellmann rejected
the literariness of the novel. In an essay published in the same year as Wilson’s edition,
Franco Moretti confessed that “[o]nly a few years ago, to write about Dracula meant being
taken for an eccentric loafer, and one’s main worry was to prove that one’s work was
legitimate: ‘You see, Dracula is part of literary history too’” (Moretti 15-16, original
emphasis). However, the view persists today: one expert in Gothic literature recently
introduced a volume of essays on the novelist by stating that “No one, except a maniac,
would claim that Stoker was a particularly great writer, although he is better than his
reputation would have you believe. Admittedly, his novels are often tedious, over and
under plotted, sometimes nonsensical, confusing, confused, and Dracula, in as much as it is
a Gothic masterpiece, is clearly a kind of fluke. Even with Dracula, we are dealing with a
very uneven novel” (Killeen 16).
Dracula is, after all, an adventure story and a horror novel with fairy-tale
undertones: the hero becomes the captive of a monster who later threatens his beloved but,
1
with the help of several allies, he manages to destroy the brute back in its remote lair. In
“The Children of the Night: Stoker’s Dreadful Reading and the Plot of Dracula,” Dick
Collins argues convincingly that, in the choices he made in the spring of 1890 and later,
Stoker was crucially influenced by the characters and plot of The String of Pearls (18461847), the “penny dreadful” series that introduced the character of Sweeney Todd. In both
narratives, there is a young solicitor1 who is engaged but goes abroad on business leaving
his fiancée behind in England; the young woman has a friend who is courted by three
suitors; all of them, led by an older, wiser man, join a quest to kill the monster who is the
young solicitor’s employer; and the monster flees England in a boat, but is later killed (see
Collins 3ff). All this might explain the reluctance of some readers (including myself) – and
moviegoers – to accept Stoker’s novel as a masterpiece, albeit of the Gothic kind.
Unlike the editors discussed in the following study, with the notable exception of
the Romanian-born Radu Florescu, I never read Dracula as a child or as a teenager. While
in Transylvania, one of Stoker’s major sources wrote that Hungarians
greatly prefer English authors. They do not, however, care for the “sensational,”
preferring the sentimental and romantic. In their cheap journalistic literature the
kind of pabulum known as “penny dreadful” does not exist. The Hungarians of the
lower class do not care to take their “horrors hot;” and such things as delight an
Englishman of the same calibre fall flat upon the mental palate of a Hungarian.
(Mazuchelli II, 50)
The traveller’s words still ring true more than a century later, in that part of Europe, at least
for Romanians. I first read Dracula for a graduate seminar on the British novel and it did
1
Collins deliberately conflates Tobias Ragg, who is employed by Sweeney Todd, and Mark Ingestrie, a sailor
who had been studying to be a lawyer.
2
not surpass my expectations. I did understand, however, that it is a work of fiction worth
studying as representative of late-nineteenth-century attitudes in Britain, especially with
regards to the notion of degeneration and the encounter with the European Other.
Therefore, I expected the novel to include a series of misrepresentations about the lands
visited by its characters in the first and last chapters.
On the other hand, I was surprised at the mistakes in the annotations concerning
Transylvania and Romania in the editions of the novel; indeed, it would not be an
exaggeration to say that, in any of the scholarly editions of Dracula, it is almost impossible
to find a single annotation on Transylvania and Romania that does not include at least one
error. The present study is the result of my inquiry into the reasons for this situation. Over
the years, I discovered that some of the mistakes had been caused by the editors’ desire to
follow a “rule” generally accepted by textual critics, according to which explanatory notes
should use sources that were available to the original reader of the work, in this case latenineteenth-century British sources, rather than more recent reference books. This poses a
series of unexpected problems for a text like Dracula. First, much of the information about
East Central Europe in the Victorian era did not come from the most reliable sources.
Second, and more important, most of the information about Transylvania and Romania
provided by Bram Stoker came not from encyclopaedias, guidebooks or newspapers and
thus it was not common knowledge. Rather, it came from the works of a series of travellers
who had passed through the region in the quarter of a century before 1890, when it is
generally assumed that he began working on the novel.
Up to 2015, there have been five extensively annotated editions of Dracula,
identified here as Wolf 1975 (to differentiate it from his later edition, from 1993),
3
McNally/Florescu, Wolf, Leatherdale, and Klinger. There are also three more sparsely
annotated editions, which use instead a considerable amount of background material
(Byron) or background material and critical essays (Auerbach and Skal, and Riquelme).
Finally, Oxford World’s Classics has published a more generously annotated edition
(Luckhurst), after the very succinct ones by Wilson and Ellmann.
Leonard Wolf first published The Annotated Dracula (1975), a pioneering work in
which he correctly identified many of Stoker’s sources, although he did not have access to
the novelist’s working notes. These notes were discovered by Raymond McNally and Radu
Florescu, the editors of The Essential Dracula (1979). Wolf borrowed this title for his 1993
revised edition of the novel, in which he again did not use Stoker’s notes. The edition
produced by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (1997) is notable for the consideration, both
in annotations and in the supplementary material, of the novel’s adaptations. Glennis
Byron’s edition (1998) uses extracts from other works by Stoker, while Riquelme’s (2002)
includes essays that analyse the novel from different critical perspectives. The most heavily
annotated editions are Clive Leatherdale’s Dracula Unearthed (1998) and Leslie Klinger’s
The New Annotated Dracula (2008): the former introduces a religious perspective, while
the latter is the first edition to make use of Stoker’s manuscript. Whenever they explain
information originating in one or more of these travelogues, the editors of Dracula appear
to quote from these very texts. They were, after all, nineteenth-century sources. However,
they were neither common knowledge to readers of the time nor entirely reliable.
Moreover, with few exceptions, the annotations do not quote from these texts directly, but
rather from Stoker’s research notes, which include misreadings, misinterpretations, and
reworkings of the original. They usually summarise long passages and thus often hide some
4
of the information that shows both how Stoker constructed his fictionalised version of
Transylvania and why he might have chosen to include such details in his narrative. It is the
study of the sources, in fact, that spearheaded the in-depth study of the novel: “More
extended and admiring treatments of Dracula began to appear when critics examined in
detail the book’s relation to folkloric and historical sources and its narrative techniques.
Source studies and commentaries concerned with literary form provided a backdrop against
which later critics could treat Dracula seriously from psychological and social
perspectives” (Riquelme 411). However, the discovery of Bram Stoker’s research notes for
the novel has been a boon and a bane for Dracula studies. All editors have been persuaded
to use them to the exclusion of most other source texts, including the actual passages that
Stoker summarised, distorted or used out of context. Paradoxically, the notes’ existence has
made research into Stoker’s notes redundant.
The scholarly editions of Dracula give the impression that Stoker’s sources have
been researched and all or most of the relevant passages have been matched with, and
explained through, these sources. In reality, the editors have used Stoker’s notes –
containing brief jottings, general ideas and some quotations out of context – instead of his
actual sources to explain passages in the novel. Literally, the editors annotate Stoker by
quoting Stoker, while referencing the travellers. Instead of explaining the information in
Stoker’s text, these notes rather compare the final version of Dracula with its earlier avatars
contained in the author’s research for the novel. As Stoker’s working notes often find their
way, almost unchanged, into the text of Dracula, the author’s research can be considered an
early draft of the story. This means that the editors explain the novel through the novel
itself. The reader almost never finds out how Stoker manipulated the information of his
5
sources or how much of that information was erroneous in the first place. The travellers
from whom Stoker borrowed the information about Transylvania and Romania, including
the part about the belief in vampires (taken from an essay by Emily Gerard), are introduced
as authorities or without any comments. To support the information about vampire beliefs
among Romanians, the editors use, without questioning, two sources from the 1920s
(Agnes Murgoçi and Montague Summers), even though Stoker could not have known
them. More often, however, they simply make unsourced statements about Romanian,
Transylvanian or even “Balkan” lore. The idea that “Stoker used some authentic lore in his
novel” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 128) is taken for granted and none of the editions ever
mentions a single Romanian source about the folklore or the history of the region. In many
ways, the scholarly editions of Dracula reclaim Transylvania for the West as its own
fictional construct. Furthermore, what the editors do not say can be just as important as
what they do say: the non-fictional aspect of Dracula, in other words the historical and
biographical facts that Stoker would have been tempted to use in his novel, are consistently
avoided by his editors. Yet, Stoker was “literal rather than literary” (Frayling, “Mr Stoker’s
Holiday” 196) and much that remains unexplained in the scholarly editions of Dracula can
become less obscure if one takes into account the fact that Stoker had many other
opportunities to find out about his subject than just the five books and one essay from
which he took research notes.
A look at the most impersonal of the editors of Dracula can be quite revealing.
Reviewers have noticed that “Riquelme is particularly objective in his notes, preferring
concise historical facts and word etymology to any subjective commentary or
interpretation” (Martin 107). The objectivity as well as the brevity can be explained
6
through the list of books consulted by Riquelme for his annotations: five are guides (four
concern London or Great Britain, only one the Austrian-Hungarian empire, none Romania);
six are dictionaries and encyclopaedias (two versions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the
rest are English dictionaries and a dictionary of law); the works of Shakespeare and Pope’s
translation of the Odyssey; and Wilkinson’s Account and Emily Gerard’s book (Riquelme
xii). Heavily relying on encyclopaedias, the annotations in his edition are often perfunctory.
There is very little independent research and the choice of encyclopaedias is never
explained. Some notes rely on a recent online version of the Britannica, some on the
eleventh edition published in 1910, and others on both. The reader is therefore introduced
sometimes to knowledge from about the time of the publication of the novel and others to
knowledge from the time of the publication of the Riquelme edition.
Riquelme provides a similar cursory treatment of the article “Vampire” from the
1888 Encyclopaedia Britannica. The name of the author of the article is not given, and we
are only informed that he was “a scholar who died in 1895, before Dracula was published”
(Riquelme 375). This indicates that Riquelme knew that the author of the article was
Surgeon-Major George Edward Dobson, a zoologist and a leading expert on bats, fellow of
the Royal Society, with two decades of military service in India. It appears, however, that
Riquelme is unaware of the fact that Dobson and the author of Dracula had more than a
trivial connection. Both were Anglo-Irish – Dobson was born on 4 September 1848 in
county Longford (he was, thus, less than a year younger than Stoker) – both entered Trinity
College Dublin in 1864, and both were granted an M.A. in 1875.2 Dobson entered the
2
Dublin (Trinity College) was one of only three universities (along with Oxford and Cambridge) that granted
an M.A. on application, without any graduate courses or research. The candidate needed only seniority as
7
Army Medical Service in 1868 and retired in 1888. Before taking charge of the museum of
the Royal Victoria Hospital, Netley, he was stationed in India (Flower xv-xvi), like two of
Stoker’s brothers, Thomas (1849-1925) and Richard (1851-1931). Documents of Trinity
College Dublin show Dobson and Stoker next to each other on the list of the university’s
“senators” in the early 1890s (Dublin University Calendar 511). Riquelme inserts the
article on “Vampire” because Stoker could have read it; the article’s author remains
unnoted, although, as a specialist in vampire-bats, he is the closest thing to a real-life
“vampire hunter” that Stoker could have met.
The editors’ inclusion of such background material is discussed in the following
study, although the focus will always be on the annotations. However, I have included the
annotations that are relevant to the topic of the present study, which is the representation of
Transylvania and Romania in Bram Stoker’s Dracula as explained by the novel’s editors.
The fact that their ideas are usually very similar has been helpful. While each editor (or duo
of editors) builds his or her own parallel narrative about the novel, together they also build
one common narrative. They quote each other, they borrow from each other, they dialogue
within the space of the annotations. Riquelme admits that he has used Auerbach/Skal and
Wolf in “writing the glosses for Dracula” (Riquelme viii). Auerbach/Skal is rather lightly
annotated but Wolf provides rich annotations and Riquelme puts them to good use, as he
sometimes quotes Wolf directly in his own “glosses.” In historical and geographical
matters, the more sparsely annotated editions (Auerbach/Skal; Byron; Riquelme;
Luckhurst) often rely on the two most popular annotated editions that have preceded them:
member of the university (including his undergraduate years). While Dobson had previously obtained a
Master of Surgery degree in 1867, Stoker had received a B.A. as an “unclassed candidate” in 1870.
8
Wolf and McNally/Florescu. All the editors are discussed in each of the nine chapters of
the present study.
Although I have relied mostly on a close reading of the annotations, introductions
and other materials included by the editors, as well as on historical research, each of the
three parts of the study can be said to have its own methodology. The first part is an attempt
to understand the inner workings of scholarly editions of modern fiction in general, and of
the editions of Dracula in particular. The first chapter analyses the eight critical editions of
Stoker’s novel strictly from the point of view of editorial theory; the notions of “textual
note,” “note of recovery” and “explanatory note” are used to distinguish the various types
of annotation found in these editions. The way these notes are arranged on the page as well
as the part played by illustrations and supplementary material is also analysed here. More
importantly, perhaps, I discuss the widely circulated precept according to which editors
should explain a text with sources contemporary with the text itself. The second chapter is
descriptive and introduces the eight editions that are analysed in this study, along with three
others that have played an important role in the editorial history of Dracula and with the
2008 edition of Bram Stoker’s working notes for the novel. Each of these versions of the
work is placed in its historical and cultural context, which includes the way they have been
received. The third chapter introduces the editors and the reasons behind many of their
editorial decisions. Transylvania is discussed for the first time as a “place of the
imagination,” constructed by Stoker and kept alive by the “Dracula enthusiasts.”
The second part discusses the extent of Stoker’s knowledge and his interest in all
things Romanian, both of which are usually disregarded by the editors of Dracula, who
prefer to use the little that has been preserved in the novelist’s research notes. Although
9
A.N. Wilson’s claim in the introduction to his 1983 edition of the novel that Stoker “did
some – but very little – research for his fantasy” (Wilson x) is universally rejected, the
editors also insist that “Stoker himself never visited Transylvania and seems to have limited
his library research on Tepes to a single volume by William Wilkinson” (Auerbach and
Skal 331). Whether they make it explicit or not, all editors seem to agree that Stoker did not
read “beyond the references found in . . . his listed sources” (Leatherdale 11). Elsewhere,
Leatherdale ambiguously acknowledges “Stoker’s known researches into folklore, the
occult and much else. . . . Whatever the extent of Dracula’s shortcomings, allegations of
lack of research on Stoker’s part are difficult to substantiate” (The Novel and the Legend
12). As another editor explains, “the author of Dracula was a well-informed writer who had
spent substantial time doing research for the book, which he wrote over a period of seven
years” (Riquelme 411). This is, in fact, a widespread opinion among the editors: that Stoker
researched more than one might be tempted to think (and more than some had thought
before), but that, paradoxically, he restricted his research to only a few choice topics, so
that he knew almost nothing about Transylvania and Romania except for what has been
preserved in his research notes.
The third part discusses the ways in which the editors of Dracula use Stoker’s notes,
as well as other resources, to explain the people and places of Transylvania and Romania.
Stoker’s vision is regularly reinforced through the annotations in various ways. The
author’s working notes are used instead of the original sources, which often paint a
different picture, and the reader does not find out how much is received information and
how much is fictionalised. The editors never question the idea, preserved in a single
paragraph in Emily Gerard’s article about “Transylvanian Superstitions,” that “the vampire,
10
or nosferatu” is a real folk belief; instead, they seek ways to confirm it. Romanian sources
are conspicuously absent from all the editions, despite the fact that the most heavily
annotated passages are those concerning Transylvania and Romania. Ultimately, the editors
of Dracula preserve and sometimes enhance the operation of “othering” initiated by Bram
Stoker.
In order to trace the genealogy of the sanctioned interpretative directions of the
novel as well as of the editorial notes, it is useful to review, however briefly, the
development of Dracula Studies. Overlooked for more than half a century, Bram Stoker’s
1897 novel Dracula was reborn as a subject of literary study in the late 1950s and early
1960s, when two competing readings of the novel emerged, one historicist and the other
psychoanalytical, which were to remain the leading interpretative approaches for the
quarter of a century that followed. The historicist view on Dracula began with two essays
in which Stoker’s character was identified with a Romanian medieval ruler better known as
Vlad the Impaler: Bacil F. Kirtley’s “Dracula, the Monastic Chronicles and Slavic
Folklore” (1956) and Grigore Nandriş’s “The Historical Dracula: The Theme of His
Legend in the Western and in the Eastern Literatures of Europe” (1966). This was
supported by the first biography of Bram Stoker, published in 1962 by Harry Ludlam and
based on interviews with the author’s only son Noel, who also suggested that the novelist
had found out about Vlad from a Hungarian acquaintance named Arminius Vambéry. The
beginning of the psychoanalytic reading of Dracula is also usually placed in the late 1950s,
with the publication of Maurice Richardson’s 1959 essay on “The Psychoanalysis of Ghost
Stories.”
11
Dracula’s second rebirth in literary studies was in 1972. Several books on Dracula
and his Romanian origins appeared in the early 1970s (including a new biography by
Daniel Farson, Stoker’s great-nephew, and Leonard Wolf’s first critical edition of the
novel, both from 1975), but none were as important as the 1972 bestselling In Search of
Dracula by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu. In the following years, McNally and
Florescu published more books on the subject and were invited on TV shows as experts on
both Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, who had by then come to be automatically associated
with Stoker’s vampire Count. In 1979 they, too, provided a scholarly edition of the novel.
The two critical approaches mentioned above were influential in the shaping of the
annotations in the first scholarly editions of the novel.3 In the meantime, the medieval
stories about Vlad Ţepeş were studied, among others, by William C. McDonald, Matei
Cazacu and Raymond McNally, while Harry A. Senn worked on cognizant tales and
legends, resulting in his monograph Were-Wolf and Vampire in Romania (1982).
Starting with the early 1980s, however, the two most important avenues of critical
inquiry in Dracula Studies have been, on the one hand, the scholarly edition, the
biographical study, the collection of essays and the close reading of the novel; and, on the
other hand, examinations of the political and cultural implications of Dracula. New
biographies were published by Phyllis Roth (1982), Barbara Belford (1996; revised edition,
2002), Paul Murray (2004) and Lisa Hopkins (2007). New editions included those edited
by A.N. Wilson in 1983, followed by Maud Ellmann in 1996 for Oxford University Press;
Leonard Wolf (1993, a revised version of the 1975 edition); Nina Auerbach and David J.
3
The most widely quoted essays of the psychoanalytical approach are Christopher F. Bentley, “The Monster
in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1972); Joseph S. Bierman, “Dracula:
Prolonged Childhood Illness, and the Oral Triad” (1972); Phyllis A. Roth, “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula” (1977); and Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in
Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1984)
12
Skal (1997); Clive Leatherdale (1998); Glennis Byron (1998); John Paul Riquelme (2002);
Leslie S. Klinger (2008); and Roger Luckhurst (2011). Clive Leatherdale also published
Dracula: The Novel and the Legend (1985) and edited excerpts from Stoker’s sources for
the novel in The Origins of Dracula (1987). Elizabeth Miller edited Bram Stoker’s Dracula:
A Documentary Volume (2005) and, together with Robert Eighteen-Bisang, a facsimile
edition of Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula (2008). Some of the most influential essays on
the novel have appeared in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Sucking through the Century (1997; ed.
Carol Margaret Davison); Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow (1998; ed. Elizabeth
Miller); Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic (1998; eds. William Hughes
and Andrew Smith); Post/Modern Dracula (2007; ed. John S. Bak); and Bram Stoker:
Centenary Essays (2014; ed. Jarlath Killeen). Studies of Dracula as a response to
nineteenth-century cultural realities in Great Britain, more specifically reflecting the fears
of Victorian society, began chiefly with Carol A. Senf, “Dracula: Stoker’s Response to the
New Woman” (1982); Franco Moretti, “The Dialectic of Fear” (1982); Patrick Brantlinger,
“Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel” (1985); and
Daniel Pick, “‘Terrors of the Night’: Dracula and ‘Degeneration’ in the Late Nineteenth
Century” (1988), republished in Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848c.1918 (1989). Some of the most influential studies belonging to this second avenue of
research appeared in the 1990s: Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and
the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation” (1990); Kathleen L. Spenser, “Purity and Danger:
Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis” (1992); Judith
Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1993); Alexandra
Warwick, “Vampires and the Empire: Fears and Fictions of the 1890s” (1995); and David
13
Glover, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction
(1996).
The most recent studies focus on the context of Imperial Britain and attempt to
approach the novel from a postcolonial perspective: William Hughes, Beyond Dracula:
Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context (2000); Eleni Coundouriotis, “Dracula and
the Idea of Europe” (2000); Matthew Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question (2006);
Jimmie E. Cain, Jr., Bram Stoker and Russophobia (2006); and Thomas McLean,
“Dracula’s Blood of Many Brave Races” (2013). These are all studies that focus solely on
Stoker’s Dracula and that struggle to find the best way to approach and explain Stoker’s
attitudes as a man of his time, closely connected to those who kept the Empire running.
There have also been important theoretical developments that help the advancement
of postcolonial inquiry in Dracula Studies, particularly Maria Todorova’s seminal study
Imagining the Balkans (1997) and Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania: the
Imperialism of the Imagination (1998). The former traces the discursive construction of the
Balkans (understood as all Central and Eastern European territories that were, at various
times, under Ottoman rule) in the Western imagination and how this biased representation
has informed the attitude of policy makers and intellectuals in what is today called the first
world towards the Balkans. Applying Todorova’s balkanist framework would be beneficial
to the study of a great number of British and American works of fiction and non-fiction.
Many of the novel’s descriptions of peoples, places, and cultures can be revealed as
informed by prejudice and the belief in the British superiority. Until now, no such approach
has been introduced in Dracula Studies. This work would have been a perfect tool for this
research, had it not been limited to countries that, as Todorova explains, have never been a
14
colony of the West. In the beginning, Todorova’s study was indeed the study I was using to
build my theoretical approach. However, as I discuss in the second part of this study, the
Romanian Principalities are a special case. In the nineteenth century and up until the end of
World War Two, the Lower Danube, which features prominently in Stoker’s novel, was a
neo-colony of the West, especially of Britain. In the case of Stoker’s vampire novel, the
already established methodology of postcolonial inquiry, as outlined by Raymond Kennedy
(1945) and Daniel Chirot (1976), proves to be more helpful in uncovering the colonisercolonised relation that informs Dracula and that often influences the work of the editors
and various commentators who analyse the “Romanian” elements of the novel.
Furthermore, this dissertation is greatly influenced by Edward Said’s study Orientalism
(1978). Said discusses how the West’s construction of the East is an exercise in power
which leads to the orientalising of those who cannot represent themselves but must be
represented (21).
More important for the study of Dracula from a postcolonial perspective has been
Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. Goldsworthy’s
examination of the literary colonisation of lands and peoples in Central and Eastern Europe
by Western writers is compelling and extremely pertinent for a discussion of Stoker’s
novel. Goldsworthy has an interesting section on Dracula in which she builds a strong case
of literary colonisation. Albeit insightful and new, Inventing Ruritania has remained
virtually unnoticed in Dracula Studies. It is my hope that this research will bring to the fore
certain problematic aspects and generate the type of scholarship that is needed. However,
although I could not entirely avoid interpreting the novel, the focus of the present study is
the work of the editors of Dracula: what they say and do not say, how and when they say it.
15
In the end, it is my hope that it will prove of use to those working on critical editions of any
work so that they can reflect on their roles of mediators between the text and the reader.
The underlying politics of editorial practices cannot and should not be underestimated.
16
Part I
Dracula and Editorial Theory
17
18
Chapter 1
Footnotes, Endnotes, Lateral Notes
Dracula has been in print ever since it was first published in 1897. It has also gone
through a surprising number of critical editions beginning in 1975. In these editions,
explanatory notes or fragments of Bram Stoker’s source documents (or both) are provided
so as to elucidate places, names, and allusions in the novel. Dracula’s “meanings” and its
place in English literature and culture are analysed in critical introductions and
supplementary historical, biographical or bibliographical essays. With each new edition, the
novel is repackaged according to a preferred interpretation and the reader is offered a new,
reconstructed version. A study of Dracula’s editions will show the mechanisms through
which Stoker’s novel has been re-imagined by each of the individual textual scholars that
have edited and annotated it. In order to understand more adequately and more thoroughly
the ways in which the editors of Dracula treat the text of the novel, the editions will be
discussed in light of recent theoretical approaches to editions and annotations.
Textual scholarship4 is the study of written documents, usually in view of their
subsequent publication in annotated editions. Most often these documents are hundreds, or
even thousands of years old; they are written in languages that fewer and fewer people
understand; and they may have circulated in several more or less different versions. The job
4
This branch of study is also known as textual studies or textual criticism or by its older names of philology
and bibliography; its theoretical arm is sometimes called editorial theory or editions theory. The most
important academic journals dedicated to textual scholarship today are Text: Transactions of the Society for
Textual Scholarship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), Variants: The Journal of the European
Society for Textual Scholarship (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols), and Studies in Bibliography (Charlottesville,
VA: University of Virginia Press).
19
of the textual scholar is to make these documents accessible, by providing a reliable text;5
by explaining or even translating its language; and by supplying a critical apparatus that
will give the reader access to the historical and cultural background of the work.6 However,
editorial theory studies almost without exception the treatment of texts, whether complete
or fragmentary, in view of providing an authoritative version, whereas the practices of
annotating and commenting on texts are seldom analysed, unless the annotation refers
strictly to the choices made by the editor when faced with variants and fragments. In The
Powers of Philology: Dynamic of Textual Scholarship, an examination of the textual
practices in North America and Europe, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht makes this clear. He
indicates that “[i]dentifying fragments, editing texts, and writing historical commentary are
the three basic practices of [textual scholarship]” (3), but he also states that the main task of
textual scholarship “is the identification and restoration of texts from each cultural past in
question” (3). Thus, annotating and supplying background (historical) information for the
text that is being restored is seen as one of the practices of the editors, but not as their
principal mandate.
Another topic that is underrepresented in textual studies is that of editing and
annotating modern novels. This has been noticed and discussed in three seminal essays in
5
This can be a single text, either chosen by the editor among the variants as the one version that represents
more genuinely the author’s wishes (and without the errors of earlier transcriptions) or a text entirely
constructed by the editor as an aggregate of the variants when these wishes are deemed unknowable. Also, it
can be a multiple text which reproduces several distinct versions.
6
Textual scholars usually distinguish between “text” and “work”: the former is any of the versions that the
work can take, whether in manuscript, typescript, or print form. A literary work is the sum total of its own
textual avatars. The classics of Anglo-American textual scholarship include: W.W. Greg, “The Rationale of
Copy-Text,” Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950-1951), 19-36; Fredson Bowers, Bibliography and Textual
Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). A good introduction is Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (eds.), The
Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2013). A detailed history is provided by G. Thomas Tanselle, Textual Criticism since Greg: A Chronicle,
1950-2000 (Charlottesville: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 2005).
20
the field of annotation: Arthur Friedman’s “Principles of Historical Annotation in Critical
Editions of Modern Texts” (English Institute Annual 1941 [1942], 115-128); Martin C.
Battestin’s “A Rationale of Literary Annotation: The Example of Fielding’s Novels”
(Studies in Bibliography 34 [1982], 1-22); and Ian Small’s “Annotating ‘Hard’ Nineteenth
Century Novels” (Essays in Criticism 36: 4 [October 1986], 281-293), later revised and
expanded as “The Editor as Annotator as Ideal Reader,” in The Theory and Practice of
Text-Editing (eds. Ian Small and Marcus Walsh; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991, 186209). In Friedman’s pioneering essay, which remained the only guide in the field for four
decades, annotations are presented as an instrument that helps re-situate the work in the
historical context of its creation. Battestin’s essay is a direct response to Friedman, whose
ideas it develops and expands, starting from the experience of annotating eighteenthcentury classics. In turn, Small fleshes out, questions and elaborates on Battestin’s earlier
work, while also taking into account two less theoretical essays, written by Ian Jack and
Stephen Wall, respectively. Using nineteenth-century examples, Small distances himself
from Friedman and Battestin by arguing that it is not always possible or desirable to
historicise the work.
The relative underrepresentation of the issue of editing and annotating modern
fiction in textual scholarship can be easily explained by the fact that “the systematic editing
of novels is a recent development – the first four Oxford English Novels appeared in 1964,
closely followed by a number of novels in the Penguin English Library” (Jack 321). That
these editions were so late to appear can, in turn, be explained by a few factors: the effort to
produce a critical edition seemed unnecessary as long as most modern works were known
to have been published in reliable versions, usually supervised by the authors themselves;
21
critical editions and annotations were, and are, deemed to be a measure of classicisation and
canonisation – and editors before the 1960s were reluctant to work on Victorians or
Edwardians, who seemed too recent; finally, because “classic English novels . . . often still
feel close enough for us not to realise how far off they have become” (Wall 6). Perhaps
even more importantly, English literature as an object of study in Anglo-American
universities is fairly recent and the study of the moderns remained marginal even until the
1950s (Graff 197).
It is all the more surprising, then, that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in a
critical edition relatively early (Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Dracula appeared in 1975),
when the novel was far from being widely acknowledged as a classic masterpiece; and that
no fewer than ten other such editions of the novel were published in the following three and
a half decades. However, the canonising gesture (or, rather, gestures, because Wolf’s 1975
edition was soon followed by the McNally/Florescu edition in 1979) occurred in the United
States, where critical editions of mid- and late-nineteenth-century works of fiction had also
been underway since the early 1960s. In fact, one could speak of three different traditions
of critical editing of nineteenth-century fiction in the Anglo-American world, two of which
originated in North America. The British tradition, that of the Oxford University Press and
Penguin, mentioned by Ian Jack (himself the editor of Wuthering Heights in the Oxford
World’s Classics series and general editor of the Oxford Brontë novels series), ordinarily
provides a reliable text preceded by a critical introduction (also, very often, a chronology of
the author’s life, a bibliography, and a note on the text) and followed by the annotations
presented as endnotes, to which a few appendices might be added. Dracula went through
three Oxford World’s Classics editions (for reasons that will be discussed below): A.N.
22
Wilson’s version, in 1983; Maud Ellmann’s, in 1996; and Roger Luckhurst’s, in 2011.
Maurice Hindle’s Penguin Classics edition, very sparsely annotated, is from 1993 (and it
was reissued in 2003 with a preface by Christopher Frayling and two additional
appendices).
Two different traditions emerged almost simultaneously in the United States, the
better known of which is the one initiated by W.W. Norton in 1961 with critical editions of
American masterpieces: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter,
followed by The Red Badge of Courage in 1962. By the mid-1960s, W.W. Norton was
already publishing British classics of the nineteenth century: Tess of the d’Urbervilles in
1965, Pride and Prejudice and Hard Times in 1966.7 The Norton Critical Editions series
typically provides (as it is usually announced on the front cover of its volumes) the
“authoritative text,” preceded by a brief introduction, and followed by “background and
sources” (articles and excerpts from books that may have influenced the author or that
exemplify the zeitgeist as well as contemporary reactions to the work) and by “essays in
criticism” (an anthology of representative interpretations of the work, usually covering
several decades and using different approaches). The annotations to the text are always
included as footnotes. The Norton Critical Edition of Dracula was overseen in 1997 by
Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal. In a similar vein is Glennis Byron’s 1998 edition
published by Broadview (a Canadian academic press that abandons critical essays in favour
of more background documents and contemporary reactions). An offshoot of this tradition
is the “casebook” or “case study,” in which different carefully selected critical approaches
are applied to the same work. John Paul Riquelme edited Dracula in 2002 in the “Case
7
In 1961 it had already published an eighteenth-century classic: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
23
Study in Contemporary Criticism” series for Bedford/St Martin’s Press, using footnotes and
including both background material from Stoker’s known (and possible) sources and five
analytical essays from different schools of critical thought.
The other American tradition of critical editing of modern works is also the first one
in chronological order. It originated not in a university or academic press, but in the milieu
of smaller imprints of general-interest publishing houses, most notably Clarkson N. Potter,
an imprint of Crown, established in 1959 by the eponymous editor (1928-2001). Almost
immediately, Clarkson N. Potter started a series of annotated books, published in hardcover
and on letter-size paper, with the collaboration of two editors from outside academia. The
first was Martin Gardner, who debuted with two Lewis Carroll works: The Annotated Alice
(1960) and The Annotated Snark (1962), and continued with The Annotated Ancient
Mariner (1965) and The Annotated Casey at the Bat (1967). The other was William S.
Baring-Gould, editor of The Annotated Mother Goose (1962) and, most notably, The
Annotated Sherlock Holmes, published in two imposing volumes in 1967.8 This small-press
tradition publishes fully illustrated books, in which the text is preceded by critical and
historical essays and followed by various useful appendices, while the annotations are
printed in the margins. These lateral notes tend to be exhaustive in their attempt to
explicate as much of the text as possible. Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Dracula was
published by Clarkson N. Potter in 1975, and this edition uses the format established in
1960 by The Annotated Alice.
8
Martin Gardner (1914-2010) was a science writer known especially for his newspaper columns on
mathematical puzzles. William S. Baring-Gould (1913-1967) was an executive of the Time, Inc. media
conglomerate and prominent member of the Sherlock Holmes aficionados club known as the Baker Street
Irregulars. Coincidentally, he was the grandson of Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, one of Stoker’s main sources.
24
Other small presses followed this pattern, including Mayflower Books from New
York, which published McNally and Florescu’s The Essential Dracula in 1979, the second
edition of the novel that is fully illustrated and uses lateral notes. However, this type of
critical editing was rapidly welcomed by the other traditions: The Annotated Alice was
reissued by Penguin as early as 1965; Martin Gardner also published The Annotated Father
Brown with Oxford University Press in 1987. The series initiated by Clarkson N. Potter
was discontinued after 1981 (Leonard Wolf also published there The Annotated
Frankenstein in 1977), but it was revived by W.W. Norton, which, in addition to its Critical
Edition series, now also publishes the Annotated Books series. This began with the
reprinting of revised and expanded versions of the Clarkson N. Potter books: The
Annotated Alice and The Annotated Hunting of the Snark (both edited by Martin Gardner),
but has included books originally published by other houses.9 Instead of William S. BaringGould’s edition, W.W. Norton published Leslie S. Klinger’s three-volume The New
Annotated Sherlock Holmes. The same editor was invited to publish The New Annotated
Dracula in 2008.10
The three editorial traditions I have identified can be easily traced if one follows the
most common practices of the major publishers involved. However, this does not mean that
one particular publisher is bound to follow one of these traditions forever. Nor does it mean
that there are no special cases of hybrid versions, such as Leonard Wolf’s second edition of
9
For example, The Annotated Uncle’s Tom Cabin, edited by Philip Van Doren Stern and published in 1964
by P.S. Eriksson, was reissued by Norton four decades later, this time edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
10
This tradition, before and after its takeover by W.W. Norton, has been remarkably successful. The
Annotated Alice sold over half a million copies before being reprinted (according to the back cover of its
Norton version) and was translated into several languages. Klinger’s The New Annotated Dracula was
translated into Spanish by Juan Rodrigo Puertolas as Drácula Anotado (Madrid: Akal, 2012), in the same
format and with all the notes and the original background material. Several notes of the translator are inserted
within Klinger’s own notes and usually explain particularities of some English phrases.
25
Stoker’s novel, The Essential Dracula, published in 1993 by Plume, an American division
of Penguin. Here, Wolf changed the lateral notes of his first edition into Norton-style
footnotes, while adding between chapters an unusual series of reactions to Stoker’s novel
from present-day horror writers. The same kind of footnote was used by Clive Leatherdale
in his 1998 edition, Dracula Unearthed, published by Desert Island Books (owned by the
editor), although the supplementary material that opens the volume is similar to the one
used in the small-press tradition. However, the publication of so many annotated editions of
Dracula is in part explained by the existence of these distinct traditions of editing modern
fiction classics. At least inasmuch as the internal organization and the physical appearance
of the text are concerned, the risk of one edition being similar to the others is rather small.
A second reason is that the complete original text of Dracula exists in three slightly
different versions.11 The first edition, published in 1897 by Archibald Constable and
Company in London (actually, Westminster, as it appears on the title page), is generally
recognized as the “copy-text,” i.e., the most authentic version of the text of the novel.12 As
such, it has been used by most of the critical editions analysed here: Wolf, Auerbach/Skal,
Leatherdale, Byron, Riquelme, and all three Oxford University Press versions. The second
possible copy-text is that of the 1899 American edition (Doubleday & McClure), which has
been preferred by McNally/Florescu – although the two editors have not provided a “Note
on the Text” explaining or at least indicating their choice. This version includes one minor,
although much interpreted, difference: in Harker’s diary entry of 29 June, where all the
other versions show Dracula telling the female vampires “Tomorrow night, tomorrow night
11
I am not counting the 1901 abridged version, published by Constable, and which may or may not have been
overseen by Stoker.
12
Robert Eighteen-Bisang argues that the edition published in Hutchinson’s Colonial Library (also in 1897)
may have appeared earlier, although “The only observable differences between the Constable and Hutchinson
editions are the binding, the copyright and the title page” (Eighteen-Bisang 5).
26
is yours” (Dracula 82), the Doubleday version has Dracula say “To-night is mine. Tomorrow night is yours” (McNally and Florescu 80).
Finally, the 1912 edition published by Rider of London – and “subsequent editions
from Jarrolds, Hutchinson and Arrow” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 114 n. 30) – corrects
many of the typographical errors of previous editions and inserts another minor change: in
chapter 12, Lucy Westenra’s hair is no longer “sunny,” but “shiny.” This is consistent with
her description in the tomb, in chapter 16, as a “dark-haired woman” (Dracula 249).
Several editors have been baffled by the inconsistency in the Constable edition: “The
nagging question is still, what colour is Lucy’s hair?” (Wolf 201 n. 30). Some have tried to
find an explanation for the change: “Lucy’s blonde hair is appropriate to her role as
innocent young girl, but . . . when her role changes her hair colour will change as well”
(Auerbach and Skal 146 n. 6). Clive Leatherdale explains that “In later editions Stoker
changed ‘sunny’ to ‘shiny’” (244 n. 128), without indicating which editions and perhaps
presuming too much about Stoker being the one behind the modification. The 1912 Rider
edition, despite providing a corrected version and the last one that Stoker could have
supervised himself, has rarely been used. It is the copy-text of the 1993 Everyman series
(with an introduction by Marjorie Howes) and the 1996 Barnes & Noble Dracula: The
Definitive Edition (edited by Marvin Kaye), neither of which includes annotation. In
general, the editors of Dracula prefer to correct the errors tacitly, with the exception of
Wolf, who reproduces the text of the novel in facsimile, “by the photo offset process” (iv),
and prefers to introduce a correcting note for each typographical error. If “there are no
burning questions about the ‘authoritative’ text” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 86) of Dracula,
every new edition, reprint, or reissue of the novel is, in fact, a new textual version. Even
27
reprints “do not always reprint, inasmuch as they may include intentional or unintentional
intrinsic changes, or reflect the extrinsic influence of political and economic conditions”
(Grigely 199). Each time Dracula is edited, the audience is presented with a new Dracula.
1.1 The Editor as Mediator
Another reason – perhaps the main reason – for the existence of so many
annotated Dracula editions is that there is much ongoing debate surrounding the
annotations themselves, especially those concerning the first chapters of the novel, when
Jonathan Harker is in Transylvania. The first two annotated editions (Wolf 1975, revised
1993; and McNally/Florescu 1979) drew largely on the idea advanced by McNally and
Florescu in their 1972 In Search of Dracula that Stoker’s character was based on the
Wallachian ruler Vlad the Impaler. This was (sometimes hotly) contested later by
Auerbach/Skal in 1997 and Leatherdale in 1998, whereas the latest editors (Klinger 2008
and Luckhurst 2011), although in agreement with their immediate predecessors, also
incorporate much of the initial hypothesis. That annotators of the same novel can make
radically different choices may derive in part from the fact that annotation itself is a
territory much less regulated than the editing of texts and fragments of texts. There is
always a certain degree of anarchy in annotation, since editors “have no comparable set of
principles to guide them in that other, . . . no less important operation, the annotation of the
text” (Battestin 2). The two main questions the annotator has to answer are what and how to
annotate. In both cases, the “rules” are few and sometimes controversial.
28
The decision on what and how to annotate is generally influenced by two very
elusive notions: the author’s intention; and the expectation of the audience. The annotator is
supposed to bring before today’s audience exactly what had been meant by the author for
his own contemporary audience. The representation that the annotator has of both
audiences, although it affects even “the decision itself to annotate or not to annotate”
(Battestin 6), can only be subjective. So is the author’s intention, as reconstructed by the
annotator (4). Nonetheless, the editor is often asked to “annotate only what his author has to
say about a subject, not the whole subject and everything connected with it. Yet very
frequently editors seem unable to omit anything they know or have found interesting”
(Friedman 119). Leatherdale, for example, has been criticised for providing unnecessary
information: “what is the point of notes informing us that Chinese trains under communist
rule are punctual (p. 30), ‘that the Virgin Mary is “Blessed” may be found in Luke 1:48’ (p.
147), or that Pepys mentioned trepanning (p. 384)?” (Hopkins, Review of Leatherdale 269).
Such guidance is not without its merit and Hopkins is probably right about trains in
communist China, although Leatherdale’s sentence comes at the end of a useful footnote
stating that Harker is wrong about trains in late-nineteenth-century China, which were
managed by western companies (Leatherdale 30 n. 34). However, it seems very difficult to
know exactly what the author means to say about a given subject when writing for an
intended reader.
These two slippery notions – the author’s intention and the intended audience – are
the main issues, at the same time accepted and debated, in the three founding texts in the
field of annotation mentioned above. The three theorists agree that, as a “matter of practice
. . . [the] concept of authorial intention . . . is more useful – in the sense that it does more
29
work – than any other theory” (Small, “The Editor” 207). For the editor, the concept of
authorial intention is a “once derided but now rehabilitated concept” (Small, “Annotating”
286), since even the most fundamental editing job, namely establishing the text, is done so
as to respect the author’s intention about his or her work (Friedman 115). However, the
author’s intention about the final form of the text can be the subject of intense debate
which, in the case of Stoker’s novel, is related to the editors’ decision to include and/or
annotate “Dracula’s Guest,” published for the first time in 1914 by Stoker’s widow in a
collection bearing the same title and presented as “a hitherto unpublished episode” from the
novel. In 1979, McNally and Florescu inserted “Dracula’s Guest” before the novel itself,
because they considered it “part of the original manuscript of Dracula” (28). As such,
“Dracula’s Guest” has in their edition its own annotations and illustrations. Wolf, who in
his 1975 edition had no room for “Dracula’s Guest,” published it in the 1993 edition, as
“Appendix A,” with no footnotes or illustrations, but bearing the subtitle “The Deleted
Original First Chapter of Dracula.”
In their 1997 edition, Auerbach and Skal provide “Dracula’s Guest” only as the last
of their four “contexts” of the novel, but with an introductory note citing Florence Stoker’s
opinion that it represents a deleted first chapter of Dracula. Coming after strong
suggestions in the 1980s and early 1990s that the story has, in fact, little to do with the
novel (Leatherdale, The Novel and the Legend 115-117), Auerbach and Skal’s editorial
decision has been criticised: “This is one of the few missteps made by the editors, who
were perhaps overly persuaded by Auerbach’s polemical view that Stoker removed the
‘chapter’ wilfully in order to erase evidence of the influence of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872
lesbian vampire story ‘Carmilla’” (Latham, “Dracula’s Century” 134). Leatherdale’s 1998
30
Dracula Unearthed does not include “Dracula’s Guest,” but Byron’s edition, published in
the same year, follows Wolf in placing it immediately after the novel, as “Appendix A.”
The story is missing in Riquelme’s 2002 edition, but resurfaces in Klinger’s 2008 The New
Annotated Dracula, where it is “Appendix 1” and is annotated. The first two editions in the
Oxford World’s Classics series (Wilson 1983 and Ellmann 1996) do not include “Dracula’s
Guest,” but in the third (Luckhurst 2011) it is presented as the only “Appendix” and is,
once again, annotated.13
The editor must make the author and his words “genuinely accessible” (Monod 18)
to the reader and therefore his principal function is understood as that of a mediator
between the author and the reader (Battestin 4). That is why, especially when he annotates,
“his job is to convey the author’s work to his readers, not to show off his own scholarship;
and the readers are interested not in the editor but in the edition” (Gaskell 7). In the case of
Dracula, the editors from the OUP tradition are the most self-effacing. Their annotation is
always placed after the text of the novel and their name does not appear on the front cover
(there is only a brief mention in small letters on the back cover and a brief note in the front
matter). In the Norton tradition, the annotator is more visible: his commentary is presented
as footnotes and thus accompanies the reader on every page; his name appears on the front
cover (also on the spine in the Broadview version, which is Glennis Byron’s case); and he
is introduced in a few sentences on the back cover. Yet more visible are the editors of the
small-press tradition. They are in fact everywhere: on the back and front cover, on the
spine; and they are more thoroughly introduced, on the back cover or on the back flap of
13
Similar, though less debated, has been the fate of Stoker’s Preface to the 1901 Icelandic version of Dracula.
Only Leatherdale and Klinger include it in their editions but, whereas the former places it before the text of
the novel, the latter places it immediately after Stoker’s dedication to Hall Caine and his brief note on the
authenticity of the journals and recordings, i.e., inside what Klinger calls “The Text of the Novel.” He also
gives it the title “Author’s Preface” and annotates it (Klinger 5-8).
31
the dust jacket (McNally and Florescu even with photos). The most visible is Leonard Wolf
who, on the title page of his 1993 edition, seems to take Stoker’s place as author of the
book: “The Essential Dracula, Written and Edited by Leonard Wolf, Including the
Complete Novel by Bram Stoker” (iii).
The recipient of the annotator’s mediating endeavour, i.e., the intended audience,
remains “the most commonly invoked criterion of appropriateness for annotation” (Small,
“The Editor” 197). New editions and new annotations appear to be necessary because
audiences change: “There is always a new audience, with its new ignorance” (Jack 323).
Leonard Wolf, the first annotator of Dracula, assumed that some of his readers were “about
. . . to reread” (ix) the novel. However, later annotators address brand-new readers: Klinger
encourages “a new generation of Dracula students to enjoy solving the puzzle” (xiii) of the
novel; and Luckhurst’s “Introduction” begins with a “spoiler alert”: “Readers who do not
wish to learn details of the plot may prefer to treat the Introduction as an Epilogue” (vii).
The reader’s ignorance drives the efforts of the annotator: Leatherdale, for example, writes
“for an international readership. I therefore hope British readers will not be irked to find
footnotes explaining that King’s Cross is a London railway terminus, which is tantamount
to telling Americans that Greenwich Village is in New York City” (24).14 The annotator
also “cater[s] to the needs of [his] contemporaries” (Gumbrecht 42), which is just as
important as catering to their ignorance. There is always a new audience, with new needs.
Providing information that matches these needs may be influenced by the annotator’s
14
Ian Small suggests that annotators might be persuaded by the publishers and general editors of the series in
which the novel is being published always to annotate “allusions which a moderately well-educated, nonnative speaker of English would not understand” (“The Editor” 187).
32
personal beliefs and judgements about the text he is presenting; in turn, these beliefs
reconstruct the text.
1.2 The Politics of Annotation
Since literary annotation is primarily the attempt of a particular editor to mediate
between a literary work and a particular (real or assumed) kind of reader, it will necessarily
vary from one edition to the other (Battestin 7). What does not change is that “the editor
cannot help governing, to some degree, the reader’s response to the text” (14). The
hegemonic position of the editor/annotator makes it possible to speak of “politics in textual
scholarship . . . [and of] partisan purposes” (Warren 119). Deliberately or not, the annotator
tends to limit the plurality of the text:
Annotation will by its very nature validate some readings and attempt to disable
others: such, after all, is one of its undeclared purposes. And often annotation,
although rarely explicitly so, tends to point to one reading to the exclusion of others.
. . . This tendency to assign priority to one particular reading at the expense of
others, to move in the direction of an allegedly “correct” reading, may not always be
the intention of the annotator, but it is a simple consequence of selectivity or
partiality. (Small, “The Editor” 190; emphasis his)
In the case of the editors of Dracula, this tendency is often intentional, and reviewers have
noted, for example, that McNally and Florescu’s goal is to prove the connections between
the Count and the historical Dracula and that they “ride their hobby-horse to the point of
exhaustion” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 186). On the other hand, “What Leatherdale seems
33
most interested in doing is using the edition to attack a number of what he sees as
misconceptions about the novel, principally the ideas that the short story ‘Dracula’s Guest’
is the missing first chapter of the novel, and that Stoker was well informed about the
historical Vlad the Impaler” (Hopkins, Review of Leatherdale 269). If Leonard Wolf
always seems to promote a “psychosexual reading of the text” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense
186), “[t]here is an unfortunate tendency in [the Auerbach/Skal] edition towards
foregrounding Dracula’s homoerotic ‘connections.’ This particular slant is clear in the
notes” (Davison 358).
The one reading imposed by the editor/annotator comes largely from the way in
which the text is “historicised,” that is, from the way in which the annotated text is
accompanied by other documents. On the one hand, the reader is constantly offered the
historical and cultural background of the text; on the other, contemporary sources, which
the author may or may not have known or consulted, are often quoted in annotations in
support of the understanding of the text as suggested by the annotator. Textual scholars
often perceive a certain distance that separates today’s readers from the text presented to
them and, consequently, “annotation is always a testimony to alienation from the text,
always represents a response to a prior culture from which one believes oneself (and
consequently, nearly everyone else) distanced” (Hanna III 178). The annotator tries to
backtrack this distance and “enable his contemporaries to read a book as its original
audience read it” (Jack 323). Here is where a key political issue of annotation emerges:
should the annotator backtrack to the historical and cultural context of the annotated text
while keeping the original distance; or should he simply cancel it through his annotation?
34
Arthur Friedman and Martin C. Battestin, as well as other commentators of the
practice of annotation, have strongly suggested that, in order to mediate meanings, the
annotator needs simply to reconstruct for the reader the context in which the meanings have
been produced. Friedman speaks mostly of “notes of which the aim is to set a work in its
historical context” (117), and that is why he prefers to identify “historical annotation” as
the main mediating activity of the editor. Battestin advises the editor to reconstruct “the
historical and intellectual milieu that influenced [the author’s] thought, for he will then be
better able to tell when the author is using concepts that carried a special significance for
him and his first readers of which a modern audience may be unaware” (15). For a
successful mediation, this theorist sets down the following rule: “Since the aim of
annotation is to reconstruct what a passage meant to the author and his first readers, all such
information should be drawn as far as possible from contemporary sources rather than from
modern reference books” (Battestin 20). However, while historicisation can be a healthy
endeavour (and the source of most annotations in general), since it is tantamount to
“suspending the ‘naïve’ presupposition that any object we encounter will be somehow
pertinent for us” (Gumbrecht 60), it can also lead both to the distortion of meanings and to
objectionable politics.
In his response to Battestin, Ian Small hints at the two shortcomings of Friedman’s
original principle: first, that the annotator may assume too much about the knowledge of
the earliest audience; and second, that it is a fallacy “merely to recreate a contemporary
historical context, defined without reference to any present-day demands” (Small, “The
Editor” 198). For his first argument, Small discusses annotations that explain dialect words
used in nineteenth-century fiction (Ian Jack argues in favour of glossing such words in
35
Wuthering Heights). Small maintains that such a need is “implausible . . . because it is far
from clear whether or not many contemporary readers were in fact in possession of such
linguistic knowledge” (“The Editor” 201; emphasis his). Or, one might add, whether or not
the author himself was in possession of such linguistic knowledge. Bram Stoker, for
example, had to rely on a glossary of Whitby dialect (Bram Stoker’s Notes 143-150) and,
very probably, on other sources for all the regionalisms that he uses in Dracula. However,
when the editors translate such dialect, they are lauded: Wolf provides “useful ‘translations’
of difficult parts of Mr Swales’s dialogue (rendered by Stoker with an impenetrable Whitby
dialect)” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 185); one reviewer finds “useful . . . [Leatherdale’s]
translation of Whitby dialect” (Hopkins, Review of Leatherdale 269). However, “the
annotator should at least entertain the possibility that [the author] did not intend dialect
words to be understood” (Small, “The Editor” 201-202; emphasis his).
As for the second and more important argument, Small suggests that “all annotation
is by its very nature contingent . . . and thus annotation, willy-nilly, like all other texts (and,
indeed, all human products), will bear witness to the specificity of the moment of its
production” (“The Editor” 190-191). Yet, paradoxically, annotators hope to be able to
provide a definitive reading experience that is specific to another moment of production. In
the case of Dracula, such a paradoxical attempt of giving today’s reader an experience
similar to that of Stoker’s contemporaries takes the form of annotations quoting from
Stoker’s sources and background material either reproducing at large the same sources or
providing contemporary theoretical works, without mentioning that either Stoker’s sources
or Victorian social sciences may be outdated or wrong. For example, Glennis Byron
provides passages from works by Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso (mentioned by
36
Abraham Van Helsing in the novel) but only writes that “Theories of degeneration were
widespread in the second half of the century and scientists from diverse areas contributed to
the debate over society in crisis” (468). About Nordau, Byron says that he “did much to
popularise the concept of degeneration” (470), but does not say whether the concept is in
any way problematic. The same is true of the excerpts from Stoker’s sources. Moreover,
these are usually praised as accurate: Emily Gerard’s travelogue is described as “accounts
of the customs and folktales” (439) of Transylvania; Charles Boner “has a keen eye for
Transylvanian scenery, particularly the human female variety” (444); Sabine Baring-Gould
“had a particular interest in myths and folktales” (448).
With any new edition, a literary work is, as Joseph Grigely says, re-inscribed, recontextualized, or “grafted” (199-200) onto the historical moment of its new publication.
Nevertheless, Dracula’s editors re-inscribe the novel in 1897 by solely providing
annotation and editorial apparatus that would have been available to Stoker and the initial
readers of Dracula. As Small explains:
A familiar argument in hermeneutics holds to the view that, if through the passage
of time a literary work has come to be culturally distant from the modern reader,
then there can be no guarantees that works (or documents) taken from other
discourses or disciplines will not have also suffered from a similar process of
hermeneutic obfuscation: bluntly put, if the understanding of a literary work has
become “corrupt” (in whatever way), then so too has the understanding of texts (or
works) from all other discourses. (“The Editor” 196-197)
Such “corrupted” works might be abstruse, but they might also be obsolete and include
information that has been discarded. The uncritical reproduction of passages from such
37
works, either in the notes or in the background material of the edition, may either puzzle
the modern reader or persuade him to have a similar outlook with that of the author’s
contemporaries. For example, when the editors of Dracula provide sources such as Emily
Gerard or Sabine Baring-Gould without at least mentioning the possibility that such
documents might be crude exaggerations, they perpetuate the idea that Transylvanian
folklore is replete with vampire beliefs, and that Catholicism and Orthodoxy are mostly
collections of superstitions. One should also note that the editors of Dracula are not always
consistent in their historicising endeavour: as Emily Gerard is the only nineteenth-century
source for the existence of vampire beliefs in Transylvania, all editors quote from two
much later sources: Agnes Murgoçi’s 1926 article “The Vampire in Roumania” and
Montague Summers’s 1929 The Vampire in Europe (which in fact reproduces Murgoçi’s
text). In consequence, the general belief today, of academics and public alike, is that
Romanians believe in vampires and that their lives are, or at least were at the turn of the last
century, guided by rituals and superstitions related to the undead. Critical material
continues to be published in which Romanian beliefs are central to the investigation, yet
none of these investigations cite Romanian sources – which would contradict them. Instead,
the same sources Stoker used, along with Summers and Murgoçi, constitute the basis of
these writings.
Moreover, the account of the past that is advanced by the historicising annotator
should emerge from the “critical study of all sources” (Grafton 77), because “historical
truths could be established only by critical, comparative study of the sources” (89). Too
often, the editors of Dracula rely on obsolete encyclopaedia entries or on their own
observations as tourists. Since Dracula has come to be understood as an encyclopaedic,
38
multi-layered work, the editors become amateur historians, ethnographers, and folklorists,
following in the footsteps of the amateur folklorists Emily Gerard, Agnes Murgoçi and
Montague Summers. This is especially evident in all things Romanian. In both his 1975 and
his 1993 edition, Leonard Wolf mentions only two Romanian specialists in his
acknowledgements: Alex Besuan and Ioan Puia from the Cluj Agronomic Institute. They
were consulted on one trivial matter: the existence (or inexistence) of the “Golden
Mediasch” wine. In their 1979 edition, McNally and Florescu acknowledge the support of
“Mihai Pop, professor emeritus and former director of the Folklore Institute in Bucharest”
(4), although it is not clear from their notes what kind of support they have received from
him. One has to look at the first book that McNally and Florescu co-authored in 1972 and
in which they gave him the wrong name: “Professor Ion Pop, director of the Folklore
Institute, who provided the assistance of his team of experts” (In Search 7). The only
situation in which Romanian folklorists appear to have helped the two authors is in
gathering a couple of contemporary legends about the historical Dracula (79-81).
In his discussion of the issues facing the editor of a nineteenth-century British
novel, Stephen Wall admits that the author may at times use inaccuracies and suggests a
kind of annotation that could “help us to assess, at such a point, how much his picture of
the world around him was record and how much fantasy – or, more probably, at what point
the one modulates into the other” (3). If, in fact, the modern reader were supposed to have
the same experience as the earliest reader, he would not need such an illuminating note. If,
on the other hand, we may assume that the modern reader can be allowed to know when the
author and his sources fantasise or are simply wrong, the entire critical apparatus should
clarify this. The editors of Dracula often show the plot’s contradictions; or, like
39
Leatherdale, they signal an error regarding the punctuality of trains in China. This is
inconsistent: if some errors are shown, then errors all of kinds could be shown, including –
or especially – ideological ones. Vesna Goldsworthy’s observation that it is possible for
writers today to propagate distortions about East-Central Europe “which would appal them
if applied to Somalis or the peoples of Zaire” (xxviii) can easily be extended to editors. The
Norton Critical Edition of Heart of Darkness, for example, has included, since 1988,
background documents and analytical essays that criticise Joseph Conrad’s depiction of
Central African natives. However, no edition of Dracula attempts to counterbalance
Stoker’s representations, while Romanians are castigated for their “determination to
counteract the notion that Romania is the natural home of the vampire” (Miller, Sense &
Nonsense 129).
1.3 Types of Annotation
Editors usually distinguish between textual and explanatory notes: “textual notes
differ from and are sometimes kept separate from explanatory notes, which are intended to
help readers make sense of the passage in question, providing definitions or explanations of
arcane. Textual notes are instead concerned almost wholly with microhistories of the text”
(Kelemen 116). In his edition of the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Ian Small, for
example, uses the textual notes, which he calls “textual apparatus,” as footnotes, and the
explanatory notes, which he calls “commentary,” as endnotes. More often than not,
especially when the editor finds few reasons for the “textual apparatus” to be very large,
textual and explanatory notes are not at all separate. Since the former gloss on the text that
40
is being provided, while the latter explain the work, many editors find the distinction
problematic for the reader: “Can we say anything about the text that will conduce to
understanding of the work? Is it useful, or fatal, to this or any effort at annotation to admit
such a distinction into our project?” (Middleton 174; emphases hers).
However, in his pioneering essay, Arthur Friedman calls the second type “historical
notes,” which he subsequently divides into “notes of recovery” and “explanatory notes.” As
he understands them, notes of recovery “supply information that would presumably have
been known to the author’s contemporaries, but that has been lost by the passage of time
[while] ‘explanatory notes’ . . . attempt to make a work more intelligible by showing its
relationship to earlier works” (118). Friedman illustrates this through a comparison
between Alexander Pope’s letters and David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion:
In Pope’s letters we find many allusions to contemporary persons, places, and
events, all of which we may suppose were readily understood by the recipients of
the letters, but many of which are not understood by readers today. The intention of
annotating this sort of allusion is the recovery of lost information so that the modern
reader can read a work with something like the same understanding as the author’s
contemporaries for whom the work was originally intended. (117-118)
On the other hand, in Hume’s Dialogues “where there are few allusions, the problem of
recovery is a minor one; and the main job of the annotator would be to explain the text by
showing its relationship to earlier writings” (118).
Friedman admits, though, that the distinction between notes of recovery and
explanatory notes “often turns out in actual practice to break down; allusions which at first
41
sight seem to call for only a little information can often be satisfactorily explained only by
a thorough search through the author’s background” (Friedman 128). Battestin still uses
this distinction (9-10), but later writers on the subject do not and prefer, instead, to call
them both “explanatory.” This is the term used in the OUP editions of Dracula: all
annotations are gathered after the text of the novel as endnotes in a section entitled
“Explanatory Notes.” However, both Wilson’s and Ellmann’s annotations can be
considered “notes of recovery.” Only Luckhurst goes as far as to link the text of the novel
with earlier writings and possible influences. In any case, Friedman argues convincingly
that both types of notes should make use of contemporary sources (125-126), rather than
sources that might be possible but are too old or sources that are impossible because they
have been published at a later date. What Friedman does not discuss – perhaps because he
analyses two nonfictional bodies of writing – the private letters of a poet and the
theological work of a philosopher15 – is the fact that, apart from allusions to contemporary
people and places or to earlier writings, a piece of literature (and especially a piece of
fiction) can include mistakes, exaggerations, or distortions which are based on precisely
those contemporary sources that he thinks “enlightening” (125).
Unlike textual notes, explanatory ones (including what Friedman calls “notes of
recovery”) manage to add to the text, to become part of it, or at least to enter in a dialogue
with it. Thomas McFarland, who wrote on “The Myth of Annotation” in 1991, calls textual
notes “reference” notes and explanatory ones “dialogical” and insists that they be either
separated (with the former placed after the text of the novel) or else kept together at the
15
Also, perhaps, because his examples (and Battestin’s) are from the eighteenth century. Of the three major
theorists of annotation, Small (editor of Wilde) is the only one who specialises in the (late) nineteenth century,
the age of the maximum expansion of the British Empire and perhaps the richest era of British fiction.
Instead, Friedman edited the collected works of Oliver Goldsmith and Battestin several works by Henry
Fielding.
42
bottom of the page as footnotes (McFarland 155). McFarland thus contributes to the
valuable discussion of the relations of power that exist within the “[m]aterial forms [of the
book] between editor and text, edited text and source materials, edited text and readers,
different parts of the edition itself” (Warren 125). Annotations may be in a dialogic
relationship with the work, but they are physically present in the text, and, as such, they
command a similar form of respect as the edited material. The place of the annotations
signals the importance given the mediation process that, in turn, may lower the weight of
the annotated text.
For the annotator, the notes “either are or are not part of the text, that is to say,
essential to the text or not essential. If they are part of the text, they should be presented as
part of the text, that is, at the bottom of the page. Only if they are not considered part of the
text, and therefore not essential, may they be relegated to the back of the book” (McFarland
153). The mere presence of the footnote may “establish more direct networks of power”
(Warren 125) than those suggested by the “absence” of the endnote. However, endnotes
also have a sort of autonomy, even though they are relegated in another space than that of
the text and, as such, do not converse with the text. The most privileged position is
occupied by lateral notes, precisely because they are placed in “the lateral and not the
inferior margins of the principal text” (Derrida 193). Lateral notes such as those of the first
Wolf, McNally/Florescu, or Klinger16 occupy a space that is similar to that of the annotated
text inasmuch as it covers the entire height of the page.
Lateral notes create a special space for the annotator, which runs parallel to the
principal text and, unlike the space occupied by footnotes, is kept free if the annotator has
16
For another example, see Patricia Meyer Spacks’s recent edition of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility
(Cambridge, Ma: Harvard UP, 2013).
43
nothing to say. McNally and Florescu, for example, have scores of pages in which the
margins remain blank: “the annotation is unbalanced, extensive in the sections in which
Stoker drew from his sources (especially the first four chapters), and much lighter (at times
non-existent) elsewhere” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 186). The use of lateral margins
allows the editor to include not only annotations, but also photographs and engravings that
participate in the construction of the text. In Klinger’s edition, the richest in term of
illustrations, “at times the secondary material overshadows the text itself. In a number of
instances, the text of the novel disappears for an entire page as the commentary and
illustrations roll on filling both columns” (Holte, Review of Klinger 430). On the other
hand, endnotes, which are preferred by the OUP in its World Classics series, are the only
annotations that do not share the page with the annotated text, and hence display no desire
to compete with it or even to explain it.
The layout of the page also marks the attitude of the publisher and of the editor (or
at least the general editor of the series in which the text is being published) towards the
edited text. Layouts “can emphasize similarities among texts (uniform shapes for disparate
sources, familiar modern forms for ancient sources) or differences” (Warren 125). In
Wolf’s first edition, the text of the novel is reproduced in facsimile, with numbers
signalling a note placed at the end of the line, and lateral notes positioned as closely as
possible to the respective lines. The title page, Stoker’s dedication to Hall Caine, and
Stoker’s note about the factuality of the subsequent “papers” are not numbered and seem to
be part of the editorial apparatus. Moreover, these are separated from the main body of the
edited text by another unnumbered page that reproduces a nineteenth-century drawing of
the Széchenyi Bridge, while page number 1 contains only the first lines of Chapter 1. Thus,
44
in Wolf’s 1975 edition, the writer and the editor appear to collaborate in introducing the
novel. In the 1993 revised edition, Wolf introduces opinions of science-fiction writers
about Dracula between the chapters of the novel, thereby expanding the text into a sort of
collective chapbook.
Many editions (especially, but not necessarily, those that prefer endnotes) belong to
annotators that try to appear “self-effacing” (Jack 334), but that keep their interpretations
for the introduction. After all, “[a]lthough historical annotation should help in analysis, it
can never take the place of it; alone it will give only a very partial explanation” (Friedman
124-125). The introduction, the background information and excerpts of sources, the
various essays, maps, and graphs that may be furnished by the editor play a part that
matches and sometimes exceeds that of the annotation in the power relationships of the
edited text. “The proportionality of ‘apparatus’ to ‘text’ can physically signal the power
plays of editorial practice; when the apparatus far exceeds the text, it signals a kind of
interpretative exhaustion even before the reader reaches the text itself” (Warren 125). Here,
Warren alludes to editions that place their apparatus before the text itself; however, this is
often positioned after the text – and the sheer length (and weight) of the subsequent pages
dominate the edited text before and during the act of reading.
On the other hand, when the apparatus is “reduced to a bare minimum or even
eliminated, the silence signals the text’s self-sufficiency, naturalising editorial intervention”
(Warren 125). It is usually trade editions that “naturalise” editorial intervention, by making
no reference to the changes brought to the text. In practice, many critical editions use the
fairly similar procedure of introducing a brief “Note on the text” in which such changes are
summarily explained. All the editors of Dracula do this, with one significant exception:
45
Leonard Wolf, who keeps all the typos of the 1897 edition intact and annotates them. This
is another way through which the editor, advertising his intervention, exercises the powers
provided by his position as mediator of the text. A more “silent” annotator can still speak
through the background material. This is achieved, for example, by Glennis Byron, who
sometimes inserts a note that sends the reader to the appendices placed after the text of the
novel. Thus, the background material can indirectly participate in the annotation. Through
his or her commentary, the supplementary documents, critical and biographical essays, and
even illustrations, the editor succeeds in mediating not only the text, but also in providing
an interpretation – his or her interpretation – of the work.
46
Chapter 2
The Fight for a Masterpiece
The annotations provided by the many editors of Dracula, as well as the
background material usually placed after the text of the novel largely contribute to the
imposition of a certain reading preferred by the respective editors. In fact, despite several
minor differences, the existence of only two competing readings can be easily traced from
the moment these were first suggested by Leonard Wolf and by Raymond McNally and
Radu Florescu, respectively, until today. In the small-press tradition, Wolf gives the novel
(twice, in 1975 and 1993) a “psychosexual” reading, as it has been called by other editors.
McNally and Florescu suggest a “historicist” reading, which is also adhered to, although
with different results, by Leslie Klinger and by the editors of Bram Stoker’s Notes (which I
will add in this chapter as an example of a partial attempt at annotating Dracula). Clive
Leatherdale oscillates between the two readings but insists on a third, a theological one,
which might explain in part why his edition is much less discussed than the others. Nina
Auerbach and David J. Skal prefer the “psychosexual” reading, as does Glennis Byron
despite her hesitations, whereas John Paul Riquelme chooses the “historicist” one. In the
OUP editions, A.N. Wilson is less concerned with providing a particular reading, Maud
Ellmann takes a psychosexual approach, and Roger Luckhurst’s approach is historicist.
Inevitably, such preferred readings give rise to intense debate over the meaning of
some passages, Stoker’s intentions, and his use of sources and informants. Consequently,
much effort is spent by the Dracula editors in countering each other’s hypotheses. Another
47
major issue that consumes a lot of effort on the part of the editors is that of the (literary)
value of Dracula. In general, when an editor decides to present a new textual version of a
literary work, it is because its literariness is accepted by a large number of professional
readers (Small, “The Editor” 191). The editors of Dracula have not been able to find a
similarly categorical consensus among literary critics and, apart from the effort of
“[c]anonisation through commentary” (Gumbrecht 47), their editions also construct the
novel’s canonicity discursively, mostly in the critical introductions. In each of the three
traditions I have identified, even though the starting points are considerably different, the
canonising effort gains momentum from one edition to the next.
2.1 Leonard Wolf: The Annotated Dracula (1975)
Wolf’s first edition of the novel, The Annotated Dracula opens with a general
appreciation of the novel and of the eponymous character, with sentences such as these:
“What an elegant monster he is! How strong, how graceful, how lonely, how wise. And
above all – and here is his central mystery – how deadly . . . and erotic” (ix). Eroticism is a
recurrent theme in Wolf’s annotations. This elegant monster, Wolf thinks, is the main
reason for the novel’s success: he suggests that Stoker’s legacy consists in having written
“one – and only one – work whose central figure could become an overwhelming symbol
of the crimes and temptations of the twentieth century” (xviii). This is the main idea of his
1972 essay A Dream of Dracula, in which he analyses the vampire subcultures and the
influence of vampire movies in America. A Dream of Dracula appeared in the same year as
McNally and Florescu’s In Search of Dracula, which Wolf mentions as “a popular study”
48
(xiv). In the bibliography, Wolf gives their names as “Florescu, Radu, and McNally,
Raymond T” (357), even though the order is actually vice versa.
Although Wolf fully embraces McNally and Florescu’s idea that Count Dracula is
based on a Romanian medieval ruler known as Vlad the Impaler, he prefers to quote other
sources such as Harry Ludlam and Gabriel Ronay or to use his own research. The rival
scholars are mentioned in the annotations (always as “Florescu and McNally”) mainly to be
contradicted: Wolf does not agree with the association they make between the German
word “wüttrich” and the English word “berserker” (31 n. 9); and he is more confident than
his predecessors that Arminius Vambéry is the model for “my friend Arminius” (214 n.
10). Wolf provides “Appendices” that are quite similar to those used by McNally and
Florescu in their book In Search of Dracula: maps of Transylvania, Europe, England,
Whitby, London, and the Zoological Gardens (335-342); a Calendar of Events (343-349);
“Dracula Onstage,” which (despite the misleading title) provides a list of the Count’s
appearances in the novel (350-351); “Selected Filmography” (352-353); “English-language
and Foreign Editions of Dracula” (354-355); and a “Bibliography” (356-360), in which he
promises to “list the various editions of Dracula that have appeared” (356). He does not, in
fact, because the only edition listed in the bibliography is the 1897 Constable.
Elizabeth Miller has summarised well Wolf’s Annotated Dracula: “As the first
annotated edition of the novel, this is a pioneer work. Its more than 600 notes reveal an
admirable erudition, albeit that many are tangential to the novel” (Sense & Nonsense 185).
Although Miller’s last sentence seems more appropriate for Wolf’s 1993 edition, some of
the annotating choices of 1975 are surprising, simply because Wolf is driven by the effort
to show and prove the novel’s literariness. For example, where Doctor Seward ends his
49
diary entry of 10 September by noting: “It must have been my weakness that made me
hesitate to tell it to my friend, but I felt it all the more, like unshed tears,” Wolf comments:
“This is another of those fine lyric sentences that give one a startled glimpse of Stoker’s
submerged poetic power” (124 n. 28). One reason for such commentary is that very little
(favourable) interpretation of the novel was available in the early 1970s, and in his
introduction Wolf can only quote from Anthony Boucher and Montague Summers.
However, not even these two sources, neither of whom was a literary critic,17 were
entirely ready to accept the novel’s literariness and Wolf is forced to amend their words:
Cultivated readers of the book, like Anthony Boucher who obviously loved and
appreciated it, are willing to concede that “it is . . . a masterpiece of a kind, if not a
literary one.” Montague Summers, nearly forty years before Boucher, would
concede to Stoker only brilliantly selected subject matter and occasionally
“admirable” writing. Summers . . . admired the first chapters of Dracula but wished
that “the whole story [could] have been sustained at so high a level.” “Then,” says
Summers, “we should have had a complete masterpiece.” Let me say at once that
we have a complete masterpiece, flawed here and there, as the Chinese insist
masterpieces should be, but, nevertheless, the real thing. (ix-x)
Wolf then repeats this opinion in a brief introductory note to the “Bibliography,” which is,
according to him, “a testimonial to Stoker’s pack-rat mind which, while it was engaged in
making a masterpiece, was also busy stuffing its pages with helter-skelter references to all
sorts of things” (356).
17
Boucher was a mystery writer who provided an illustrated edition of Dracula in 1965; Summers was a
clergyman who wrote widely on the subject of vampires and witches in the 1920s and 1930s.
50
Stoker’s curious mind and his wide-scale research appear to be the ultimate reasons
for the partial or total canonisation of Dracula – they are that upon which later editors will
base their appreciation or rejection of the novel. Wolf, the first to advance this theory, uses
it to counter one last “mystery” behind the writing of the novel:
Anthony Boucher . . . asks: “How did the most successful horror novel in the
English (and possibly in any) language come to be written by a man whose first
published book was entitled The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland?” One
might extend the question to inquire how Dracula came to be written by the same
man who wrote [his other fictions]. Anthony Boucher, shrewdly, did not try to
answer his question, and I have no intention of answering mine. Literary greatness
is easier to acknowledge than to explain. It is enough that the world was lucky.
(xviii)
Wolf himself states that “Stoker was a hasty writer with the habits of a hack” (x),
and his explanation for the literary value of Dracula is, in fact, his very “Introduction” to
the novel. After first suggesting that it is a flawed masterpiece, he writes a history of Gothic
literature in Britain (x-xii), mentions vampire lore and lauds Emily Gerard (xiii) for
gathering it, then he moves on to the historical Dracula as a model for the vampire count
(xiv-xv). Thus one may infer that, in Leonard Wolf’s 1975 perspective, Dracula should be
placed within the realm of Gothic literature, where it remains a masterpiece, notable for the
imaginative use of vampire beliefs and the clever fictionalisation of a historical character.
51
2.2 Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu: The Essential Dracula
(1979)
In 1972, McNally and Florescu dedicated their first co-authored book, In Search of
Dracula, “to the memory of Bram Stoker on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his
masterpiece – Dracula” (McNally and Florescu, In Search 4). However, seven years later,
in The Essential Dracula, McNally and Florescu take their cue from Boucher and Wolf
when they ask themselves “how Stoker, a notorious writer of potboilers, came to create this
masterpiece of Gothic horror” (McNally and Florescu 20). Their answer is very similar to
Wolf’s: Stoker cleverly used vampire beliefs and fictionalised a historical character, as well
as “the circumstances of his life at the time he came to write the book” (20). Yet, however
highly McNally and Florescu think of Dracula as a novel, they doubt that the author of
potboilers could have written the final draft of the Gothic masterpiece:
Recent startling evidence has called into question Stoker’s final authorship. In the
Lovecraft Collection at John Hay Library, Brown University, there is an
unpublished letter by H.P. Lovecraft. . . . In the letter Lovecraft writes: “. . . Stoker
was a very inept writer when not helped out by revisers. . . . I know an old lady who
almost had the job of revising Dracula back in the early 1890s – she saw the
original ms., & says it was a fearful mess. Finally someone else (Stoker thought her
price for the work was too high) whipped it into such shape as it now possesses.” . .
. Now that we have found Stoker’s notes, it is clear that Stoker at least did all the
basic research for the book, as well as the outline of its contents. But was he capable
of completing this massive re-write? (24)
As they rely on Farson’s biography, McNally and Florescu suggest that “the early stages of
syphilis” (24) might have prevented Stoker from doing the work anyway. While it seems
52
hard to nominate the real author of the final version of Dracula, “we would opt for . . . Hall
Caine [who] was one of the best-selling authors of his day. He wrote The Eternal City,
which sold a million copies, and The Manxman, which Stoker helped him to draft. And
they certainly were intimate: Caine was one of the few friends who attended Stoker’s
funeral in 1912” (25).
As they explain the most important (and aesthetically valuable) aspects of the novel
through circumstances in Stoker’s life, McNally and Florescu list all possible models for
the Count and for sightings of the undead: Florence Stoker; various stage characters; a man
whom Stoker tried unsuccessfully to save from drowning on 14 September 1882; his
brother George’s experiences in the 1877-1878 war (20-22). What is most striking in the
McNally/Florescu edition, as well as its “‘claim to fame’ . . . is that it takes into account
Stoker’s Notes, and integrates whole chunks of them into the annotations” (Miller, Sense &
Nonsense 186). McNally and Florescu emphasise that “Wolf did not have access to the
notes” (17), but no other mention of Wolf’s edition is made until the bibliography, where it
is described as a “[w]idely publicized annotation of Stoker’s novel containing a number of
errors. . . . Weak on Romanian history and folklore” (309). Instead, McNally and Florescu
insist on Wolf’s previous essay and emphasise Wolf’s preference for a psychosexual
reading of the novel: “Leonard Wolf, in A Dream of Dracula, is searching for a twentiethcentury living American vampire, dressed up in funky California-modern dress . . . then
proceeds to ruminate about Victorian repressed sexuality” (18).
53
2.3 Leonard Wolf: The Essential Dracula (1993)
Wolf is the only editor of Dracula who had the opportunity (and a span of 18 years)
to expand and revise his earlier edition. He did so by increasing his annotations “by one
third. Alas, the expansion did not take into account the one thing that should have been
obligatory: Stoker’s Notes. . . . What Wolf provides in this edition is the same psychosexual
reading of the text, bolstered with entertaining (though for the most part irrelevant)
commentary by present-day writers and aficionados” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 186).
Indeed, Wolf’s The Essential Dracula is only expanded, but not revised. It is also much
less illustrated and the lateral notes of the 1975 edition have been replaced by footnotes.
The front cover of the 1993 edition bears the following subtitle: The Definitive Annotated
Edition of Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel. Thus, Wolf made the choice of not simply
improving, but literally replacing one edition with another. Inside the front matter of Wolf’s
last words on the matter, his 1997 book Dracula: The Connoisseur’s Guide, on a page
listing other works by Leonard Wolf, only The Essential Dracula of 1993 is mentioned
(The Connoisseur’s Guide ii). As a consequence, this is the only Wolf edition I will refer to
from now on.
The 1993 edition remains, as Elizabeth Miller concedes, “[o]ne of the most widely
consulted texts” (Sense & Nonsense 17) on Dracula. It was published by Plume, a division
of Penguin Books (and it has been alternately presented in subsequent bibliographies as
being published by either Plume or Penguin). In fact, the front matter of the volume also
identifies this edition as a “Byron Preiss Book.”18 The text of the novel is followed by
“Dracula’s Guest” (missing in the 1975 edition), which replaces the calendar of events.
18
Byron Preiss (1953-2005) was a publisher who specialized in fantasy and children’s literature and who
developed titles for HarperCollins, Random House, and others.
54
Other appendices are identical with the first edition, but the “Bibliography” now includes a
few new titles: McNally and Florescu appear this time not only with In Search of Dracula,
but also with their 1979 edition, The Essential Dracula (although the year given is 1977).
Wolf’s “Acknowledgments,” unchanged since 1975, include both “Raymond McNally,
coauthor of In Search of Dracula” and “Radu R. Florescu, coauthor of In Search of
Dracula.” Thus, the rival annotators are not acknowledged as such; and Wolf adds a middle
initial that Florescu used neither when he signed the 1979 edition nor as coauthor of In
Search of Dracula. The “Introduction” is identical in the two editions, except for the last
part, in which Wolf now includes a few pages about the legacy of the book, both on film
and paper (xix-xxiii). Here, he praises Anne Rice’s vampire fiction: “her work has a
visionary grandeur of nearly epic proportions” (xxi); he sees her as the true heir of Bram
Stoker’s legacy.
Like in the 1975 edition, the text of Stoker’s novel begins just as Wolf’s
introduction ends; in fact, the two are merged together: Stoker’s dedication to Hall Caine as
well as his introductory words about “how these papers have been placed in sequence” are
placed on page xxiv, as if they were still part of the paratext of one and the same book. As
stated before, the annotation itself has not really changed from one edition to the other: here
are the same notes (presented on the lateral margins in 1975 and on the bottom margin in
1993) with the same (now) conspicuous lack of reference to Stoker’s working papers. The
new annotations either help the reader keep track of the plot by reminding him of previous
occurrences or signalling inconsistencies, or make reference to the way in which some
aspects of the novel have been used in film adaptations.
55
The most important difference between the two editions, though, is that in the 1993
version most chapters of Dracula are supplemented by a personal thought, sometimes a
personal story, about the novel, provided by science-fiction authors and vampire
aficionados. These are separated from the text of the novel by a vignette representing a bat
and appear in italics. However, they belong to this textual version of Dracula even more
than Wolf’s footnotes since they occupy the same part of the volume’s layout as the novel
itself and use a font of the same size (unlike the much smaller characters used for the
footnotes). Perhaps the most obvious role of these insertions is that of being Wolf’s
mouthpiece in his effort to suggest that Dracula is a masterpiece. Here, L. Sprague de
Camp proclaims the novel “A masterpiece of skilled storytelling” (266).
Among many other contributors to Wolf’s 1993 edition, Ramsey Campbell states
that “Dracula is more than the epitome of the Gothic villain, revitalised by the supernatural,
though that would be enough; he has become one of the lasting myths of modern fiction”
(36). Joe R. Lansdale writes that the novel works “on some deeper literary level that taps
the darker more primal nature of the human experience and opens a gate inside of us from
which dark and ancient allegories escape” (266). Thomas F. Monteleone explains why he
has never written a vampire novel: “When something has been done right the first time,
only a fool is going to try to redecorate the Sistine Chapel” (328). Wolf perhaps feels that
he needs the help of all these contributors, because he still believes Dracula to have been
an accident. In his last book about Dracula, he still wonders “[w]hat makes a writer of
mediocre skills and mediocre vision somehow reinvent himself . . . my own tentative
explanations . . . [are] that even a mediocre mind . . . can, like someone carrying a family
member down the stairs of a burning building, have access suddenly to the intellectual
56
adrenaline he needs to outdo himself. Before and after Stoker wrote Dracula, his work
expressed the thoroughly mediocre man he was” (Wolf, The Connoisseur’s Guide 147).
2.4 Clive Leatherdale: Dracula Unearthed (1998)
Clive Leatherdale does not seem to think that Dracula is the exception in an
otherwise lacklustre literary career. His annotated edition was published by Desert Island
Books, a press he owns, in the “Dracula Library,” a series that “promotes the study of
Dracula, vampirism, and the works of Bram Stoker” (according to the dust jacket of
Dracula Unearthed). In 1996, in the same series, Leatherdale had already published an
annotated edition of The Jewel of Seven Stars – and more annotated editions of Stoker’s
oeuvre were to follow.19 From the very first book he wrote on Stoker’s novel (Dracula: The
Novel and the Legend, 1985), Leatherdale seems convinced that Dracula is a masterpiece.
However, given that the novel had been overlooked even by studies of the Gothic, he
oscillates between showing that Dracula is a “Gothic masterpiece” (3) and one of the
“classics” (The Novel and the Legend 12). First, he insists on the former and deplores the
fact “that serious examination of supernatural fiction can, and does, frequently sidestep
Dracula. This wholesale dismissal of the novel borders on the extraordinary. It is akin to
discarding Plato from the study of Western philosophy, for Dracula is almost the Gothic
novel par excellence” (11). Nevertheless, he ends by suggesting that the novel “deserves to
be treated as a major work of fiction” (13).
19
Desert Island Books has also published annotated editions of Stoker’s The Primrose Path (1999; ed.
Richard Dalby), Snowbound (2000; ed. Bruce Wightman), The Shoulder of Shasta (2000; ed. Alan Johnson),
The Lady of the Shroud (2001; ed. William Hughes), and Lady Athlyne (2007; ed. Carol Senf).
57
Thirteen years after his critical study of the novel, Leatherdale seems less convinced
of the literariness of the novel and insists, rather, on its versatility: “Dracula’s endurance
and appeal, at least for the present writer, stem not from Stoker’s literary style, which
superior critics are happy to condemn, but, firstly, from the complexity and density of the
text. Few novels of my acquaintance permit so many readings as Dracula” (Leatherdale
10). Here, he does not hesitate to call the novel “superficial” and “profound” in the same
breath: “there is more to Dracula than textual richness. It is, and I use the word carefully, a
profound book. Though it may be enjoyed as a superficial horror tale, it possesses
surprising depths” (10). The depths he mentions are mostly of a religious nature: “Stoker
was a [sic] intensely scriptural writer, punctuating The Jewel of Seven Stars and Dracula
(and no doubt other tales) with theological references that are frequently overlooked by
modern critics” (10). Such a statement announces, to use Ian Small’s formula,
Leatherdale’s “one” reading of the novel as an allegory of the age-old battle between good
and evil, which pervades many of his footnotes.
Probably unaware of the fact that Auerbach and Skal were preparing a critical
edition for Norton (which appeared, in fact, in 1997, before his own) and Glennis Byron
another one for Broadview (1998), Leatherdale feels compelled to explain “the need for
another annotated text. Other than a revised edition of Wolf’s (1993), no fresh annotated
edition of Dracula has appeared for thirty years” (Leatherdale 9). Here, he does not take
into account the first two OUP editions, too sparsely annotated. He also obviously means
“(almost) twenty years,” since the McNally/Florescu edition is from 1979. Leatherdale first
distances himself from the two editors from Boston and posits himself as the first British
annotator of Dracula: “When annotating a novel set largely in England, a British scholar
58
enjoys certain advantages over those based in America. Added to which, Florescu and
McNally’s forte is the historical Dracula” (9). Then he explains Wolf’s major flaw: “though
I am no less indebted to Leonard Wolf’s researches, I would question his lack of references
to Stoker’s research papers” (9). After his 11-page “Introduction” and a list of Stoker’s
sources, Leatherdale includes a “Select Bibliography” of only 15 authors (13 if one leaves
out Stoker and Leatherdale himself). The two previous annotated editions of Dracula are
here, but no other works by Wolf or by McNally and Florescu.
Dracula Unearthed remains the most heavily annotated of all the Dracula editions,
with its 3,500 footnotes extending to “110,000 words, only 50,000 fewer than the text of
Dracula” (Leatherdale 24). Not all seem pertinent enough, and one reviewer observes that
they “are indeed copious. Unfortunately, however, I would term 90 per cent of them
fatuous, 5 per cent plain wrong, and only the remaining 5 per cent of any actual use or
interest” (Hopkins, Review of Leatherdale 269). The same reviewer points out a series of
“egregious errors. . . . [He] seems to confuse ‘mendacious’ with ‘mendicant’ . . . and
‘implies’ with ‘infers.’ . . . He errs too in declaring that ‘Omnia Romae venalia sunt’ is
‘Latin for “All Romans are venal”’ (p. 112). . . . And I cannot imagine why . . . he should
attribute The Lost World to Jules Verne (p. 436)” (269). Another reviewer states plainly “I
cannot urge to acquire Leatherdale’s book” (Latham, “Dracula’s Last Gasp” 363),
recommending instead “Leonard Woolf’s [sic] The Essential Dracula (1993), still in print
from Plume” (363). Leatherdale has one passionate champion in Elizabeth Miller, who
writes of this edition: “The reliability far surpasses that of either of its predecessors” (Sense
& Nonsense 187). It is true, though, that Miller was Leatherdale’s collaborator and
“provided invaluable assistance with the annotations” (Leatherdale 24).
59
2.5 Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller: Bram Stoker’s
Notes for Dracula (2008)
One decade after the Leatherdale edition, Elizabeth Miller collaborated with another
Dracula enthusiast in producing a new, more original, and perhaps more eloquent,
canonising gesture: an “annotated and transcribed” facsimile edition of the contents of the
box of Stoker’s papers “discovered” in 1970 at the Rosenbach Foundation in Philadelphia
by McNally and Florescu. Eighteen-Bisang and Miller are so convinced of the place held
by Dracula in the history of literature that they call it an “immortal masterpiece” twice, the
first time in a chapter on the “Methodology” of arranging the papers (Eighteen-Bisang and
Miller 9). Most remarkable in this edition (published by McFarland, an independent
academic press based in North Carolina) is that it is structured like many other annotated
editions of Dracula. It has a series of appendices (295-314), including a biography of
Stoker; a bibliography; a list of nonfiction sources for the novel and another of possible
literary influences; as well as the encyclopaedia article on “Vampire” also provided by
Riquelme. It includes an essay on “The Myth of Dracula” (291-294) and an “Overview”
(275-289) in which the editors discuss many of the original issues raised by Wolf and
McNally/Florescu: the year in which the novel is set; the range of Stoker’s knowledge
about Transylvania; the similarities between Count Dracula and Vlad the Impaler.
Moreover, the annotations to Stoker’s meagre jottings read like annotations to the
novel. To give a single example, when Stoker’s memo reads simply “Chapter 7 – return of
the Texan – new light on Dracula – the Professor’s lecture in history,” the editors add a
long note. They begin by quoting amply from Dracula (Van Helsing’s report of Arminius’s
60
letter on the Count in Chapter 18) so as to make their comment more naturally based on the
text of the novel, then say, “With the exception of the reference to the Voivode Dracula
who pursued the Turks, this account is fiction not history.” The note continues with yet
another quote from Van Helsing (Chapter 23), after which the annotators add, “Again, this
‘history’ is fictional” (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 73 n. 170). There is no “history,”
fictional or not, however; the “account” the annotators are referring to does not exist in
Stoker’s working papers, but only in the novel itself.
Eighteen-Bisang and Miller write the correct forms of words misspelled by the
author: for example, where the notes say “wehr wolf” and “Fins,” they transcribe
“werewolf” and “Finns” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 200-201)20; instead of “handl” and “gulgas”
they write “hendl” and “gulyas” (212-213); instead of “Bukorest” they write “Bucharest”
(246-247). In other places, they misspell what Stoker has written correctly: “nópte”
becomes “nopte” (120-121); “Dieu” becomes “dieu” (122-123); “these men said of legend”
becomes “these men said if legend” (152-153); “Religio Medici” becomes “Religico
Medici” (236-237). Sometimes they do not see a mistake and neither correct nor annotate
when Stoker writes “My Major Johnson” instead of “By Major Johnson” (220-221). They
rearrange Stoker’s lines: when a note reads “fox or wolf good” and then “woman with full
jug of water lucky,” the editors transcribe “fox or wolf” and then “good woman with full
jug of water lucky” (122-123). These are only a few of the mistakes in the Notes. They are
just a symptom of the editors’ main concern, that of providing a particular reading for
Dracula, according to which the historical voivode was not the real model for the Count
and Stoker did not do any further research on him other than what he found in Wilkinson
20
The first page given here refers to the facsimile; the second, to the transcription.
61
(Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 285); and, although Stoker did more research than originally
thought (the editors take the opportunity to lambaste A.N. Wilson for believing the
opposite), he did just enough and did not pursue any matters relating, for example, to
Transylvania (287). This is a methodological double bind that Miller prescribes more
clearly elsewhere: “It would be foolhardy to claim that Stoker’s sources are limited to what
he mentions in the papers. But it is just as absurd to claim that he ‘must have’ read this or
that, when there is no supporting evidence” (Sense & Nonsense 18).
2.6 Leslie S. Klinger: The New Annotated Dracula (2008)
Leslie Klinger replaced Leonard Wolf when W.W. Norton took over the Annotated
series from Clarkson N. Potter. He immediately acknowledges Wolf’s first edition as the
real forerunner of his own: “I crossed paths with Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Dracula
shortly after its appearance in 1975. . . . Its scope and erudition were broad, and its
production values beautiful. Wolf took Dracula seriously, and I wanted to as well” (Klinger
xi). However, he emphasises that Wolf’s updated edition does not include Stoker’s Notes.
He salutes but criticises “the groundbreaking The Essential Dracula by Raymond McNally
and Radu Florescu . . . which made extensive use of Bram Stoker’s then newly discovered
notes for the book . . . but leaned heavily on the erroneous theory that Vlad the Impaler and
Dracula were the same person” (xi). Klinger also mentions the “Norton Critical Edition
with notes by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal . . . [the] John Paul Riquelme . . . edition
with notes . . . and Clive Leatherdale’s 1998 Bram Stoker’s Dracula Unearthed . . . the
most heavily annotated” (xii).
62
Klinger is most critical of literary critics: “In recent years, Dracula has become a
cottage industry for esteemed academics and serious scholars, who see the text as proof of
virtually every wrong that may be blamed on the Victorians” (Klinger xii). He suggests,
instead, treating the text of the novel as an enjoyable piece of fiction: “My principal aim,
however, has been to restore a sense of wonder, excitement, and sheer fun to this great
work” (xii). This is as far as he gets in proclaiming the literariness of the novel, after calling
it “one of the most influential books of the nineteenth century . . . [a] timeless work” (xi).
The edition does seem intended to enhance the pleasure of the encounter with Stoker’s
story and characters, as it includes abundant illustrations and constant accounts of the
editor’s own search for the places, the objects, and the people mentioned in the novel. One
reviewer has said that Klinger’s edition “may be trying to do too much” (Holte, Review of
Klinger 430) and that “a reader coming to the novel for the first time might benefit from a
less visually bewildering text” (432).
The most extensive appendices of The New Annotated Dracula are those dedicated
to the novel’s legacy in literature and on the screen, which are usually treated by other
editors as well. The only entirely original background material in Klinger’s edition is an
appendix on “The Friends of Dracula” (581-583), about the societies organized by the
“legions of fans” (581) starting with the early 1960s. The most influential are: the Dracula
Society, founded in London in 1973 by Bruce Wightman and Bernard Davies (581-582);
the Transylvanian Society of Dracula (which publishes a Journal of Dracula Studies),
created in 1991 in Bucharest and with several branches in other countries, of which the
most active is the Canadian chapter led by Elizabeth Miller; and the Bram Stoker Society,
formed in 1980 in Dublin. Some of the members of these societies are academics; many are
63
“Dracula scholars” or, as Jim Holte calls them, “scholars of the night.”21 Holte gives a
passionate account of the way this community regarded with much pleasure how each
edition contributed to the appreciation of Dracula as a literary work and Stoker as a writer,
but emphasises the importance of the Auerbach/Skal edition: “the announcement of a new
Norton Critical Edition was the equivalent of a papal proclamation of canonisation,
literally. . . . [I]n 1997, when Norton brought out its Dracula, edited by Nina Auerbach and
David Skal, there was celebration throughout the community of the scholars of the night.
We had arrived, big time. We were canonical” (Holte, “A Clutch of Vampires”).
2.7 Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal: Dracula by Bram Stoker
(1997)
Paradoxically, though an established student of vampire literature and film, Nina
Auerbach does not consider Stoker’s novel one of the best works in the genre, let alone a
literary masterpiece. Prior to her edition of Dracula, she published a study of the genre
entitled Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995), in which, as a rival editor of Dracula puts it,
“[h]er views are distinctly and provocatively at odds with many critics’ characterisations of
Dracula. . . . Auerbach prefers instead to examine both material that antedates the book and
later developments, including films and our own contemporary situation. . . . Auerbach’s
interpretation of earlier literary representations of vampires enables her to argue that Count
Dracula is not a transgressive figure” (Riquelme 421-422). Another rival editor makes a
21
Clive Leatherdale is not the only Dracula scholar to have founded a publishing house dedicated to the
canonisation of Bram Stoker. Robert Eighteen-Bisang owns Transylvania Press, which has published
Dracula: The Rare Text of 1901 (1994, introduction by Raymond McNally) and Elizabeth Miller’s
Reflections on Dracula (1998). Robert Reginald founded Borgo Press, specialized in science-fiction, but
which also reissued rare Stoker titles like The Watter’ Mou’, Under the Sunset and The Lair of the White
Worm.
64
similar comment: “Nina Auerbach’s fine study of the perpetually mobile metaphor of the
vampire, Our Vampires, Ourselves, works hard to dismiss Stoker as the least interesting
and most conservative element in a long and sinuous history” (Luckhurst viii).
Indeed, the Norton editors insist that the novel owes much to the Wilde trials of
1895, although Stoker’s vampire suffers from “abstinence”: “Compared to such earlier
vampires as Polidori’s Lord Ruthven and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Dracula is
scrupulously hygienic, even monogamous. . . . Later, more comfortably progressive
decades would develop these faint hints of a vampire existence that eludes patriarchal
categories: in the 1970s, Dracula was transformed into a poignantly androgynous liberator
of trapped women, while Anne Rice’s best-selling Vampire Chronicles are openly
homoerotic” (Auerbach and Skal xii). As for Dracula’s literary value, the novel is
described as “commonplace”: “Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, authors such as H. Rider
Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H.G. Wells turned out hordes of
tales – several more eloquent and sophisticated than Dracula” (ix).
As the annotations in the Auerbach/Skal edition are “somewhat skimpy” (Latham,
“Dracula’s Last Gasp” 363) and the introduction is only four pages long, the reader has to
rely on the supplementary material. After all, “The principle of the Norton Critical Editions
is that readers like to be stimulated by hints and documents to carry out their own
investigations” (Monod 33). True to Nina Auerbach’s opposition to “historicist readings . . .
which situate the book in relation to its historical context” (Riquelme 421-422), the
Auerbach/Skal edition provides only four texts as “contexts” – and only one of these is a
source used by Bram Stoker: two excerpts (four pages) from Gerard’s 1885 article on
“Transylvanian Superstitions.” Much lengthier (forty pages) is the following section about
65
“Dramatic and Film Variations.” Both Wolf and McNally/Florescu include treatments of
theatre and film adaptations, and many references to Stoker’s sources and other background
information have found their way into their annotations. The real novelty of the
Auerbach/Skal edition is the inclusion of critical essays, many of them published after
Wolf’s 1975 edition and McNally and Florescu’s work from 1979.
The section of “Criticism” includes seven texts (not all in complete form): five of
them offer psychoanalytic readings; one is a Marxist reading; Arata’s essay “The
Occidental Tourist” is the only “historicist” text and is notable by its assumption that the
novel has an unstable “meaning” and that today’s readers should be informed of the
expectations of Stoker’s implied reader of 1897. The same reviewer who pans
Leatherdale’s Dracula Unearthed writes about the Auerbach/Skal edition that it is
“indispensable . . . in a league of its own” (Hopkins, Review of Auerbach and Skal 84).22
Others observe, on the contrary, that with Auerbach/Skal, “the reader enters more
ideologically-charged terrain. . . . On the basis of what appears to be no evidence at all, the
editors argue that Stoker ‘may, in freer days [before his marriage to Florence Balcombe]
have been involved in the homosexual community later ostracized in [Oscar] Wilde’s
person’” (Davison 358). In fact, the Norton editors go as far as to suggest that “[t]he [1895]
Wilde trials generated the terror that took the form of Dracula” (Auerbach and Skal xii),
which makes Elizabeth Miller exclaim: “They most certainly did not! . . . The Notes make
clear that most of the ingredients that comprise the novel’s terror were there from the early
1890s” (Sense & Nonsense 69).
22
The reviewer, Lisa Hopkins, although originally a specialist in Elizabethan literature, later wrote about
Dracula herself, in Giants of the Past: Popular Fictions and the Idea of Evolution (2004) and Screening the
Gothic (2005), then published a new biography of Stoker: Bram Stoker: A Literary Life (2007).
66
The debate around the reading of the novel – and hence the perceived need for more
editions – necessarily focuses on annotation or, when they play a lesser part, on the
documents provided as background material. The most controversial choice in the
Auerbach/Skal edition is Talia Schaffer’s essay “‘A Wilde Desire Took Me’: The
Homoerotic History of Dracula”: “Working from the highly speculative and unsupported
premise that ‘Dracula explores Stoker’s fear and anxiety as a closeted homosexual man
during Oscar Wilde’s trial,’ Schaffer’s essay is an example of . . . flawed scholarship in this
field . . . it should have been replaced by one of several noteworthy essays considering the
science-versus-faith question, an extremely pertinent theme in Dracula” (Davison 359).
Schaffer’s essay “was likely included due to Auerbach’s fascination for the general subject.
. . . Similarly, Auerbach’s interest in nineteenth century images of demonic women . . .
probably explains the presence of the brief excerpt from Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of
Perversity” (Latham, “Dracula’s Century” 135). Latham, too, suggests that not only
Schaffer, but also Senf and Dijkstra, should “have made room for two other, more trenchant
critical pieces – which might have included Judith Halberstam’s study of Stoker’s antiSemitism . . . or a sample of David Glover’s fine work on nationalist ideology in Stoker’s
texts . . . or Friedrich Kittler’s potent meditation on information-processing systems in the
novel” (135).
In the end, Riquelme’s observation about Auerbach’s opposition to historicist
readings appears to echo several reviews of the Norton edition, as well as comments
generated by Auerbach’s earlier work.23 In this view, it seems less surprising that the one-
23
For example, a reviewer of her 1982 Woman and the Demon concludes that “the flaws in her presentation
awaken us to the dangers of ahistoricity: of confusing mythic, psychological, and social realities” (Moglen
232).
67
and-a-half-page “Selected Bibliography” of Auerbach/Skal mentions only Wolf’s 1993
edition, while McNally and Florescu appear with In Search of Dracula, which, according to
the Norton editors, “lavishes far more research on the historical figure than Bram Stoker
himself ever attempted and is therefore more revealing as history than as a key to Stoker’s
literary intentions” (Auerbach and Skal 488). While In Search of Dracula is, indeed, a
historical rather than a literary study, it is surprising, although undoubtedly part of the
debate around the reading of Dracula, that Auerbach and Skal mention it while, at the same
time, they do not consider the 1979 Florescu/McNally edition.
2.8 Glennis Byron: Dracula by Bram Stoker (1998)
Byron’s introduction is considerably longer than Auerbach and Skal’s, devoting
seventeen pages to discussing Stoker’s life and literary activity and about why Dracula as a
Victorian novel is still relevant today. Unlike Norton, Byron’s publisher (Broadview) does
not include critical essays, which instead allows the editor to bring together more sources
and other background material. In the Byron edition, a brief chronology of Stoker is
followed by appendices. The first were authored by Stoker: “Dracula’s Guest” and the 1908
article in favour of “The Censorship of Fiction,” presented as containing “what many see as
a central precept of the novel: for the sake of the social purity of the nation, the frontiers
must be patrolled, and the corrupting infection to which women are particularly susceptible,
whether it be vampire or impure text, must be beaten back” (Byron 434). The following
section, entitled “Transylvania: History, Culture, and Folklore,” includes five pages of
excerpts from Emily Gerard’s essay on “Transylvanian Superstitions,” three and a half
pages of excerpts from Charles Boner’s 1865 Transylvania: Its Products and Its People,
68
and three full pages of excerpts from Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Werewolves
(Baring-Gould does not mention Transylvania, but he does speak of werewolves,
berserkers, Slovaks, and Elizabeth Báthory).
Another section, entitled “London,” includes four and a half pages of excerpts from
the 1898 Baedeker travel guide about the British capital. This holds a place similar to the
maps in the first editions by Wolf and McNally/Florescu or to some of the notes in
Leatherdale or Klinger, both of whom use the same Baedeker as a source for their
annotations. Byron includes it, of course, because her own edition is lightly annotated. Its
presence might indicate that Byron wants her intended reader to have the same kind of
knowledge as the readers of 1897. However, this wish is belied by the fact that Byron’s
annotations repeteadly refer to present situations.
A section entitled “Mental Physiology” includes excerpts about Mesmer from
Stoker’s 1910 book Famous Imposters and eight pages of excerpts from William B.
Carpenter’s Principles of Mental Physiology, about “unconscious cerebration,”
“somnambulism,” and “mesmerism.” Two more sections deal with “Degeneration” (two
pages of excerpts from Lombroso and three pages from Nordau) and “Gender”: brief
excerpts from John Ruskin’s lecture “Of Queens’ Gardens”; Stoker’s essay, “Women as
Men,” first published in his Famous Imposters; Thomas Laycock’s 1860 Mind and Brain;
Lombroso and Ferrero’s The Female Offender; and a passage about Otto Weininger from
Stoker’s 1908 Lady Athlyne. While only the fragments from three of Stoker’s sources and
the last section, “Reviews and Interviews” (including reviews from The Athenaeum, The
Spectator and Punch, and an interview with Stoker in British Weekly) are deemed notable
by Elizabeth Miller (Sense & Nonsense 187), all the others (covering 30 pages) are
69
consistent with the reading suggested by Byron in her introduction and which is quite
similar to Nina Auerbach’s. If the Norton editor contends that Dracula hints at numerous
transgressions without being transgressive, Byron posits that “The text allows for a both
exhilarating and threatening experience of freedom from boundaries before firmly
reinstating them at the end with the destruction of Dracula” (16). Byron suggests three
major themes of the novel as worthy of study today: the representation of women, the
degeneration of society, and the advancement of science and technology. These topics
might seem “historicist”; however, Byron places them under the aegis of an “anxiety over
boundaries” (16).
Byron takes a “psychosexual” stance as she believes that “the last word, for now,
must go to Nina Auerbach who, in Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995), has so alarmingly
pulled the carpet out from under the feet of much recent criticism” (24). Sufficient unto
itself, this edition includes no mention of any predecessors (Auerbach appears only as a
Dracula specialist). The book ends with a bibliography (four and a half pages) which does
not include editions. Yet, the ghost of Leonard Wolf, who informs many of Byron’s notes,
is present in the “Introduction”: when the Broadview editor writes her last line, “Perhaps
Auerbach is right: the monster is not Victorian England, the monster is us” (25) she echoes
the last lines in both of Wolf’s editions: “Finally, Stoker’s achievement is this: he makes us
understand in our own experience why the vampire is said to be invisible in the mirror. He
is there, but we fail to recognize him since our own faces get in the way” (1975, xviii;
1993, xxiii).
70
2.9 John Paul Riquelme: Dracula: A Case Study in Contemporary
Criticism (2002)
Riquelme does not call Dracula a literary masterpiece, preferring more neutral
descriptions, labelling it as “a . . . well-known book, whose importance and influence has
continued to grow . . . [and] has left an indelible mark on literature, film, and popular
culture” (Riquelme 19). However, he insists that the book was “unusual” for its
contemporaries and an “astonishingly new artwork” (12) that even today we are learning to
appreciate. An original section in his edition is “A Critical History of Dracula” (409-433),
which narrates the reception of the novel and ends with these words: “we recognize
Dracula as a book whose continuing relevance to our modernity we are just beginning to
understand” (428). The introduction, entitled “Biographical and Historical Contexts” (321), is in fact a biography of Stoker, stressing the novelist’s place in the literary field of
late-Victorian England. It is here that Riquelme finds ways of proclaiming the artistic
excellence of the novel and of its author, by putting them on equal footing with other,
already canonised works and/or writers.
He compares Stoker’s literary life with that of Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde:
“Like them, he was an active member of the community of artists and writers in London in
the 1880s and 1890s, when Victorian tendencies . . . were . . . transformed into what
eventually became literary modernism. In that transformation, Dracula (1897) arguably
holds as important a place as Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) or Wilde’s Salomé
(1893)” (Riquelme 3). Likening Dracula to other late-Victorian works set in faraway and
dangerous places, Riquelme contends that “Stoker produced a narrative combining the
menace of Gothic writing with the fascination for the exotic that was strong at the end of
the nineteenth century. Like Joseph Conrad in The Heart of Darkness (1899), who also
71
combines a dark menace with exotic materials, he evoked important issues concerning
home and homeland” (11-12). The same kind of favourable comparison is applied even to
Stoker’s Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving: “The book’s sometimes fragmented,
disjointed character recalls various autobiographical works by Stoker’s younger, modernist
contemporaries, including Yeats’s Autobiography, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, and Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being” (13-14).
Rather than pronouncing Dracula’s canonicity, Riquelme acknowledges it as a fait
accompli: “The increased availability of the book in reliable editions and the more frequent,
more various scholarly writing about Dracula suggest that it has crossed into the canon of
literature regularly taught and discussed in university classrooms, as Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein did in the 1970s” (414 n. 4). Here, Riquelme mentions Dracula’s presence in
what has been termed “the pedagogical canon” (Harris 113), which consists of the texts
that are favoured in literature courses over a given period of time, and to which these
annotated editions contribute by providing easily available and easily teachable versions of
the novel. Dracula still lacks the recognition of the most powerful canon-making
instruments in English studies, however. It is absent from major literary histories as well as
from popular anthologies of British literature such as Norton and Longman. Consequently,
like other editors of Dracula, Riquelme has to keep a certain degree of ambivalence with
regard to a novel that he is canonising through his annotation as well as through the
material presence of the edition he has prepared.24
24
Also interesting is that Riquelme uses Stoker’s literary life to justify the writer’s canonicity, although the
biographical details about Stoker that are available to us suggest his marginality. In Philip Waller’s 1,181page survey of Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain, 1870-1918 (OUP, 2006), Stoker is
only mentioned a few times, mainly as a friend of Hall Caine.
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Riquelme’s edition includes brief excerpts from Richard Burton’s Vikram and the
Vampire, Major E.C. Johnson’s On the Track of the Crescent, Sabine Baring-Gould’s The
Book of Were-Wolves, Emily Gerard’s The Land Beyond the Forest, Cesare Lombroso’s
Criminal Man, Max Nordau’s Degeneration, Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia
Sexualis, Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, Karl Marx’s Capital (for which Riquelme
provides his own translation), Friedrich Nietzsche’s Joyful Wisdom (again in Riquelme’s
translation), James Frazer’s Garnered Sheaves: Essays, Addresses and Reviews. The
contextual documents also include two texts in their entirety: Rudyard Kipling’s 1897
poem “The Vampire” and the article on “Vampire” from the ninth edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica (1888), the one that Stoker would have used. All the contextual
documents cover sixteen pages, out of which Stoker’s confirmed sources (Gerard, Johnson,
Baring-Gould) account for only a little over four pages. A reviewer has noticed that, in the
Riquelme edition, “there is relatively little on Whitby and its topographical significance in
the novel” (Mulvey-Roberts 194). This is actually true, and somewhat surprising, of the
Byron and Auerbach/Skal editions as well. Riquelme indicates that some of the documents
included appeared “while Stoker was working on Dracula” (374). However, several seem
directly connected not with the novel, but rather with the critical studies at the end of the
volume.
These studies, which are the second-largest part of Riquelme’s volume (after the
text of the novel itself), constitute the actual “case study”: each essay is preceded by an
introduction to the type of critical approach that is being used, with a selected
73
bibliography.25 The five essays are “Corruption of the Blood and Degeneration of the Race:
Dracula and Policing the Borders of Gender” by Sos Eltis, as an example of the gender
studies perspective; “‘The Little Children Can Be Bitten’: A Hunger for Dracula” by
Dennis Foster, as an example of psychoanalytic criticism; “Ambivalence and Ascendancy
in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” by Gregory Castle, as an example of the new historicist
approach; “Doubling and Repetition/Realism and Closure in Dracula” by John Paul
Riquelme as an example of the deconstructionist approach; and “Vampiric Typewriting:
Dracula and Its Media” by Jennifer Wicke, which is said to be “combining perspectives.”
There is no mention, in any of these studies, of the historical aspects of Dracula or of the
historical context at the time of its publication, other than that in Ireland. In fact, Castle’s
new historicist essay analyses “Stoker’s ambivalent Anglo-Irishness” (522) and
understands Dracula “as an allegory of Ascendancy deracination” (533).
The studies make no mention of any of the previous annotated editions, either.
Instead, as Riquelme admits, “[i]n writing the glosses for Dracula, I consulted various
editions but primarily those by Nina Auerbach, Maud Ellmann, Marjorie Howes, and
Leonard Wolf, whose efforts I acknowledge with thanks” (Riquelme viii). Howes published
an edition of Dracula for Everyman without annotations; the Auerbach/Skal and Ellmann
editions are lightly annotated; only Wolf provides rich annotations and Riquelme puts them
to good use, as he sometimes quotes Wolf directly in his own “glosses.” The most heavily
annotated edition (Leatherdale) is peculiarly absent, although Riquelme mentions
Leatherdale’s 1985 study Dracula: The Novel and the Legend in his “A Critical History of
Dracula” (413-414). Similarly, McNally and Florescu are barely mentioned as the authors
25
In his 1985 Dracula: The Novel and the Legend, Clive Leatherdale performs a one-man case-study of
Dracula, similarly providing “five alternative readings of the novel” (13).
74
of In Search of Dracula (411), with a footnote adding that “McNally and Florescu have
together and separately published other volumes focussing on the history and legends that
stand behind the figure of Dracula, including their The Essential Dracula (1979) and
McNally’s Dracula Was a Woman (1984). I have not included these books in the review of
criticism, since their subjects are more historical than literary” (411 n. 2). While Riquelme
reproduces here quite accurately Auerbach’s justification, he does mention The Essential
Dracula, but the reader has no inkling that the “volume” going by that name is, in fact, an
annotated edition of the novel.
In historical and geographical matters, not only Riquelme, but all three editors who
provide numerous appendices (Riquelme, Auerbach/Skal and Byron) rely heavily on the
two most popular annotated editions that have preceded them: Wolf and McNally/Florescu.
For example, the note for “Carpathians” in McNally/Florescu begins with the following
lines: “The heavily forested Carpathian mountains form a V-shaped mountain range. . . . In
essence, this range of mountains with few peaks reaching eight thousand feet, separates
Transylvania proper from the other two Romanian provinces – Wallachia to the south and
Moldavia to the East” (52 p. 9). Auerbach summarises it as follows: “A heavily forested,
V-shaped mountain range separating Transylvania proper from other Romanian provinces:
Moldavia to the east and Wallachia to the south” (9 n. 5). Wolf’s note is quite brief (and not
entirely accurate): “A mountain range extending 800 miles from northeast Czechoslovakia
to northern Romania. The highest peak is 8,737 feet” (2 n. 9), but Byron summarises it
anyway: “Mountain range extending from Czechoslavakia [sic] to Romania” (31 n. 5).
About “Bucovina,” the McNally/Florescu edition provides a note ending with the
words “it was reconstituted into an autonomous duchy (which was its status when Bram
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Stoker wrote Dracula) and administered by an Austrian governor who resided in the capital
of the new province, Gernauti (Czernowitz)” (53 n. 11). Auerbach also writes that “In the
1890s, Bukovina was an autonomous duchy within the Austro-Hungarian Empire” (10 n.
8), but does not keep the wrong spelling of Cernauti (Cernăuţi), which resurfaces instead in
Klinger: “Gernauti (Czernowitz) was its capital” (17 n. 22). Later, in Chapter 3, McNally
and Florescu quote Major E.C. Johnson to explain “bloody sword” as a “signal of national
emergency” in Hungary (67 n. 5). Auerbach writes, similarly, without quoting, that it is “In
Hungary, a signal of national emergency” (34 n. 4). Wolf prefers the more poetical
equivalent of “gauge of battle” (41 n. 18). Byron conforms and writes: “Gauge of battle”
(60 n. 7). Riquelme makes it more prosaic and writes simply “Call to battle” (53). Most
telling is, perhaps, the treatment of the term “Huns.” McNally and Florescu give no
definition, but the San Francisco-based Leonard Wolf calls them “an Asiatic race of warlike
nomads who invaded Europe” (4 n. 19). Auerbach and Skal realise the term has become
offensive and write “Asian nomads,” but Byron is still loyal to Wolf and calls them “an
Asiatic nomadic tribe” (32 n. 5). Well into the twenty-first century, the first two heavily
annotated editions of Dracula act as reference books for the more recent editors.
2.10 A.N. Wilson: Dracula by Bram Stoker (1983)
In his 1982 essay on “Annotated English Novels,” Stephen Wall praises the
American Norton Critical Editions and especially the French series Classiques Garnier,
writing that the latter “characteristically prints a higher proportion of editorial and
annotatory matter than any English series that might reasonably be compared with it –
Oxford English Novels, for example, or the New Wessex Edition of Hardy . . . or the
76
revamped but essentially perfunctory World’s Classics” (Wall 4). The year after Wall’s
essay was published, the World’s Classics series of the Oxford University Press issued the
first of its three versions of Dracula. Fittingly, the editor, A.N. Wilson, provides only two
pages of annotations at the end of the volume. In the absence of any background material,
the reader has to rely on the editor’s introduction for any supplementary information.26
Still, vampire aficionados were probably hoping that Dracula would achieve canonicity
right then, in 1983. It was a momentous event, not only because of the prestige of the
publisher – arguably, the most important academic press in the world – but also because
Dracula had just been added “as the one hundredth book” (Luckhurst viii) of the World’s
Classics series.
However, “A.N. Wilson did not seem entirely comfortable with introducing such a
potboiler” (Luckhurst vii). Far from considering it a masterpiece, the first OUP editor
writes that Dracula “is patently not a great work of literature” (Wilson xiv) and that “No
one in their right mind would think of Stoker as a ‘great writer’” (xiv). Writing almost three
decades later, the third OUP editor recounts that, back “in 1983, there was some press
concern that the notion of the literary classic was being undermined [by the inclusion of
Dracula in the series.] . . . Stoker’s other novels, needless to say, were considered ghastly,
beneath contempt” (Luckhurst vii-viii). That Wilson disparages the novel he is editing is
certainly surprising, but statements about literary value are not easy to challenge.27 Instead,
proponents of the literariness of Dracula as well as other editors of the novel (from
26
Works by modern writers in the World’s Classics series are edited with explanatory notes placed at the end
of the volume. Instead, Shakespeare plays in the same series have much longer introductions, background
material, and footnotes on every page rather than endnotes.
27
A.N. Wilson concedes, however, that “with Dracula [Stoker] composed, indeed, one of the World’s
Classics” (x), which might be explained by the fact that, according to the back matter of the volume, the
World’s Classics series also publishes such popular titles as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone or Mrs Beeton’s
Book of Household Management.
77
Leatherdale to Klinger) have attacked another of Wilson’s statements, according to which
“[i]t would seem likely that [Stoker] did some – but very little – research for his fantasy”
(x). In his 1991 Vampyres, for example, Christopher Frayling retorts: “Evidently, A. N.
Wilson had done some research for his anaemic contribution – but very little” (297;
emphasis his). In their “Overview” to Bram Stoker’s Notes, Eighteen-Bisang and Miller go
much further and use Stoker’s proven research as evidence of the novel’s value: “The Notes
put the lie to Wilson’s remark. Research from diverse sources combined with incessant
revisions and emendations testify to a fervour and commitment that elevate Bram Stoker’s
immortal masterpiece to a level none of his other works aspire to” (Eighteen-Bisang and
Miller 275).
2.11 Maud Ellmann: Dracula by Bram Stoker (1996)
The second OUP editor provides ten and a half pages of annotations and a much
longer introduction than Wilson. She also seems unwilling to give a unique reading to the
novel: “Dracula . . . can never be pinned down” (Ellmann xxviii). This has been noticed by
reviewers: “Ellmann resists the inclination to direct her readers’ interpretation of Stoker’s
work” (Davison 357). However, the analysis of Dracula in her introduction could be
summarised as follows: Stoker drew inspiration from history, folklore and especially
Gothic fiction and invasion literature to create a novel that showcases his “fascination with
cutting-edge technologies” (Ellmann xviii) and that can easily – “perhaps too easily” (xxiii)
– be interpreted through a Freudian lens. She calls Dracula “Stoker’s stroke of serendipity”
(viii), thereby joining other previous editors who thought the novel an accident in an
otherwise less than brilliant career. When it comes to the literary value of the novel and to
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Stoker’s merits as a writer, Ellmann is hardly gentler than Wilson: “Stoker is a cack-handed
narrator . . . the novel wouldn’t be so good if it weren’t so very bad” (viii). Ultimately, just
like Wilson, Ellmann leaves the reader with the same question: “Why did she choose to edit
a ‘very bad’ novel?” (Davison 358).
2.12 Roger Luckhurst: Dracula by Bram Stoker (2011)
The first thing Nathalie Saudo-Welby notices in her review of Roger Luckhurst’s
edition is that the Oxford World’s Classics series now provides thirty pages of notes
(Saudo-Welby 260). She also notices that in Luckhurst’s introduction the literary value of
the novel is no longer doubtful, although she writes that the editor is “less concerned with
the stylistic aspects of the work and more with its rich cultural and ideological content”
(260) and that, in the context of David Punter’s query (in The Literature of Terror) about
the universal or the historical nature of the Gothic, Luckhurst “seems to take place rather in
the second approach” (261). Indeed, the third OUP editor insists that Gothic fiction is a
modern genre (Luckhurst xii) and so are vampire superstitions (xv): both are creations of
the Age of Enlightenment. Like Ellmann, he enumerates possible interpretations of the
novel: sexual terrorism, questions of race, the conflict between science and superstition
(xx-xxxi). Yet, he discourages too much interpretative equivocation: “This is not a licence
to read anything into the novel, however. All of the concerns identified here reinforce a
central problem in Dracula: the integrity of Anglo-Saxon identity in a moment where it
was perceived to be under pressure from all manner of insidious attacks” (xxix). The editor
reiterates his “historicist” conclusion in a later essay: “Count Dracula is defeated by an
alliance of Anglo-American-Dutch Nordics, with only the occasional fit of unmanly
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hysteria to mar their restoration of proper order. The vampiric pollution is chased out of
London, pursued back through the dark night of Europe to its Balkan limits again, and there
pitilessly dispatched” (“Gothic Colonies” 63). However, this reading is absent from the
annotations, which often summarise the commentary supplied by previous editors.
The Luckhurst edition is notable for acknowledging other annotated editions “by
Auerbach and Skal, Klinger, McNally and Florescu, and Wolf” (Luckhurst 363), and by the
first use of the 2008 facsimile edition of Bram Stoker’s Notes. As for the literary value of
the novel, although he ends by admitting that Dracula “is still a rattling good read retaining
a genuine power to unsettle and unnerve” (Luckhurst xxxii), the 2011 editor actually begins
by repeating one of Ellmann’s phrases as well as the original “mystery” formulated by
Leonard Wolf more than 35 years before: “The achievement of Dracula is all in spite of its
author, whose cack-handed attempts at literature only accidentally unleashed the primal
force of myth” (viii). In fact, Luckhurst questions the literariness of the entire Gothic genre:
“Gothic texts . . . are not ‘good’ novels on the measure of the art of fiction determined by
Henry James, but they were never meant to be, and to judge them on this criterion is
absurd” (xiv). Dracula is more interesting today than at the time of its initial publication
because “historical distance reveals the book to be an uncanny echo-box of its place and
time” (xix). Stoker himself “was merely a vehicle for the cultural energies of the late
Victorian period, currents that he did not necessarily fully control” (viii). Thus, with
Luckhurst, the editors of Dracula have completed a full circle: just like in the mid-1970s,
the novel appears again remarkable for creating a cultural myth, to which Stoker, a
mediocre writer, had come by accident.
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Chapter 3
The Editors of Dracula and the Places of the
Imagination
The issue of Dracula’s literariness or lack thereof informs much of the critical
apparatus provided by the novel’s editors. Three other predicaments act on a deeper,
ideological level, to influence both the textual version of Dracula that is presented to the
reader by each editor and the ways in which key passages in the novel are explained and
commented upon. The first of these predicaments is that of embracing or rejecting the
“extratextual myth” (Grigely 206) of the novel, especially the one created over the last
hundred years through stage and screen adaptations. As two of the editors of Dracula
complain, “it is difficult to detach the novel from its vigorous twentieth-century life: we
tend to superimpose on Bram Stoker’s enigmatic monster Bela Lugosi’s intonations or
Frank Langella’s sinuous seductiveness or Gary Oldman’s tears” (Auerbach and Skal ix).
Some editors use the extratextual myth to illustrate the version of the novel that they
provide; or to keep the characters and the plot alive through the “filmographies” that they
discuss in supplementary materials; or to enliven the annotations themselves by referring
both to the novel and to the other media. By contrast, other editors prefer to downplay or
even conceal the novel’s adaptations.
The second predicament originates in the ambiguity of the vampire itself and of the
place it has in Gothic literature. Alternately seen as a force of pure evil and as a figure of
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subversion, flaunting its difference before Victorians, the vampire elicits antithetical
reactions from its commentators. As many of the Dracula editors confess to having long
been fascinated by vampires in general and the Dracula character in particular – they are
“even more loyal to the vampire, perhaps, than Renfield” (Auerbach, Our Vampires 204 n.
32) – their perspective on the Count often takes on a personal note and they refashion
themselves according to their own relation with Dracula and their own ideas about
vampires. Thus, they might introduce themselves to the reader as someone who belongs
somehow to the world created by Bram Stoker and other Gothic writers. The last and
perhaps most consequential predicament has to do with the country of the vampires as
described by Bram Stoker. The fact that the places imagined by the novelist do not match
reality has gradually been accepted by the editors. However, they hesitate to dispel the
magic of Stoker’s Transylvania and they continue to rely on the novel’s sources.
3.1 The Extratextual Myth
The decision to use or not to use the extratextual myth of Dracula in critical editions
seems to be directly connected with the editors’ belief in either the literariness or the
cultural significance of the novel. By foregrounding Dracula’s lasting legacy in the film
industry, some editors emphasise the fact that the novel is “omnipresent in Western
culture” (Klinger l). Others, instead, choose to conceal it because it might be detrimental to
the text of the novel itself. The most explicit in this respect is Clive Leatherdale who
suggests that, if he were alive today, “Bram Stoker would be unhappy . . . because the
creation of his pen has been overtaken and habitually trivialised by the creation of the
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cinema [and by] the cinema’s prurient debasement of Stoker’s novel” (The Novel and the
Legend 11). As a consequence, Leatherdale’s 1998 edition does not include a discussion (or
even a list) of film adaptations. Instead of a still from one of the movies, which has been
the practice of most Dracula editors, Leatherdale’s book uses as cover illustration a
painting “of Dracula as depicted in the novel” (according to the front flap of the dust
jacket). The author of the painting is actor Bruce Wightman, co-founder and chairman of
the Dracula Society.28 This indicates not only the editor’s mistrust of the extratextual myth
of Dracula but also his loyalty to the Dracula Society in London which, in the early 1980s,
“welcomed [him] among its ranks” (The Novel and the Legend 9).
Similarly, no film adaptation is mentioned in either the introduction or the five
critical essays of Riquelme’s 2002 edition of Dracula. The only time the reader finds out
that the novel even has an extratextual myth is in one sentence: “Dracula, the most
memorable of Stoker’s varied and numerous publications, has left an indelible mark on
literature, film, and popular culture” (Riquelme 19). Since this edition is one of the more
recent ones, one should probably note that the extratextual myth contributes to the
popularity of the novel itself (and the appearance of successive editions) while at the same
time it finds itself expelled from these textual versions.29 There are no “filmographies” and
the illustration on the dust cover of Riquelme’s edition includes a detail of Caspar David
Friedrich’s 1817 Epitaph for Johann Emanuel Bremer, with what appears to be a Gothic
landscape. With this painting fashioned 80 years prior to the publication of Stoker’s novel,
28
The illustration is in fact reminiscent of old photographs of Transylvanian peasants and it has been used
before in two other Leatherdale books (The Novel and the Legend 104; Origins 49).
29
In her “Introduction” to Ian Jack’s Oxford World’s Classics edition of Wuthering Heights, Patsy Stoneman
remarks how difficult it is to explain a novel that “has assumed an ‘after-life’ to some extent independent of
its origin” (vii) because of film and TV adaptations. Her introduction was published for the first time in the
1995 reissue of the novel, whereas the text and Jack’s notes date back to 1976.
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the editor (or the publisher) seems to wish to place Dracula in a longer tradition of Gothic
writing.
Similarly anachronistic is Byron’s edition, which uses as cover illustration an 1862
photograph showing “Visitors to the International Exhibition, London.” A tall, dark figure
with a top hat is towering mysteriously over two little girls and a thumbnail version of his
head is reproduced on the book’s spine. The photo continues on the back cover and one can
see a woman, presumably the mother, looking in the direction of someone or something
outside the picture. The man might very well be the father, but the old photo is out of focus
and he appears frightening, all the more so if he is to be associated with Count Dracula,
because his presumed victims on the cover are two little girls, rather than nubile women,
like in Stoker’s book. An explanation is found on the last page of the book: “The distinctive
cover images for the [Broadview Literary Texts] series are . . . designed to draw attention to
social and temporal context, while suggesting that the works themselves may also relate to
periods other than that from which they emerged – including our own era” (Byron, back
colophon). Glennis Byron mentions Dracula’s cinematic legacy only to criticise Coppola’s
1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula for “humanis[ing] . . . Stoker’s King Vampire because . . . the
cold impersonal horror he personifies and portends is too uncomfortably close to home”
(25).
An interesting, and consistent, choice is that of the Oxford University Press.
Although it makes little mention of film adaptations, A.N. Wilson’s 1983 edition has Bela
Lugosi on the front cover, staring grotesquely from behind a wall. An enhanced detail of
the same picture, namely Lugosi’s face, was kept by the Oxford University Press for Maud
Ellmann’s 1996 edition. Luckhurst’s 2011 version uses, instead, a frame from Murnau’s
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1922 Nosferatu, namely Count Orlock’s shadow on the wall. No other pictures or stills are
used in these editions. The three editors seem hesitant to reject entirely, but also to accept
wholeheartedly, the extratextual myth.
If editors for whom Dracula is a literary masterpiece try to avoid any reference to
adaptations, those who find the novel’s power insufficient and its artistry doubtful make
constant use of the novel’s extratextual myth. For example, in his two editions of the novel
(the 1975 Annotated Dracula and the 1993 Essential Dracula), Leonard Wolf insists that
“[e]verywhere one looks, the power – or the legacy – of the book is felt. The film industry
in a dozen countries inexhaustibly reinvents the adventures of the Count or his various
semblables” (viii; 1975 ix). Both of Wolf’s editions provide a “Selected Filmography,”
much expanded in 1993 (12 pages compared to only 2 in 1975). If the cover of the 1975
Annotated Dracula uses a fairy-tale-like illustration of a medieval castle on top of a
mountain on its cover, the 1993 edition displays a colour movie still from Werner Herzog’s
1979 Nosferatu, showing actor Klaus Kinski planting his fangs in a female victim’s neck.
The omnipresence of the novel’s extratextual myth is in fact announced by the book’s back
cover: “Leonard Wolf . . . examines the cultural history of the Dracula myth [up] to Francis
Ford Coppola’s blockbuster Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) . . . [The edition also includes]
Commentary by leading contemporary horror writers, including Harlan Ellison, Robert
Bloch, and many more.”
Dracula belongs, undoubtedly, to that category of texts that are continuously
recreated long after their first textual manifestation and that Paul Davis calls, in his 1990
The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge a “culture-text.” Stoker’s novel, just like
Dickens’s tale, can be understood both ways: “The text of A Christmas Carol is fixed in
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Dickens’s words, but the culture-text, the Carol as it has been re-created in the century and
a half since it first appeared, changes as the reasons for its retelling change. We are still
creating the culture-text of the Carol” (Davis 4). Leonard Wolf, for example, proclaims his
loyalty to the culture-text of Dracula which “managed to interject into the culture of the
West the image of a creature of such symbolic force that he has become something like a
culture hero . . . Everywhere one looks, the power – or the legacy – of the book is felt”
(Wolf vii-viii; 1975 ix). If the novel’s legacy is present only sparsely in Wolf’s 1975
edition – especially via photographs of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee as Dracula (viii) –
the 1993 edition includes commentary from science-fiction and horror writers that have
been influenced by Dracula and from scriptwriters and filmmakers involved in the
numerous big-screen adaptations of the novel. The continuous references to films and to
other fantasy texts play two roles: they enhance the reader’s experience of the “magic”
world of the culture-text, which might be somewhat lost in the encounter with the novel
alone (and with Stoker’s late-Victorian discourse); and they constantly remind readers of
the iconicity of Dracula and the perenniality of the story.
Wolf’s commitment to Dracula’s legacy is not confined to his editions and to other
books about the novel or its extratextual myth (his first book, A Dream of Dracula is
entirely dedicated to the latter). He is also inextricably linked with the myth itself through
his indirect contributions to the novel’s literary and cinematic afterlife. Anne Rice, the
author of The Vampire Chronicles, a series of novels begun in 1976, was Wolf’s student in
the early 1960s (Wolf, The Connoisseur 188). In 1975, Rice brought Wolf the manuscript
of her first novel, Interview with the Vampire: “She wondered whether I would mind giving
her book a critical reading. Of course I did not mind. I read her book with pleasure and
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made notes of the changes I would suggest that I thought would tighten the story line and
would make her narrative flow more smoothly” (189). Something similar happened two
years later, when James V. Hart started working on a screenplay that would become the
1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “The first thing I did was to seek out Leonard Wolf . . . [at]
San Francisco State University, and engage his services. . . . I knew that if I ever took a
meeting with the devil, I wanted Wolf there to hold my hand” (Coppola and Hart 7). Wolf
appears in the film credits as “historical consultant”: “With Coppola and Hart, I reviewed a
nearly final print of the film and was pleased to see how scrupulous the filmmakers had
been to be as historically accurate as possible” (Wolf, The Connoisseur 242).
Equally committed to the preservation of Dracula’s extratextual myth are Raymond
McNally and Radu Florescu. The front cover illustration of their 1979 edition shows actor
Frank Langella as Dracula in a film adaptation by John Badham that premiered in the same
year. The back cover shows Castle Bran, while the endpapers consist of a negative
photograph of Whitby or, rather, “Whitby Harbor by Moonlight,” according to the book’s
“list of illustrations” (6). Thus, McNally and Florescu encapsulate the text within its own
extratextual myth, not only the cinematic legacy, but also the tourism associated with the
novel and the films, which the two editors support by providing an appendix about
“Dracula Tours” (315-320). The book also uses what the editors call a “frontispiece” (6),
which again shows “Frank Langella in Dracula” (4). The next illustration is that of Klaus
Kinski in Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of Nosferatu (8). “Dracula’s Guest” is preceded
by another photograph of Frank Langella in Dracula (34). The text of the novel itself is
preceded by a photograph of Bela Lugosi in the 1931 adaptation (45) and one of Klaus
Kinski and Isabelle Adjani in the 1979 Nosferatu (46). The photos on pages 34 and 46 are
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reused, in much smaller versions, as illustrations for the text at the end of Chapter XXI in
Stoker’s novel (221-222). The “Annotated Filmography” is preceded by another full-page
photograph reproducing a movie still, namely Bela Lugosi in Dracula (278). This
filmography has 27 pages, one of which is dedicated entirely to another still of Frank
Langella as Dracula (303).
Klinger’s edition uses a silver engraving of a basilisk on the front cover, as well as
the novel title in blood-red letters and a special “gothic” calligraphy by Charles Brock,
which was exactly the same used for the posters of Coppola’s 1992 adaptation. The front
matter includes a photograph of Bela Lugosi as Dracula, framed by the name of the
publisher: “W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London” (iv), which makes this look
like a second, alternative, cover for the edition (although it imitates the Norton Critical
Edition type of cover). Apart from photographs, drawing and maps that can be said to
accompany the text of the novel, Klinger’s edition includes almost one hundred illustrations
that pertain solely to the extratextual myth of the novel, ranging from the omnipresent stills
from movies (not only Dracula adaptations, but also other vampire films) to postcards,
souvenirs, and a 32-cent stamp with Bela Lugosi as Dracula.
The cover illustration of Auerbach and Skal’s edition is a photograph of Henry
Irving as Mephistopheles in Lyceum’s staging of Faust, rather than a movie still. This has
been interpreted as “tacit support for the increasingly prevalent association of Dracula
himself with Henry Irving” (Hopkins, Review of Auerbach and Skal 85). However, this
edition provides the lengthiest and most scholarly discussion of Dracula’s theatrical and
cinematic legacy, with articles signed by the editors themselves and an excerpt from
Gregory A. Waller’s book The Living and the Undead about Todd Browning’s 1931 film.
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The editors announce from the introduction their opinion about the text and the culture-text,
respectively, when they describe Dracula as a “novel that seemed commonplace in its time
[but] unfurled into a legend haunting and defining the next century” (Auerbach and Skal
ix). The author of Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach “derives comfort from the
novel” (Wolf, The Connoisseur 259) and thinks of vampires “as [her] confederates”
(Auerbach, Our Vampires 3). On the occasion of the novel’s centenary, Auerbach summons
the vampire in a speech reminiscent of spiritist séances: “Dracula is with us, a hungry guest
at his own birthday party, because we have invited him, as we have done before in this
bloody century” (“Dracula Keeps Rising” 23).
Auerbach and Skal do not provide a dedication for their 1997 edition of Dracula.
Nor do Leatherdale in 1998 and Riquelme in 2002. Klinger dedicates his edition “To Bram
Stoker,” to which he adds in guise of epigraph Van Helsing’s words: “we want no proofs;
we ask none to believe us!” (vii). Wolf is more explicitly loyal to the culture-text both in
1975 and in 1993 as his thoughts go to a film actor: “This edition of Dracula is dedicated to
Bela Lugosi” (iv; 1975 iv). McNally and Florescu are committed to an extratextual version
contemporary with their own edition and dedicate it “To Frank Langella, whose portrayal
of Dracula reveals new dimensions of the immortal count” (5). Others are more personal:
Glennis Byron dedicates her edition “For Rose, who will still shudder as one should” (5);
or go so far as to identify themselves with the characters of the novel: Robert EighteenBisang dedicates the edition of the author’s working notes “To Matilda: My wife, my muse,
my Mina” (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller v).
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3.2 Hunters and Enthusiasts
The editors’ second predicament is the one that also face many of the novel’s
legions of fans: that of choosing between hunting the vampire and being the vampire. It is,
perhaps, less of a predicament because the editors, just like the fans, routinely choose to do
both. For the Dracula editor, the vampire Count is “a culture hero whom our first duty it is
to hate even while we have for him a certain weird admiration” (Wolf vii-viii). Nina
Auerbach literally “identifie[s] with vampires” (Miller, The Shade and the Shadow 15) and
she equates the chase for the undead with the operation of bringing vampires into the light:
“We thank all other Dracula-hunters who preceded us in leading the vampire out of the
shadows. We wish good hunting to the many who will surely follow” (Auerbach and Skal
xiv). The two editors obviously refer here to all those involved in the field of “Dracula
studies” and such wording is far from unusual. Here is how a reviewer of Riquelme’s
edition expresses her enthusiasm:
Riquelme has gathered a wide range of critical and theoretical material relating to
Bram Stoker’s Dracula in a truly vampiric embrace. . . . Riquelme’s edition should
come with the warning that the additional material be consumed in moderation. If
ignored, its richness can lead to an engorgement that leaves the reader
uncomfortably satiated. . . . Riquelme’s achievement in hunting down these
secondary sources should not be underestimated for he has succeeded in
vampirising the vampirists in a manner worthy of the Count. (Mulvey-Roberts 193195)
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Several of the Dracula editors are members of the fans’ organisations that Leslie
Klinger calls “The Friends of Dracula” (581): Clive Leatherdale is a member of the Dracula
Society in London, while Elizabeth Miller, who assisted Leatherdale in the annotation, is
president of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula and of the so-called Lord Ruthven
Assembly. In 1995, the first of these organisations made her Baroness of the House of
Dracula (Miller, The Shade and the Shadow 18). Leslie Klinger himself is a member of
both the Dracula Society and the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, and he is also a
prominent member of the Baker Street Irregulars. Scholars and fans often get together and
exchange opinions, as it happened at “Dracula 97,” the Centenary Celebration at Los
Angeles, in August 1997: “Sponsored by the American and Canadian chapters of the
Transylvanian Society of Dracula and the Count Dracula Fan Club, this convention brought
together scholars and fans alike to pay homage to a novel that has never been out of print
since its initial appearance in 1897” (Miller, “Introduction” 9). The result of the convention
was the volume Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow, published in 1998 by Leatherdale’s
press, Desert Island Books.
What the fans and the scholar-fans have in common is the fact of taking pleasure in
the novel and that of urging the readership that Dracula’s literary value justifies their own
fascination with Stoker’s creation. None, perhaps, has tried to turn the critical opinion
about Dracula more than Elizabeth Miller, the president of the Transylvanian Society of
Dracula, editor of Bram Stoker’s Notes to Dracula and Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A
Documentary Volume in the “Dictionary of Literary Biography” series. Author of many
books and articles on the subject and, until recently, editor of The Journal of Dracula
Studies, Miller commands a lot of respect among the Stoker experts and her works on the
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more controversial issues raised by the novel (the 1997 Reflections on Dracula and the
2000 Dracula: Sense & Nonsense, revised in 2006) are among the most frequently quoted
books in the field. As both a prolific scholar and a leader of the novel’s fans, Miller
occupies a privileged position at the epicentre of the controversy around Stoker’s sources,
the role played by Vlad the Impaler in the novel, and the literariness of Dracula.
The way Miller justifies Dracula’s literary value by quoting those who already saw
it when the novel was first published is revealing of the unusual position in which the
editors/fans find themselves when they begin their work of persuasion:
There are certainly many who did not think so [that the book was “trashy”]. Arthur
Conan Doyle, for example, told Stoker: “I think it is the very best story of diablerie
which I have read for many years,” while Winston Churchill consented to be
interviewed by Stoker, partly because “you are the author of Dracula” (qtd in
Belford 275, 311). Anthony Hope Hawkins (The Prisoner of Zenda) observed that
Stoker’s vampires “had robbed him of sleep,” while Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady
Audley’s Secret) found Dracula superior to her own vampire story “Good Lady
Ducayne.” (Sense & Nonsense 99)
None of those quoted here are critics; none are really known as authors of great fiction; and
none say anything more than the fact that they know the book while offering only relative
superlatives: the book is better than others, it is better than other “diableries,” etc. In the full
quote, Churchill actually explains that the book appealed to his “young imagination”
(Belford 311), thereby placing it in the category of juvenile literature.
In fact, most of the editors became fans of Dracula in their early years. Clive
Leatherdale confesses to having been “hooked as a teenager” (“Introduction” 6). Even in
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his 1998 edition, he reminisces: “My own fascination for Dracula dates back to my teens,
when I first read the book. Its impact was immense” (Leatherdale 9). Nina Auerbach’s
fascination began much earlier. In the notes “About the Contributors” (usually provided by
the contributors themselves) for the volume of essays Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow,
she is introduced as follows: “Nina Auerbach read Dracula surreptitiously when she was
seven and has identified with vampires since then” (15). Leonard Wolf also speaks of his
“fascination with Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, and the myth that he turned loose into the
world in 1897” (The Connoisseur 3) and admits being a fan of the horror genre: “I love the
scary arts. Almost at the top of my voice, I have praised the juicy accounts of depravity in
novels like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. I admire as a work of genius a film like The Bride
of Frankenstein, whose mix of poignancy and horror brings tears to my eyes even as my
hair stands on end” (62). Such fascination cannot but have some influence on the work of
the editors, because “there will always be areas . . . where annotation will reveal as much
about the values and social experience of the annotator as it does about the work in
question” (Small, “The Editor” 199-200).
With Dracula often considered an example of “genre fiction,” the Dracula editors
can get to see themselves marginalised and even victimised. In an interview with People
magazine shortly after the publication of his first edition of the novel, Leonard Wolf
declared that “[t]here are a lot of people who are very, very angry that I am fiddling around
with monsters. . . . I have received some anonymous letters from vicious colleagues”
(“English Prof Leonard Wolf”). In one of her books dedicated to vampire literature and
cinema, Nina Auerbach speaks of a long list of “friends and colleagues [who] provided
invaluable food for this book, though some of them look down on vampires – or claim to”
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(Our Vampires vii). She thanks those who “read drafts of the manuscript with an empathy
and wisdom that transcended their initial distaste for its subject” (vii). She also confesses
her “love” for vampires, but decries the fact that “most women I know are less accepting: I
was received with polite revulsion at a Women’s Studies symposium when I gave my paper
on undeath” (3). Even others among those involved in the promotion of the novel can
unsettle the editors, which makes Clive Leatherdale explain that there is “pleasure and pain
in being an aficionado of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The pleasure comes from the novel itself,
from grappling with Stoker’s multi-faceted meanings and in probing its many layers of
construction (“Introduction” 6). The pain, instead, “comes from writing of those who,
whether well-meaning or mischievous, have jumped aboard the Dracula bandwagon to pen
articles or books that pay scant respect to the rules of evidence, or, to put it bluntly, are just
plain daft” (6).
The Dracula editors do not always know one another very well. Riquelme mentions
Glennis Byron’s 1999 Dracula: A New Casebook but is unaware that she is a woman, so he
writes about the way “Byron organizes his selected bibliography” (410 n. 1; emphasis
mine). If they often contest each other’s hypotheses, sometimes they also call into question
each other’s credentials: “Florescu and McNally were able to grab the inside lane and
dominate the race from the outset. Inevitably, those first on the scene bring their own
perspective to bear. The two professors are primarily historians of eastern Europe: they are
not students of literature, far less authorities on Bram Stoker, nor would they pretend to be”
(Leatherdale, “Introduction” 8). In fact, similar arguments could be made of several of the
Dracula editors. Leatherdale himself “has a Ph.D. in Arabian history” (Miller, The Shade
and the Shadow 17). David J. Skal, author of books on genre cinema and fantastic
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literature, obtained a B.A. in journalism from Ohio University in 1974. When he published
the first OUP edition of Dracula in 1983, Andrew Norman Wilson (born in 1950) was a
novelist and newspaper columnist. Leonard Wolf taught poetry in the Creative Writing
department of the San Francisco State University (The Connoisseur 188) before and after
he became an editor of Dracula. Nina Auerbach and Glennis Byron have always been
interested in Gothic, especially from a feminist perspective. However, John Paul Riquelme,
Maud Ellmann (both experts in modernism) and Roger Luckhurst (a specialist in
contemporary science fiction) changed the focus of their research for a shorter or longer
period of time.
A way of justifying their research comes, somewhat unexpectedly, through the
association with the vampire Count or with his place of origin. Leonard Wolf explains that
writing his first book about the influence of Stoker’s novel, the 1972 A Dream of Dracula
(Little, Brown, 1972), “had nothing to do with the fact (proclaimed, naturally, by my
publishers on dust jackets ever since) that I was born in Transylvania” (The Connoisseur 7).
His 1975 edition of Dracula is the most explicit in this respect, because, underneath a
photograph of the bearded, bushy-eyebrowed30 editor (the largest photograph in the entire
book), the caption begins “Leonard Wolf was born in Vulcan, Romania (in Transylvania)”
(Wolf 1975, back cover). Even Maud Ellmann has some Romanian origins, since she is the
daughter of Richard Ellmann (1918-1987), famous as biographer of James Joyce and Oscar
Wilde, and the granddaughter of James Isaac Ellmann, a Jewish-Romanian immigrant to
the United States.
30
The journalist who interviewed Wolf for People magazine in 1975 writes that he “resembles Christopher
Lee, the horror film star, with a sinister beard added” (“English Prof Leonard Wolf”).
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Leonard Wolf (born in 1923) was only 7 when he left Romania and settled with his
family in Cleveland, Ohio (“English Prof Leonard Wolf”). Radu Florescu (1925-2014) left
Romania at the age of 14 and joined “his parents in London, where his father was serving
as a Romanian diplomat” (De Luca and Quinlan 7-8), then settled in “the United States, a
country he was already familiar with having lived in Washington for a while in the 1930s,
when his father was, in essence, the head of the Romanian embassy” (8). As his son
recounts, in 1939, Florescu “boarded one of the last West-bound Orient Express trains
weeks before the outbreak of WWII” (John Florescu 9). Had it been the very last (not “one
of the last”) Orient Express trains, this would have sounded even more like a thriller.
However, Romania only entered the war in June 1941, two years after Florescu’s escape to
England. The Orient Express did stop running in 1939, but Florescu’s native country was at
peace long enough after that and he could have gone to London in a less romantic means of
transportation.31 If Wolf was too young when he left to have gone to school in Romania,
Florescu did not either, although he “was educated in his early years by tutors in Bucharest
and at their family country home in wine vineyards on the banks of the Argeş river. As a
son of a diplomat, his schooling extended to Washington D.C., Berlin, London and Oxford
where he finished his secondary education at St. Edwards school” (John Florescu 9).32
Radu Florescu goes the furthest in constructing his connection with the historical
character he believes was Stoker’s main source for the vampire Count. In the first book on
the subject, published together with Raymond McNally, he finds his origins in the times of
31
He could have followed in Dracula’s footsteps and travelled to England by sea. Romanian ships carried
passengers out of the country all through World War II. For example, he could have gone to France’s “Free
Zone” until the end of 1942 or to Spain after that and then taken another transport to London.
32
The fact that they were not educated in Romania may explain why both hesitate to reject (or even accept
outright) the term “nosferatu.” Elizabeth Miller observed that “[e]ven Leonard Wolf, of Romanian origin,
claims that it is a Romanian word for ‘not dead’” (Sense & Nonsense 40). McNally and Florescu, instead,
claim that it might come from a Romanian word that means “sizzling” (McNally and Florescu 40 n. 11).
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Vlad the Impaler: “the Florescus trace back to a boyar family of Dracula’s time, and one
prominent in 15th-century Wallachian history” (In Search 12). He also uses the word
“boyar,” mentioned several times in Stoker’s novel, although relatively unnecessary in
fifteenth-century Wallachia, whose social stratification was much more complex than in
Stoker’s times.33 Seven years later, in the edition of Dracula he co-edited with McNally,
the boyar from Vlad’s time is replaced by Vlad himself: “Radu Florescu is Romanian and
an indirect descendant of the historical Dracula, Vlad the Impaler” (McNally and Florescu,
back flap of dust jacket). A revised version of the first book leaves aside the word “boyar”
but keeps a reference to Dracula’s relatives: “the Florescus can trace their line back to an
aristocratic family of Dracula’s time with marriage connections to Dracula’s family” (In
Search 1994, 3). In 1998, the editors of a festschrift say he was born “into an old boyar
family . . . count[ing] . . . heads of state, generals, diplomats, and academicians” (De Luca
and Quinlan 7) or simply that he “descend[s] from an old boyar family with deep roots in
Romanian history” (John Florescu 9). However, Florescu’s last book, published one year
before his death and co-written with Matei Cazacu, the 2013 Dracula’s Bloodline: A
Florescu Family Saga, suggests that a sister of Dracula “may have been” (19) married to a
Florescu. The book has no bibliography and Florescu admits in the preface that he uses no
documents.
Sometimes even a research assistant can provide an indirect connection with the
novel. Such is the case of Riquelme, who acknowledges: “My primary debt concerning the
annotations, however, is to Theodora Goss, my research assistant during the project of
33
“Boyars” (in Romanian, “boieri”) in medieval Wallachia were exempt of taxes in exchange for military
service and, until the seventeenth century, “boieri” was a term applied to all men who owned land, regardless
of the size of their property (Giurescu 61). By contrast, “dregători” were a powerful class of wealthy
landowners who acted as cabinet ministers. In the fifteenth century, there is such a prominent “dregător”
called Florescu, a loyal follower of the Dans, adversaries of the Draculas (Stoicescu 26-27).
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editing Dracula. She contributed substantially to every aspect of our work in common, but
especially to the annotations” (Riquelme viii). Theodora Goss is a fantasy short-story writer
who in 2011 completed a Ph.D. dissertation entitled “The Monster in the Mirror: Late
Victorian Gothic and Anthropology.” More importantly, she was born in Budapest, the city
located, according to Harker, on the border between East and West. Since Riquelme’s
edition is, in many respects, the most sophisticated one, Goss could very well be credited
with the most unsophisticated part of the volume, namely the annotations, which most often
quote encyclopaedias or even previous editions. Some research assistants are mentioned on
the cover (Roxana Stuart in Wolf’s 1993 edition and Janet Byrne in Klinger), others only in
the acknowledgments like Goss or Elizabeth Miller: “I am indebted . . . particularly [to]
Elizabeth Miller, who provided invaluable assistance with the annotations and proofreading” (Leatherdale 24). Miller later commented on Leatherdale’s edition: “The
reliability far surpasses that of either of its predecessors” (Sense & Nonsense 187) in a book
that had been conceived together with the same editor (Leatherdale, “Introduction” 8-9).
If some editors seek a connection with Vlad the Impaler, Transylvania, Romania, or
Hungary, others identify with vampires and vampire-hunting. Raymond McNally is
described in his festschrift as a sort of James Bond: “During the three years he spent in
Berlin [1953-1956, when he was working on his Ph.D. dissertation], he also served in the
Intelligence Branch of the United States Air Force” (Carol McNally 1). However, he
prefers to be associated with Catholic vampire hunters like the eighteenth century Augustin
Calmet and early twentieth-century Montague Summers, to whom he dedicated his 1974 A
Clutch of Vampires: These Being Among the Best from History and Literature: “To the
memory of Augustin Calmet (1672-1757) and Montague Summers (1880-1948), holy
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fathers in the Christian faith and the spiritual fathers of all latter-day vampirologists” (A
Clutch of Vampires 5). When he taught at Boston College, he adorned his office with
vampire-related souvenirs and vampire-hunting paraphernalia. Starting with the mid-1990s,
Florescu, his colleague at the same school, disavowed some of their collaborative findings
and explained: “Unlike Ray, I am not a Gothic movie buff, nor a specialist in Stoker or
vampire lore and have avoided capes and Bela Lugosi imitations” (Florescu, Essays 73). A
similar type of “buff” is Leonard Wolf: “As a gimmick, and to spark a little media
attention, Wolf began decorating his office with garlic, the traditional defence against
vampire, and carrying a vampire-killing kit: an oaken stake and two knives” (“English Prof
Leonard Wolf”).
3.3 Places of the Imagination
What many Dracula fans as well as many Dracula editor-fans do is travel to
Transylvania, Whitby, and other places mentioned in the novel, following in the steps of
the vampire and/or of the vampire-hunters. Leonard Wolf went both to Transylvania and to
Whitby and took photographs that he included in his 1975 edition. In their 1979 edition,
McNally and Florescu included an Appendix on “Dracula Tours.” The six-page text gives
details on possible planned tours on the track of Dracula and Bram Stoker, in London;
Hampstead; Purfleet; Whitby; Cruden Bay; Bucharest; Târgovişte; Curtea de Argeş; Târgu
Jiu – for the Monastery of Tismana, described as Dracula’s “favourite residence” (McNally
and Florescu 317); Râmnicu-Vâlcea; Bistriţa; Câmpulung; Suceava; Sighişoara; Braşov;
Sibiu; Hunedoara; Innsbruck; Bosen; Buda; Visegrad; Csejthe Castle (of Elizabeth
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Bathory). The book also ends with a panoramic photograph of “Bathory Castle and the
valley below” (320). These Dracula Tours have become a “must” for Dracula scholar-fans
(they are described at length by Leslie Klinger) who sometimes take part in their
organisation: Elizabeth Miller wrote the official brochure offered by Romanian authorities
to Dracula tourists, later expanded in her 2005 A Dracula Handbook.
“Everyone has heard of Transylvania, but not everyone realises that it exists,”
explains Miller (Sense & Nonsense 119). What everyone knows, in fact, “is the mythology
that has grown up around Transylvania [but] many in the West are surprised to learn that
Transylvania is a real place” (Light 28). This is true even of a Dracula editor like Raymond
McNally: “More than 15 years ago, as a fan of Dracula horror films I began to wonder
whether there might be some historical basis for their vampire hero. I re-read Stoker’s
Dracula, and noted that not only this novel but almost all of the Dracula films are set in
Transylvania. At first, like many Americans, I assumed that this was some mythical place”
(In Search 9-10). More than fifteen years before this statement McNally was working on
his Ph.D. in Berlin. Another example is that of the British geographer Duncan Light, the
author of the 2012 The Dracula Dilemma, about the phenomenon of Dracula tourism.
Light remembers “looking at an atlas during an A level Geography lesson and being
surprised and a little startled to discover that Transylvania really existed. I’m sure I’m not
the only person to have reacted in this way” (1).
Less known as a real place, “Transylvania has come to exist in the West more as a
fantasy” (Gelder 5). In his recent book on Places of the Imagination, Dutch cultural
geographer Stijn Reijnders uses the topic of Dracula tourism to support his idea that the
pilgrimage to what Pierre Nora has called “places of memory” (“lieux de mémoire”) is
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doubled by another one, “not so much concerned with collective memory, as [with]
collective imagination” (Reijnders 8), which he calls “places of the imagination.” Elizabeth
Miller also notices that “[m]any visitors to Transylvania, especially Dracula pilgrims (or
journalists catering to them), romanticise the region, seeking confirmation of their
preconceptions. Cultural conditioning has created a Transylvania that is significantly
different from the actual one” (Sense & Nonsense 119). Nevertheless, in the name of her
Transylvanian Society of Dracula the adjective refers precisely to such a place of the
imagination, rather than the real place. Reijnders also identifies a circular movement that he
calls “the circuit of the imagination. In the case of media tourism, this can be split into four
consecutive phases: (1) Physical places inspire artists; (2) Artists construct places that they
have imagined; (3) Imagined places are appropriated by fans; and (4) Fans go in search of
physical references to imagined places” (110).
Reijnders wants to find out what motivates the Dracula tourists to book a trip to
Transylvania or to Whitby and questions several of them (all North Americans) and
discovers a reaction very similar to that of McNally’s back in the 1950s: “most of the
respondents mentioned that at a certain moment they had the thought that perhaps Dracula
was more than just imagination. For example, they discovered that Transylvania is the
name of a real province in Romania” (Reijnders 88). There are other similarities with the
efforts of the Dracula editors. Reijnders observes, for example, that the Dracula tourists
reverse Stoker’s imaginative process:
While Stoker used existing surroundings and local history to create his story, the
Dracula tourists take the story itself as their point of departure, proceeding to search
for signs of reality in the story. The Dracula films and the book are carefully sifted
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for information: references to existing place names are checked, the travel routes
described are traced on the map, and departure and arrival times are compared with
official travel times, preferably historical sources from the late nineteenth century.
(90)
The Dracula tourists also wish to come “closer to the story” and bring it back to life
through re-enactments “in which fans have the sense that they are summoning Count
Dracula and are personally becoming part of the story” (Rijnders 100), just like Wolf and
McNally used to do.
Rijnders’s previous observation about tourists looking for signs of reality in
Stoker’s descriptions deserves a few more lines, especially as the editors of Dracula act in
a similar way. Rijnders’s “places of the imagination” should perhaps be divided into three
distinct categories: real places that have not (or have barely) been re-created by the
author(s)/filmmaker(s), such as the Oxford corner visited in the Inspector Morse Tour
(Rijnders 1-2) or Whitby in Dracula; real places entirely re-created (by Stoker but also by
the extratextual myth), like Transylvania; and places created by imagination, like Tolkien’s
Middle Earth, now “visited” in New Zealand (3-4) after being made “real” by Peter
Jackson. In terms of the imagination, the second and the third category are similar (both
have two versions: written and filmed, although the latter does not, or cannot, match the
former34). In terms of place, the first and the third are similar, because tourists visit the
locations of movies or TV series. Whitby, which Stoker knew and researched, belongs to
this group. Transylvania, deliberately turned by Stoker into the land of vampires, belongs to
the other group and is in fact closer in kind to Middle Earth than to Whitby.
34
No major adaptation or spinoff of Stoker’s novel has been filmed in Transylvania.
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The Dracula editors (many of whom have gone on Dracula Tours) also look for
signs of reality in Transylvania – from “finding” the Dracula Castle to simply keeping their
annotation in concordance with Stoker’s description (and sometimes going further than the
novelist). Most editors/annotators do not indicate inconsistencies in the text, and those who
do resemble the fans who look for “facts,” but who deliberately mix up real facts with
fictional “facts.” The best example is Leslie Klinger, who follows his work in The New
Annotated Sherlock Holmes of employing
a gentle fiction . . . that the events described in Dracula “really took place” and that
the work presents the recollections of real persons, whom Stoker has renamed and
whose papers (termed the “Harker Papers” in my notes) he has recast, ostensibly to
conceal their identities. In looking at the materials from this historical perspective, I
point out the “cover-ups,” inconsistencies, and errors in the names, dates, locations,
and descriptions of people and events. I also provide background information on the
times, using contemporary Victorian sources, to understand the history, culture,
technology, and vocabulary of those remarkable individuals. I compare the
knowledge gleaned about vampires from these records with other accounts,
including those of Anne Rice, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and the creators of Buffy the
Vampire Slayer. (Klinger xii)
This long passage deserves a closer look, as it includes, in exaggerated tones, several issues
concerning the annotations in the editions of Dracula. Klinger’s argument can be
summarised as follows: if one assumes that everything in the novel is real, then everything
it says is true; to show the truth in all its splendour, the editor can use contemporary
Victorian sources, although he can also use anything about vampires, no matter how recent;
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if anything seems untrue, it is thus only through lack of correspondence with the rest of the
“facts” of the novel.
Klinger extends the “facts” to the entirety of Stoker’s writings, especially the
working notes and the manuscript. Consequently, he assumes that some names of
characters who appear in the working notes belong to “real” people, but “Stoker went to
great lengths to conceal the involvement of several people in the events” (Klinger 7 n. 11).
This is actually a strategy employed by the editor-fans of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who
take everything kept in the “Canon” as “fact.” For example, William Baring-Gould, the
editor of the first Annotated Sherlock Holmes, discusses at length the locations in which
Sherlock could have been hiding between 1891 and 1894, when the character disappears
from Doyle’s writings.35 An example of a similar confusion between “facts” is Klinger’s
discussion of the Golden Krone hotel in Bistriţa, which the editor/tourist discovers to be
fictitious. Because Christopher Frayling has shown that there used to be a Krone Hotel in
Oraviţa, mentioned by Crosse (10), Klinger infers that “it is possible that Harker stayed
there” (23 n. 42), about 400 miles away, rather than in Bistriţa. Not much different is
Leatherdale, who often speaks “of all the characters of the novel as though they were real
people (and never missing an opportunity to blame them for not doing things differently)”
(Hopkins, Review of Leatherdale 269).
The belief in the “reality” of the text makes Klinger set the events of the novel in
1890 and Wolf (in his first edition) in 1887.36 The fact is that, if the events take place in
1893 (as is the consensus), then the epilogue, written by Harker seven years after the fight
35
Baring-Gould begins his “biographical” chapter about Holmes thus: “And now let us go from the Sherlock
Holmes of fiction to the Sherlock Holmes so many of us would like to think of as fact” (47).
36
Wolf changed his mind in his second edition, but later changed it back again (The Connoisseur 301-308).
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with the Count, must refer to a time post-1897 which Stoker could not have known. And if
it is in the future, then it is not real. Wolf’s choice is also supported by Stoker’s remark in
the 1901 Icelandic preface (that is, another place in the novelist’s writings and, thus,
another source of “facts”) that the events in the novel took place a little while before the
Jack the Ripper murders. For one who believes in the factuality (albeit fictional) of the
entire “canon” of an author’s writings on a series of characters, inconsistencies can be
explained away, but the idea of untruth is unacceptable. Something similar happens, with
both tourists and editors, when it comes to the comparison between imagined history and
authentic history, as presented by Romanian tour guides and historians, respectively: “some
fans see historic ‘corrections’ of the story as a satisfying and enriching addition, while
others consider this a direct assault on their imagination, as the demystification of a
cherished world” (Reijnders 99-100).
What Dracula fans, tourists, and editors alike often prefer to do is to keep alive,
enhance, and use the places of the imagination, together with their imagined histories. Just
like the tourists questioned by Reijnders, Dracula’s editors search for signs of reality in
Stoker’s imagined people and places. The complexity of the novel (arising, at least in part,
from its inconsistencies) can be overwhelming. It is little wonder that for those who choose
to offer commentary on the novel, knowledge becomes knowledge of the novel and reality
becomes the reality of the novel. Then, again like the Dracula tourists, they make the
reverse trip and apply that knowledge and that reality on the world outside the novel. For a
more accurate understanding of Stoker’s “intentions,” as Ian Small insists an editor is still
obliged to do, I propose that the original trip be restored. Instead of starting from what we
know from and about the novel, I suggest we start from what and who Stoker knew.
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106
Part II
The Historical Context of Dracula
107
Chapter 4
Who Stoker Knew
The issue of Bram Stoker’s sources for Dracula is covered in the explanatory notes
of the annotated editions, in introductions and in the supplementary material, as well as in
other books and articles written by the novel’s editors. What Stoker used or did not use is
both important and controversial, on the one hand because of the richness of information
included in Dracula, and on the other because some of the author’s choices, if proven or
disproven, can provide the tools for a certain interpretation of the novel. Stoker’s working
papers were discovered as early as 1970 and most annotators have used them. However, as
the editors of these documents admit, “[i]t is not possible to determine if [what has been
found] includes all of his preliminary Notes. . . . Almost half the events in the novel are not
mentioned in the Notes. . . . [Stoker] probably bridged the gap between them [and the
novel] with one or more lost drafts” (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 9). The most useful part
of the Notes consists in extracts from various works or informants that Stoker wrote down
and later used in the novel. Nevertheless, the Notes also include information that Stoker
never used as well as simple references to works and authors (but no extracts). Also, they
do not include works that are used almost verbatim in the novel (for example, the 1896
Baedeker guide Austria, Including Hungary, Transylvania, Dalmatia and Bosnia); names
of friends, acquaintances and family members37 who provided information or became
characters in the novel; and earlier Gothic works that were influential in the shaping of
Dracula.
37
With the exception of a “memo” on head injuries written by the novelist’s elder brother, Sir William
Thornley Stoker (Bram Stoker’s Notes 179-185).
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In his “Principles of Historical Annotation,” Arthur Friedman sets down “as a
principle that the most convincing explanatory notes are those in which unmistakable
plagiarism from earlier writings is shown . . . it follows that other notes . . . will be
convincing and enlightening to the extent that the parallels pointed out approach
plagiarism” (121-122). In the case of Dracula’s editors, this principle has been faithfully
applied beginning with the 1979 McNally/Florescu edition, in which quasi-plagiarised
passages are provided in lateral notes, next to Stoker’s sentences. Parallels between
Dracula and other possible sources which do not appear among Stoker’s Notes remain
more questionable. As Elizabeth Miller puts it,
While the Notes ought to be required reading for any Dracula scholar, they are not
the “be-all-and-end-all” of the background of the novel. It would be foolhardy to
claim that Stoker’s sources are limited to what he mentions in the papers. But it is
just as absurd to claim that he ‘must have’ read this or that, when there is no
supporting evidence. (Sense & Nonsense 18)
The only way out of Miller’s predicament – avoiding the improbable but accepting the
fairly possible – is to say that Stoker “could have” read or known something. The question
remains about when and how often one can do that.
This issue is addressed by Arthur Friedman, who wonders about “the value of the
kinds of notes which appear in even the best editions where the author being edited is
paralleled with writers whom he may not have, or probably had not, read” (122). The
solution he provides can be very helpful in deciding whether or not a certain idea or piece
of information is relevant as a possible source of inspiration, an allusion and/or an
undeveloped plotline in Dracula:
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The answer is, I think, that the value of such annotation depends largely upon the
kind and number of the parallels. If, for example, a passage in Goldsmith’s works
written in 1760 were to be annotated by quoting from an obscure work published,
let us say, in 1525 and from another obscure work published in 1610, we should
probably conclude that unless there were unmistakable signs of plagiarism the
parallels were in no way significant. If, on the other hand, the same passage written
in 1760 were annotated by drawing parallels from a dozen equally obscure works
published between 1750 and 1759, we should probably consider the notes very
illuminating. For in the second case we should conclude that the works cited were
representative of a popular current of thought in Goldsmith’s own day and that,
whether or not he had read any of these particular works, he was probably
acquainted with the ideas expressed in them by reading similar works or by
conversation. (122-123; my emphasis)
The most contested parallels made in the Dracula editions, again beginning with
McNally/Florescu, are those that link the setting, the plot, the characters of the novel, as
well as the more general topos of the fear of invasion and racial degeneration with the story
(and the personality) of a medieval Romanian ruler and with the country in which he lived.
The question of what Stoker could have known, that is to say what he had access to, is
directly connected with the question of who he knew. Apart from the books and articles that
show up in the writer’s Notes, family, friends and acquaintances from the circles in which
Irving and his manager circulated provided Stoker the access he needed to acquire, as
Friedman says, “by reading . . . or by conversation” the information and the ideas that were
put to work in the creation of Dracula. Two observations should be made from the start:
that it is not always possible (or helpful) to make a radical distinction between who and
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what Stoker knew; and that he only needed a relatively small circle of interconnected
individuals to bring forth the plotline and the characters and to consolidate the ideology of
his 1897 novel.
4.1 Crimea and After
Bram Stoker had an abundance of possible informants for the places where the first
and the last chapter of Dracula are set. Romania – or, rather, the Romanian Principalities of
Wallachia and Moldavia, as they were known until 1859 – suddenly became the centre of
attention and the subject of heated debate in Britain in 1852-1853, when it was occupied by
Russian armies. As Orlando Figes has shown in
The Crimean War,38 this Russian
occupation of the two principalities provided in Britain a similar reaction to the German
military interventions in Belgium and Poland in the world wars of the twentieth century
(122-129). Although largely forgotten today, “for our ancestors before the First World War
the Crimea was the major conflict of the nineteenth century, the most important war of their
lifetimes, just as the world wars of the twentieth century are the dominant historical
landmarks of our lives” (Figes xix). Bram Stoker was still a child during the 1853-1856
conflict, but echoes of the battles would have reached him, thanks to the many
correspondences and photographs from the front – a practice that was introduced during
Crimea and which has been called “the mid-century revolution” of war reporting (Matthews
52-78). Moreover, the Crimean War “left a deep impression on the English national
identity. To schoolchildren, it was an example of England standing up against the Russian
38
Published in the United Kingdom as Crimea: The Last Crusade.
111
Bear to defend liberty” (Figes 479), which means that Stoker would have been exposed to
stories of the battles precisely because he was a child.
In his Dublin diary, in which he wrote down especially what other people say in
view of using their words in his literary works (many found their way into his early fiction),
Stoker mentions an Irishman demonstrating against a candidate in the elections, addressing
the military and speaking of “Crima-an medals & Victory crosses” (The Lost Journal 102).
Here, the diarist reproduces, as he often does, the speaker’s peculiar pronunciation as well
as his lack of familiarity with the symbols of the Empire: the Victoria Cross (rather than
“Victory cross”), the highest military decoration in Britain, was established during the
Crimean War. Stoker, on the other hand, was familiar with stories of the conflict thanks to a
well-informed source: his father-in-law, Lieutenant-Colonel James Balcombe. Stoker’s first
biographer, relying on information received from Noel, Bram’s only son, writes that the
Colonel “found [Stoker] a ready listener to his tales of army service in the Crimea and
India” (Ludlam 48). Starting from Ludlam’s sentence, Jimmie E. Cain, Jr. writes in Bram
Stoker and Russophobia that the author of Dracula listened “to the Colonel’s tales of the
horrific battles of Inkerman, Alma and Sevastopol in the Crimean campaign” (Cain, Jr. 9).
In fact, Balcombe was not present at Alma, because the ship carrying his regiment
(HMS Mauritius) was delayed by a storm and then it stopped to “coal” in Constantinople,
according to the Historical Record of the Fifty-Seventh, or, West Middlesex Regiment of
Foot, published in 1878 by lieutenant-general Henry James Warre (116). James Balcombe
joined this regiment in 1835, “being then under age” (281), and rose through all the grades
of Non-Commissioned Officer until 1851, when he was appointed Quartermaster. The 57th,
known as “the Die Hards,” returned from India in 1846 (where it had been stationed since
1830) and its headquarters were moved to Dublin in 1848 (Warre 101), then to Kilkenny
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and Cork. The men served in Crimea from October 1854 to May 1856, where the
Quartermaster distinguished himself, “especially in bringing up supplies and rations during
the very severe winter of 1854” (282), after which they were stationed for two years in
Malta (139-145). Quartermaster Balcombe returned to Ireland in 1858 and left the 57th
with the rank of captain in 1859, becoming Adjutant of the Royal South Down Militia.
Promoted to major in 1875, he retired as lieutenant-colonel in December 1876 and, in 1878,
when Bram Stoker became his son-in-law, he was serving as Secretary to the Clontarf
Township, County of Dublin (282).
The Colonel had five daughters, the third of whom, Florence, became Bram
Stoker’s wife in December 1878. She had been named “either after Florence Nightingale or
after the town of Floriana in Malta where the Colonel was stationed in 1857” (Belford 8385). Daniel Farson, Stoker’s great-nephew, writes on the contrary that “apparently she was
named not after Miss Nightingale, but after the Italian town” (Farson 38) of Florence.
Starting in 1878, as Henry Irving’s manager, Stoker spent many “delightful hours”
(Personal Reminiscences I, 315) in the company of veterans of the Crimean War, such as
Field Marshal Wolseley, who lost an eye at Sevastopol (I, 321); Field Marshal Sir
Frederick Haines (I, 324); Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar, who took part in most of the
major battles before being appointed aide-de-camp to the Queen (I, 324); General Frederick
Thesiger, who was in Ireland before the war and then served in the 2nd Division (I, 317);
Sir Coutts Lindsay, who commanded the 1st Regiment of the Italian Legion (I, 321); war
correspondents like Irishman E.C. Godkin (I, 321), who just before the war had published a
book on The History of Hungary and the Magyars, and the famous William Howard
Russell (I, 317), who wrote not only about the Charge of the Light Brigade, but also about
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Moldavia and Wallachia39; and veterans of the Black Sea fleet like Admiral Henry Keppel
(I, 315), Admiral Lord Frederick Alcester (I, 319) and Ernest Prince of Leiningen (I, 325).
One of the Crimean veterans receives special treatment in the Personal
Reminiscences: Stoker recounts ten meetings with him between 1878 and 1886. This is
Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890), perhaps the most famous of all Victorian explorers
(with the possible exception of Livingstone), who became quite a close friend of Stoker’s.
After their last meeting, Stoker asked Burton’s wife for a picture of her husband, to which
she complied, although she expressed Burton’s dislike of having his photograph taken:
“Dick said he would give it you, because it was you; but that he wouldn’t have given it to
any one else!” (Personal Reminiscences I, 360-361). The only (indirect) reference to
Burton in Dracula is in Chapter 3, when Jonathan Harker compares his own diary with “the
beginning of ‘Arabian Nights,’ for everything has to break off at cock-crow” (Dracula 61).
All annotators point to the fact that Stoker (and Harker) would have known the book in
Burton’s translation, but not all mention the fact that Stoker knew the translator.
Byron is the most succinct: “The best-known nineteenth-century translation is by Sir
Richard F. Burton. Shahrázád breaks off her stories at dawn” (61 n. 3). Both Wolf and
Auerbach/Skal mention the translator but not the friendship, and focus instead on what the
reference to the book might suggest: “Given the complex, if subvert, relationships that will
develop between Jonathan Harker, Harker’s wife-to-be, Mina, and Dracula, this early
reference to The Arabian Nights makes it worthwhile to recall that adultery is the
framework in which that collection of tales is firmly set” (Wolf 43 n. 27); “exotic amalgam
of storytelling and murder; enormously popular in Victorian England, especially in Sir
39
His 1858 History of the British Expedition to the Crimea was reprinted, in a revised edition, in 1876, on the
verge of yet another conflict spurred by “the Eastern Question.”
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Richard Burton’s 1885 translation” (Auerbach and Skal 35 n. 3). Other editors mention the
relationship between the two authors: “The Thousand and One Nights, a new translation of
The Arabian Nights, was published in 1885 by Stoker’s friend Sir Richard Francis Burton”
(Klinger 71 n. 37); “A new unexpurgated translation of the Nights had been published in
1885 by the notorious traveller Sir Richard Burton, a friend of Stoker, who dined at the
Lyceum Theatre’s ‘Beefsteak Club’” (Luckhurst 370).
Other editors make a connection between Burton’s personality or his writings and
Dracula. Riquelme mentions one of Burton’s earlier writings that Stoker could have
known: “Stoker’s friend Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890) . . . also translated a vampire
story, Vikram and the Vampire (1870), which he called the ‘rude beginnings’ of the
Arabian Nights” (54).40 McNally and Florescu mention that “Burton’s magnificent
personality and ‘prominent canine teeth’ impressed Stoker, who knew Burton personally”
(McNally and Florescu 68 n. 91). Leatherdale goes further and provides a longer quote
from Personal Reminiscences: “Richard Burton . . . was known personally to Stoker and
described in these striking terms: ‘Burton’s face seemed to lengthen when he laughed; the
upper lip rising instinctively and showing the right canine tooth… As he spoke the upper
lip rose and his canine tooth showed its full length like the gleam of a dagger’” (69 n. 48).
Stoker was, indeed, fascinated with Burton: “When in the early morning of August
13, 1878 . . . I met him [in Dublin] . . . the man riveted my attention. He was dark, and
forceful, and masterful, and ruthless. I have never seen so iron a countenance” (Stoker,
Personal Reminiscences I, 350). He then told Irving: “‘I never saw any one like him. He is
steel! He would go through you like a sword!’” (I, 351). Over the next eight years, Stoker,
40
Elizabeth Miller makes a similar suggestion: “Stoker may have been familiar with Richard Burton’s
translation of Vikram and the Vampire (1870). Significantly, this book had been reissued in London in 1893,
while Stoker was working on Dracula” (Sense & Nonsense 23).
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Irving, Burton and Burton’s wife met several times. Stoker recounts the unpleasantness of
having to share Burton with a larger crowd. It is always “a disappointment” (I, 356) when
the four of them cannot share what he calls a “partie carée”: “there was not the charm of
personal reminiscence, which could not be in so large a gathering” (I, 358) Though he only
met Burton in 1878, Stoker “had been hearing about him and his wonderful exploits as long
as [he] could remember” (I, 352). He managed to inspect the adventurer’s face better in
February 1879 and noted its main features: “the darkness of the face – the desert burning;
the strong mouth and nose, and jaw and forehead – the latter somewhat bold – and the
strong, deep, resonant voice” (I, 352). Also in February 1879, Burton “spoke of life in
South America and of the endurance based on self-control which it required” (I, 353).
Stoker gives no other details, but Burton had explored a “vampire cave” in Brazil in 1867
(Hitchman 283) and he could have mentioned it then.
Stoker recounts admiringly the conversations with Burton; however, he is constantly
impressed with the latter’s physical characteristics, such as the way he talks – “ to this day
I can seem to hear the deep vibration of his voice” (Personal Reminiscences I, 354) – and
laughs. When Stoker makes a joke, Burton laughs and his “face seemed to lengthen . . . the
upper lip rising instinctively and showing the right canine tooth. This was always a
characteristic of his enjoyment. As he loved fighting, I can fancy that in the midst of such
stress it would be even more marked than under more peaceful conditions” (I, 355). The
last observation with the apparent parallel between laughter and combat seems quite
unusual. However, it simply foreshadows another instance in which Burton shows his
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canines when recounting the killing of an Arab “lad”41 who was about to blow his cover on
the road to Mecca:
He said it was quite true, and that it had never troubled him from that day to the
moment at which he was speaking. Said he: “The desert has its own laws, and there
– supremely of all the East – to kill is a small offence. In any case what could I do?
It had to be his life or mine!” As he spoke the upper lip rose and his canine tooth
showed its full strength like the gleam of a dagger. Then he went on to say that such
explorations as he had undertaken were not to be entered lightly if one had qualms
as to taking life. That the explorer in savage places holds, day and night, his life in
his hand; and if he is not prepared for every emergency, he should not attempt such
adventures. (Stoker, Personal Reminiscences I, 359)
Despite the possible comparison between Burton’s teeth-baring tic and Count Dracula’s
iconic representation, one should note that the famous traveller is shown as an example of
Western mettle in “savage places” and “supremely of all the East,” where the adventurer
must kill or be killed. Rather than an inspiration for the vampire, Burton’s figure seems to
be a model of fortitude and resoluteness for Dracula’s vampire hunters.
As for Burton’s other possible influences on the novel, apart from the 1870 novella
Vikram and the Vampire, it is just as possible that Burton mentioned to Stoker and Irving
his nonfiction. In 1875, only three years before their first meeting, Burton had finished two
short treaties, The Jew and The Gypsy (both were published posthumously, in 1898). Like
Stoker, Burton never visited any of the Romanian provinces, but using previous sources he
wrote in great detail about them simply because they had Jewish and Roma minorities –
41
Focused as he was on the speaker’s features, Stoker may have misremembered Burton’s version of the
story, since the traveller’s biographers insist that he vehemently denied the legend of the killing (Lovell 185186; Rice 136-137).
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Burton only admired the latter and convinced himself that he was partly Gypsy (Lovell
222). In his chapter on “The Gypsy in Hungary,” Burton uses John Paget’s 1839 Hungary
and Transylvania and Andrew Crosse’s Round about the Carpathians (the latter, at least,
one of Stoker’s major sources for Dracula) and describes in nuce the characteristics of the
Gypsies in Stoker’s novel: they “prefer to be mere hangers-on at the castle of the Hungarian
Magnate” and “are trusted as messengers and carriers” (Burton 265); “they dug for treasure,
and they washed for paillettes of gold the Transylvanian affluents of the Danube” (265);
Wallachians “play with fire” (266) when they are not scared enough of the Gypsy curses.
Stoker did not meet Burton for six full years, between February 1879 and June 1885, when
the traveller was in the service of the Ottoman Khedive (Viceroy) of Egypt and was making
plans for one last journey:
Burton had in hand a work from which he expected to win great fortune both for
himself and his employer, the Khedive. This was to re-open the old Midian gold
mines. He had long before, with endless research, discovered their locality, which
had long been lost and forgotten. He had been already organising an expedition, and
I asked him to take with him my younger brother George, who wished for further
adventure. He had met my suggestion very favourably, and having examined my
brother’s record was keen on his joining him. He wanted a doctor for his party; and
a doctor who was adventurous and skilled in resource at once appealed to him.
(Stoker, Personal Reminiscences I, 356-357)
The expedition did not take place, but in 1885 Stoker, who had never travelled very far
eastwards, seemed ready to do it vicariously through his adventurous younger brother. The
“record” he mentions has to do with George’s presence in close proximity to the places
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later described in Dracula: from 1876 to 1878, the younger Stoker had lived and worked in
Bulgaria as an army doctor.
4.2 Wars of Independence
The possible links between George Stoker’s career in Bulgaria and Bram Stoker’s
literary works (especially Dracula and The Lady of the Shroud) were only brought to the
attention of Dracula specialists in 2006, when two book-length studies on the political and
ideological attitudes of the two brothers were published: Bram Stoker and Russophobia by
Jimmie E. Cain, Jr. and Dracula and the Eastern Question by Matthew Gibson.42 This
explains in part the fact that only Roger Luckhurst, the latest editor/annotator of Dracula
(his OUP version is from 2011) makes reference to Stoker’s younger brother as an
influence on the text of the novel. To be sure, two previous editions mention George, but in
a different context. In both cases, he appears in the introduction, rather than in the
annotations, and no connection is made between George’s wartime experiences and any of
the information in the novel. McNally and Florescu suggest he had been a model for the
character of a “Mad Doctor,” who appears in Stoker’s working notes for an early draft of
the London chapters:
The Mad Doctor might be an oblique reference to Stoker’s own brother George who
was a doctor. Among Stoker’s notes is the quote: “The divisional surgeon being
sick, the doctor is asked to see the man in the coffin and restores him to life.”
42
Jimmie E. Cain, Jr. first stated the main ideas of his 2006 book in the article “With the ‘Unspeakables,’
Dracula and Russophobia: Racism, Tourism and Imperialism,” published in the 1998 volume Dracula: The
Shade and the Shadow (ed. Elizabeth Miller). Gibson first published a shorter version of his study under the
title “Bram Stoker and the Treaty of Berlin” in the November 2004 issue of Gothic Studies.
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Stoker’s brother George had served with the Turkish army as divisional surgeon and
Chief of Ambulance of the Red Crescent during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78.
(McNally and Florescu 22)
Riquelme, on the other hand, speaks of George as one member of Stoker’s family
with whom the novelist remained in contact and suggests that Bram helped him with the
writing43 of his campaign account:
In 1878, he worked with another brother, George, on With “the Unspeakables”; or,
Two Years’ Campaigning in European and Asiatic Turkey (1878), an account of his
brother’s experiences as a medical officer during the last of the Russo-Turkish Wars
(1877-78). . . . Through Bram Stoker’s influence, George became a consulting
physician for the Lyceum Theatre. (Riquelme 5)
The difference between the McNally/Florescu and Riquelme editions, on the one
hand, and the version provided by Luckhurst, on the other, is that the latter’s comments are
in the annotations and also that he suggests that some of the information in Dracula might
have come from Stoker’s brother. In doing so, Luckhurst gives a short summary of the
Eastern Question in the late 1870s and the ensuing war between Russia and Turkey:
In the late Victorian era, the establishment of modern Bulgaria in 1878 had been a
place of atrocities conducted by both Bulgars, Turks, and the advancing Russian
army; there had been a public outcry in England against Russian cruelty. Bram
Stoker’s brother George worked in Bulgaria as a volunteer doctor between 1876 and
1878, and admired the Turks but denounced the Bulgars and their Russian allies.
(Luckhurst 369)
43
This is supported by the accounts of several biographers, e.g., Ludlam (49), Farson (156), Belford (128).
120
Luckhurst writes all this at the end of a lengthy note on “Magyar, Lombard, Avar, Bulgar,”
that is, the migratory peoples that have come through Transylvania, according to Count
Dracula. In the process, he conflates “Bulgar” (the Turkic people who settled south of the
Danube in the early Middle Ages) and “Bulgarian” (the Slavic people who have lived there
in the modern era). Luckhurst writes again about George Stoker when he explains for the
reader that the Bosphorus is “the strait that divides Europe from Asia. Controlled by the
Turkish authorities, it was necessary to pay baksheesh, a small fee or bribe, to pass.
Stoker’s brother George describes his journey through the Bosphorus in the opening pages
of his memoir, With ‘the Unspeakables’ (1878)” (Luckhurst 376).
What is common to all these editors, though, is that none identifies George Stoker’s
actual wartime experiences as possible inspiration for the setting, the atmosphere, the
characters, the themes or the ideology of Dracula. Before Cain Jr. and Gibson only David
Glover, in his 1996 Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of
Popular Fiction, suggested that in With the “Unspeakables”
one discovers an account of the Balkans that contains many of the features that later
graced Stoker’s 1897 novel: the men with their enormous black mustaches and
traditional peasant dress consisting of wide baggy trousers and white homespun
shirts; the simple, almost superstitious, religiosity of the local people; the packs of
wolves coming down from the hills to terrorise the villagers; and the difficult
journey across the snow-clad mountains through precipitous gorges and dangerous
ravines. (Glover 33)
More daring on the subject are some of Bram Stoker’s biographers, such as Barbara
Belford, in her 1996 Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula and Peter Haining
and Peter Tremayne, in their 1997 The Un-Dead: The Legend of Bram Stoker and Dracula,
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who speculate that George was the first of the Stoker brothers to find out about the
historical Dracula while on the frontline of the 1877-1878 war and soon informed Bram of
this fascinating character (Belford 128; Haining and Tremayne 122).
What is certain is that George, like Bram Stoker, orientalises the part of Europe that
he describes in his memoir. Like Jonathan Harker, who famously enters the East while
crossing a bridge in Budapest, the narrator of With “the Unspeakables” prefers the general
notion of “the East” (George Stoker 4) instead of what the Victorians usually called “the
Near East.” In order to get to Constantinople, George Stoker took the train via Vienna,
Budapest, Belgrade, Baziaş; then the steamer from Baziaş via Vidin to Ruse (Rustchuk);
then the train from Ruse to Varna; and finally another steamer from Varna to
Constantinople. When he boarded the steamer at Baziaş, he met other British doctors who
had joined the Ottoman army, including Charles Ryan, originally from Melbourne, who
was to play a key role in George’s adventures in Bulgaria and in the Caucasus. In 1897,
Ryan published his own memoirs of the 1876-1878 campaign, entitled Under the Red
Crescent: Adventures of an English Surgeon with the Turkish Army at Plevna and
Erzeroum. This is how the Australian doctor remembers the steamer trip down the Danube:
“Among the others on board . . . several of my professional brethren, including Dr. George
Stoker, brother of Bram Stoker, Sir Henry Irving’s manager. . . . There were a number of
pretty Roumanian women on board too, and altogether we had a jolly party” (Ryan 10-11).
Here is how George Stoker remembers the same moment:
After passing Widdin, Rustchuk is the most important and characteristic town one
sees on Turkish territory whilst following the direct route to Constantinople, being,
as it is, the terminus of the Varna Railway. On approaching the town the traveller’s
attention is at once attracted by the tall minarets rearing their graceful forms, with
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their gilded summits glistening in the bright sunlight. From these the gaze wanders
earthwards, at once caught by the peculiar construction of the houses – more
especially the cool verandahs and latticed windows. These latter suggest to the
stranger thoughts of harem life, beautiful Circassian slaves, jealous husbands, and
unfaithful wives tied in sacks and cast into the waters. (George Stoker 1)
Although, unlike his brother, George is not trying to write a Gothic novel, he identifies
himself as a “stranger,” one whose gaze captures only Oriental elements and then imagines
women enslaved in harems and routinely killed. He does not see the “pretty Romanian
women” on equal footing with other passengers, including the British male narrator. There
is no “party” on board his ship.
However, what is most evident in the young doctor’s memoir of the war is his
Turkophilia. George Stoker was actually a doctor in the Turkish Army first, and only
afterwards transferred to the Red Crescent. The first half of With “the Unspeakables”
describes his experiences as an Ottoman officer (especially the campaign in the Caucasus).
In his book, George Stoker admits that there are some corrupt Turks, but only because they
have acquired their “views of civilisation and honesty . . . from their intercourse with
oriental Christians” (George Stoker 4). He is sure that the Turks deserve to win and, in his
position as an Ottoman officer, he calls the Turks “our troops” and “our fellows [who]
fought splendidly” (58). The Turks are the more moral side, whereas “morality is an
unknown quality to the Bulgarian” (7) and the reports of Ottoman atrocities were “greatly
exaggerated” (40). George Stoker’s memoir also “reiterates Russophobic fears and
stereotypes prevalent during the Crimean War” (Cain Jr. 105) and presents Russians as
“virtually subhuman savages, loathsome figures prone to corruption, ignorance and
wantonness” (104).
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When George was in Bulgaria, the entire Stoker family was afraid of what the
Russians might do to him, and apparently his mother even feared he would be cannibalised:
“She seemed to think that just then the Russians might be taking him with onions” (Stoker,
The Lost Journal 147). Bram Stoker undoubtedly shared his brother’s Russophobia.
Dracula both invades and evades England on ships with Russian names and/or sailing under
a Russian flag (Demeter and Czarina Catherine). The crew of both ships include
Romanians, who are singled out as more superstitious than the others and also as more
knowledgeable about vampires, similar in this respect to the Transylvanians encountered by
Jonathan Haker in the first chapters of the Dracula. Their role is minimal, they function as
extras, necessary either as native populace or as expert witnesses of vampires. Romanians
call the 1877-1878 conflict their War of Independence, but in With “the Unspeakables”
they are barely mentioned. Even when the young chief of ambulance visits Plevna and
converses with the Ottoman commander Osman Pasha, George Stoker makes room for a
single reference to the Romanian army (86) that was actually besieging the Turks. In the
same sentence he then calls the Romanians “the Russian allies,” after which he only speaks
of Russians.
George Stoker’s picture of the 1877-1878 war as a confrontation between the
rightful suzerain of the Balkans (the Turks) and the greedy conquerors (the Russians)
supported by insignificant smaller nations is consistent with the general view of the conflict
in Britain. This was especially true of the Disraeli cabinet, which was influential at the
Treaty of Berlin. Their position is well summarised in James William Ozanne’s Three
Years in Roumania, an 1878 book that the two Stoker brothers could have known. The
author condemns the alliance between Romanians and Russians, which, he insists,
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bad as it was, was as nothing in comparison with the wickedness which was to
follow. The armies of the Czar, which had previously won victory after victory,
were brought to a standstill before Plevna, which Ghazi Osman defended with an
amount of spirit and energy simply marvellous. Foiled and beaten, the Czar, who
had often before declined with contempt the offers of Prince Charles, fell on his
knees and besought the Roumanians to save him. Well did the Roumanians fight,
and it is clear that, but for their hearty co-operation, the troops of the Czar could
never have held their own, but must have been driven back until they took refuge on
friendly soil. Thus did Prince Charles add to his previous treachery the sin of
warring against his Suzerain Lord. (Ozanne 222-223) 44
The fact that George Stoker omits to say that the Romanians, led by their Prince Charles of
Hohenzollern (1866-1914), and not the Russians, were the actual winners at Plevna, is
probably inspired by the prevalent idea that Romania had been a mere instrument and never
an agent in the Eastern Question. This idea is formulated, among others, by James
Samuelson, author of Roumania, Past and Present (1882), a book that Stoker mentions in
his working papers (Bram Stoker’s Notes 221). Samuelson describes in detail the Romanian
participation in the war and suggests that Prince Charles was forced by the advances of the
Russian army to enter into an alliance that the country did not wish (Samuelson 236).
By the end of the nineteenth century, the notion that Russia was an insufferable
enemy was no longer that widespread in England, where at least the second Gladstone
cabinet (1880-1885) was “mildly pro-Russian” (Gibson 238). Even Turkophilic sentiments
44
Ozanne’s account is consistent with that of Lieutenant-General Valentine Baker (a Briton serving in the
Ottoman Army) who, in his 1879 memoir War in Bulgaria, writes: “nor can it be doubted by any impartial
military historian that but for the aid of the Roumanian forces, the whole Russian army which was fighting
north of the Balkans would inevitably have been driven into the Danube” (II, 334).
125
like those of George Stoker were being curbed. What persisted, nevertheless, was the idea
that the Ottoman dominance in the Balkans was preferable to the British and that it was
preferred by the locals.45 Revealing in this respect is a passage from Scrisori către Vasile
Alecsandri [Letters to Vasile Alecsandri], the memoirs of Ion Ghica, first published in
1884, when the author was Romania’s ambassador to London. In a chapter about David
Urquhart, perhaps the most Turkophile British MP of the mid-nineteenth century, the
memoirist, now a canonical author in Romania, remembers that
after he listened with the greatest attention and interest as long as I was telling him
of Russia’s behaviour in the Principalities, of the claims that she sought to enforce
and of her ambitious plans, when I also began to speak of Turkey’s wrongdoings . . .
I was startled to see him incensed: his charming, good-natured countenance
suddenly became wild and menacing; his entire bearing was so crumbled that one
could no longer recognise him; his hands were tense, his fists were clenched and his
arms took the stance of a pugilist. When I saw that, I left him in the care of the good
Lord and, every time I met him afterwards, I avoided him. (Ghica 108-109)
That the Romanians might see the Turks as historical enemies is unacceptable for
Turkophiles like Urquhart and George Stoker. As for the author of Dracula, his sentiments
are made obvious by his choice of turning an anti-Ottoman warrior into a vampire.
The scenario suggested by Barbara Belford and by Peter Haining and Peter
Tremayne, although undeniably far-fetched, could benefit from being placed in the right
context. Elizabeth Miller finds inadmissible the idea that George Stoker could have heard
of the historical Dracula while on the Bulgarian battlefields because the latter’s incursion
45
At least one of the editors of Dracula maintains this idea: Radu Florescu, the author of The Struggle against
Russia in the Romanian Principalities (1964).
126
south of the Danube did not take him as far south as Plevna. Also, she finds it “difficult to
accept on faith that Bulgarians and Turks in the 1870s spent their spare time telling tales of
a Romanian voivode from the distant past” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 175). In fact, Plevna
is only 50 kilometres (31 miles) south of the Danube and the Turks were facing there, for
the first time in centuries, a Romanian army. When the Romanian troops, as Francis Welch,
a British officer at Plevna reports, assaulted the Turkish positions in a series of bayonet
charges after having shot 240 million rounds at them (Welch 341) and forced Osman Pasha
to surrender, some of the more learned Turkish officers with whom George Stoker often
conversed could have remembered another formidable and fearsome enemy coming from
the left bank of the Danube.
Although Vlad Ţepeş (the Impaler) was “a voivode from the distant past,” as
Elizabeth Miller puts it, he was not forgotten in Turkey. An interesting piece of evidence
about this comes from the first Turkish version of Dracula, published in 1928 as an original
novel by Ali Rıza Seyfi (1879-1958) under the title Kazıklı Voyvoda (The Impaling
Voivode). This work formed the basis of the first Turkish horror movie, the 1953 Drakula
Istanbul’da. As Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar has shown in “Adding towards a Nationalist Text:
On a Turkish Translation of Dracula,” Kazıklı Voyvoda is in fact a translation/adaptation of
Stoker’s novel, partly abridged, partly enlarged and a clear case of plagiarism, since it was
presented by Seyfi as his own creation. Furthermore, Turkish literary historians considered
Kazıklı Voyvoda an original novel until 1998 (Gürçağlar 127), whereas several editors of
Dracula were more or less aware of the connection with Stoker’s novel.
The “Annotated Filmography” of McNally and Florescu’s 1979 edition includes a
description of the movie:
127
Drakula Istanbulda [sic] (1953), Demirag, Turkey: producer, Turgut Demirag;
director, Mehmet Muktar; screenplay by Unit Deniz, after the novels Dracula by
Bram Stoker and The Impaling Voivode by Riza Seyfi. The first film to link Stoker’s
vampire Dracula with Vlad the Impaler. Alif Kaptan, an aged Turkish actor, plays
the lead. The plot of the Turkish novel is very similar to Stoker’s, except for some
minor details and the fact that the setting is Istanbul and Romania. It even imitates
Stoker’s epistolatory style, so that the story unfolds through letters, diaries, and
notes. (McNally and Florescu 286)
The two editors seem aware of Seyfi’s plagiarism, but still credit the similarities, at least
partly, to the fact that the film is based on the 1897 Dracula as well as on the 1928 Kazıklı
Voyvoda.46 Finally, the editors acknowledge that Drakula Istanbul’da is the first film to
present Count Dracula unmistakably as Vlad the Impaler but do not seem to realise that
Seyfi’s “novel” had already done so as early as 1928.
Wolf has no place for Drakula Istanbul’da in the brief filmography of the 1975
edition and does not mention it in his 1997 Connoisseur’s Guide. Nevertheless, in the 1993
edition he describes the movie (he calls it “Drakula Istanbula”) as the “first non-Western
adaptation” (Wolf 460) of Dracula, but makes no mention of Seyfi’s version. Better
informed is Klinger who, in his 2008 edition, relates that
The 1953 Turkish production Drakula Istanbul’da, directed by Mehmet Muhtar,
was the first to show Dracula climbing his castle wall facedown and suggests a
connection to Vlad the Impaler. Set in contemporary Istanbul, the script is based on
46
In fact, the movie, just like Seyfi’s translation/adaptation, makes no mention whatsoever of Stoker’s novel.
The titles and the credits include only references to the author of the Turkish version.
128
Ali Riza Seyfi’s 1928 novel The Impaling Voivode, “inspired” by Stoker’s work,
and features a fine, bald, fang-sporting vampire. (560)
The quotation marks surrounding the word “inspired” suggest that Klinger is aware of
Seyfi’s plagiarism. Elizabeth Miller goes further and considers Kazıklı Voyvoda an
“abridged adaptation” of Dracula (like the Icelandic version Makt Myrkrann):
Virtually unknown in the West, this text retains much of Stoker’s plot, although it is
considerably shortened and uses Turkish characters and settings. The author, Ali
Riza Seyfi, introduces one major variation: Count Dracula is more clearly identified
as the infamous Impaler who wreaked havoc on the Turks in the fifteenth century.
This adaptation probably had a nationalistic agenda, in that it was published
immediately following the Turkish War of Independence. (Sense & Nonsense 85)
The interpretation of Seyfi’s work as part of the author’s nationalistic agenda is also Şehnaz
Tahir Gürçağlar’s thesis. Seyfi needed a fierce enemy from Turkey’s past to use in his
nation-building project and he chose Stoker’s novel because he knew very well that it was
about Vlad Ţepeş.47
As Gürçağlar shows, the author of the 1928 version, who was in fact known as a
translator from English, changed his mind when he realised that Stoker had written about
the Romanian medieval ruler: “while translating Dracula, Seyfi renamed it Kazıklı
Voyvoda, associating it right from the start with an evil figure from Turkish history”
(Gürçağlar 130). All the heroes as well as Dracula’s victims are Turks in Seyfi’s version.
Doctor Resuhi (the Turkish Van Helsing) “often comes back to the pains inflicted on
innocent Turks by Vlad the Impaler, and this may be considered a deliberate attempt to
47
Thus, Seyfi is the first to identify Count Dracula as Vlad the Impaler in 1928, long before Bacil Kirtley in
1956, Grigore Nandriş in 1959, Harry Ludlam in 1962 or McNally and Florescu in 1972.
129
forge a strong sense of nationhood” (141). The references to Vlad the Impaler and his war
on the Ottoman Empire abound in the letters produced by Azmi (Jonathan Harker) and
Güzin (Mina), and “it is no coincidence that, at the end of the novel, as Dracula is being
stabbed to his eternal death, Seyfi has one of the characters say: ‘This is the revenge of my
fellow nationals impaled on the banks of the Danube!’” (140). Although the last part of the
novel involves a chase through Istanbul (the vampire-hunters, all former officers in the
1919-1923 Turkish War of Independence, do not need to follow Dracula back to his lair)
and the enemy’s powers are curbed by Muslim weapons (for example, the crucifix is
replaced by the Quran), Kazıklı Voyvoda remains faithful to Stoker’s original. What the
Turkish adaptation suggests, however, is that even 50 years after George Stoker’s campaign
south of the Danube, and in the context of another devastating war in the Near East,
“Dracula is identified with the nation’s enemies” (Gürçağlar 140), which makes it quite
likely for Vlad the Impaler to be identified as such a powerful symbol in 1877-1878, when
the Turks were actually fighting Romanians and Bram Stoker’s brother George had the
opportunity to listen to their concerns and fears.
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4.3 Friends of James Knowles
By seeking independence in 1877, Romania was the enemy of the status quo
established by the British victory in the Crimean War.48 Public opinion in Great Britain
during the Near Eastern crisis of the mid- and late 1870s was overwhelmingly in favour of
the preservation of the Ottoman Empire and against the independence or autonomy of its
dependent territories in the Balkans. William Gladstone’s opposite view, thunderously
expressed in Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, a pamphlet published in
September 1876, is well-known. At the time, Gladstone was, however, the most prominent
member of “a small, though vocal, minority” (Hammond 609), whereas Disraeli’s proTurkish position reigned supreme. Although Stoker knew and admired Gladstone, his views
regarding the Eastern Question were “firmly Conservative . . . and in keeping with the
legacy created by Disraeli” (Gibson 239). The author of Dracula only met the Earl of
Beaconsfield once, but Henry Irving “met him often and liked to talk about him” (Stoker,
Personal Reminiscences II, 37). When, in Chapter 9 of Dracula, Stoker has Dr Seward say,
“‘The unexpected always happens.’ How well Disraeli knew life” (Dracula 143), all editors
(with the exception of McNally and Florescu) try to identify the quote. Some believe it
comes from Disraeli’s Endymion (Leatherdale 179 n. 51; Byron 143 n. 1); others place it in
Henrietta Temple (Klinger 178 n. 25; Luckhurst 378); Auerbach and Skal think it is from
Sybil (102 n. 8); finally, others think it does not come from Disraeli at all (Wolf 142 n. 10;
Riquelme 125). None mentions the fact that Stoker met Disraeli and had reasons to admire
him.
48
This was made clear by the then prime-minister Benjamin Disraeli. See Richard Millman, Britain and the
Eastern Question: 1875-1878 (267-269). For a Romanian view, see Nicolae Iorga, Histoire des relations
anglo-roumaines (160-163).
131
In fact, Stoker’s account of the relationship between Irving and Disraeli seems much
embellished, perhaps because of his own admiration for the Conservative Prime Minister.
Most of the chapter dedicated to Disraeli consists of anecdotes related by other people who
had known the Earl of Beaconsfield. The only time that Stoker met him, on 17 November
1880, when he came to see a performance of The Corsican Brothers (Stoker, Personal
Reminiscences I, 168) might also be the only time that Henry Irving met him, despite
Stoker’s statement that the two men “met often.” Of Disraeli’s opinion of the famous actor,
Stoker writes cautiously: “I think also that Beaconsfield liked him” (II, 37) and “I believe
[he] expressed himself pleased with [the play]” (I, 168). On the contrary, in a letter to Lady
Bradford, dated 26 November 1880, the former Prime Minister (he had been succeeded by
Gladstone on 21 April of that year) writes: “I liked the ‘Corsican Brothers’ as a melodrama,
and never saw anything put cleverer on the stage. Irving, whom I saw for the first time, is
third-rate and never will improve; but good enough for the part he played” (Disraeli II,
395). If Disraeli saw Irving for the first time in late 1880, a few months before his final
illness (he died on 19 April 1881), during which he rarely went out and grew almost blind
(Weintraub 655), it is very likely that Irving never met him again and that Disraeli never
changed his opinion of Irving’s acting skills. The fact that Stoker included a chapter on
Beaconsfield in his Reminiscences, immediately after the one on Gladstone, suggests both
that he wanted to preserve the illusion of Irving’s unblemished level of recognition in late
Victorian England and that he inserted his own opinions of Disraeli in the memoir about the
actor.
Gladstone, instead, became in time a close friend of Henry Irving and came
regularly to the Lyceum “[f]or fourteen years, from 1881 to 1895” (Stoker, Personal
132
Reminiscences II, 26).49 As the title of an article he published in the June 1878 issue of The
Nineteenth Century shows, the new prime minister was in favour of “Liberty in the East
and West.” He supported the independence of the new states emancipated from Ottoman
domination (for this reason he was made an honorary Romanian citizen in 1861) and Home
Rule in Ireland. Knowing his latter interest, Stoker sent Gladstone a copy of The Snake’s
Pass and Gladstone replied with a letter that Stoker later published in facsimile (Stoker,
Personal Reminiscences II, 27-28). When Charles Stewart Parnell issued the manifesto “To
the People of Ireland” that caused division in the Irish Parliamentary Party, Gladstone lent
an ear to Stoker: “though I was a philosophical Home-Ruler, I was much surprised and both
angry at and sorry for Parnell’s attitude, and I told Mr. Gladstone my opinion” (II 31).
Another time, Stoker put to use his experience as former inspector of petty sessions and
penned his opinion on a new Rule of Procedure for the House of Commons, “which I sent
to [Gladstone] through the kindness of his friend James Knowles” (II, 31).
An architect turned editor, James Knowles (1831-1908) played an important role in
late Victorian intellectual and social life and also became somewhat of a mentor to Stoker.
In July 1877, when he was still a Dublin civil servant and was vacationing in London,
Stoker was urged by Irving to visit Knowles at the office of The Nineteenth Century. Irving
knew of Stoker’s “wish to get to London where as a writer [he] should have a larger scope
and better chance of success than at home” (Stoker, Personal Reminiscences I, 44) and
thought Knowles more qualified to give advice to the aspiring novelist. Knowles invited
Stoker to publish in The Nineteenth Century, which only happened in June 1890. But the
editor and his periodical remained influential in Stoker’s career: “From that hour Sir James
49
In fact, as Jeffrey Richards shows in his biography, Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and His World,
Gladstone had first seen Irving in Hamlet as early as 1875 (Richards 178).
133
and I became close friends. I and mine have received from him and his innumerable
kindnesses; and there is for him a very warm corner in my heart” (I, 46). It was in The
Nineteenth Century (the July 1885 issue) that the author of Dracula read Emily Gerard’s
essay on “Transylvanian Superstitions.” Only one of the editors mentions the fact that
Stoker was close to Knowles, in an endnote to a study of Dracula: “This journal was edited
by a friend of Stoker’s Sir James Knowles” (Leatherdale, The Novel and the Legend 231 n.
31). However, none of the editions, Leatherdale’s included, make this connection.
Knowles appears in a few other, crucial, moments in Stoker’s Personal
Reminiscences of Henry Irving.50 Apart from his role as liaison between Irving’s manager
and Gladstone, Knowles introduced Stoker to Alfred Tennyson (I, 201) and, at the first
dinner with the translator of A Thousand Nights, Stoker “sat between Burton and James
Knowles” (I, 351). The editor of The Nineteenth Century is also present indirectly in
Stoker’s memoir: just like Disraeli before him, Gladstone came to the Lyceum for a
performance of The Corsican Brothers on 3 January 1881 (the first time Stoker met him),
but it was in fact a double bill, the other play being The Cup, written by Tennyson and with
sets designed by Knowles. Both Tennyson and Gladstone were members of the
Metaphysical Society, which was founded by Knowles in 1869 and had monthly meetings
until 1880 to discuss the relationships between religion and science.51 The members
included, alongside Gladstone, Tennyson and Knowles, many Victorian luminaries: John
Ruskin, Walter Bagehot, Thomas Huxley, Cardinal Manning, Arthur Balfour, Leslie
50
The title of Stoker’s memoir may be inspired by Knowles’s policy of publishing “personal reminiscences”
in The Nineteenth Century. See, for example, “Gordon at Gravesend: A Personal Reminiscence” by Arthur
Stannard, in the April 1885 issue.
51
A brief but useful history is provided by Knowles himself in a “Note from the Editor” attached to Richard
Holt Hutton’s article “The Metaphysical Society: A Reminiscence,” in The Nineteenth Century 18:102
(August 1885), 177-179.
134
Stephen, James Anthony Froude, and Dr William Benjamin Carpenter, who coined the term
“unconscious cerebration,” later used by Stoker in Dracula.
According to Knowles’s biographer Priscilla Metcalf, the former architect became a
kind of “midwife” to the divided post-Darwinian intelligentsia of London and also to the
various branches of the Royal Family (Metcalf 308). Knowles was especially close to the
Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII), at whose Sandringham House in Norfolk he
spent many weekends between 1884 and 1908 (it was there that the King knighted him in
1903). All the members of the Metaphysical Society became contributors to The Nineteenth
Century, the monthly periodical with the highest circulation in Late-Victorian Britain
(Metcalf 285). As Julia Stapleton writes in her study of Political Intellectuals and Public
Identities in Britain since 1850, Knowles was a “facilitator” and an agent for the
intellectual elite. He “achieved extraordinary influence, not only with the foremost
intellectuals of his day but also among royalty, whom he frequently entertained at his
London home” (Stapleton 23). Many of Knowles’s friends became Irving’s and Stoker’s
friends and appear in the latter’s Personal Reminiscences as guests at the various banquets
offered by the Lyceum. In fact, if one sets aside all the American and foreign guests as well
as the many writers, actors, painters and sculptors (usually involved somehow in the
theatre), the remaining cast of characters in Stoker’s memoir are politicians, intellectuals
and socialites belonging to one or more of the three circles that made up James Knowles’s
social life: former members of the Metaphysical Society; contributors to The Nineteenth
Century; and friends of the Prince of Wales.
Stoker’s list of guests includes five prominent members of the Metaphysical
Society: Knowles, Gladstone, Balfour, Tennyson and Froude, all of whom were
135
contributors to The Nineteenth Century and close to the Royal Family.52 Other contributors
to Knowles’s journal who frequented the Lyceum were Ray Lankester, author of
Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880); Garnet Wolseley, military correspondent;
the Earl of Dunraven, war correspondent during the 1877-1878 conflict; and Edward Dicey,
who accompanied the Prince of Wales on a trip to Russia in 1867 and later published
copiously on matters related to the English presence in Egypt. In 1870 he also published
The Morning Land, a travelogue describing his trip down the Danube and then all the way
to the Holy Land after crossing a bridge that divided the West from the East, which may
have inspired Jonathan Harker’s account of a slow voyage beyond Budapest. Dicey also
writes in the form of a diary and, when he goes through the Danube’s Iron Gates, he
remembers: “For the last thirty hours I have been travelling East, due East, as fast – it
would be more true, but less poetical, to say as slowly – as rail and steam could carry me.
During that time I have traversed the whole length of Hungary” (Dicey I, 1). What is
distinctive is also Dicey’s view of his trip as eastwards, although the steamer that took him
down the Danube from Budapest to Orşova, where he wrote this diary entry, had to sail
southwards, following the flow of the river.
Among the guests of the Lyceum there were several who were employed by the
Prince of Wales (e.g., Sir Dighton Probyn, the Earl of Albemarle, Sir George Lewis, Lord
Knollys); many who were his close friends (e.g., the Earl of Lytton, Horace Farquhar,
Alfred de Rothchild, the Duchess of Manchester); and two of his mistresses (Agnes Keyser
and the Countess of Warwick). However, two of the guests who were close to Queen
Victoria and to the Prince of Wales, respectively, were of crucial importance for the writing
52
Gladstone and Balfour were Liberal and Conservative leaders, respectively; Tennyson was the Poet
Laureate; Froude knew the Prince of Wales through his best friend Charles Kingsley, the Prince’s tutor.
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of Dracula: German-born Max Müller (1823-1900) and Hungarian-born Arminius
Vambéry (1832-1913). Both were famous Orientalists celebrated in Victorian England.
Both were contributors to The Nineteenth Century. And both became characters in Bram
Stoker’s novel: Max Müller is the likely model for Abraham Van Helsing, while Vambéry
is the former’s “friend Arminius” from the University of Budapest.
There is no direct reference to Max Müller in Dracula and only the
McNally/Florescu edition makes the connection between Van Helsing and the Oxford
professor:
Stoker was especially interested in Muller’s book Comparative Mythology and cited
his work Magyarland in his working notes to the novel; the Brotherton Library at
Leeds University has a letter which Dr. Muller wrote to Stoker on April 13, 1886.
Muller may have been one of the general models for Van Helsing. (McNally and
Florescu 117 n. 191)
In the letter, Müller asked Irving’s manager for tickets to Faust and later studies have
shown that Magyarland was actually written by Elizabeth Sarah (better known as “Nina”)
Mazuchelli (1832-1914), a mountaineer and explorer. This might explain why McNally and
Florescu’s suggestion has been disregarded in subsequent editions. Only two others discuss
Van Helsing when the character shows up in Chapter 9. Leonard Wolf implies that the
professor from Amsterdam is the hero of the novel because of his name: “If we have any
doubts about whose side the author is on in the battle between darkness and light in the
novel, we need only compare Van Helsing’s first name with Stoker’s own. ‘Bram’ is a
contraction of ‘Abraham,’ which was also the name of Stoker’s father” (Wolf 148 n. 20). A
similar comment is made by Klinger (185 n. 48). Leatherdale insists on Stoker’s practice of
137
“adding the final, crucial member of the dramatis personae well into the book” (184 n. 91),
which he also does in The Jewel of Seven Stars.
Stoker does mention Müller’s name in his research notes, but only as he writes
down ideas from Magyarland, where he is cited. The editors of Stoker’s papers explain that
“Max Muller may have been the model for Professor Van Helsing” (Eighteen-Bisang and
Miller 201 n. 308). In their “Overview” at the end of the book, they add: “If there was a live
model for Van Helsing, a case can be made for a contemporary German professor at
Oxford, Max Muller, while the Notes champion Bram’s brother William Thornley as a
candidate” (283). In a note to this, they explain: “Many scholars believe that this professor
from Germany, who lectured in mythology and religion [Max Müller], inspired the
character of Van Helsing” (283 n. 375).53 The scholars who turned the tide in favour of
Max Müller as model for Van Helsing are two Germanists, David B. Dickens and Clemens
Ruthner, each of whom published an essay arguing this in the 1998 volume Dracula: The
Shade and the Shadow edited by Elizabeth Miller. Dickens concludes that Van Helsing is
based on Max Müller because Van Helsing speaks German, not Dutch; Stoker knew Müller
and his ideas; Müller’s personal tragedies mirror Van Helsing’s; and Müller once withdrew
to Whitby (Dickens 36-37). Ruthner believes the same because Stoker mentions in the
preface to the Icelandic version that Van Helsing is based on a “highly respected scientist,
who appears here under a pseudonym”; in the working papers, Van Helsing appears first as
a German professor called Max Windschoeffel; and Müller was familiar with vampire
legends (Ruthner 61-62).
53
One the editors of the notes repeats this elsewhere: “a strong case can be made for a contemporary German
professor at Oxford, Max Müller” (Miller, “A Dracula ‘Who’s Who’” 221).
138
All these arguments are valid and convincing, although it remains a little unclear
why Stoker would have chosen this particular professor instead of another. More
information regarding Müller’s reputation and character can be revealing. Nirad C.
Chaudhuri, Müller’s biographer, writes that he was characterised by tenacity, zest for life
and wit, features that can also describe Van Helsing. When he was up for an important
Professorship at Oxford (the election became a cause célèbre in 1860), Müller was defeated
and his imperfect knowledge of English was one of the arguments against him (Chaudhuri
227). Van Helsing’s use of the English language may be an allusion to Müller’s (whose
written English was, nevertheless, impeccable). Stoker could have read about the scholar in
an essay-portrait dedicated to him in the October 1878 issue of The Dublin University
Magazine, an independent academic journal owned and managed by Sheridan Le Fanu.
There, the anonymous author quotes from one of Müller’s speeches, in which he gives
directions for a spiritual battle “if Christianity is to retain its hold on Europe and America,
if it is to conquer in the Holy War of the future” (“Professor Max Müller” 482). Van
Helsing’s exhortation to his comrades that they “go out as the old Knights of the Cross”
recalls Müller’s lecture “On Missions” quoted above.
Another argument suggesting that Max Müller could be the model for Abraham Van
Helsing is that Stoker was well aware of the scholar’s fame and of the respect that he was
due. The first meeting between Stoker and Müller in the former’s memoir was on 7 March
1886 at Oxford, where Irving and his manager were among the fourteen guests of an
exclusive dinner. Three of the guests were Müller, his wife and his daughter (Stoker,
Personal Reminiscences II, 252). The second meeting took place on 14 April 1886 at the
representation of Faust followed by a supper in the Beefsteak Room, situated above the
139
theatre. As Stoker recounts the events of the night, it becomes clear why Müller had asked
him for tickets. Franz Liszt came especially to see the play and
musical London made such a rush for the old man that it was absolutely necessary
to guard him when he came to the theatre. . . . As it was necessary to keep away all
who might intrude upon him – enthusiasts, interviewers, cranks, autograph-fiends,
notoriety seekers who would like to be seen in his box – we arranged a sort of
fortress for him. (II, 145-146)
Müller was among those that were invited to dine with Liszt. This was not so surprising
because, as a teenager in Leipzig, where he was intimate with Felix Mendelssohn, Müller
had met Liszt and, being a tenor, had shared the stage with him (Chaudhuri 29-31).
Stoker could not have been unaware of Max Müller’s fame in Victorian England.
Not just “a contemporary German professor at Oxford” or a “professor from Germany, who
lectured in mythology and religion,” as the editors of Bram Stoker’s Notes call him, Müller
was a “world figure” (Chaudhuri 1). He was especially famous in late Victorian Britain,
where he “occupied a central role in the intellectual life of the nation” (Beckerlegge 179).
He has been described as “one of the giants of the English intellectual world” (Kitagawa
and Strong 184) of the time. Thanks to his “uncomplicated prose and his concern to write
as much for the layman as for the scholar, he can truly be ranked alongside those great and
eloquent ‘sages,’ such as Ruskin, Kingsley, Spencer and . . . Arnold, all of whom were to
some extent the father-figures of the Victorian fireside” (Trompf 200). He was also close to
the Prince of Wales (Chaudhuri 2-4), but especially to Queen Victoria, “as a result of links
forged with Albert, the Prince Consort” (Beckerlegge 185). The Queen offered him a
knighthood in 1886 but he refused, then in 1896 appointed him to the Privy Council “for
his scholarly work and not for his services to the Indian Empire as Queen Victoria had
140
originally proposed” (185). Much of his most widely read and discussed scholarship was
published in The Nineteenth Century. From January 1882 (“Mythology among the
Hottentots”) until November 1899 (“Literature before Letters”), he contributed fourteen
essays to James Knowles’s periodical.
In the January 1885 issue, to which Müller contributed an essay on “The Savage,”
Arminius Vambéry’s signature also appeared. The “noted Russophobe,” as the historian
R.W. Seton-Watson calls him (Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question 4), published
in The Nineteenth Century essays about the Russian peril in Central Asia. The one from
January 1885 (with a second part in the February issue) was entitled “Will Russia Conquer
India?” and coincided with one of Vambéry’s many visits to London. Unlike Max Müller,
his name (or at least his first name) and his position as professor at the University of
Budapest are mentioned explicitly in Dracula. Consequently, all editors (except Wilson and
Ellmann, the first two OUP editors) sanction the connection and acknowledge the fact that
Stoker knew Vambéry personally (McNally and Florescu 193-194 n. 274; Wolf 291 n. 22;
Auerbach and Skal 212 n. 3; Leatherdale 337 n. 65; Byron 280 n. 1; Riquelme 245; Klinger
340-341 n. 41; Luckhurst 385). However, Klinger also writes that “my friend Arminius”
could be based on a sixteenth-century Dutch Reformist, and in a 1997 essay Leatherdale
suggests that “Stoker threw in his [Vambéry’s] name in passing, as a fleeting and
unthinking tribute. This accorded with the author’s long habit of dropping into his fiction
the names of personal acquaintances” (“Stoker’s Banana Skins” 142-143). Furthermore,
Elizabeth Miller notes that Stoker “devoted several pages of Reminiscences to Burton
compared to just over a page on Arminius Vambery” (Sense & Nonsense 23).
However, the name of Arminius could not have been thrown in passing. It can only
refer to Vambéry because both he and Stoker’s character teach at the remote University of
141
Budapest. Moreover, just as Arminius is Van Helsing’s friend, Vambéry knew Max Müller
and they had similar scholarly interests (both wrote extensively on Central Asian languages
and on their relation with Fino-Ugric and Turkic idioms). Also, the few lines on Vambéry
in the Personal Reminiscences are placed strategically at the very end of the first volume,
after the accounts on two other travellers: Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley.
Stoker relates two meetings with the Hungarian: on 30 April 1890, in the Beefsteak Room,
when Vambéry told stories of his adventures in Central Asia and “Irving was delighted
with him” (Personal Reminiscences I, 371-372); and two years later, when the Hungarian
was being given a degree at the Tercentenary of Trinity College Dublin where “he shone
out as a star. He soared above all the speakers, making one of the finest speeches I have
ever heard. Be sure that he spoke loudly against Russian aggression – a subject to which he
had largely devoted himself” (I, 372). Stoker had probably met Vambéry at least once
before 1890: he describes a visit with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry at the Prince of Wales’s
Sandringham House to entertain the Queen on 26 April 1889 (II, 212-215). The Hungarian
was also a guest at the same time (Vambéry, “Professor Vambéry Speaks” 383) and was
subsequently invited for dinner and an overnight stay at Windsor Palace.
Far from being one of the more obscure references in Dracula, Arminius Vambéry,
just like Max Müller, was famous worldwide. An autodidact polyglot, he jumpstarted his
career in the early 1860s by travelling from Constantinople to Samarkand and back
disguised as a dervish and then publishing his account simultaneously in London and
Budapest. His close relationships with monarchs, particularly that with the sultan Abdul
Hamid II, the success of his lectures and books based on voyages through Central Asia and
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on the Anglo-Russian rivalry along the frontier of India,54 as well as his first
autobiography, the 1884 The Life and Adventures of Arminius Vambéry Written by Himself,
subsequently turned him into a much sought-after European celebrity. Richard Burton, who
had become equally famous thanks to an incognito trip to Mecca, met Vambéry as early as
1864, when the Hungarian had just come to London to promote his first book (Isabel
Burton I, 348). The Prince of Wales also met him in 1864 (Vambéry, “Professor Vambéry
Speaks” 382) and they became such good friends that Vambéry was later cited as an expert
on the future king (Legge, More about King Edward 278-279).
An interesting argument in favour of the hypothesis that Vambéry was the first to
mention the name of Dracula to Bram Stoker is that the library in Whitby, where the
novelist found Wilkinson’s Account on the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, “was
not, in fact, a public library – it was a private subscription library” (Frayling, “Mr Stoker’s
Holiday” 188) and visitors had to ask for specific books. Stoker met Vambéry in the
Beefsteak Room right before his holiday in Whitby and may have been advised by the
Hungarian about books such as Wilkinson’s or Johnson’s. One of Stoker’s main sources on
Transylvania, Major E.C. Johnson (author of On the Track of the Crescent) also knew
Vambéry in his position as Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. When the Hungarian
professor lectured before the society in 1885 (Goldsmid 388), Johnson was a member of the
board.55 Another member was Max Müller. By that time, Vambéry’s fame was such that a
chapter was dedicated to him in William Henry Davenport Adams’s In Perils Oft:
Romantic Biographies Illustrative of Adventurous Life (1885), where he was in the
54
The most important books he published in Victorian England are Travels in Central Asia (1864), Sketches
of Central Asia (1868; a sequel to the previous title), Central Asia and the Anglo-Russian Frontier Question
(1874) and The Coming Struggle for India (1885) which prompted his invitation at Windsor.
55
Stoker could have known Johnson personally. The major was an M.A.I., that is to say “Magister in Arte
Inginiaria,” a degree only conferred by the University of Dublin.
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company of other famous explorers, such as General Gordon, Samuel Baker and Edward
Henry Palmer.
During one of the meetings with Burton (Stoker, Personal Reminiscences I, 356),
Irving was especially eager to learn of the fate of his good friend Edward Henry Palmer
(Stoker mistakenly writes “Edmund Henry Palmer”), who had been murdered by marauders
in Egypt in 1882. Burton was a member of the investigation sent there afterwards. Palmer,
whom Irving had known since the early 1850s, when they were both clerks in merchant’s
offices (Brereton 6-12), was very knowledgeable both in Arabic (he translated the Quran)
and in Romany. He “first learned to talk Romany as boy. He knew all the varieties of it,
from the pure gipsy language, spoken in its integrity by very few English gipsies, to the
tinkers’ road talk and thieves’ patter” (Besant 177). In 1875 he published a bilingual
volume of English Gipsy Songs. When he returned from the journey through the Holy
Places (recounted in the two volumes of his 1871 The Desert of the Exodus: Journeys on
Foot in the Wilderness of the Forty Years’ Wanderings), Palmer travelled from North Syria
to Constantinople and then “came home by way of Vienna, where he met Arminius
Vambéry, who became and remained one of his firmest friends” (Besant 110-111). The
men that Stoker knew (either through family connections or through Henry Irving) and
contributed, voluntarily or not, to the shaping of Dracula in the 1890s and even before were
scholars and explorers specialising in the Near and the Middle East, usually Russophobes
and/or Turkophiles, and often gravitating around the British Royal Family.
144
Chapter 5
What Stoker Knew
Bram Stoker’s working notes give us some indication of the research he did for
Dracula and the editors of the novel (with the exception of Leonard Wolf) have put them to
use in their annotations. However, much of what he wrote about the people of Transylvania
and what was then the Kingdom of Romania can only be explained through information he
gathered from books that are not mentioned in his papers; from newspapers; and from
conversation. There are many things that Stoker (and many well-informed Britons of his
time) simply knew (or thought they knew) about Romania. As a commentator of the novel
has recently put it, “the Victorians in general knew more about Eastern Europe than we
give them credit for knowing, and . . . Bram Stoker in particular was surrounded by friends,
family, and acquaintances who understood much of the history, politics, and conflicts of
these lands” (McLean 339). Much of what Stoker knew cannot be found in his working
notes and therefore is not commented on by Dracula’s editors; however, this knowledge is
manifest in the novel. The editor is supposed to explain such implicit knowledge because
“he has a responsibility to share his knowledge and understanding with the reader by
providing whatever information may be necessary to make the author’s meaning
intelligible” (Battestin 10). Starting from the information that was available to Stoker and
that he could have worked into Dracula, an editor of the novel might be able to reveal more
about the author’s intentions.
145
Rather than choosing Transylvania merely as a more convenient setting for Dracula
(in that it was remote and not much utilised in previous fiction and therefore more original),
Stoker was keen on writing about lands inhabited by Romanians. In an 1897 interview with
Jane Stoddard from the British Weekly, Stoker is quoted as saying “I learned a good deal
from E. Gerard’s ‘Essays on Roumanian Superstitions,’ which first appeared in the
Nineteenth Century, and were afterwards published in a couple of volumes” (Byron 486487). Here, Stoker conflates Gerard’s 1885 essay called “Transylvanian Superstitions” and
her 1888 book The Land beyond the Forest into one work that he identifies as “essays” not
on the several ethnicities of Transylvania (Gerard actually speaks of Saxon and Gypsy
superstitions as well as Romanian),56 but on Romanians only.
The fact that Stoker knows that the book had two volumes and that he speaks of
Gerard’s “essays” (in the plural) suggests that he may have consulted the book.57 He may,
in fact, have known other works by Emily Gerard and may have found inspiration in her
1886 novel The Waters of Hercules, initially published serially in Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine, which Stoker had known and read since his early years (Dick Collins 4). The
Waters of Hercules is set on the frontier between Hungary and Romania and recounts the
mystery surrounding a place called “Gaura Dracului” – the name is kept in Romanian in the
novel, but it is also aptly translated by the author as “the devil’s hole” (Gerard, The Waters
of Hercules 95). The heroine of the novel, forced by circumstance to search for her roots, is
56
“Transylvanian Superstitions” begins with Romanians and continues with Saxons and then Gypsies. The
Land beyond the Forest begins with Saxons, continues with Romanians, then goes back to Saxons in the
second volume, in which Gypsies are added.
57
Elizabeth Miller suggests he did not (Sense & Nonsense 21) but later, in a note, expresses “a nagging
doubt” about this: “One piece of vampire lore used in Dracula is that ‘The branch of wild rose on his coffin
keep him that he move not from it.’ This does not appear in Gerard’s article . . . But [it does] in The Land
beyond the Forest” (44 n. 9).
146
the granddaughter of the enigmatic “Count Damianovics de Draskócs”; both this name and
the name of the place foreshadow that of Stoker’s famous vampire.
In another interview, granted to The San Francisco Call on 13 March 1904, Stoker
speaks neither of Transylvania nor of Romania but, as it had been traditional during the
nineteenth century, of “the wildest country of the Danubian banks” (Stoker, Forgotten
Writings 212). This formula shows, again, that the author of Dracula regarded his novel as
a kind of Romanian tale, set somewhere close to the mouth of the Danube, with which the
country was conventionally associated.58 Romania was created in the aftermath of the
Crimean War59 through the union of Wallachia and Moldavia, previously known as the
Danubian Principalities60 and the country was frequently referred to as “the Danubian
lands” or a similar periphrasis. Stoker’s interest in the region is also attested to by the fact
that he owned F.D. Millet’s 1892 travelogue The Danube, from the Black Forest to the
Black Sea, which was on the list of books auctioned off by his wife Florence in 1912 (Bram
Stoker’s Notes 313). Stoker’s copy bears the inscription: “To Bram Stoker, Esq. with
regards of F.D. Millet, New York, 1893” (Stoker, Forgotten Writings 229). While there is
no way of knowing if Stoker actually read the book, the fact that he knew its author
suggests that he was at least aware of its contents. In typical fashion, Millet describes the
descent down the Danube, south of Budapest, as the passageway to the Orient. Just like
Jonathan Harker who, in Dracula, believes he is “leaving the West and entering the East”
58
Stoker wrote down the fact that the Russian schooner Dimitry (the model for the Demeter in the novel) was
bringing to Whitby “silver sand – from mouth of Danube” (Notes 139), although in Dracula he had the ship
sail from Varna, a port well-known by his brother George.
59
The unification was achieved despite the opposition of Britain, Turkey, Russia and Austria-Hungary. The
union was brought about in 1859 by electing the same prince in both Moldavia and Wallachia. Britain finally
recognised it in 1861, one of its most vocal advocates being Gladstone, who was made an honorary Romanian
citizen for his support.
60
They were described as such by Sir Patrick O’Brien, later MP for King’s County in Ireland who, on the eve
of the Crimean War, published a Journal of a Residence in the Danubian Principalities in the Autumn and
Winter of 1853. However, British travellers continued to describe Romania as Danubian Principalities even
after the union (see, e.g., James Creagh’s 1876 Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah).
147
when he crosses a bridge in Budapest, Millet catches the “first glimpses of Oriental life”
(Millet 160) after leaving Budapest and, when he approaches Vidin (some 300 miles south
of the Hungarian capital), he finds himself “well across the line that separates the Orient
from the Occident” (240). George Stoker, it will be remembered, also thought himself in
the Orient somewhere close to Vidin. Millet also travels up and down the river on steamers,
which may have encouraged Stoker to have Arthur Godalming and Jonathan Harker go
upstream on a “launch” in the last chapter of Dracula.
A renowned American painter and sculptor, Millet was a guest in the Beefsteak
Room (Personal Reminiscences I, 323) but Stoker probably met him through their mutual
friend Mark Twain.61 That he gave Stoker a book about the Danubian lands rather than a
painting or a drawing suggests that he was aware of the novelist’s interests. A natural topic
in their conversation would have been the 1877-1878 war, in which George Stoker took
part and during which Millet was a correspondent for both the New York Herald and the
London Daily News. In letters sent to the British newspaper at the end of the war, the
correspondent suggests the strong links between Romania and Transylvania: “It is wellknown that Roumania hopes at some future day to have Transylvania and other Austrian
provinces where Roumanian is spoken” (The War Correspondence of the “Daily News”
578). Stoker’s conflation of different Romanian-speaking lands in his interviews can be
explained by such readings and conversations. On the other hand, this suggests, on Stoker’s
part, a more general interest in Romania and Romanians.
61
Known today chiefly as a victim of the Titanic sinking, F.D. Millet (1848-1912) was good friends with
Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Mark Twain, both of whom were witnesses to his marriage in 1879 (Twain was
his best man). In Personal Reminiscences, Stoker also relates a visit to the United States in 1886 when he
tried to arrange for a bust of Walt Whitman to be sculpted by Saint-Gaudens (II, 108-109).
148
5.1 On the British Danube
The idea that after Budapest one entered “savage Europe”62 was current in Victorian
England. Scottish missionary Catherine Edward (1813-1861), who lived in present-day
Romania between 1846 and 1848 seeking to convert Jews to Protestant Christianity, makes
a similar comment in her memoirs of Missionary Life among the Jews in Moldavia, Galicia
and Silesia, published in 1867 and narrated in the third person: “they set out on the route to
Moldavia, which was by carriage to Ratisbon on the Danube, and then by steamer to
Vienna and Pesth and Galatz. The first halt was made at Pesth, where – previous to
venturing into the wilds of South-eastern Europe – she was cheered by the conversation and
hospitality of the brethren . . . of Jewish Missions” (Edward 34-35). During her stay in
Moldavia, Edward spent a lot of time in Galaţi (Galatz), where she met not only Jews, but
also Britons. She was accompanied through Moldavia by one of the early converts,
Reverend Dr Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889) who, in later life, was a preacher and professor
at Oxford. Count Dracula’s Jewish minion that the vampire hunters meet in Galaţi is called
Immanuel Hildesheim and this name may have been inspired by that of the Jewish-born
High Churchman.63
Although the vampire hunters spend only one, very eventful, day in Galaţi, the
city’s name appears eighteen times in the novel (Dracula 379-393), which makes “Galatz”
62
The phrase was used by traveller Harry de Windt (1856-1933), younger brother of Margaret Brooke, Ranee
of Sarawak (hosted by Stoker in the Beefsteak Room), in his 1907 book Through Savage Europe, Being the
Narrative of a Journey . . . throughout the Balkan States and European Russia.
63
The name of the character in Dracula is even more similar to that of an important spiritual leader of Berlin
Jews, Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer (1820-1899), with roots in the German province of Hildesheim. However,
there are no connections between him and the city of Galaţi.
149
the fourth most frequently mentioned locality in the entire book.64 It is, in fact, the most
frequent Romanian toponym, more frequent than “Transylvania” itself, which is mentioned
fifteen times.65 The name’s recurrence could seem fortuitous unless one took into account
the fact that, from the earliest stages of his work on the novel, Stoker was interested in
Galaţi and keen on using it in Dracula. In August 1890, when he took down information
from William Wilkinson’s Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, after
five other notes on Romanian history and before notes on local colour, he wrote: “Galatz is
in Moldavian [sic] close to Wallachia at broadest & deepest part of Danube 60 miles from
Black Sea and 72 from Bukorest [sic]” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 246-247). The original
sentence was not much different: “Galatz is in Moldavia, but nearly touches the frontier of
Wallachia: it is situated at the beginning of the broadest and deepest part of the Danube,
distant sixty miles from the Black Sea, sixty-five from Yassi, and seventy-two from
Bukorest” (Wilkinson 79). Stoker kept all the information, including the spelling of the
Romanian capital’s name and the much too optimistic distances,66 but he was not interested
in the Moldavian capital Iaşi. Since he transcribes almost verbatim, as he usually does, the
omission is conspicuous; it suggests that in 1890, the author was confident that he was not
going to mention the city of Iaşi in the novel.67
64
After London (67 times), Whitby (43 times) and Varna (24 times) but before Exeter (16 times) and Purfleet
(6 times). More frequent than “Galatz” are also the Count’s two estates: the castle (44 times) and Carfax (24
times).
65
These two are followed by: Borgo Pass (11 times), Bistritz (9 times) and, rather surprisingly, Bukovina (8
times).
66
Wilkinson is quite accurate with the distance between Galaţi and the Black Sea (he came to the
Principalities by sea from Constantinople) but, writing as he was in the times before railways, he is wrong
about the other two distances; both should be doubled. Stoker obviously researched further, since he has his
characters cover the distance from Varna to Galaţi via Bucharest by train in a little over 24 hours.
67
Stoker’s research notes are never very extensive. He only wrote down what he thought he might use and
later added signs marking what he had used, might still use or was no longer interested in. However, as they
are all typed from a pre-existent handwritten original, they may be abridgements of longer notes.
150
In Dracula, Bram Stoker speaks of a part of Europe that had been much talked
about in Victorian England. The British Empire was interested in Romania’s economic
potential and the city of Galaţi played an important role in the international trade in the
region. In 1802, the Ottomans granted British commercial ships the right to sail the Black
Sea and to use the ports of the Danube (Cernovodeanu, “British Economic Interests” 107).
As early as 1800, Francis Summerers was sent to the Danubian Principalities as acting
consul. He was recalled in 1807, but the Levant Company, which regulated the British trade
in the region, appointed William Wilkinson as the new consul in 1813. This is, of course,
the author “discovered” by Stoker in Whitby’s public library. Although the Account that he
published in 1820 about Wallachia and Moldavia provided vital information for Dracula, it
had a very different purpose, namely to raise awareness about the commercial opportunities
in that part of Europe and to invite Britons to partake in the “opulence” (Wilkinson 74) of
the “Peru of the Greeks” (71).68 Wilkinson describes Galaţi as “the great market for the
produce of the two principalities, and the only landing-place for some articles of
importation” (80), prophesying that its harbour “would soon stand in rivalship with all the
ports of the Black Sea, not excepting Odessa” (85).
However, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, British interests on the
Lower Danube were severely threatened by Russian headway. The 1829 treaty of
Adrianople had given Russia control over the entire Danube Delta and Britain accused the
Russian authorities in Sulina, “the only navigable entrance connecting Galaţi and Brăila
with the Black Sea, of trying to block the Danube to favour the commerce of its own port,
Odessa” (Ardeleanu, “The European Commission of the Danube” 73). In the early 1830s,
68
In the early nineteenth century, Wallachia and Moldavia had Greek princes and Hellenophone elites. In a
similar vein, British merchants of the mid-nineteenth century thought Sulina, the port of entry into the
Danube, was “a little California where fortunes are to be made” (Focas 179).
151
navigation on the Lower Danube became a “European question,” at least in the eyes of
Great Britain, which “found a profitable place to acquire high-quality, inexpensive grain
after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and the great famine in Ireland in 1847. This led
to a spike in traffic. . . . Grain exports to Britain soon became lucrative” (74).69 In the two
decades prior to the Crimean War, despite Russian chicaneries, the British Danubian trade
had increased dramatically: “In 1837, British exports to the principalities were worth
97,405 pounds sterling; by 1848, they were worth 606,694 pounds. . . . In 1853, about onethird of the ships calling at Brăila and Galaţi were either British or bound for Britain”
(Chirot 93).70 Consequently, “the demand for a free outlet for the corn of Roumania began
to assume a louder tone” (Stokes 561). The Vienna Note of 8 August 1853, drafted by
English and French diplomats, gave Russia an ultimatum, asking specifically to remove any
obstacle to the navigation on the river (Rossetti and Rey 6).
After victory in the Crimean War, the 1856 Treaty of Paris created the European
Commission of the Danube (ECD). More exactly, the ECD “resulted from an important
modification in international maritime law which provided that if a state which controlled
an important sector of an international river was unwilling or incapable of [providing] free
navigability of the waterway, the other powers could intervene to ensure free commerce”
(Ardeleanu, “The European Commission of the Danube” 75-76). Its creation originated
with Charles Cunningham, vice-consul in Galaţi since 1836 (Krehbiel 39) and was largely a
British enterprise. Stoker could have known about the ECD and the importance of Galaţi
69
Some time after the end of the Crimean War, Sir John Stokes, the first British Commissioner of the
European Commission of the Danube, admitted that, because of “the great importance to Western Europe of
the corn supply of the countries bordering on the Danube . . . it is not surprising that all the negotiations for
peace . . . contained provisions for placing the Danube mouths under European control” (Stokes 561).
70
In a letter sent from Iaşi on 13 March 1847, Catherine Edward reports that “The famine in Britain has,
strange to say, been felt even here; so much Indian corn has been exported, that bread and mamilika, as the
meal is called, is much raised in price, in fact, there was a fear of scarcity, and the exportation has been
stopped” (Edward 80).
152
for British trade simply by reading the newspapers or from the first pages of a book like
James Samuelson’s Roumania, Past and Present (1882), which he mentions in his working
notes (Bram Stoker’s Notes 220-221).71 This possible source for Dracula indicates that
“[t]he greater part of the external trade of the countries bordering on the Danube which
passes in and out of the Sulina mouth, the only navigable embouchure, is carried on in
British bottoms” (Samuelson, Roumania 30).72 In November 1873, the Journal of the
Society of Arts reported that “the exports from the Danube to Great Britain far exceed those
to any other country; on a moderate calculation they may be valued at £ 1,500,000 a-year
on an average of the last five years” (“The Trade of the Lower Danube” 341). The first
lines of Samuelson’s book are very telling about the British sentiments concerning
Romania: “There is no country in Europe which at the present time possesses greater
interest for Englishmen than does the Kingdom of Roumania” (Samuelson, Roumania v).
He also speaks of the European Commission of the Danube and adds that, at the 1878
Congress of Berlin, “its jurisdiction was extended to the Iron Gates” (32), that is to say, on
the entire Romanian course of the Danube.
Formed at Great Britain’s suggestion, the Commission was supposed to be
temporary, that is, as long as there was need of works to facilitate the navigation on the
Lower Danube.73 The catch was that the British could always justify the necessity of new
71
Though a barrister, James Samuelson (1829-1918) was first known as a writer of popular science books
(some in collaboration with John Braxton Hicks) and editor of The Popular Science Review and Quarterly of
Journal of Science where future contributors of The Nineteenth Century also published. In later life, he
published country monographs: Roumania: Past and Present (1882), Bulgaria: Past and Present (1888) and
India: Past and Present (1890), in which he uses an epigraph from Max Müller and cites Arminius Vambéry
as a friend and correspondent (Samuelson, India 27).
72
The author also provides a table showing that the total tonnage of British ships entering and leaving the
Danube in 1880 was 412,706 (carried on 479 steamers and only 15 sailing ships) while that of all the other
nations was 384,848 (on 242 steamers and 1,526 sailing ships).
73
At the 1855 Vienna Conference, Austria had suggested the commission be formed by riparian countries
(that is, the three empires, Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman), but Lord John Russell (the English
representative) protested. In 1856, at the Paris Conference, Russia was stripped of its riparian status (to this
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technical works on the river (Ardeleanu, “La Grande Bretagne et Ses Efforts” 706-707)
and, consequently, the European Commission of the Danube survived until 1948. The
Commission’s power grew with each renewal of its mandate. At first, it only governed over
the waterways from Sulina on the Black Sea shore to Isaccea (thereby including the Danube
Delta), although its headquarters were upstream in Galaţi. Its dominion was extended to
Galaţi in 1878 (by the Treaty of Berlin) and to Brăila in 1883 (Treaty of London). It was
directly administered by an Executive Committee formed by the British, French and
Austrian commissioners.74 Of these three, the Briton was the most powerful, in part
because the British Navy was still in the Black Sea and up the river for years after the end
of the Crimean War (Ardeleanu, “The Little Known Autobiography” 94-97) and Article 52
of the Treaty of Berlin allowed British vessels of war to sail to Galatz (Holland 303),75 but
especially because the British were in charge of all the works on the river.
Major John Stokes (British Commissioner between 1856 and 1871) had led the
engineer corps of the Anglo-Turkish Contingent in the Crimean War. He recommended that
one of his captains, Charles Hartley, become Chief Engineer of the ECD. More engineers,
surveyors, and sappers also came from England (Hartley 110-111) and for the remainder of
the Commission’s existence the Britons formed the majority of the personnel. Neither
Stokes nor Hartley asked the other Commissioners for permission or advice. Instead, they
end, southern Bessarabia was reattached to Moldavia in the peace treaty), and the two British representatives
(Lord Russell and Count Westmorland) accepted that the riparian states would be the members of a
permanent commission, on condition that another, temporary, commission (formed by the European Powers)
deal with regulating the fair navigation on the Danube’s maritime sector, including all necessary works at the
mouth of the river.
74
These were the only ones residing in Galatz and also serving as consuls. The ECD was nominally run by a
board of seven members (eight after 1879, when a Romanian delegate was included) who only met twice a
year (Rossetti and Rey 66-67).
75
Jonathan Harker is once terrified by Dracula’s eyes, “with all their blaze of basilisk horror.” Another name
for basilisk, as Auerbach/Skal and Leatherdale observe, is cockatrice. Coincidentally, HMS Cockatrice was a
British man-of-war stationed at Sulina from 1860 to 1885. In 1883, when Romania was trying to boycott the
British trade on the Danube because the Treaty of London had extended the powers of the ECD from Galaţi to
Brăila, The Cockatrice was sent up the river as a show of force (Hartley 483).
154
communicated directly with the Foreign Office in London when they asked for workers
(110) or when they requested approval of the technical works on the river (157). Although
he did not have administrative duties, Chief Engineer Charles Augustus Hartley (18251915) was Britain’s main instrument in keeping a tight grip on the ECD: first because the
Commission’s existence depended on his regular reports stating the need for more work on
the river; and second, simply because he remained in his position as Chief Engineer for
more than half a century (1858-1910).76
Starting with the late 1850s, Galaţi became known as “the seat of the all-powerful
Danube Commission” (Powell 359). From its beginnings in 1856 and until 1948, the
European Commission of the Danube remained a powerful organization, praised by
enterprising financiers and idealist radicals alike as an early example of international
cooperation (for example, Leonard Woolf, who lauded its functions in his 1916
International Government, published for the Fabian Society with a preface by Bernard
Shaw), disparaged by journalists and experts in international law (for example, Armand
Lévy and André de Saint-Clair) for its encroachment on Romania’s territory. As late as
1930 an American observer offers a cold description of the ECD’s status:
Without territorial possessions, it is nevertheless a distinct international entity
possessing sovereignty over the broad waters of the Danube . . . the power to
borrow money, to maintain a treasury by assessing and collecting dues, to issue
regulations which have effect of law and to enforce its ordinances by adequate
penalties. These entirely discretionary functions need the sanction of no group of
nations, and there is no appeal from the edicts of the commission. It displays its own
76
Hartley’s first job of opening up the Sulina branch of the Danube for big cargo ships was a great success in
1861 and soon after, in 1862, he was knighted by Queen Victoria (Hartley 166).
155
insignia and flag. The World Court in an advisory opinion declared that “the
European Commission exercises its functions in complete independence of the
territorial authorities.” . . . It falls short of being a bona fide member of the family of
nations because its existence is largely de facto and not de jure. It is safe to predict
that the need for protecting the integrity of the commission will some day compel
the powers to lift it out of the twilight of statehood and accord it membership in the
League of Nations. (Blackburn 1154)
As soon as Charles Hartley’s first works at the Sulina mouth opened the Danube for the
larger ships, the Commission started to enforce taxes and exact fines. As a measure against
inflation, the ECD had its own currency, that is, the French gold franc. The ECD patrol
ships, under the leadership of its Inspector of Navigation, policed the river from Sulina to
Brăila, and its navigation laws were being applied on the entire river and its tributaries.
The only editor who mentions the ECD is Clive Leatherdale, who comments on the
fact that Lord Godalming is going to meet the British vice-consul in the city: “Navigation
of the Danube was a major concern among the European powers, necessitating an
international committee to sit at Galatz. British interests were handled by a Consul-General,
whose name in 1893 was Percy Sanderson. If Arthur found the vice-consul uncooperative,
he might find himself seeking an interview with Mr Sanderson in person” (470 n. 20). The
right term is “commission,” but Leatherdale might be talking of the Executive Committee
made of the British, French and Austrian commissioners. However, Great Britain did not
have a consul-general in Galaţi, but only a consul, as is indicated in the novel. Unlike
Leatherdale, McNally and Florescu write that “A British vice consulate was established at
Galatz in the early 1840s and eventually a full consulate, because of the rising importance
of British trade on the Danube” (258 n. 353). Consul Percy Sanderson was also the British
156
Commissioner in the ECD and, if the posse led by Van Helsing arrived in Galaţi in late
1893 (as most editors suggest) they probably missed him, as he had to go back to London
and from there to the U.S.A., where he took charge of his new mission, that of ConsulGeneral for the states of New York, Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Connecticut.
The new Commissioner, lieutenant-colonel Trotter, only arrived in Galaţi the following
year, in 1894 (Rossetti and Rey 80-81). In her journal, Mina Harker writes specifically that
Godalming “went to see the Vice-Consul,” as if he knew that Sanderson was not in Galaţi,
only to add a few lines later that “The Consul is away, and the Vice-Consul sick” (Dracula
388).
Bram Stoker was aware of the British presence in Galaţi and of the role played there
by the European Commission of the Danube, even if the latter is not explicitly mentioned in
Dracula. Stoker knew, for example, that London shipping companies had branches in
Galaţi. In the novel, the firm of Hapgood is represented in Galaţi by its agents, “Messrs
Mackenzie & Steinkoff” (Dracula 388). One of the editors wonders how Captain Donelson
“came to be master of a Russian vessel. The text is unclear; the Czarina Catherine may
even be British-registered” (Leatherdale 471 n. 24). The text indicates, in fact, quite clearly,
that the ship is British because the vampire hunters need permission from the London
company’s agents to go on board the vessel.
The Count’s lackey Petrof Skinski was paid with an English bank note, which he
“cashed for gold at the Danube International Bank” (Dracula 390). In Galaţi, the
Commission had its own bank (Rossetti and Rey 88) and on the territory it administered the
preferred currency was the gold French franc (179-180). After Skinski is killed and
Dracula’s trail gets cold, Mina concludes that the Count could not have fled on land
because “there are, or there might be, customs and octroi officers to pass” (Dracula 392).
157
Instead, by remaining on water for a longer time, “The customs and the octroi . . . have
been avoided” (393). The only way Dracula could avoid the customs was by staying on
waters controlled by the ECD, rather than stepping on Romanian territory. The Danube
Navigation Act, debated on 16 August 1858, had given in to British demands, and all ships
could thereafter freely navigate the Danube, all its distributaries in the Delta, as well as all
its tributaries, as long as they were navigable (Ardeleanu, “La Grande Bretagne et Ses
Efforts” 715). When Stoker’s vampire hunters go up the Siret in a “steam launch,” they are
actually travelling in waters governed by the European Commission of the Danube.
Tellingly, when they leave a tributary of the Danube to go up a different river, they are very
much aware that they have crossed a frontier: “at Fundu, where the Bistritza runs into the
Sereth, we got a Roumanian flag which we now fly conspicuously” (Dracula 399).
Unlike other places in what Harker describes as “the East,” Galaţi is an oasis of
civilisation. Despite the presence here of some of Dracula’s helpers (Hildesheim, Skinski,
the Slovaks), Galaţi is the only place where the travellers feel at home. Their hotel rooms
had been booked via telegraph and Jonathan Harker actually calls the hotel “home”
(Dracula 391). The people (all British) are benevolent and sympathetic. The clerk that
Godalming meets at the consulate “was very obliging, and offered to do anything in his
power” (388) to help him. Messrs Mackenzie and Steinkoff “were more than kind and
courteous” (388) with Drs Seward and Van Helsing. Even Captain Donelson is wellmeaning and amicable and tells them everything he knows, without asking for any
gratuities. One editor’s conclusion about the absence of terrifying scenery in the trip from
Varna through Romania is that the author was less interested in finding out about the
places: “Whereas Stoker filled in the background detail of Transylvania by reference to
variously named source works, he appears to have done little or no research on Bulgaria
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and Romania. These chapters in consequence lack local colour” (Leatherdale 459-460 n.
81). In reality, George Stoker had been stationed in the region, which means that his
brother had access to enough information (and this explains the presence of the city of
Varna in the novel). It is more likely that, like his contemporaries, Stoker saw it as a
territory that had been made safe for the Western traveller by the British presence there.
From Varna to Galaţi one would get fairly quickly in a ship, but the vampire hunters
do not venture on the Black Sea. Rather, they embark upon a sinuous railway journey, from
Varna to Ruse, Giurgiu, Bucharest, Buzău, Brăila, and Galaţi – only Bucharest is
mentioned in the novel, but this was the only possible way in the 1890s (McNally and
Florescu 256 n. 350). What Stoker could have known is that the railway route from Varna
to Galaţi was the work of British engineers and of British money. The Varna-Ruse line had
been built by a British company led by William Gladstone (a cousin of the politician) and
H. Wollaston Blake (Jensen and Rosegger 119). This is the line that George Stoker used in
1876, when he was going to Constantinople to sign up with the Turkish army. From Ruse,
the traveller had to cross the Danube to Giurgiu, in Romania, and take the train on the very
first Romanian railroad, from Giurgiu to Bucharest, built in 1869 by J. Trevor Barkley,
backed financially by John Staniforth from Sheffield (117-118). The line that went north
from Bucharest was conceded to the Ofenheim Syndicate, which, despite the German
name, had three English investors (Charles of Romania 130) and, in turn, they ceded the
southern half, Bucharest-Galaţi, to a Prussian-British consortium led by Bethel Strousberg
(131). Stoker could have heard about some of these British engineers. We know at least that
he was interested in their presence abroad. In his Dublin diary, he mentions “great
engineer[s] – like Lesseps or Hawkshaw” (The Lost Journal 113), as well as a graduate of
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Trinity College named “Hugh Carlile” (83) (or Carlisle), who was a railway engineer in the
Russian Empire.
The most famous Briton with whom the city of Galaţi can be associated (and could
have been associated by Stoker) is Charles George Gordon (1833-1885), one of Lytton
Stratchey’s four “eminent Victorians.” Gordon’s death in Khartoum and the belated relief
expedition may have been inspirational in Stoker’s creations in Dracula (Cain, Jr. 142-143)
and The Jewel of the Seven Stars (Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse 173-175). In his
Personal Reminiscences, Stoker mentions several officers who had gone to Sudan in search
of Gordon and who were later celebrated in the Beefsteak Room: General Sir Owen Lanyon
(I, 315), Admiral Lord Charles Beresford (I, 316), Major General Sir Hector Macdonald (I,
322) and Field Marshall Garret Joseph Wolseley (I, 321), commander-in-chief of the Relief
Expedition.77 Gordon first stayed in Galaţi in 1856-1857 as member of the Boundary
Commission, which surveyed and established the 200 miles that were the new frontier
between Russia and Moldavia at the end of the Crimean War. In 1871, he returned to Galaţi
as Great Britain’s second Commissioner of the Danube, a position in which he served until
1873. Gordon travelled widely through Moldavia, from Iaşi to Galaţi and southern
Bessarabia, where, as he recounts in his letters, some knowledge of German was very
helpful (as it would be for Jonathan Harker). In the 1850s, he met the Moldavian prince,
hunted wolves and foxes, admired the abundant land and noticed the “swarming” Jews, “an
evil-looking lot” and “the leeches of this country” (qtd. in Tappe 571). Gordon’s letters
from the Galaţi period were published to great acclaim in 1884, and the Victorian reader
could find in them a description of the Carpathians, of a voyage down the Siret (in Dracula,
77
Gordon’s death in 1885 was a big shock for British society and “few, if any, will ever forget that ‘Black
Thursday’ the fifth of February, when the news of the fall of Khartoum and the slaughter of Gordon was
announced” (Axon 6).
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Harker and Godalming travel upstream on this river) and of wolves “which are very bold in
this country” (Gordon 134).
5.2 Learning about Romania
One cannot know for sure how much Bram Stoker read in the six or more years
while he was writing Dracula. His Notes, which already show an impressive range of
interest and tireless research, are not complete. Although this is cursorily admitted by the
editors of Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula,78 it should be stressed that many of the
remaining documents date strictly from 1890, the year when Stoker visited Whitby, read
William Wilkinson’s Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia and inquired
into the wreck of the Russian schooner Dimitry. The two editors, Robert Eighteen-Bisang
and Elizabeth Miller, have tried to arrange the Notes chronologically, after dividing them
into “Handwritten Notes on the Plot,” “Handwritten Research Notes” and “Typed Research
Notes.” The first category starts with several notes dating to early 1890 and continues with
a long synopsis of the events of the novel, also from 1890, which the author intended to
organise into books and chapters; an outline of the plot from February 1892; three
“memos” jotted down on a single sheet of paper in 1895-1896; and two pages written on
the stationery of a hotel in Philadelphia, where Stoker stayed both in 1894 and in 1896.
The research notes, instead, seem to date mostly from 1890, whereas the research
done by Stoker in the following six years is missing from the documents preserved at the
Rosenbach Museum and Library. Thus, apart from a few quotations about necromancy
78
They write that “some additional pages may have been lost” (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 9).
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taken down from a book by seventeenth-century scholar Thomas Browne (which could
have been read at a later date), all the “Handwritten Research Notes” are from before and
during Stoker’s 1890 stay in Whitby: quotes from Emily Gerard’s “Transylvanian
Superstitions”; Sabine Baring-Gould’s 1865 The Book of Were-Wolves; Robert H. Scott’s
1887 Fishery Barometer Manual; notes on the Whitby dialect; on the 1885 wreck of a
Russian ship off Whitby; a Whitby diary with drawings; a summary of Transylvanian
history based on his first readings (present in the “Typed Research Notes” category); and a
list of books to read. Apart from yet another series of quotes from Thomas Browne, the
“Typed Research Notes” include Whitby tombstone inscriptions; the official names of wind
degrees; quotes from Magyarland (1881); Andrew Crosse’s Round about the Carpathians
(1878); E.C. Johnson’s On the Track of the Crescent (1885); Isabella Bird’s The Golden
Chersonese (1883); Charles Boner’s Transylvania: Its Products and Its People (1865); and
William Wilkinson’s Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820).
Wilkinson’s book, read by Stoker in the spring of 1890 at Whitby, is the next to last (just
before the notes on the Whitby tombstones and the degrees of wind, also taken most likely
at Whitby). This shows that we have little or no information about anything that Stoker
may have read on any topics related to Dracula in the years 1891-1896.
Not all editors give an explicit opinion on the extent of Stoker’s research for
Dracula. When they do not, their annotations and supplementary material show them
convinced on the one hand that Stoker’s fact-finding work was impressive and on the other
that he was not interested in knowing too much about Romania, Transylvania and the
historical Dracula. When they do, their views can be sweeping or contradictory. They
might write, for example, like Auerbach and Skal, that “Stoker learned most of what he
knew about Eastern European history and legend in the British Museum” (Auerbach and
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Skal 9 n. 6), and that he Stoker “seems to have limited his library research on Tepes to a
single volume by William Wilkinson” (331). Relying on Harry Ludlam’s biography, the
editor of the first Annotated Dracula writes that the chapters on Transylvania “took Bram
many hours of research among books and maps in the British Museum” (Wolf 1975, 3 n.
9). However, despite being convinced that Stoker read about the historical Dracula
“following a lead provided him by a Hungarian friend, Arminius Vambery” (Wolf xiii), this
editor also thinks that the writer found most of what he needed in Emily Gerard’s book,
which “is crammed with information about [Romanians’] history and folkways” (xiii).
What the editors (with the exception of McNally/Florescu and, in a less clear
manner, Wolf) contest, explicitly or implicitly, is that Bram Stoker did any research on the
historical Dracula after finding his name in an old book. As one editor puts it: “No one
disputes that Stoker lifted the name from the Wallachian voivode. That much is clear from
Stoker’s papers. It is the idea that Stoker read up on the Impaler, beyond the references
found in one of his listed sources – William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of
Wallachia and Moldavia – that is hard to accept” (Leatherdale 11). When it comes to other
kinds of reading that Stoker may have done, the editors are more accepting. Thus, they
admire “the staggering range of Bram Stoker’s knowledge and awareness – not only of
vampires and the occult, but of the mores, the science, the art, of his own England”
(Auerbach and Skal xiii); and they are ready to accept and insert in their editions material
that is not mentioned in the writer’s working notes. Riquelme published in his edition the
article on “Vampire” from the ninth edition (1888) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
because “Stoker would have had access to [it] in the British Library while he was writing
Dracula” (Riquelme 375). He also inserts a fragment from Richard Burton’s vampire story
Vikram because “Stoker, who knew and admired Burton, would have been aware that
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Vikram was republished . . . when Stoker had just begun work on Dracula” (372). Elizabeth
Miller justifies the inclusion with the same argument (Sense & Nonsense 23). She also
admits that many vampire characteristics present in the novel do not “appear in Stoker’s
listed source-texts” (24), although it is evident that Stoker must have read Polidori’s The
Vampyre, James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampyre and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla.
In the interview with Jane Stoddard published in the British Weekly (1 July 1897),
Stoker said that he had “always been interested in the vampire legend” and that “the
knowledge of vampire superstitions shown in Dracula was gathered from a great deal of
miscellaneous reading” (Byron 486). If this is true, he could have started his research for
Dracula before 1890, which is suggested by one of the editors of the novel (Ellmann xiii),
while the editors of the working notes admit that Stoker may have read at least Emily
Gerard’s essay on “Transylvanian Superstitions” before 1890 (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller
121 n. 253). This is also what Florence Stoker seems to intimate in her Preface to
Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Tales, published in 1914: “Had my husband lived longer,
he might have seen fit to revise this work, which is mainly from the earlier years of his
strenuous life” (qtd. in Miller, Sense & Nonsense 109). The phrase is ambiguous and one
cannot know how Florence saw the stages of her husband’s life. However, “the earlier years
of his strenuous life” could refer either to the beginning of Stoker’s work with the Lyceum
Theatre (the early 1880s) or even to his life before Florence (the 1870s).
What seems certain, though, is that there are sufficient indications that Stoker had
knowledge and interest in both vampire stories and Romanian circumstances from an early
point in his career (that is to say, the 1870s, when he was close to Sheridan Le Fanu and his
brother George was on the Lower Danube) and that this interest continued and broadened
in the 1890s while he was working on Dracula. Leslie Klinger, the first editor to use
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Stoker’s manuscript for the novel, notices once that the writer kept looking for sources.
When the vampire Count speaks of the “Hungarian yoke” thrown off by some of his
ancestors after 1526 (Dracula 61), the author has inserted a last-minute correction: “The
Manuscript refers to an ‘Austrian yoke,’ altered in the published text to ‘Hungarian’ – again
suggestive of research by Stoker” (Klinger 70-71 n. 32). Because Quincey Morris says, “I
understand that the Count comes from a wolf country” (Dracula 365), other editors suggest
that the author may have read up on the ancient kingdom of Dacia:
An interesting remark, indicating Stoker may have done some reading on early
Romanian Dacian history which is mentioned in the books of Wilkinson and
Samuelson. The old standard of the Dacian people who inhabited Romania before
the Roman conquest was a dragon with a wolf’s head. The standard was made of tin
and gave a frightening noise when fluttering in the wind. The wolf had acquired the
prestige of a god in pagan Dacia. Some linquistic [sic] experts believe that the very
word “Dacian” meant “wolfman” in the Dacian language, which has not survived.
(McNally and Florescu 244 n. 333)
The link between the phrase “wolf country” and the Dacians seems improbable; after all,
Morris is talking about wolf-hunting in Romania, which Stoker could have read about in
General Gordon’s letters, Andrew Crosse’s Round about the Carpathians or Emily
Gerard’s The Land beyond the Forest – but not in her “Transylvanian Superstitions” and
certainly not in An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, whose author
writes that Romanian wolves are “of the most timid nature” (Wilkinson 128).
However, Stoker’s working notes show him curious to understand the entire history
of Romanians (from Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania) beginning with their
ancestors, the Dacians. On top of his note from Wilkinson’s Account, he typed: “Ancient
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Kingdom of Dacia = Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania and Temesvar – finally conquered
by Romans” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 246-247). Although this was taken from Wilkinson (2),
Stoker did not write down the page; the sentence stands alone and seems to be one of his
usual “memos” to himself. On a handwritten note, Stoker tried to make sense of the history
of the territories inhabited by Romanians. He first made a column of all the centuries from
the Roman conquest down to his own time (from the first century AD to the nineteenth)
and then added events and historical circumstances. Most of these concern Transylvania,
but some speak of Wallachia or, more generally, of Dacia (before the separation of the
three principalities). There are corrections, marginal notes and sentences added
subsequently. This note, too, is introduced by a memo: “Wallachs descendants of Dacians”
(Bram Stoker’s Notes 170).79 Despite suggestions from editors and other commentators that
Stoker neither knew nor was interested in Romanian history, the note shows his efforts to
understand it, century after century, with the sources that were available to him.
Stoker’s list of Romanian centuries is actually a rehearsal for Count Dracula’s
narrative of his own ancestors. The list follows the arrival of Goths, Huns, Avars, Gepidae,
Bulgars; the settlement of the Szeklers and of the Magyars; the clashes between
Wallachians and Turks. It mentions the Honfoglalas (Hungarian conquest of fatherland)
and it speaks of the battles of Kosovo and Mohacs. Thus, from an early stage in the
development of the plot of Dracula, the writer was carefully trying to understand the
biography of his quasi-immortal protagonist. Nevertheless, there is no direct evidence that
79
Or, rather, “Wallachs descendants of Dacians – Saxons.” The last word seems to be connected to the rest by
a simple dash, probably marking Stoker’s wish to remember some kind of importance that the Saxons were
supposed to have in the novel. The editors of the Notes, however, transcribe “Dacians and Saxons” (171).
This is, in fact, an unlikely reading suggesting that Romanians are a mixture of ancient Dacians and medieval
Saxons. The information for Stoker’s list of centuries comes, as the editors suggest, “from various sources”
(171 n. 292), more exactly from Wilkinson, Crosse, Johnson and Mazuchelli. However, none of these authors
suggest such an ascendancy for Romanians.
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Stoker tried to find out more on the life and deeds of the so-called Vlad the Impaler, which
is why many commentators today insist that the medieval Romanian ruler and the vampire
Count have little in common except the name: “Examination of Stoker’s novel and research
notes suggests he knew little about the historical Dracula, other than the brief, muddled
paragraphs in Wilkinson, and this all-important footnote: ‘Dracula in the Wallachian
languages means Devil’” (Leatherdale 12). Or, as Elizabeth Miller has put it, in an essay
calling on Dracula specialists to forget about the Impaler connection: “Are we to believe
that [Stoker] knew about Vlad’s bloodthirsty activities but decided to discard such a history
for his villainous Count in favour of the meager pickings gleaned from Wilkinson?”
(Miller, “Filing for Divorce” 175).80 However, some of his research such as the list of the
centuries of Romanian history show that Stoker had sufficient motivation to try to find out
more. He also would have had the necessary sources to do so.
To be able to take into account the books that mention Vlad the Impaler as possible
inspiration for Stoker’s eponymous character in Dracula, one need only apply Arthur
Friedman’s principle mentioned earlier that an editor should list as sources such works
which the author may or may not have known even if there is no proof that he did and even
if the works are obscure, provided that they are in sufficient number and that they were
recent enough when the author started writing. The first work that deserves such mention is
James Samuelson’s Roumania: Past and Present (1882). Major E.C. Johnson quotes from
it in his On the Track of the Crescent and Stoker duly wrote down the name of the author
and the title. It is “a fleeting reference” (Leatherdale, Origins 88) and there is no way to
80
Yet, the opposite seems equally odd and even disturbing: that all Stoker knew about the historical Dracula
was what he had read in Wilkinson (the voivode battled the Turks and had a nickname that could mean brave,
cruel or cunning), and still he made him a vampire. In this light, the idea that Stoker actually knew the legends
of the bloodthirsty Vlad seems a valid enough hypothesis.
167
know if the author of Dracula ever opened Samuelson’s book. However, if he did, he
would have found this portrait of the historical Dracula:
the Turks were so much afraid of Hunniades that they are said to have given him the
name of “the Devil”; but the same designation, as well as that of the Impaler, has
also been bestowed upon Vlad, a voivode of Wallachia, who was probably the ally
of Hunniades, and who, if one-tenth of what has been related of him be true, has a
much better claim to the title. He is represented to have been one of the most
atrocious and cruel tyrants who ever disgraced even those dark ages. One day he
massacred 500 boyards who were dissatisfied with his rule. The torture of men,
women, and children, seems to have been his delight. Certain Turkish envoys, when
admitted into his presence, refused to remove their turbans, whereupon he had them
nailed to their heads. He burned 400 missionaries and impaled 500 gipsies to secure
their property. In order to strike terror into Mohammed II he crossed over into
Bulgaria, defeated the Turks, and brought back with him 25,000 prisoners, men,
women, and children, whom he is said to have impaled upon a large plain called
Praelatu. (Samuelson, Roumania 170)
The author includes a footnote which explains: “He was universally named the Impaler in
consequence of a practice which is well known to our readers through the so-called
Bulgarian atrocities. A sharpened pole was forced into the body of the victim, and the other
end was then driven into the earth, the unfortunate man, woman, or child being left to
writhe in agony until relieved by death” (170 n. 1). Following Samuelson’s suggestion, it
seems quite possible that the “Bulgarian atrocities” reminded some among the informed
contemporaries in Britain and elsewhere of the medieval Romanian ruler.
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A second possible source for the historical Dracula is William Beatty Kingston’s
book A Wanderer’s Notes (1888). “Beatty Kingston (the war correspondent of the Daily
Telegraph)” (Stoker, Personal Reminiscences I, 358) was present at one of Stoker’s many
dinners with Richard Burton. He was actually a good friend of Henry Irving’s: he dedicated
to the actor his book Music and Manners: Personal Reminiscences and Sketches of
Character (1887), in which there is a long chapter on the music and on the manner of
Romanians – including a brief mention of the historical Dracula as “Vlad the Cruel”
(Beatty Kingston, Music and Manners 117). He was also the special envoy of the Daily
Telegraph to Bucharest several times between 1865 and 1885; he knew personally both
Prince Cuza (1859-1866) and King Charles I of Romania (1866-1914) as well as many
Romanian politicians; he even learned some of the language of the country and was able to
have a simple conversation in Romanian; and he dedicated his book Monarchs I Have Met
(1887) to Elisabeth, Queen of Romania. Perhaps he wrote more – and more frequently – on
Romanian matters than any other Victorian.
A Wanderer’s Notes contains several legends surrounding the historical Dracula,
although the author confuses Vlad with Radu the Handsome and he calls the former Vlad
the Ferocious and the latter “the Devil” (not entirely inaccurate, since Radu himself was a
Dracula, while Vlad is usually known in Romania as “Ţepeş”). This passage includes some
exploits that are several times mentioned in Stoker’s novel:
No sooner were [the Sultan’s] emissaries fairly within the boundaries of Hospodar
Vlad’s Principality than he caused them to be arrested, and their hands and feet to
be cut off; after which they were impaled in front of his palace. Having performed
this highly characteristic feat, he assembled all the armed forces at his disposition,
crossed the Danube, and ravaged the Turkish provinces on its right bank with fire
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and sword, burning all the towns and villages, and putting man, woman, and child to
death. The Turkish officers, soldiers, and officials whom he captured, he had
carefully impaled and set up, planted on the long poles transfixing their bodies,
along the bank of the Danube, pour encourager les autres. The Sultan, in his turn,
invaded Wallachia with an enormous army and drove Vlad into the hills, where the
latter offered a long and desperate resistance to the Turkish forces; and it was during
this war that he exercised his rights as an independent sovereign by appealing to the
Hungarians for aid against the invader, and offering them his alliance against the
Turk. This proceeding on the part of Vlad served as precedent to his successors.
(Beatty Kingston, A Wanderer’s Notes II, 29-30)
Another possible source is Edwin Lawrence Godkin (1831-1902), an Irishman who
had settled in America and was, in the 1880s and 1890s, editor-in-chief of the New York
Evening Post. Godkin is mentioned in Stoker’s Personal Reminiscences (I, 321) and was a
contributor to Knowles’s The Nineteenth Century. Early in his career, before going to the
Crimea as a war correspondent, Godkin published The History of Hungary and the
Magyars (London: John Cassell, 1853), in which he speaks of Vlad Dracul, the Impaler’s
father, the one first mentioned in Count Dracula’s speech about his ancestors. In 1444,
before the battle of Varna, this Dracula tried to dissuade King Ladislas of Hungary from
fighting the Turks:
Drakul, the waywode of Wallachia, whom he called upon to accompany him, with
his vassals, on seeing the royal forces, which did not amount to more than 20,000
men, presumed to remark that their numbers did not exceed the hunting retinue that
sometimes attended the sultan, and presented Ladislas with two horses of matchless
speed, as if to mark his evil foreboding of the event. But the king felt such implicit
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confidence in the skill and valour of Hunyadi, and the prayers and protection of the
church, that he scarce felt a pang of doubt or of remorse. (Godkin 111)
Another author who wrote about the historical Dracula in nineteenth-century Britain
is James Henry Skene, British Consul in Aleppo between 1855 and 1877, brother of the
better-known historian of Celtic Scotland William Forbes Skene. After several trips across
the Romanian principalities (including Transylvania), Skene published The Frontier Land
of the Christian and the Turk (two volumes, 1853-1854), in which he dedicated several
pages to the “remarkable era of . . . the Hospodar, Vlad the Empaler, or, as he was called,
Dracul, the Devil” (II, 68-69). Skene is the first traveller through Romania who speaks of
Vlad being arrested and imprisoned, then freed so as to start again his wars with the
Ottomans in the 1470s. His final portrait of the warrior shows a sympathetic tone not unlike
that expressed by Van Helsing:
When he took prisoners from the Turks, he had their feet flayed, rubbed with salt,
and licked by the rough tongues of goats. And with all this he was a remarkably
handsome man, with a mild expression of countenance and long soft hair; he was
possessed of undoubted bravery, and was of a comic humour withal; though, in
refinement of cruelty, he far surpassed Louis XI of France, John IV of Russia, and
even Caligula, Domitian, and Nero; for the most remarkable instances of his
barbarity are such as were never heard of elsewhere. (Skene II, 71)
In Dracula, Arminius informs Van Helsing that the Count has been “in life a most
wonderful man,” which appears incongruous to some editors: “If this is meant to be a
portrait of Vlad the Impaler, it is so fanciful that it raises doubts about whether Stoker and
Arminius Vambéry ever conversed about him . . . rather it points to Stoker’s almost total
ignorance of Vlad the Impaler” (Leatherdale 414 n. 5). In fact, such a portrait is consistent
171
with the one provided by Skene or by James William Ozanne in Three Years in Roumania
(1878), in which all the legends about Vlad are again collected (Ozanne adds a few more).
The author says that “Vlad V, of Wallachia, surnamed ‘The Impaler,’ was a hero, but a
cruel tyrant” (Ozanne 187) who “with consummate skill, utterly routed the Turkish army,
which numbered 250,000 men, forcing it to retire in disorder towards the Danube” (188).
Although he speaks of Vlad’s atrocities, Ozanne qualifies them: “On the other hand, the
country was kept by this regime in the most tranquil condition” (191). Mary Adelaide
Walker (1820-1904), another possible source for Dracula,81 rejects such excuses in
Untrodden Paths in Roumania (1888) and writes about “Vlad ‘the Impaler,’ a hideous
distinction, that indicates but faintly the unimaginable cruelties with which he thought to
awe and to arrest even the fierce and unscrupulous Ottoman invaders” (Walker 309). She
notes that “it is truly remarked of this ruler, sometimes called also Vlad the Devil, that he
established order by terror” (311), but rejects unnamed Romanian informants according to
whom Vlad was a zealous Christian: “The mixture of devotion and devilry . . . cannot
soften or extenuate his crimes” (312).
Finally, Bram Stoker could have found something about the historical Dracula in
Arminius Vambéry’s writings. McNally and Florescu have established that “a search
through all of the professor’s published writings fails to reveal any comments on Vlad,
Dracula, or vampires” (In Search of Dracula 178), and their conclusion is quoted by other
81
Committed to the editorial tenet that only sources contemporary with the author may be used to explain
obscure terms from the edited text, Leonard Wolf quotes Walker’s definition of a “boyar”: “Mrs. Walker in
Untrodden Paths in Romania says: ‘The Boyards were created a distinct class of nobility in the fifteenth
century, when Radu, Voïvode of Wallachia, endeavoured to model them in imitation of the offices of the
Court of Byzantium. The title of Boyard, if now used, merely signifies a person of fortune and position’”
(Wolf 28 n. 14). Although Stoker may have seen this definition, he certainly saw others. Walker confuses
“boyars” (in Romanian, “boieri”), with a small group of boyars, called “dregători,” which formed the
executive branch of government and had been modelled after the Byzantine courtiers. See my earlier
comment in a prior chapter on this distinction.
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editors (Wolf 291 n. 22; Leatherdale 337 n. 65; Klinger 341 n. 41). While it is true that
Vambéry does not use the names of Vlad and Dracula, he does speak of Vlad Dracul, the
first Dracula mentioned by the Count in the speech about his ancestors. In Hungary in
Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern Times (1887), Vambéry speaks of “the vayvode of
Wallachia [who] joined [Hunyadi] with about 10,000 men” (206) at the 1444 battle of
Varna and then of the 1448 battle of Kosovo in which again took part “the Wallachian
vayvode” (211). These are brief mentions of only one of the Draculas, but they show that
Vambéry was knowledgeable about medieval Romania and that Stoker could have found
more information about Dracula’s ancestors in the book of someone he admired.
The really contentious issue remains the suggestion made by Harry Ludlam in his
1964 biography of Stoker that Vambéry gave the writer the impulse to look into the story of
Vlad the Impaler also known as Dracula. Elizabeth Miller, who has rejected this idea
several times on the grounds that there is no evidence in Stoker’s notes,82 insists that
“Ludlam does not identify sources (no footnotes, no bibliography) and the author revels in
reconstructing conversations from anecdotal evidence gleaned from his primary source,
Stoker’s son Noel” (Sense & Nonsense 188). Some editors quote Ludlam’s (and Noel
Stoker’s) suggestion about Vambéry’s vital role in the shaping of Dracula without
mentioning the biographer (McNally and Florescu 193-194 n. 274). Others quote him as
saying that Vambéry “enlarged Stoker’s understanding of the historical Dracula” (Wolf 291
n. 22). Some accept the idea with caution: “presumably Vambéry introduced him to
Transylvanian history and legend” (Auerbach and Skal 212 n. 3). Others reject it
82
One of the reviewers of Leatherdale’s edition, who also speaks of Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow (ed.
Elizabeth Miller), suggests that “Miller’s attempted demolition of [Vambéry] is not quite as conclusive as she
seems to think” (Hopkins, Review of Leatherdale 270). In the “Introduction” to her edition of Stoker’s
working notes, Miller takes the more moderate position that “the Notes neither prove nor disprove the rumour
that the Hungarian professor Arminius Vambéry furnished Stoker with any information about Dracula or
Transylvania” (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 4)
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completely: “What is not reasonable to assume is that the real Arminius gave Stoker real
information about the historical Dracula” (Leatherdale 337 n. 65). Clive Leatherdale later
mixed up Vambéry with the novel’s character Arminius, insisting that the Hungarian
cannot be accepted as a reliable source because he describes Dracula with “wholesome
epithets, not wicked ones. Vlad Dracula enjoyed few apologists so generous as Arminius,
which serves to confirm that he could have known little or nothing about him” (337 n. 67).
Yet, just as the other possible sources mentioned above do, Arminius (Vambéry) could
have drawn a semi-sympathetic portrait of the medieval warrior.
Evidence that Stoker at least read what Vambéry had written about Transylvania
and Romania can be found in the novel. In one of his first conversations with Jonathan
Harker, the Count speaks of a battle in which Wallachians, mentioned simply as “patriots,”
waited for the Hungarians and Austrians “on the rocks above the passes, that they might
sweep destruction on them with their artificial avalanches” (Dracula 52). The reference
here is to the 1330 battle of Posada between the Wallachian ruler Basarab I (the founder of
the principality) and the Hungarian king Charles Robert of Anjou. McNally and Florescu
write that “Charles Robert of Anjou, king of Hungary, penetrated Romanian soil as far as
the pass of Posada in November of 1330. He was caught there in the narrow passage by the
armies of Prince Basarab of Wallachia who had boulders hurled upon the Hungarians” (63
n. 60). Auerbach and Skal repeat the information about the Romanians “hurling boulders
down upon [Anjou’s] army” but misread the phrase “Romanian soil” and speak of
“Hungary invad[ing] Romania” (27 n. 6). Klinger, too, thinks the king of Hungary “invaded
Roumania [sic]” rather than Wallachia and also writes that “the invaders were crushed by
boulders hurled down on them” (53 n. 47). None of the editors make any suggestions about
Stoker’s possible sources for the brief description of the battle.
174
The reason must be that the battle is not mentioned in any of Stoker’s recorded
sources. The books about Transylvania and Hungary from which we know that Stoker took
notes are travelogues and general descriptions of geographical, economic and ethnographic
circumstances and do not dwell long on historical matters. The only survey of Romanian
history, Wilkinson’s Account, simply states that “from the commencement of the 14th
century, [Wallachia’s and Moldavia’s] independency was acknowledged by Hungary”
(Wilkinson 15). In fact, the battle is absent from all English-language books on Romania,
Transylvania or Hungary that Stoker could have read – with only two exceptions.83 The
first is E.L. Godkin’s 1853 History of Hungary:
Despairing of being able to contend against the king in the open field, Bessarab
resorted to stratagem. Decoying the Magyar army into a mountain pass by feigning
a retreat, he suddenly surrounded them on every side . . . he in the meantime
fortified the entrances to the defile, and crowned the heights with men-at-arms and
archers, ready to pour down showers of arrows, and roll heavy rocks upon the
Hungarian army at the word of their leader. When the Magyars became aware of the
full danger of their position, their consternation was great. . . . Their only hope lay
in forcing the entrance of the gorge without delay; but long ere they reached it,
three-fourths of their number were buried beneath the missiles of their assailants.
(Godkin 71)
The other, more modern, version of the battle that Stoker could have known is in Arminius
Vambéry’s Hungary (1887):
83
This can be explained. The battle would have been deemed obscure (and certainly inglorious) by the
Hungarian informants of travellers such as Boner, Paget, Johnson, Crosse, Mazuchelli, Gerard, and was littleknown in Romania at the time. Wallachian chroniclers do not mention either Basarab or the battle and speak
instead of a legendary Radu Negru (the Black). Skene, Ozanne and Walker (who had Romanian informants)
all mention Radu Negru. Stoker could only have found it in historical surveys of Hungary.
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Charles boldly advanced, with his spirited knights, over the impassable and
unfamiliar roads of Wallachia. . . . The Hungarian army was led astray by the
Wallachian guides, and in retreating found itself quite unexpectedly hemmed in
between steep and towering rocks from which there was no outlet. A shower of
stones descended on their heads; the Wallachians who occupied the heights sent
down dense volleys of rocks and arrows upon the doomed Hungarians. . . .
Wallachia maintained her independence. (Vambéry, Hungary 161)
Since there is no mention of the battle in Stoker’s working notes – not even in the
handwritten list of centuries, it seems very likely that he continued to research Romanian
history and that Vambéry’s writings provided sufficient data.
5.3 The Historical Dracula
Most of what Bram Stoker knew about Vlad Ţepeş’s life, exploits and lineage is
contained in Count Dracula’s speech given to an astonished Jonathan Harker in the third
chapter of the novel. This is, without a doubt, the most heavily annotated passage in
Dracula. As a rule, all editors consider the speech so incoherent that, rather than a narrative
of the life of a medieval Romanian warrior, it could refer to nobody in particular. Their
annotations usually indicate that the speech is too “murky” (Auerbach and Skal 34 n. 96) to
be given any consideration; that it is “so vague and contradictory as to be worthless as an
historical portrait” (Leatherdale 69 n. 46); and that “the only point of coincidence between
Count Dracula and Vlad the Impaler is their name” (Klinger 71 n. 36). Elizabeth Miller has
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given a very exact summary of these views in a book conceived for the use of Western
tourists in Romania:
All that we are certain Stoker knew is this: that there was a voivode named Dracula:
that this Dracula crossed the Danube River and attacked the Turks; that he enjoyed a
brief success; that he was driven back into Wallachia, was defeated, and escaped
into Hungary; and that his brother replaced him as voivode. That’s it. There are no
further references to Vlad Dracula in Stoker’s Notes; nor is the voivode mentioned
anywhere in the remaining books and articles that Stoker listed as his sources for the
novel. Everything else about the connection between Count Dracula and Vlad is at
best speculation, or at worst fabrication. (Handbook 112-113)
Miller’s text also summarises Dracula’s speech, although it does not mention the curious
last part about a successor of “a later age.” This is, in fact, what Count Dracula has to say
about the historical Dracula:
When was redeemed that great shame of my nation, the shame of Cassova, when
the flags of the Wallach and the Magyar went down beneath the Crescent, who was
it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on
his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that his own unworthy
brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of
slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race
who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into
Turkeyland; who, when he was beaten back, came again, and again, and again,
though he had come alone from the bloody field where his troops being slaughtered,
since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph? (Dracula 60-61)
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The speech is clearly a development of the notes which Stoker took from
Wilkinson’s account. He first wrote down the idea that “DRACULA in Wallachian
language means DEVIL,” then he summarised the following from pages 18-19 of
Wilkinson’s book:
The Wallachians joined Hungarians in 1448 and made war on Turkey being
defeated at battle of Cassova in Bulgaria and finding it impossible to make stand
against the Turks submitted to annual tribute which they paid until 1460 when
Sultan Mahomet II being occupied in completing conquest of islands in Archipelago
gave opportunity of shaking off yoke. Their VOIVODE (DRACULA) crossed
Danube and attacked Turkish troops. Only momentary success. Mahomet drove him
back to Wallachia where pursued and defeated him. The VOIVODE escaped into
Hungary and the Sultan caused his brother Bladus received in his place. He made
treaty with Bladus binding Wallachians to perpetual tribute and laid the foundations
of that slavery not yet abolished. (1820) (Bram Stoker’s Notes 244-245)
The parenthesis added by Stoker at the end of the note shows that he was well aware of the
political situation in Romania and felt the need to point out that the book had been
published in 1820. Dracula’s speech follows William Wilkinson’s narrative84 quite
faithfully up to a certain point. Wilkinson speaks of an attack on “few Turkish troops”; in
84
This is the original passage in Wilkinson’s account: “The Wallachians under this Voïvode [Dan] joined
again the Hungarians in 1448, and made war on Turkey; but being totally defeated at the battle of Cossova, in
Bulgaria, and finding it no longer possible to make any stand against the Turks, they submitted again to the
annual tribute, which they paid until the year 1460, when the Sultan Mahomet II, being occupied in
completing the conquest of the islands in the Archipelago, afforded them a new opportunity of shaking off the
yoke. Their Voïvode, also named Dracula, did not remain satisfied with mere prudent measures of defence:
with an army he crossed the Danube and attacked the few Turkish troops that were stationed in his
neighbourhood; but this attempt, like those of his predecessors, was only attended with momentary success.
Mahomet having turned his arms against him, drove him back to Wallachia, whither he pursued and defeated
him. The Voïvode escaped into Hungary, and the Sultan caused his brother Bladus to be named in his place.
He made a treaty with Bladus, by which he bound the Wallachians to perpetual tribute; and laid the
foundations of that slavery, from which no efforts have yet had the power of extricating them with any lasting
efficacy” (Wilkinson 18-19).
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his notes, Stoker drops “few,” then in the novel writes that the historical Dracula “beat the
Turk on his own ground,” that is, south of the Danube. The author might be trying to make
the Count (assuming that he and his ancestor are one and the same) more formidable; or he
could be altering his narrative to have it fit other, more impressive accounts of the exploits
of the historical Dracula.
Wilkinson’s narrative is not only coherent, but quite accurate, although much too
brief. He speaks first of the 1444 battle of Varna, where “Dracula’s son” (Wilkinson 17)
shows up (this is, of course, not Vlad Ţepeş, but his older brother, Mircea II; quite tellingly,
Stoker skipped this part); then about the battle of “Cossova” (18), where a “Dan” (in fact
Vladislav II, son of Dan II, but fourteenth-century historians like the Byzantine
Chalkokondyles also called him Dan, after his father) takes part; then about the campaign
south of the Danube of another Dracula (19) – here he adds the famous footnote in which
the name of the hero is said to mean “the Devil”; and, finally, about this Dracula being
replaced by his own treacherous brother (19). Dracula’s speech in the novel is actually
simpler, as it starts with the “shame of Cassova” and continues with how this defeat was
later redeemed by one “of his race” who crossed the Danube to battle the Turks on their
own ground. The narrative again turns tragic with the treason of an “unworthy brother” that
brought about the downfall of Dracula’s presumed ancestor. To this, the Count adds a
descendant who, inspired by his ancestor, crossed again the river “in a later age.”
However, the editors insist that the speech is confusing and unreliable. For example,
although by “the shame of Cassova” Dracula can only refer to the 1448 battle of Kosovo
Polje, since this is the one discussed by Wilkinson, Stoker’s principal (and, according to
most editors, only) source for the speech, some editors (Auerbach and Skal 35 n. 5;
Leatherdale 67 n. 34) also mention the 1389 battle with the same name. Others – Leonard
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Wolf (41 n. 19)85 and Klinger (68-69 n. 24) – even consider the latter as the actual fight
hinted at by the Count. While it is true that the battles have the same name, they are sixty
years apart, and, according to modern accounts, there were no Hungarians or Wallachians
on the battlefield in 1389. More importantly, Wilkinson makes absolutely no mention of the
first battle of 1389, and understandably so, since it concerns Serbia, not Wallachia.
Dracula’s speech appears thus convoluted and arcane, which is reinforced by the way in
which the clearest reference to the historical Dracula has been annotated.
When the Count speaks of his ancestor’s incursion into Ottoman territory, some
editors accept it as a reference to Vlad Ţepeş’s “attack in Bulgaria in 1462” (McNally and
Florescu 67 n. 87), “a ruthless campaign of slaughter” (Luckhurst 370), while others insist
that “this incident remains historically murky” (Auerbach and Skal 34 n. 6). Many editors
simply suggest that, although Count Dracula clearly states that he is talking of “a Dracula
indeed,” he is in fact talking about John Hunyadi, voivode of Transylvania and regent of
Hungary, who died in 1456 while defending Belgrade, and who was not related to the
historical Dracula. Wolf writes that the event mentioned in the Count’s speech refers to
Hunyadi’s “victory over the Turks at Nándorfehérvár in 1456 [which] stemmed the eastern
threat to Europe for a hundred years and earned him the nickname ‘Turk-beater’” (41 n.
21). Leatherdale makes the same choice and insists that, “Although he identifies the
voivode as a Dracula, he does not say which Dracula. Janos Hunyadi, for example, also
85
Perhaps because he is quoting from Short History of the Near East (1922) by W.S. Davis, Wolf’s narrative
is fraught with pro-Turkish rhetoric. Implausibly, the Turks appear “outnumbered”; they were “better
disciplined and led”; the Christians (Serbians) are mentioned as their “foes”; Sultan Murad was killed, “but
not in battle”; the Serbian national hero Miloš Obilić appears only as a “nobleman named Milosh,” so as to
diminish his importance; it is the Westerners who ultimately stopped the Turks, although it is not said when;
and Hunyadi led a “revolt,” as if Hungary had been under Turkish domination. This idea of the “revolt” is a
topos of many Victorian and post-Victorian commentators, who see the battles against the Turks as clashes
between Orientals, rather than Christian crusades. The “revolt” is associated not only with countries that were
in some sort of dependent relationship with the Ottomans, but even with countries that were fully independent
and even empires in their own right, like Hunyadi’s Hungary.
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defeated the Turks, at Nándorfehérvár in 1456” (68 n. 37).86 Leatherdale seems convinced
that Hunyadi was one of the Draculas, whereas Klinger, who also writes that “Dracula
probably refers here to János Hunyadi” (69 n. 26), later confesses his puzzlement:
“Dracula’s meaning here is somewhat unclear, does he claim a familial relationship with
Hunyadi, a national hero? Or, as is more likely, is he using the term ‘Dracula’ in its literal
sense: a dragon, a devil, a person of cunning and courage?” (69 n. 27). Such meaning,
suggested by Wilkinson, is never used in the novel. The Count makes it clear that he is
talking of an actual ancestor, a Dracula “of my own race.” Moreover, there is no mention of
Hunyadi in the novel and not even in Wilkinson’s account.
Ţepeş’s replacement by his own brother, Radu the Handsome, who made a treaty
with the Sultan, “by which he bound the Wallachians to perpetual tribute and laid the
foundations of that slavery” (Wilkinson 19) is also clearly mentioned in Dracula’s speech.
McNally and Florescu tell the story of this brother, left as a hostage at the sultan’s court
when Ţepeş’s father made peace with the Turks, and who had been “won over by Murad
the Second and later Mohammed the Conqueror because of his effeminate nature and good
looks” (McNally and Florescu 67 n. 88), although such an account is not mentioned in
Wilkinson or in the novel. Auerbach and Skal offer a similar story, also with the emphasis
on the possible amorous relationship between Radu and the Sultan, although in their
version the hostage teen becomes the predator rather than the prey: “In 1444, the Turks
captured both Vlad Tepes and his brother Radu. The seductive Radu became politically and
sexually entangled in the Ottoman court. As the Turkish candidate to the Wallachian
throne, he fought and displaced his patriotic (if sadistic) brother Vlad” (Auerbach and Skal
86
Wolf is actually quoting from Gabriel Ronay’s 1972 The Truth about Dracula, whose author uses the
Hungarian name for Belgrade: Nándorfehérvár. Both Wolf and Leatherdale forget to translate it and most
English-language readers would have a hard time figuring out what city was defended by Hunyadi in 1456.
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35 n. 8). Wolf goes one step further and sides with the invading Turks, writing that Radu
became ruler of Wallachia in 1462, when “Vlad the Impaler was finally driven from
power” (Wolf 41 n. 27). Klinger turns Vlad’s nickname into a family name for both
brothers but, instead of realising that his speculation about Hunyadi as the real Dracula
does not quite hold water, prefers to claim that the Count’s speech is confusing: “Dracula
appears to refer here to Radu Ţepeş . . . . However, this contradicts the identification of the
Voivode who ‘crossed the Danube’ as Hunyadi and confirms that the ‘history’ given here is
a hodgepodge of misremembered ‘facts’” (Klinger 70 n. 28).
However, the most puzzling episode in Dracula’s account is that of the last ancestor,
“that other of his race . . . in a later age.” He is more difficult to identify because the Count
no longer seems to follow Wilkinson’s tight narrative. Most editors do not annotate this
part of the speech. Others simply state their perplexity: “Cryptic, to say the least”
(Auerbach and Skal 35 n. 9); “It is anyone’s guess who Stoker has in mind here”
(Leatherdale 68 n. 40). Leonard Wolf seems confused about the chronology of events when
he suggests (following Gabriel Ronay) that this ancestor is “Vlad III Dracul, who
distinguished himself in the battle of Varna in 1444” (Wolf 42 n. 23), in other words Vlad
Ţepeş’s father. This is impossible not only if the previous Dracula is to be understood as
Vlad Ţepeş, but even if one were to follow Wolf in identifying him with John Hunyadi.
The latter died in 1456, nine years after ordering the death of Vlad Dracul. Another
proponent of Hunyadi, Leslie Klinger notices the anachronism but again blames the
Count’s lack of clarity: “this makes nonsense of Dracula’s ‘later age’ remark” (Klinger 70
n. 29). A solution suggested both by Klinger and by Auerbach/Skal is “Dracula himself,” as
inferred by Mina Harker. However, Mina simply acknowledges the fact that the Count has
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been many “Draculas” during the past few centuries, which can include all the Draculas
mentioned in the speech, rather than only the one of “a later age.”
The solution to this problem can actually be found in Stoker’s working notes. After
taking down much of the information about Dracula from Wilkinson’s account, Stoker
skipped the provisions of the treaty between Radu and the Sultan and the general situation
of the principality in the century that followed (Wilkinson 19-24). The Account mentions
no other ruler after this, until “1593, when an individual of the name of Michael was
elected to the Voïvodate. He no sooner held the reins of government than he determined to
deliver his country from the Turkish yoke, and restore it to independency” (24). Wilkinson
then provides a detailed narrative (24-28) of Michael the Brave’s campaign against the
Turks, until “the Sultan was finally compelled to relinquish his claims” (26), as well as his
battles for Transylvania, which he gained, lost, and regained in the last three years of his
reign. Stoker only wrote briefly about Michael and seemed to be more and more interested
about Transylvania: “1600. After abdication of Sigismund of Transylvania, this principality
became tributary to Emperor Rodolphus who appointed Michael VOIVODE.
Transylvanians revolted & wished to recall Sigismund but were defeated by Austrians and
whole province subjugated” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 246-247). However, he read the entire
account about Michael the Brave and, while finding information about anti-Turkish
campaigns, he was interested to note the closer and closer ties forged with Transylvania by
Dracula’s descendants. The next note he took down from Wilkinson’s Account is about
“Constantine Brancovano Bessarabba of Wallachia. . . . Emperor Leopold made him Prince
of Roman Empire and gave him landed estates in Transylvania” (246-247).
The notes taken from Wilkinson’s account suggest that Stoker was trying to
establish the family tree of the historical Dracula and of his character, who (from the point
183
of view of the family trees) are one and the same person. He was also trying to understand
how the Wallachian ruler came to have Transylvanian descendants. When he first published
an excerpt from Wilkinson in his critical study of the novel, Leatherdale stopped at the
passage about Radu the Handsome (Origins 96). Evidently, Stoker did not stop there. He
read about Michael the Brave, who was the grandson of Vlad the Monk, Ţepeş’s halfbrother, and thus a member of the Dracula branch of the Basarab dynasty, and of a later
ruler of the same dynasty (Brancovano died in 1714). Michael the Brave is the perfect
candidate for the Dracula of “a later age.” He went further and farther than Vlad Ţepeş,
because he obtained (albeit briefly) full independence and union of all three Romanian
Principalities, and because in his anti-Ottoman campaign he got only 15 miles away from
Constantinople, which, as the Count says, is very much “in Turkeyland.”
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Chapter 6
Dracula, the Other
All editors note the existence of a relationship between Count Dracula, Bram
Stoker’s creation, and Vlad Ţepeş, the historical Dracula, although how far the author went
with his research and how much he wanted the two characters to be similar remain a matter
of contention. Nevertheless, what the novel’s editors do not ask is: why did Stoker choose
the medieval ruler as a model for his villain in the first place? Leatherdale’s suggestion that
he was simply seduced by Wilkinson’s footnote about the meaning of the name “Dracula”87
is contradicted by the fact that several characters in the novel (Arminius, Van Helsing and
Mina) insist that the vampire Count had “indeed . . . been that Voivode” (Dracula 280).
Stoker also provides a detailed back-story for his fictional character, who appears at the
same time as a Szekler and as a kind of berserker, in whose veins probably flows, as
Thomas McLean puts it in the title of his recent essay, the “blood of many races.”
However, many facets of Dracula’s past remain mysterious since the editors identify them
in notes of recovery, where explanatory notes would have been necessary. For example, the
annotators state who Thor and Wodin are, while the reader might be curious to know why
they are mentioned in Dracula’s historical and mythological speech given at Harker’s
request.
In fact, “even a ‘note of recovery’ . . . will often require fuller treatment than we
might suppose. . . . What the reader wishes to know, in other words, is the author’s use of
87
This idea has been used by later editors who believe that “the only point of coincidence between Count
Dracula and Vlad the Impaler is their name” (Klinger 71 n. 36).
185
an allusion, why he chose to make the reference and how it works in the text” (Battestin 10;
emphasis mine). All the details that make up both Dracula’s past and his traits of character
remain utterly enigmatic unless the annotator tries to go beyond the text of the novel and
looks at other writings by Stoker, as well as at events and situations to which he might
allude. Before deciding that a reference to a historical or contemporary character or to a
geographical location is haphazard, the annotator should verify if there is a reason behind
their presence in the text, otherwise a novel like Dracula appears to contain too many
coincidences and random choices. In all critical editions of the novel, there is no good
explanation as to why the Count introduces himself as a Szekler rather than a Romanian,
Hungarian, German or simply Transylvanian; why he lands at Whitby, in North Yorkshire,
so far from his recently acquired estate in Purfleet, close to London; or even why he is
insistently described as having been “indeed . . . that Voivode Dracula.”
6.1 The Contemporary Dracula
Without a doubt, the most extraordinary coincidence (of which most if not all
editors would not have been aware) is that Vlad Ţepeş’s bloodline, which had become
mostly Szekler over the centuries, was about to secure a prominent place in British society
by the time Bram Stoker was ready to start his work on Dracula. HRH Charles, Prince of
Wales, divulged in the 2011 documentary Wild Carpathia88 that his family was descended
from Vlad the Impaler. In 1989, McNally and Florescu, who had done some research only
“in the Cluj archives,” wrote briefly in their book Dracula, Prince of Many Faces about
88
The information was spread by the Associated Press before the release of the film.
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Ţepeş’s two “Hungarian” sons (issued, that is, from his second marriage to Ilona Szilágyi)
and concluded that “the male Hungarian Dracula line dies out by the end of the sixteenth
century . . . [and the] female Dracula line continued until the seventeenth century” (193194). This conclusion was adopted by Elizabeth Miller and other commentators of the
novel, although it is unclear (it does not state unambiguously the end of the female line)
and does not seem based on extensive research. It now appears, on the contrary, that the
Hungarian or, rather, Szekler “female line” leads all the way to today’s Heir Apparent.89
One of the female scions of the historical Dracula was Countess Claudine Rhédey
von Kis-Rhéde (1812-1841), of a prominent Szekler family: she was the daughter of Count
László Rhédey von Kis-Rhéde, a direct descendant of Ferenc (Francis) Rhédey, prince of
Transylvania between 1657 and 1658. Countess Claudine married Alexander, Duke of
Württemberg, but their son Francis (Franz) (1837-1900) could not inherit his father’s title
because his parents’ marriage had been morganatic. Instead, he was born as Count von
Hohenstein and was later created Duke of Teck in 1863, after a successful military career
(he had been aide-de-camp to the commander-in-chief of the Austrian army during the
battle of Solferino). In 1866, he married Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge (18331897), known as “Fat Mary,” Queen Victoria’s cousin, and later became Prince of Teck.
The marriage was thought by many a misalliance, because the groom was virtually
penniless and because his mother’s much too distant connection with royalty did not allow
him to be considered ebenbürtig (of equal birth) for such a match. However, Queen
Victoria thought these views “very absurd” (qtd. in Pope-Hennessy 37), and, like many
others, admired the prince’s good looks. Francis “was tall, well-built, and elegant. His
profile was much admired, he had a fine high forehead, beautiful eyes . . . . His hair was of
89
For a genealogy of the historical Dracula, see Lelia Mihail, “Vlad Ţepeş.”
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so true a black that a lady in Vienna once said of him: ‘his hair is not black it is dark blue’”
(Pope-Hennessy 37). In a letter to her eldest child, Victoria, Crown Princess of Prussia, the
Queen explained:
I do wish one c[ou]ld find some more black eyed P[rin]ces or P[rin]cesses for our
Children! – I can’t help thinking what dear Papa said – that it was in fact a blessing
when there was some little imperfection in the pure Royal descent & that some fresh
blood was infused. In P[rin]ce Teck’s case this is a very good thing. . . . For this
constant fair hair & blue eyes makes the blood so lymphatic . . . darling Papa – often
with vehemence said: ‘We must have some strong dark blood.’ (qtd. in PopeHennessy 38; emphasis in original)
Although a German aristocrat, Francis of Teck never hid his Hungarian/Szekler roots and
was often seen driving out of the residence at White Lodge, in Richmond Park (where the
Tecks lived after 1885), as his daughter noted in an 1886 letter, “with 4 Hungarian horses,
driven by a Hungarian coachman, [and] fast” (qtd. in Pope-Hennessy 179).
The dark presence of Francis of Teck in the high society of London and his
association with the royal family was both intriguing and fascinating to the Victorians.
Compared to other suggested models for Count Dracula,90 the Duke of Teck, a “man of
striking good looks but volatile temperament” (Rose 28), had many characteristics that
would make him a much better candidate: he was a direct descendant of the historical
Dracula; he had a Szekler mother and a German father; he was a foreigner and an intruder
90
The most widely accepted is Henry Irving. However, Leonard Wolf is probably right to protest: “I object to
such a reading on the ground of common sense. If Dracula is meant to represent Irving, why are neither Irving
nor Stoker, who spent some twenty-seven years in each other’s company, ever on record – Stoker for saying
spiteful things about his employer, or Irving for hearing or sensing them? And why, after the publication of
the novel, did not some so-called friend, seeing Irving maligned in it, call his attention to the unflattering
portrait. No one did. Not Ellen Terry, nor – a more likely candidate to have spotted Stoker’s ‘vengeance’ –
Eliza Aria, Irving’s mistress during his final years. Not a single journalist. No Punch satirist. No one” (The
Connoisseur 144).
188
in the high society of London that Stoker also frequented. Born a count, like Dracula,
Francis of Teck had to use again his original title of Count of Hohenstein in the mid-1880s,
when he was living incognito in Europe, trying to hide from his creditors (Rose 31).
Although born in Vienna, the Duke hailed from Styria, where his two sisters lived all their
lives and where Stoker had initially planned to send Jonathan Harker, according to his
working notes to Dracula. His daughter, the future Queen Mary, spent many of her
holidays in Styria, in the castle of Schloss-Reinthal, “turreted, ochre-coloured . . . within an
easy distance of Graz” (Pope-Hennessy 23), where her aunt Amelie lived, and in the
neighbouring Schweizerhaus, with her other aunt, Princess Claudine von Teck (83). Sabine
Baring-Gould, whose works on werewolves were an important source for Dracula, is one
of the many fascinated with the Tecks’ birthplace. In 1911, he published a book on The
Land of Teck and Its Neighbourhood that he had long researched. Much of the volume is
dedicated to chilling stories of medieval ancestors, Gothic castles and small-scale military
conflicts.
Francis of Teck and his family may have already been used as models in earlier
works of fiction. In Emily Gerard’s 1886 The Waters of Hercules, set on the border
between Transylvania and Wallachia, the main character is a young Hungarian lady of
doubtful aristocratic origin with the unusual title of Countess of Draskócs, who gets
married to the German Adalbert Mohr. Considerably more similarities can be found in
Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, which is set in Styria. One of the editors of Stoker’s novel
asks, “Could Mircalla/Carmilla and Dracula have been related?” (Klinger 15 n. 17) and
other commentators have suggested that Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire story could have been
189
influential in the shaping of Dracula. However, the 1872 Carmilla,91 published only a few
years after Mary Adelaide’s marriage into the Teck family, includes other similarities
between its two main characters (Carmilla and the narrator) and the Teck female line. The
narrator has never been to England but knows the language of her father, an Englishman in
the service of Austria (a mere conceit which allows the story to be told in English and be
published exactly as it has been “found”). Her mother, instead, “was of an old Hungarian
family” (Le Fanu 101), the Karnsteins, just like Carmilla. Surprisingly, “[h]er home lay in
the direction of the west” (Le Fanu 91) rather than east, that is, not towards Hungary, but
rather towards southern Bavaria and the land of Teck. While complementing them with the
happy outcome of the marriage between Jonathan and Mina, Stoker made use of the same
topoi of the eerie Central-European locale (a castle or, in Gerard’s novel, a cave) and the
sinister physical and/or marital union.
In fact, “[t]he regeneration narrative, often paired with a parallel and cautionary
story of degeneracy, was hardly unique to Stoker” (Glover 134). Usually, the regeneration
narrative involved an Englishman refreshing the bloodline of a Central European royal
family, as is the case with most Ruritanian romances, including Anthony Hope’s The
Prisoner of Zenda. An interesting case is that of A Crowned Queen by Hilda Gregg (18681933), who published as Sydney C. Grier. The novel appeared in 1898 and is the same kind
of political romance set in an imaginary country (here called Thracia). The Englishman
marries the local queen, but his efforts are often thwarted by the Thracian Prime Minister,
who bears the name of Drakovics. Although Bulgaria’s history may have inspired the plot
of the novel, “Grier’s Thracians seem in character closer to Romanians” (Goldsworthy 62).
Stoker used a similar plot and a similar regeneration narrative in The Lady of the Shroud
91
It was first serialised in 1871.
190
(1909). The reverse – that is, the regeneration of British blood – was also possible;
however, it involved an Anglo-American marriage. This is only hinted at in Dracula, where
the Texan Quincey Morris offers the Harkers his blood and a name for their child, but it is
the major theme of Stoker’s Lady Athlyne (1908), in which the British aristocrat marries an
American woman. The title of the eponymous character is markedly similar with that of the
first suitor of Francis of Teck’s daughter Mary: Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and
Avondale, Earl of Athlone. Lord Athlyne in Stoker’s novel is also, in fact, an earl: Earl
Athlyne. Even more conspicuously, one of the Earl of Athlyne’s family names is Westenra,
just like Lucy’s in Dracula. The fact that Athlyne/Athlone is also a Westenra seems to be a
later confirmation on Stoker’s part that Lucy, although only a Westenra, is supposed to
represent the royal family, whose blood was infected through the marriage with (a)
Dracula.
In the spring of 1890, around the time when Bram Stoker’s notes for Dracula begin,
Francis and Mary Adelaide’s daughter Mary (Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline
Claudine Agnes), known in her youth as Princess May, was 23 years old and she was set to
marry Albert Victor (Prince Eddy), the eldest son of the Prince of Wales and second in line
to inherit the crown (“Our London Correspondence” 5). Just like in 1866, at the marriage
between Francis and Mary Adelaide, many in the royal family were displeased (PopeHennessy 213-219). Even the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) and his wife (Queen
Alexandra) were less than willing to accept the princess as daughter-in-law. On 30 August
1890, Arthur Balfour, the future prime minister (at the time Chief Secretary for Ireland)
wrote to the then prime minister Lord Salisbury that “[t]he Teck girl they won’t have
because they hate Teck and because the vision of Princess May haunting Marlborough
House makes the Prince of Wales ill” (qtd. in Egremont 103). However, Queen Victoria
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saw Princess May as the best choice for a future queen of England and her will prevailed,
so in 1891 the two became engaged. Prince Eddy (also Earl Athlone) died six weeks later in
an influenza epidemic and Princess May was betrothed to the younger brother George,
Duke of York, whom she married on 6 July, 1893. As one contemporary puts it, “The thing
was a public scandal, and no man of any character would have submitted to it” (qtd. in
Legge, More about King Edward 162).
Dracula is certainly not a roman à clef, but Stoker had “a tendency to be literal
rather than literary” (Frayling, “Mr Stoker’s Holiday” 196) and he was well informed about
the betrothals, not only because they were discussed in both the public and the private
spheres, but because he was frequently close to at least one of the characters involved in the
marriage drama of the time: Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, Mary of Teck’s
mother. She was a frequenter of the London stage, never missing a premiere, and was
unofficially regarded as an astute drama critic (Cooke 212-213). Henry Irving, who also
knew her well, wrote that
she seemed to understand to a remarkable degree both the aim of the actor and the
method of the art. It was always a delight to play to her, and a privilege to listen to
her comments, when one might be so favoured. Indeed, I cannot but think that
Nature had bestowed on her, as one of her many powers and graces, a histrionic gift
of no mean order. (qtd. in Cooke 213)
On 13 November 1881, Mary Adelaide wrote in her diary about having both Henry Irving
and his fellow star actress Ellen Terry over to her house: “We were sixteen at dinner, and
afterwards we told ghost stories till towards midnight” (Cooke 117). The party “broke up a
few days later” (117). The Tecks were such good friends of the Lyceum that once they
celebrated Princess May’s birthday in the Beefsteak Room above the theatre. Bram Stoker
192
remembers that it was a “charming night. . . . In honour of the occasion the whole
decorations of room and table were of pink and white May, with the birthday cake to suit.
Before the Princess was an exquisite little set of Shakespeare specially bound in white
vellum by Zaehnsdorf, with markers of blush-rose silk” (Personal Reminiscences I, 311).
At Disraeli’s suggestion, the Tecks were considered in the 1880s as possible Viceroy and
Vicereine of Ireland. The appointment never came, likely because of the couple’s poverty –
they lacked the “means to support the dignity of proconsular life in Dublin Castle” (Rose
30) – but such a possibility would have seemed remarkably interesting for someone like
Bram Stoker.
In his memoir of Henry Irving, Stoker mentions a certain “colonel Fitzgeorge”
being celebrated in the Beefsteak Room, probably for his participation in the Egypt
campaign of 1882-1883 (Personal Reminiscences I, 323). Fitzgeorge was Princess May’s
cousin and one of the three sons of Prince George, Duke of Cambridge (1819-1904), Mary
Adelaide’s older brother. In contravention of the Royal Marriages Act, the Duke had
married Sarah (known as Louisa) Fairbrother, an actress formerly with the Lyceum Theatre
and that is why their three sons bore the last name of Fitzgeorge and did not inherit any
titles. When Stoker’s father-in-law, James Balcombe, was garrisoned in Dublin in 1850, his
regiment was inspected by the Duke of Cambridge, who was Commander of the Dublin
District (Warre 106). The Duke was also Balcombe’s division commander during the siege
of Sevastopol and later in Malta, after which he became General Commander in Chief of
the British Army (a position he filled for 39 years). One of Stoker’s biographers considers
that “Colonel Balcombe, with five unmarried daughters, must have appreciated the security
of Stoker’s position as Inspector of Petty Sessions” (Belford 86). In reality, Stoker had
already resigned in November 1878 and got married in December. When his wedding took
193
place, Stoker was manager of the Lyceum, not government clerk. If Balcombe really
appreciated his son-in-law, it may have been because his former commander-in-chief had
also married into the Lyceum family.
Noel Stoker, the writer’s only child, disclosed to Harry Ludlam that Arminius
Vambéry had given the author of Dracula all the necessary information on the Romanian
medieval ruler. This suggestion has repeatedly been rejected by later commentators
(including most editors), since the information in the novel appears to have originated in
Wilkinson’s Account and possibly other written sources. However, Vambéry could have
been a useful informer both as an insider knowledgeable in all things Transylvanian and as
a close friend of the Prince of Wales. He was often portrayed thus, most notably in Edward
Legge’s monograph King Edward in His True Colours (1913), in which the Hungarian was
invited to sign a chapter, entitled “Professor Vambéry Speaks.” The future king was
opposed at the time to the Teck misalliance, and Vambéry could have provided details
about Princess May’s Transylvanian and Wallachian roots.
However, Mary Adelaide, Irving and Vambéry are far from being the only people
who could have connected Stoker to the story of the Tecks. In an essay about the novel’s
“in-jokes,” Bernard Davies lists a series of relatives and friends of Stoker for whom the
novelist included special allusions: to James Harker (who worked at the Lyceum), to
Anthony Hope (Hawkins) of The Prisoner of Zenda fame, to all of his brothers, who lived
near the London addresses and worked at the hospitals that are named in the novel, but
especially to a certain “philanthropist, Angela, Baroness Burdett-Coutts. She became the
richest woman in England . . . and . . . she seems to have found Bram Stoker, with his
boyish sense of fun, more relaxing company than Irving” (Davies 133). Indeed, Stoker
mentions her and his friendship with her several times in his Personal Reminiscences (he
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remembers, for example, that when Irving died and people wanted to pay their respects to
the body, the actor’s house being too small, they took him to the Baroness’s). As they were
so close, it was perhaps inevitable that she would appear somehow in the novel: “Stoker
inserted several little sallies into Dracula for her benefit. . . But his most outrageous legpull was to make her, as chief shareholder in Coutts and Company’s Bank, Count Dracula’s
banker” (Davies 134).
Yet, this is not just a simple “leg-pull,” because the Baroness was indeed, if not
Dracula’s banker, at least a banker for the Draculas. Both Mary Adelaide (Cooke II, 305)
and her daughter, Princess May (Pope-Hennessy 336), called Angela Burdett-Coutts “our
dear Baroness.” She was a very close friend (59), who helped the Tecks financially (232)
and once put a house at their disposal (159). As their banker and a close friend, “Baroness
Burdett-Coutts could be relied on to come forward in a crisis” (59), because their debts
tended to accumulate, due to Mary Adelaide’s “lavish standard of hospitality,” and there
was often “a handsome and impressive overdraft at Coutts’s bank” (59). Baroness BurdettCoutts “added her royal friends to the long list of charitable causes on which she spent her
immense banking fortune; she lent them £50,000, with scant hope of ever seeing it again”
(Rose 31). The Baroness’s presence both in the lives of the Tecks and in Dracula suggests
that Stoker may indeed have modelled his main character and the novel’s plot on the socialclimbing lives of the descendants of the historical Dracula in England. The only missing
ingredient is that Count Dracula, unlike Francis of Teck, does not have a daughter.
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6.2 Dracula’s Daughter and the Finnish Connection
The Icelandic version of Dracula, published in 1901 under the title Makt Myrkranna
(“Powers of Darkness”) as a novel by Bram Stoker translated by Valdimar Ásmundsson,92
has been regarded until recently as an abridgement of the original, notable mainly for
Stoker’s preface (dated August 1898). However, in an essay published in the February 2014
issue of Letter from Castle Dracula (the bulletin of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula),
Hans Corneel de Roos has endeavoured the first close comparison between the English
original and the Icelandic “translation.” His essay (“Makt Myrkranna: Mother of All
Dracula Modifications?”) shows that there are significant differences between the two
versions and convincingly argues that Stoker was aware of them and must have sanctioned
them. Apart from more general considerations regarding Bram Stoker’s legal, editorial and
authorial experience,93 the writer’s acknowledgement of the differences seems evident
because Makt Myrkranna includes plot developments that are consistent with the early
drafts of Dracula (present in Bram Stoker’s Notes) which only Stoker could have known:
the vampire hunters include a detective; Dr Seward goes mad; Harker’s boss Hawkins is a
developed character; Castle Dracula has a housekeeper who is a deaf and mute woman; the
castle has a secret, blood-coloured room; there is a dinner party where the Count shows up
as the last guest.
The adventures in Transylvania make up almost eighty percent of the Icelandic
version (Mina’s trip in search of Harker also takes her all the way to Bistritz; Sister Agatha
92
Ásmundsson (1852-1902) was a journalist, translator and writer. As Hans Corneel de Roos has shown, the
Icelandic version was first serialised in Ásmundsson’s weekly magazine Fjallkonan between 13 January 1900
and 20 March 1901.
93
Stoker was not only a theatre manager and a barrister who had designed his own contract with Constable &
Co., but also a co-director of the “English Library” collection of the Heinemann publishing house who had
negotiated book rights with various authors. He was well aware of plagiarism and copyright issues.
196
becomes a richer character; the Harkers stay in Vienna and consult a neurologist because of
Jonathan’s failing memory). The remaining twenty percent are quite different from the
original. Most of the events in the British part of Dracula are omitted. Instead of a single
encounter with three vampire women in the castle, Harker repeatedly meets a single blonde
vampire girl to whom he feels himself dangerously drawn. The Count appears much more
often and introduces himself in society as “Baron Székély” and, as such, he entertains Lucy
and Mina in Whitby as well as various high-ranking guests at his restored Carfax estate.
Among these guests there are foreign dignitaries such as Prince Koromesz (the Austrian
Ambassador), Countess Ida Varkony (his wife), Margravine Caroma Rubiano (medium and
fortune-teller) and Madame Saint-Amand (wife of the French Ambassador), all involved in
a political and financial conspiracy led by Dracula himself. The Count appears as “an
aristocratic gentleman openly moving around in the highest circles” (de Roos 13). He also
cancels his escape from London and is thus captured and eliminated in England, at his
Carfax estate. Van Helsing is the one who kills him by stabbing him in the heart with a
dagger. Quincey Morris takes the blame but is acquitted after a brief trial.
An important divergence from the 1897 plot is that Count Dracula has a daughter
“who played with the hearts of powerful rulers ‘like a child plays with grapes, before it
sucks out the liquid’” (de Roos 12). Although some occurrences in the Icelandic version
remain just as obscure as those in the English original, it seems that Countess Ida Varkony
and Dracula’s daughter are one and the same. The Count identifies himself as a Szekler and
descendant of Huns, but instead of the historical speech about anti-Ottoman campaigns, he
shows Harker the gallery of portraits of his ancestors, who all seem to be the same person.
Instead of Gipsies, Harker encounters in the castle a large group of men and women,
looking primitive and monkey-like, who are involved with the Count in what appear to be
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Satanic rituals (de Roos 16); the Gipsies, instead, show up in Whitby. Arthur Holmwood
has a sister (Mary), who, against her family’s warnings, has married a Romanian (Prince
Koromesz’s assistant). If some details of the plot make this version very close to ideas that
Stoker had drafted in 1890, others appear to be later developments that never found their
way into the 1897 novel: just like Francis of Teck, Count Dracula has a daughter who tries
to sneak into London high society; and theories of degeneration are made more explicit by
the presence of the primitive Transylvanian acolytes.
The curious existence of such a developed version of the novel, which Stoker
accepted and to which he seems to have contributed details from his working notes, may
have something to do with the very fact that it is an Icelandic edition. Iceland is mentioned
only once in the novel, but it appears in a crucial part of Dracula’s speech about his “race.”
Although mysterious, its presence can be explained in connection with nineteenth-century
theories of the ascendancy of Hungarians and Szeklers that were being promoted by
scholars like Arminius Vambéry and Max Müller. The editors of Dracula insist on
Arminius Vambéry’s fame as an Orientalist, which is indisputable. However, he was also
known as an authority on Hungary and East-Central Europe. When he first came to
England, in 1864, following his Central-Asian trip, Vambéry also delighted his companions
with stories of his native land. Richard Burton’s wife remembers that, in 1864, Vambéry
stayed several days at Lord Houghton’s Yorkshire house, Fryston Hall, where, instead of
recounting his journeys, he told the audience “Hungarian tales” (Isabel Burton I, 348).
Vambéry had many opportunities to talk about Transylvania and its aristocratic families
with the future Edward VII both in Hungary and in England. In 1885, the Prince of Wales
“spent nearly a fortnight at Budapest” and Vambéry “met him frequently” (Vambéry,
198
“Professor Vambéry Speaks” 385). Most of their meetings, however, took place in London
and at Sandringham. Sir Richard Holmes, the librarian at Windsor Castle, remembers
one evening when Professor Vambéry, the great authority on Eastern Europe, and
an old friend of mine, was visiting [King Edward] at Windsor. His Majesty sent for
me to join them, and for an hour or two they discussed the problems of that region. I
listened, and, as I listened, I marvelled that the King should be able to hold his own
in talk with a world-wide authority upon his own particular subject. (Legge, More
about King Edward 156)
Thus, in Holmes’s recollections, the author of Hungary in Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern
Times appears as a universally recognised authority on places like Hungary, Transylvania
and Romania rather than Bukhara and Samarkand. Moreover, King Edward also appears as
deeply interested and knowledgeable.
A fervent Turkophile and Magyarophile, Vambéry was doubly motivated to dislike
Vlad the Impaler, a controversial enemy of Mathias Corvinus (the great hero of Vambéry’s
1887 Hungary) and an iconic anti-Ottoman warrior. In the mid-1850s, as McNally and
Florescu explain, “Vambéry became private secretary to Faud [sic] Mehmed Pasha, a
Turkish politician who was in charge of the occupation troops in Wallachia after the 1848
uprising – one reason why he was well versed in Romanian affairs” (McNally and Florescu
193 n. 274). In the nineteenth century, few people would have appeared as more inimical to
Romanian national interests than Fuad Pasha. Mehmed Fuad Pasha (1814-1869)
commanded the Ottoman army that quelled the Wallachian Revolution of 1848 following a
battle in Bucharest on 13 September that year. The leaders of the revolution were forced
into exile but were allowed to return after the Crimean War. Thereafter, they were at the
forefront of all the major political changes of the nation: the 1859 union with Moldavia, the
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1877 Proclamation of Independence, the 1881 proclamation of the Kingdom of Romania.94
Vambéry’s association with the Ottoman leader (Fuad became Grand Vizier in 1861) as
well as his high opinion of the “Turkish character” in general show him ready to resent any
enemy of the Porte. In fact, if he detested Russia and the tsarist government, “that frightful
instrument of tyranny, that pool of all imaginable slander and abuse, that disgrace to
humanity” (Vambéry, Story of My Struggles 66), the Hungarian put himself in the service
of the Ottoman government. He even managed to befriend the sultan Abdülhamid II (18761909) who “valued the services of one of the few Europeans [i.e., Vambéry] to defend
publicly his handling of the Armenians” (Hamilton 89), while at the same time being “in
the irregular employ of the British Foreign Office” (81) as something midway between a
“spy” (Leatherdale 337 n. 65) and a “government adviser” (Luckhurst 385).
Although a famous orientalist, Vambéry’s interest in the East was indirect. He
remained all his life a firm believer in the idea that Hungarians and Turks, together with
Tartars, Finns and others, belonged to the Turanian or Ural-Altaic race and language
family. He went to Central Asia to look for Altaic skulls and because it was “the supposed
cradle of the Ural-Altaians at the time of the great migration to Europe” (Vambéry, Story of
My Struggles 150) and he “hoped to find in Central Asia a few rays of light to guide [him]
through the dark regions of primitive Hungarian history” (152). As he explains, “The
mysterious origin of the Magyar nation and language, which to this day has not yet been
explained, was a subject which ever since I began my linguistic studies had particularly
interested me” (150). In 1861, the Hungarian Academy sponsored his trip “on condition
that [he] went into the interior of Asia to investigate the relationships of the Magyar
94
Many “48ers” were still alive in the early 1890s (the last one to hold the position of prime minister was Ion
C. Brătianu in 1888).
200
language” (154). Apart from his celebrated English-language travelogues, the trip also
provided material for a series of books and articles arguing in favour of a Turkish affinity
of the Hungarian language. In the 1870s and 1880s, in Hungary, Arminius Vambéry was
one of the two chief adversaries in the so-called “Ugric-Turkish war” (Lafferton 717) over
the origin of the Hungarian language, the other being the comparative linguist and
ethnographer Pál Hunfalvy (1810-1891), who supported the idea of the Finno-Ugric origin.
The authors of The Folk-Tales of the Magyars, published in 1889 under the
direction of Rev. W. Henry Jones and Lewis L. Kropf and consulted by the author of
Dracula (Bram Stoker’s Notes 172-173), dedicate their volume to Arminius Vambéry and
side with his work “which received so favourable a reception at the hands of the whole
learned world [and which] defends . . . a Turco-Tartar descent” (Jones and Kropf xiii) of
Hungarians and Szeklers. Whereas Hunfalvy, Vambéry’s rival, “destroyed several national
myths rooted in romantic historiography, such as the Hunnish-Magyar affinity, or the
Hunnish descent of the Szeklers in Transylvania” (Lafferton 717), in his definitive word on
the subject Vambéry claims that the Hungarian language is closest to Turkish, whereas the
Hungarians as a nation (including the Szeklers) are a mixture of Altaic nations, mostly
Turkish,95 but also Finnish and Mongolian. He writes, in fact, of “the three principal
branches of the Uralo-Altaic race – namely, the Mongolians in the east, the Finn-Ugrians in
the north, and the Turks in the south” (Vambéry, Hungary 32). In the second half of the
nineteenth century, Vambéry was one of the two most important proponents of a Turanian
95
As one commentator explains, “Behind the attack on the Finno-Ugric origin lay nationalist pride: the image
of famous warrior ancestors, whom the whole civilised Western world had feared, was certainly more
appealing to the public than the idea of ‘fish-smelling relatives.’ Hence the public interest in the imaginary
affiliation with the splendid eastern Turks born for ruling, and also the governmental support of Asian
expeditions” (Lafferton 717).
201
race and family of languages. The other was Max Müller, who first suggested it to the
Western world in Lectures on the Science of Language (1862).
In one of his typed research notes, Stoker took information from Nina Mazuchelli’s
Magyarland and wrote the following:
p. 45 Max Muller traces Magyars to Ural Mountains stretching up to Arctic Ocean.
Close affinity of language to idiom of Finnish race east of Volga. Says Magyars are
4th branch of Finnish stock viz. the Ugric – in 4th century were called Ugrogs. (see
Max Muller’s Science of Language). (Mem wehr wolf legend trough Fins). (Bram
Stoker’s Notes 201)
The most interesting part of the note is Stoker’s handwritten memo96 added after the
somewhat disordered ideas taken from Mazuchelli (it looks as if Müller had mentioned
“Ugrogs,” but the term belongs to the author of Magyarland). It has little to do with the
book from which Stoker was taking notes and which does not mention werewolves. In
Dracula, the memo turns into a sentence in which the Count explains the behaviour of his
Szekler ancestors: “Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down
from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Woden gave them, which their Berserkers
displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, ay, and of Asia and Africa too, till
the peoples thought that the werewolves themselves had come” (Dracula 59-60). The
Finnish connection remains implicit and the reader cannot easily understand the link
between Szeklers and Iceland. The editors provide again notes of recovery, defining the
terms “Ugric,” “Thor,” “Woden” and “Berserkers,” but do not explain further.
96
The editors transcribe “werewolf” and “Finns” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 202).
202
In reality, Stoker knew that Magyar tribes (Hungarians and Skeklers) were related to
the Finns (are “of Finnish stock,” as he writes)97 and he also knew of a direct connection
between Finns and Berserkers. He took down several ideas from Sabine Baring-Gould’s
1865 The Book of Were-Wolves, including the apparent confusion “werewolf or berserkir”98
(Bram Stoker’s Notes 129). As the quote from Dracula shows, Stoker was aware of the
difference between the two. He also knew that the Berserkers were a Norse legend and he
associated it with the Vikings, who are implicitly referenced in Dracula’s account.99
However, Baring-Gould also associates Berserkers with Finns, writing that “Finns, Lapps,
and Russians are held in particular aversion [by Swedes], because the Swedes believe that
they have power to change people into wild beasts” (Baring-Gould 109). He also mentions
that in the Icelandic Vatnsdæla Saga “there is a curious account of three Finns, who were
shut up in a hut for three nights, and ordered by Ingimund, a Norwegian chief, to visit
Iceland. . . . Their bodies became rigid, and they sent their souls [on] the errand” (29).
Although Stoker did not take down these particular passages, he must have seen them (the
last quote he took is from page 115) and probably remembered them when he planned to
use Finns as the link between Szeklers (related to Finns, and so to Berserkers) and
werewolves (similar to Berserkers).
Another trace of the implicit Finnish connection is the name of Professor Van
Helsing. McNally and Florescu suggest that it is “derived from the Danish name for
97
Stoker could also have found a lot of information on the subject in William Spottiswoode’s A Tarantasse
Journey through Eastern Russia (1857), a title that he took down (Bram Stoker’s Notes 175). The editors of
the Notes explain that “We do not know if Stoker used any information from this hitherto unidentified source,
but it does contain a map that shows three rivers – the Bistritza, the Sereth and the Pruth – which are
mentioned in the final chapters of Dracula” (175 n. 297). Spottiswoode states in his preface that he based his
account of the nations encountered both on his own observations and on the writings of Max Müller, whom
he mentions again in the chapter about the Finno-Ugric tribes from Siberia.
98
Baring-Gould uses the plural form “Berserkir,” but Stoker does not seem to notice it here.
99
The sentence is ambiguous and “their Berserkers” could mean both “of the Ugric tribe” and “of Thor and
Woden.” Since Stoker knew very well, at least from Baring-Gould’s book, that Berserkers were a Norse
legend, it seems fair to assume that the possessive “their” refers to the Nordic gods.
203
Hamlet’s famed castle Elsinore – Helsingor” (In Search 1994, 147). Elizabeth Miller thinks
that “it may come from Dr Hesselius, the fictional narrator of Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a
Glass Darkly” or from that of “Van Helmont, an ancient alchemist mentioned in T. J.
Pettigrew’s On Superstitions Connected with the History and Nature of Medicine and
Surgery (21), one of Stoker’s source-texts” (Sense & Nonsense 73). However, Van
Helsing’s name seems much more closely related to Sweden and Finland. In Dutch
anthroponomy, the particle “van” indicates the place of origin. Hälsingland, also known in
English as Helsingia, is a province in central Sweden (Osborne I, 212). A native of the
region is called Helsing, Hellsing or Hälsing. The people of Helsingia emigrated to presentday Finland in the Middle Ages and founded the city of Helsinki. Although considered by
the editors of Dracula as either Dutch or German, Van Helsing is likely to be a Dutchman
of Swedish descent with roots in Finland.
Even if Stoker did not confuse people of Finno-Ugric descent with Icelanders, he
probably believed that by making Dracula part-Szekler he was already making him a man
of the North. Right after the abovementioned memo, he wrote: “HUNS under Attila came
between 3rd and 4th centuries – a century or two later came the Avars also of Northern
race. Then came Magyars under Arpad” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 201-202). He was taking
notes from Magyarland, whose author believed that Hungarians “are the descendants of a
Finnish people, who, emigrating southwards through the passes of the Carpathians from
their home in the far North, approached Hungary” (Mazuchelli I, 44), a country which was
“peopled . . . by three distinct and separate colonies of barbarians, whose birthplace was in
the regions of the frozen North” (I, 45), that is, the Huns, the Avars, and the Magyars.
However, in the novel, Dracula is also directly associated with Norse mythology. Van
Helsing compares him with “berserker Icelanders” (Dracula 278), and the Count enters the
204
body of a London Zoo wolf from Norway called Bersicker. Such an association may have
originated in Stoker’s beliefs about the origins of Romanians.
As mentioned before, it is unclear if the author thought that Romanians were
descendants of Dacians and Saxons (see Bram Stoker’s Notes 170-171), but he may have
believed them to have Gothic blood. The land inhabited before the Roman conquest by
Dacians (also known as Getae) was subsequently invaded by Goths and their close
relatives, the Gepids, who settled there for about three and a half centuries (this was duly
noted by Stoker in his handwritten survey of Romanian history). The Goths converted to
Christianity under the local bishop Ulfilas and had their story told by Jordanes in the sixth
century. Jordanes called his work Getica and suggested that the Goths and the Getae were
the same people. Although he rejects the idea, Edward Gibbon in his famous History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire generally preserves the confusion and speaks of
“Goths, or Getae” (Gibbon I, 281 n. 27). One of Stoker’s possible sources, James
Samuelson follows (and quotes) Gibbon to suggest that Dacians and Goths “blended into
one great nation” (Roumania 136). E.C. Johnson, one of the sources that Stoker uses
repeatedly, also relies on Gibbon and writes that the provinces that make up today’s
Romania were conquered by the Romans and remained “comparatively quiet, till they were
surrendered to the fair-haired Scandinavians by [Emperor] Aurelian” (Johnson 105-106).
Nevertheless, in Dracula both the villain and the heroes are associated with
Vikings. Dr Seward appreciates Quincey Morris’s strength of character before Lucy’s death
and writes in his diary that “he bore himself through it like a moral Viking” (Dracula 211).
Later, as Arthur Holmwood is about to drive a stake through Lucy’s heart, Seward notes
that “he looked like a figure of Thor” (254). In Vampires, Mummies and Liberals (1996),
David Glover notices this and speaks of a “closely run antithesis in the novel” (Glover 73),
205
that between the “moral Viking” and the vampire Berserker. He also observes that this is
the only time when Stoker associates the villain with Vikings. In other works, it is only the
heroes who benefit from such an association:
For example, in The Man (1905) the “rough voyages” undertaken by Harold An
Wolf’s “forebears amongst northern seas, though they had been a thousand years
back, had left traces on his imagination, his blood, his nerves!” And a mid-Atlantic
storm is enough to reawaken “the old Berserker spirit” (The Man 279-80).
Similarly, in The Lady of the Shroud (1909), Rupert Sent Leger refers to “the
fighting instinct of my Viking forebears.” (Glover 74)
When he finally met his literary hero Walt Whitman in 1886, Stoker asked him to recount
the death of Abraham Lincoln, and the poet did it by using old Scandinavian imagery: “it
was a wild frenzy of grief and rage. It might have been that the old sagas had been enacted
again when amongst the Vikings a Chief went to the Valhalla with a legion of spirits
around him!” (Stoker, Personal Reminiscences II, 104). In the 1897 novel, Seward’s
appreciation of Morris as “a moral Viking” serves as a pretext to introduce a comment
about American racial superiority (and equality with the British): “If America can go on
breeding men like that, she will be a power in the world indeed!” (Dracula 211). “Moral
Vikings” like Morris and Holmwood are set in marked distinction from the Count, since
they “display a measure of self-control conspicuously absent among those bellicose peoples
who have not yet evolved out of the past” (Glover 74). The antithesis between the “old”
Viking and the “new” Viking, one representing the terrors of the past, the other the
evolved, civilised and entitled man of the present, is consistent with the original ideology of
the Gothic novel.
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6.3 The Right Kind of Blood and the Wrong Kind of Marriage
British Gothic stories can often be ambiguous about the Viking past, which they
sometimes incorporate as terrible evidence of the less civilised parts of either the human
character or human history. As they belong to a pagan or a Catholic period, “the magic
incantations and ghosts in Norse tradition were symbolic of mankind’s superstitious yoke
over which Protestant reason had triumphed” (Rix 5). In Stoker’s interpretation of the
Nordic heritage, one can be either a “moral Viking” like the Anglo-Americans led by (a
possibly Scandinavian) Van Helsing, or a Berserker like Count Dracula, confined to the
primitivism of a “child brain” (Dracula 382). The Anglo-American marriage in Lady
Athlyne is a veritable “teutonic marital alliance,” while by “infecting [Lucy] . . . Dracula is
not only colonising the West, but is also modifying its cultural identity by sapping its moral
and physical energy” (Hughes, Beyond Dracula 142). Even when an Englishman
reinvigorates East-Central-European blood in The Lady of the Shroud, his Balkanic bride
bears the transparent name of Teuta. Considered together, Stoker’s Victorian and
Edwardian novels show him eager to put forward two antithetical narratives that probably
reflected his worldview: a narrative of possible degeneration (in Britain) and a narrative of
possible regeneration (elsewhere) through marriage.
The Dracula editors usually explain the antithesis as a clash of civilisations and
insist on the role played by religion, despite the fact that Bram Stoker is manifestly vague
about it. Religious and esoteric symbols and rituals are important in the novel, but there are
no clear references, positive or negative, to denominations, other than Jonathan Harker’s
acknowledgement of his being “an English Churchman” who has been taught “to regard
[the crucifix] as in some measure idolatrous” (Dracula 35). Words like “Catholic” or
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“Protestant” do not appear in the novel; nor are there any priests or ministers, other than
“the chaplain of the English mission church” (140) in Budapest, who marries Jonathan and
Mina Harker. However, among the editors and other commentators, there is consensus
about the novel’s anti-Catholic ideology, which would make Dracula sufficiently
conventional in its propaganda. The Gothic novel had “to be set . . . in historically and
culturally enemy territory, [often] Catholic – French, Spanish or Italian – marking
Catholicism as a spiritual orientalism in British Protestant imagination” (Duncan 24). Yet,
unlike other Gothic creations, Count Dracula is never clearly associated with Catholicism;
and his multiethnic origin does not link him to any one particular denomination.
Moreover, nowhere does Stoker say that Van Helsing is Catholic. Nevertheless, the
editors of Dracula are in agreement with regards to both the Dutch Professor’s religious
affiliation and the nature of the symbols and rituals that he uses in his fight against
vampires. The first clue about Van Helsing’s Catholicism is “the little golden crucifix”
(Dracula 202) that he produces in the Westenra tomb. Even if Jonathan Harker, a known
member of the Church of England, had protected himself with a similar crucifix in
Transylvania, this appears to at least one editor to be the first moment when “we learn of
Van Helsing being Catholic . . . the Dutch are a mostly Protestant nation. His Catholicism
perhaps places Van Helsing from the Limburg region, which possesses a stronger Catholic
identity” (Leatherdale 249 n. 20).100 The fact that Van Helsing’s wife lives in an insane
asylum causes similar remarks: “Being Catholic, Van Helsing is unable to divorce her, even
if he wanted to” (Leatherdale 263 n. 100); “Van Helsing, like Jane Eyre’s Rochester, has a
Bertha Rochester in his attic. . . . Van Helsing is . . . married to a madwoman whom, as a
100
In fact, in the late nineteenth century, Limburg and Noord Brabant were the only two Dutch provinces
where Catholic religious services were tolerated. It seems unlikely that Van Helsing could have been a
Professor at the University of Amsterdam if he were Catholic.
208
Catholic, he cannot divorce” (Wolf 219 n. 26).101 Clive Leatherdale also insists that Van
Helsing is Catholic because, when he leaves Lucy’s tomb, “[h]e crosses himself, but the
others, not being Catholic, do not” (Leatherdale 309 n. 67) and because he owns a missal.
Since the Professor reads from it in English, Leatherdale suggests he must have borrowed
it, because “Van Helsing’s Catholic prayer book would be in Dutch” (347 n. 19). However,
a missal can be any prayer book102 and the fact that this particular one is in English (or
Dutch) actually shows103 it is not Catholic.
The most important proof of Van Helsing’s Catholic affiliation appears to be the
ritual killing of the undead Lucy, in which the Professor uses a host as a form of protection
against vampires. The editors concur that the host is “[t]he Catholic communion wafer”
(Auerbach and Skal 187 n. 1), although they also admit that “the professor acts totally
outside Church law” (Leatherdale 303 n. 22; see also Riquelme 217; Auerbach and Skal
187 n. 1; Wolf 255 n. 2).104 What really convinces the editors is the fact that Dr Seward
refers to Van Helsing’s host as “the to him most sacred of things” (Dracula 248). As the
phrase sets the Professor apart from his Anglo-American friends, the editors conclude that
Van Helsing “is the only Catholic in the group” (Leatherdale 303 n. 24) addressing “his
non-Catholic audience” (Riquelme 217). However, Lutherans also believe in the real
presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist and hold the host in the highest
esteem; and they also use the sign of the cross as well as the crucifix (Book of Concord 374,
412, 618). Lutheranism is the established church in all Scandinavian countries and Van
101
Here, Wolf seems to forget that Rochester was not Catholic. Protestant Churches were not much more
lenient on the subject of divorce.
102
English Churchman Jonathan Harker also uses the term when he notices in Transylvania “little towns or
castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals” (Dracula 33).
103
The Roman Missal (Missale Romanum) was translated for the first time into English in 1970 and started
being used in 1973. Therefore, if Van Helsing’s missal were, in fact, Catholic, it would be in Latin.
104
The fact that Van Helsing claims to have an “indulgence” for the blasphemous use of the host temporarily
makes several of the editors doubt his Catholicism.
209
Helsing could have Swedish and/or Finnish roots. Moreover, Max Müller, Stoker’s likely
model for Van Helsing, was Lutheran. His mother, Adelheide von Basedow, “was also
deeply religious and the Lutheran religion played an important part in the life shared by
Müller and [her]” (Beckerlegge 179). Because he was Lutheran, Müller had “to convince
his future wife’s [Georgina Grenfell] family of the soundness of both his financial
prospects and his Christian beliefs” (182) and his academic career at Oxford suffered.
In Stoker’s novel, religion plays a major part, but Catholicism is not clearly depicted
or identified as a feature of either the heroes or the villains. Nor are any anti-Catholic
feelings made explicit. After fleeing Castle Dracula, Jonathan Harker finds shelter in what
must be a Catholic hospital (the St Joseph and Ste Mary) in Budapest (Dracula 134) and
Sister Agatha, who informs Mina of her fiancé’s status, is a minor but sympathetic
character. So is the woman in Bistriţa who presents Harker with a crucifix and entreats him
to accept it for his mother’s sake. Stoker’s working notes contain absolutely no reference to
Catholicism. Instead, in one of the handwritten notes on the plot, dedicated to the vampire’s
characteristics, Stoker wrote: “Memo (2) . . . attitude with regard to religion – only moved
by relics older than own real date – xxx century” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 21). The century is
unclear, and the editors explain: “It looks as if Stoker had not yet decided when, i.e., in
what century, his vampire would be born” (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 21 n. 44). In the
novel, the vampire hunters also are unsure until Van Helsing, with information provided by
his friend Arminius, concludes that “He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who
won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land”
(Dracula 280). The Count’s birth is thus placed in the fifteenth century and Stoker’s note
helps explain why Protestantism, founded in the sixteenth century, does not affect Dracula
or his victims (Lucy, Mina, Renfield), while under his spell.
210
If his religion is unclear (and probably irrelevant after so many centuries and after
his occult apprenticeship in the School of Scholomance), Dracula’s “attitude with regard to
religion” is obvious. He is immune to Protestant rationality, but vulnerable to religious
symbols and rituals from the past, that is from the fifteenth century and before. Rather than
a representative of the past because he belongs to Catholicism, like other Gothic characters,
Dracula is representative of Catholicism because he belongs to the past. For Dracula’s
Protestant enemies, as imagined by the Anglican Bram Stoker, Catholicism was first and
foremost an unfortunate interruption of the development of the Christian Church in the
British Isles, from its Celtic origins until the Reformation. In the late nineteenth century,
“the standard Protestant line portray[ed] the Celtic Church as a proud and independent
entity locked in conflict with Rome . . . a heroic remnant who bravely tried to resist alien
Continental ways” (Bradley 126).
Such a perspective on Church history was already common knowledge for Stoker’s
precursors, the Dublin Huguenots Charles Maturin and Sheridan Le Fanu (Sage 41), and it
was theorised by two Anglican historians of the Church: the Scot William Skene (brother
of James Henry Skene, who wrote about Vlad the Impaler), author of Celtic Scotland: A
History of Ancient Alba (1876-1880), and the Englishman Sabine Baring-Gould (one of
Stoker’s major sources), in his fifteen-volume The Lives of Saints (1872-1877).
Nevertheless, it was “in Ireland that the battle between different denominations as to who
represented the true Celtic Christian inheritance was fiercest” (Bradley 129). For Anglicans
like Jonathan Harker and Bram Stoker, British Protestantism had its roots in the Celtic
Church, while Catholicism was an unnatural interruption and a foreign relic of the medieval
past, uncivilised and superstitious.
211
One of the commentators of Dracula has noted that the Count’s arrival in Whitby,
rather than anywhere else,105 may play “on the resonances of the Synod of Whitby, and its
role in ensuring that the Christianisation of England took an invasive Roman – or
‘European’ – rather than a Celtic form” (Goldsworthy 91). All editors are in agreement that
Stoker chose Whitby because he had spent the summer of 1890 there, had admired the old
abbey and had found out about the Russian schooner shipwrecked in the harbour in 1885. A
single editor also mentions that “In 663-664, the Synod of Whitby was held at the abbey, to
determine the future of the Northumbrian Church. . . . A majority of the attendees chose
Rome” (Klinger 121 n. 5). For many British Protestants who “sought to identify themselves
with native traditions” (Bradley 135) and regarded Catholicism as a mere interruption, the
Synod of Whitby had come to symbolise the unfortunate turn of events that was only
corrected by Henry VIII’s Reform in the sixteenth century.106 The Britons of the nineteenth
century had three major scares that Catholicism might invade their islands and their Church
again: the Oxford Movement (also known as Tractarianism) of the 1830s-1850s; the dogma
of papal infallibility, introduced in the early 1870s, which generated Gladstone’s bestselling response The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance (1874); and the
new “[s]ensitivity over matters of ritual in the 1890s” (Sage 48). In Dracula, the
encroachment of such rituals and beliefs of the past upon Protestant modernity is a major
source of fear.
105
In one of his early notes on the plot, the author has Dracula arrive in Dover (Bram Stoker’s Notes 19).
This view survived well into the twentieth century and is incorporated in Arnold Toynbee’s celebrated The
Study of History. In “A General Introduction for My Work,” W. B. Yeats quotes from Toynbee and notes that
the historian “describes the birth and decay of what he calls the Far Western Christian Culture; it lost at the
Synod of Whitby its chance of mastering Europe” (Yeats 516). The author of Dracula owned The Countess
Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics, one of Yeats’s early attempts to resurrect native Celtic traditions,
with the inscription: “To Bram Stoker with the compliments and best regards of W.B. Yeats, Sept. 1893”
(Stoker, Forgotten Writings 231).
106
212
Van Helsing’s (and Max Müller’s) Lutheranism acts as an intermediary between the
forward-looking Church of England of the heroes and Dracula, the monster of a bygone era.
Nevertheless, the editors of the novel insist that the vampire hunters have to resort to
Catholic weapons and that they even have a Catholic leader in Van Helsing. However,
Dracula’s enemies need to be spiritually different from the vampire Count. After all, even
Vambéry, the model for Van Helsing’s friend Arminius, was a Protestant convert. Born
into a Jewish family and a fervent Zionist in his later life, Vambéry converted to Protestant
Christianity in 1865 so as to be admitted into the faculty of the University of Budapest.
Still, this could not happen without “the help of an imperial order straight from AustroHungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, whom Vambéry personally petitioned in Vienna” and
thereby he was “admitted into the Catholic university as the first ‘Protestant’ faculty
member” (Mandler 2). Dracula needed to be utterly different from his pursuers, because he
is “the antithesis of the trueborn Englishman . . . of the educated, well-travelled AngloSaxon” (McLean 332). He is “otherness itself” (Halberstam 334), which becomes explicit
in the novel when his criminal character and his underdeveloped “child-brain” (Dracula
382) can be explained through the writings of Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso.
In the late nineteenth century, “criminal anthropology constituted at once a political
geography, a conjectural history of civilisation, [and] an evolutionary account of organisms
and races” (Pick 141). As the editors of Dracula reveal, Cesare Lombroso was “the father
of modern criminology. He felt that the born criminal is an abnormal mental throwback to
his primitive ancestors. His description of the criminal type is similar to Van Helsing’s and
Harker’s portrayals of Dracula, especially the idea that Dracula has a child’s brain”
(McNally and Florescu 255 n. 348). His “L’uomo Delinqente [sic], or Criminal Man
(1875), was an influential anatomy of deviance in criminals, who, Lombroso claimed,
213
could be identified by their facial and racial characteristics” (Auerbach and Skal 296 n. 4).
Lombroso’s ideas are “closely followed” (Wolf 403 n. 25) in the novel, especially in the
description Harker gives of the vampire Count. Equally authoritative at the time was Max
Nordau, also invoked by Van Helsing. Although, as McNally and Florescu explain, his
famous book on Degeneration was supposed “to demonstrate the close relationship
between genius and moral degeneracy” (255 n. 347), its most influential ideas was “that
civilised man was degenerating intellectually as well as physically and that the modern era
was one of decadence and confusion” (Riquelme 336).
Other editors go very far when they suggest that Nordau’s book “argued that the
human race, especially the Anglo-Saxon, was deteriorating and was thus fated to endure
cultural decay” (Auerbach and Skal 296 n. 3). In fact, Nordau speaks of “classes” in
Western Europe, rather than “the human race” and, although he dedicates a chapter to the
Pre-Raphaelites and mentions Oscar Wilde, his bêtes noires are the French modernists. He
dedicated his book to Cesare Lombroso and offered a “therapeutics” for the “cultivated
classes” of Europe who are threatened by “retrogression” (Nordau, Degeneration 555).
Degeneration, which was published in English in 1895 by Heinemann, the publisher for
which Bram Stoker worked at the time, “was only the most notorious of a steady stream of
texts propounding theories of cultural decline from the 1860s onwards” (Warwick 211).
One such proponent was Max Müller who, in an essay on “The Savage” published in 1885
by The Nineteenth Century, divided his subject into two categories: the “progressive
savages,” which were all European nations at some point in their history – the term “applies
to the Aryan race only” (Müller, “The Savage” 124); and “retrogressive savages,” which
are the result of “gradual degeneracy” (119) and who “are dying out wherever they are
brought in contact with European civilisation” (118). Count Dracula is such a
214
“retrogressive savage,” a member of “a great and noble race” (Dracula 280) that has
decayed over the centuries. His presence in London jeopardises the future of civilisation,
unless civilisation itself is ready to fight back and make his kith and kin extinct.
Often seen as a more benevolent view of East Central Europe, The Lady of the
Shroud, Stoker’s novel set in the fictional Balkan state of the Blue Mountain, actually
completes Max Müller’s theory on “retrogressive savages.” The novel’s hero, Rupert Sent
Leger, describes the Blue Mountaineers as “the most primitive people I have ever met – the
most fixed to their own ideas, which belong to centuries back” (Lady of the Shroud 83).
Count Dracula is a representative of such a people, and suddenly cannot find his place
among them and seeks his own regeneration narrative amidst London’s “teeming millions.”
Like Francis of Teck, who “was regarded in his adopted country as not only foreign but
also, in a sense, stateless” (Rose 30), Dracula is a man without a country, because he feels
out of place even in his native Transylvania, a “space [where] he remains profoundly
unheimlich” (Ferguson 237). Unlike him, by marrying the heiress Teuta, the Englishman
Sent Leger is able to work on “build[ing] up . . . a new ‘nation’ – an ally of Britain” (The
Lady of the Shroud 328), which can benefit from Western ideas to become a local power.
This is consistent with the Oxford professor’s ideas that some of the modern primitives,
“though shaken by a sudden contact with the benefits and dangers of a higher civilisation,
may regain their former health and vigour, and, from having been retrogressive savages,
become once more progressive in the great struggle for existence” (Müller, “The Savage”
123).
Stoker owned the five volumes of Henry Hunter’s 1789 translation of Lavater’s
Essays on Physiognomy (Stoker, Forgotten Writings 237) and his Dublin diary shows him
passionate about phrenology. While he knew Müller personally, he may have known
215
Nordau through their mutual friend Vambéry. Nordau first met Vambéry in 1875 and they
remained good friends until the latter’s death in 1913. When Vambéry’s The Story of My
Struggles was reissued posthumously, it was introduced by Nordau’s preface, in which the
latter tells the story of his friendship with the “revered man” (Nordau, “My Recollections of
Vambéry” xxi). Perhaps because ideas such as those of Nordau and Müller were current in
the Late Victorian era, the editors of Dracula do not always insist on the obsolescence of
theories about degeneracy and atavism. Leatherdale remains neutral and calls Nordau’s
Degeneration a “controversial book” (464 n. 113). Glennis Byron provides an excerpt from
Lombroso’s The Delinquent Man without suggesting that the book’s tenets might seem
erroneous today. When Van Helsing mentions the two theorists, Byron simply notes: “Max
Nordau (1849-1923), German physician and journalist; Cesar Lombroso (1836-1909),
Italian criminologist. See Appendix F” (Byron 383 n. 1).107 Such annotations that rely
exclusively on sources that would have been available to Stoker without any clarification as
to their possible mistakes enhance the forms of othering present in Dracula and, when they
also provide supplementary material contemporary with the novel, they can deepen the
othering.
107
In “Appendix F,” Lombroso and Nordau are introduced as “scientists from diverse areas [who] contributed
to the debate over society in crisis” (Byron 468).
216
217
Part III
Dracula, Transylvania and Romania
218
Chapter 7
Othering: Place
The reader of Dracula spends less than one third of the story outside England: the
first four chapters are set in Transylvania; the last three are spent on the road through
Romania, back to the vampire’s lair. These seven chapters are the most extensively
annotated, as they include references to places, people and customs unfamiliar to both the
late-Victorian and the contemporary reader. Bram Stoker relied on nineteenth-century
British travel writers, who found in the “quaint[ness]” (Gephardt 293) of Transylvania and
Romania “an occasion for underscoring the alterity of the region” (295). In Dracula, Stoker
preserves and enhances this alterity by turning the region into a land fit for vampires with
the help of his readings. He reproduces almost word for word the passages that suit his
creative project; he passes over the ones that do not; and he adds original ideas that
sometimes clash with the information that these travelogues provide. In a fairly similar
way, the novel’s annotators themselves contribute to the othering of Transylvania and
Romania in three distinct ways.
First, they use nineteenth-century British sources for two different reasons: to give
the contemporary reader the same kind of knowledge that the Victorians had; and to show
the actual provenance of the descriptions, since it has been established that Stoker never
travelled to the region. This means that editors quote from or paraphrase both texts that the
author of Dracula knew and read; and texts that he may or may not have known, but date
largely from the same period. However, what they do not do is discuss the possibility that
these sources could be misinformed. For example, the editors of Dracula provide ample
219
passages from some of Stoker’s well-known sources such as Emily Gerard or Sabine
Baring-Gould without mentioning the likelihood that their accounts are crude
exaggerations, thereby perpetuating the idea that Transylvanian folklore is replete with
vampire beliefs, and that Catholicism and Orthodoxy are mostly collections of
superstitions.
Second, the editors often use modern sources, including modern reference books, to
explain Romanian places, customs or historical facts. However, they never use any
Romanian source, old or new, even if some are available in English. Despite the fact that
Dracula is replete with information about Romania, scholarly editions of the novel contain
no references to Romanian maps, atlases, geography and history books, or books of
anthropology, ethnography or folklore. This causes many inaccuracies to occur in all
critical editions of Dracula – all originating in the methodological (and political) fault of
disregarding local sources, which Edward Said has expounded through his re-interpretation
of Marx’s sentence: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (Said
21).108 Just like the Victorian travellers who inspired Stoker, the editors of the novel rely on
– often obsolete – encyclopaedia entries and on their own observations as tourists. Most of
them have taken the “Dracula Tour” through Romania and make reference to their travel
experience. Just like the Victorian travellers, they use in their annotations what has been
reported before by other Westerners and sometimes mention conversations with Romanians
who have accompanied them as guides on the voyage.109
108
Marx speaks of the political representation (or lack thereof) of mid-nineteenth century peasantry, but Said
applies the formula to the discourse of Western Orientalists who do not use local scholarly sources (Said 2022). Gayatri Spivak offers another seminal interpretation of Marx’s passage (Spivak 276-280).
109
This is also true of the three Romanian specialists who are mentioned in the editions. Wolf acknowledges
two researchers from the Cluj Agronomic Institute with whom he corresponded. They were consulted in one
trivial matter: the existence (or inexistence) of the “Golden Mediasch” wine, as stated in Chapter 1. McNally
and Florescu acknowledge the support of “Mihai Pop, professor emeritus and former director of the Folklore
220
Third, they add information – from old and new sources – that has little bearing on
the novel, but which supports its representation of Transylvania as the land of vampires.
Most of this information comes from two sources, Agnes Murgoçi (1926) and Montague
Summers (1928), that Stoker could not have known. Stoker took from Emily Gerard’s 1885
article on “Transylvanian Superstitions” a brief passage about vampire beliefs and
imagined the rest. Both Murgoçi and Summers were vampire enthusiasts who looked for
proof that Stoker’s account of Romanian vampires was well-founded. Many of the editors
of Dracula profess a similarly enthusiastic adherence to the world represented by a late
Victorian work of fiction, which can explain why they support and enhance the
representations provided by the novel. Sometimes they add representations of their own,
such as this comment by one of the editors about the sojourn in Varna: “Dracula might not
appear, but, according to Montague Summers, Bulgaria is vampire country” (Leatherdale
454 n. 41).
Despite the plethora of essays on Dracula that have been published over the last
half a century, only a surprisingly small number110 discuss Stoker’s representation of
Transylvania and Romania. However, as one of the commentators of the novel has noticed,
“Most of Stoker’s fiction is acutely aware of the places where they are set, and I hope that
someone will eventually address the importance of geography in Stoker’s fiction” (Senf 99
n. 45). In Dracula, what Stoker does not describe is just as important as what and how he
describes. The Borgo Pass receives most of the attention from his narrators as well as from
the editors of the novel. All the other places that appear in Dracula are either only
Institute in Bucharest” (McNally and Florescu 4), although Pop’s team only helped the two authors in
gathering a couple of contemporary legends about the historical Dracula for a different book (McNally and
Florescu, In Search, 79-81). No book or article written by a Romanian appears to have been consulted by any
of the editors.
110
The first such essay is Walker and Wright’s “Locating Dracula: Contextualising the Geography of
Transylvania” (1998), followed over the next decade by a few articles by Duncan Light and Marius Crişan.
221
mentioned by name or are described in terms of historical geography. The editors usually
conform and explain them in similar fashion, but their choices are hardly consistent. Some
places are described as they were before, during and after the events in the novel; others,
only before and during or during and after; yet others as they were in only one of the
possible moments. No editor makes of any one of these choices a habit and the reader is
given a motley image of Transylvania and Romania.
7.1 The Lay of the Land
The historical provinces that make up present-day Romania are not easy to
understand and even harder to explain without some visual aid. That is why editions of
Dracula in which terms like “Transylvania,” “Moldavia” or “Bukovina” are annotated
would benefit from the presence of maps.111 Since most editors provide a description of the
provinces at the time when the novel was written, at the time when the edition was
published, and during the centuries that preceded the events narrated in Dracula, one map
would have been necessary for each of the periods described. In reality, only three editions
include maps. Wolf’s first edition, The Annotated Dracula (1975), has a map of Romania
and Transylvania, presumably from the late Victorian era, since all the names are in
German. The source of the map is nowhere indicated in the volume. The names and
boundaries of the major provinces are almost unintelligible and smaller provinces are not
present. It is, in fact, a map “showing the Railway and Steamboat Communications and the
chief roads” (Wolf 1975, 335). Many places that appear in the novel (Bistritz, Borgo Pass
111
See such maps on pages 226-227 of this dissertation.
222
or Galatz) are on this map, but they are overshadowed by roads and railways.112 Moreover,
when he re-edited Stoker’s novel as The Essential Dracula (1993), Wolf did not include
any maps.
McNally and Florescu also include a map of the region, said to be an “adaptation of
[a] Map of Transylvania Published in Vienna 1566” (30). The editors have worked into this
medieval-looking map the location of Poenari (which they propose as the “real” Castle
Dracula) and other Wallachian places connected with the historical Dracula that are not
mentioned in the novel. More importantly, their map has so many errors – probably
inherited from the 1566 version – as to become completely useless: Bistrista (sic) is placed
north of Buda, rather than east; Cluj is west of Buda, instead of east; the Borgo Pass is
placed somewhere along the western frontier of Transylvania and, as such, far away from
Bukovina, to which it is supposed to lead; Braşov, Bran and Ţara Bârsei, all in southern
Transylvania, are placed in southern Moldavia; and although the names of all three major
provinces – Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania – are indicated on the map, it is very
hard to understand their sizes and boundaries. The only other edition that provides maps is
Leslie Klinger’s The New Annotated Dracula (2008). He reproduces a map of Bukovina
from Charles Boner’s 1865 Transylvania: Its Products and Its People; a map of Moldavia
from the 1896 Baedeker guide for Austria; and a modern map of the Carpathian Mountains
from the now-discontinued Internet encyclopaedia Encarta. However, Klinger’s maps do
not reveal the exact location of the Romanian provinces.
Simply put, “Transylvania is one of three regions that make up contemporary
Romania” (Light 28), together with Wallachia and Moldavia. Nevertheless, placing it in
relation to the other two provinces can prove quite difficult. The first two editions of
112
The volume also includes similar maps of nineteenth-century London, England and Europe.
223
Dracula (both of which were entirely or partially prepared by scholars born in Romania)
give divergent interpretations of the map. In one version, Transylvania is a “high plateau in
modern north and central Romania” (Wolf 3 n. 12); in the other, it “comprises the Western
portion of Romania” (McNally and Florescu 52 n. 10). Subsequent editors follow one or
the other of the two representations: it is “in western Romania” (Auerbach and Skal 9 n. 7);
or it is “located in the central part of modern Romania, high in the mountains” (Luckhurst
363). Other editors avoid the debate by stating simply that Transylvania is “a part of
Romania” (Byron 32 n. 1) or “a province of modern Romania” (Leatherdale 29 n. 16).
Both Wolf and McNally/Florescu are actually right, although their description of the
map is incomplete: Transylvania is at the same time in the centre, north and west of
present-day Romania. Put together, the three historical provinces give the map of Romania
the aspect of an uneven circle.113 Each province constitutes roughly one third of the
country’s land mass. To understand the positions they occupy on the map, it is sufficient to
draw a circle and divide it into three equal sections. First, one should draw a radius from
the centre of the circle straight up to the circumference; next, two more radii should be
drawn so as to form three 120-degree angles. Just like the three sections of the circle, all
three historical provinces of Romania occupy the centre. The northern part is occupied by
both Moldavia (towards the east) and Transylvania (towards the west), with the latter also
leaning southwestwardly. The southern section is Wallachia.114
113
For the purpose of this explanation, I consider the historical province of Moldavia in its entirety, as it was
until the end of World War II, when more than half of its territory was annexed by the Soviet Union. Today,
this territory forms the independent Republic of Moldova and small parts of Ukraine.
114
See diagram on the next page.
224
Transylvania
Moldavia
Wallachia
History115 complicates this simple and harmonious picture and is responsible for the
fact that the three names also designate smaller regions inside the bigger ones. The editors
of Dracula can easily become confused by the many changes. The historical principality of
Moldavia (in Romanian, “Moldova”) lost its south-eastern corner, called Bessarabia (in
Romanian, “Basarabia”) in the sixteenth century. It was occupied by the Turks, then by the
Russians. In 1812, the entire eastern half of Moldavia (between the Prut and Dniester
rivers) was occupied by the Russians, who transformed it into a governorate. This territory
was attached to Bessarabia and this name was given to the whole newly created region. At
115
For a good historical account of these provinces up to the end of World War I, see R.W. Seton-Watson,
History of Roumanians (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1934). For an updated version, see Vlad Georgescu, The
Romanians: A History (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1991).
225
Figure 7.1 The three historical provinces during the lifetime of Vlad the Impaler.
Transylvania proper is in yellow (source: Vasile Pascu, Atlas Didactic de Istorie).
the end of the Crimean War, Russia was forced to restore Bessarabia proper (the three
southernmost districts in the Tsarist governorate of Bessarabia) to Moldavia. The truncated
principality of Moldavia united with Wallachia soon after the Crimean War, in 1859, and
became thus part of a new state called Romania, which proclaimed its independence in
1877. However, at the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, the new Romanian state was forced to give
Bessarabia proper back to Russia in exchange for the province of Dobrudja (in Romanian,
“Dobrogea”), on the western shore of the Black Sea. The governorate of Bessarabia became
again a part of Moldavia when it united with Romania in 1918, but it was annexed by
Soviet Russia in 1940 and 1944. Most of its territory became the independent Republic of
Moldova in 1991 – its northern part as well as most of Bessarabia proper, in the south, had
been severed during Stalin’s regime and are now in Ukraine.
226
Figure 7.2 The historical provinces subdivided into smaller regions (source: Pascu, Atlas).
Figure 7.3 The provinces today. Transylvania proper is in blue (source: Romanian Ministry
of Education).
227
Moldavia is mentioned only once in the novel: Harker notes that the district where
Dracula’s castle is situated “is in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of
three states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian
mountains, one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe” (Dracula 32). If
“Harker errs here in describing Moldavia as a ‘state’” (Klinger 17 n. 21) – in fact, in
describing all three provinces as “states” – he is right in locating the district in the east of
Transylvania, close to both Moldavia and Bukovina, as they were understood at the time
from an Austro-Hungarian perspective.116 However, it is difficult to understand the exact
position of Moldavia relative to Castle Dracula without a map. Only two editions of the
novel give some coordinates: “Province of Romania located between the Carpathian
mountains (west) the Dniester River (east) and Wallachia to the south” (McNally and
Florescu 53 n. 11); “Moldavia is situated between the Carpathians to the west, the Dniester
River to the east, and Wallachia to the south” (Klinger 17 n. 21). Klinger’s edition
reproduces almost verbatim McNally/Florescu in delineating not the province of today or
of Stoker’s time, but the historical principality of Moldavia, which reached the Dniester
River (in Romanian, “Nistru”) from the mid-fourteenth to the early nineteenth century.
Both editions provide maps that contradict this representation; the province is smaller on
Klinger’s maps and the Moldavian rivers bear no names on the medieval sketch displayed
in McNally/Florescu.
The confusion seems to be caused by the desire to incorporate details of historical
geography. One editor is entirely ahistorical and describes Moldavia simply as “Province of
Romania” (Byron 32 n. 2). McNally/Florescu remain idiosyncratic in their attempt to create
116
It would be more accurate to say that the castle is in the east of an Austro-Hungarian province
(Transylvania), close to Romania (Moldavia) and to another Austro-Hungarian province (Bukovina).
228
a parallel narrative about the medieval ruler Vlad Ţepeş. The boundaries they provide for
the historical principality fit perfectly their description of a fifteenth-century Moldavia:
“Dracula lived in Moldavia at the court of his kinsman Prince Bogdan at Suceava, and was
given a classic Renaissance education by monks from a neighbouring monastery” (McNally
and Florescu 53 n. 11). No further information is given about Moldavia in Victorian times
or in the 1970s, when they produced the edition of the novel. All the other editors try to
define Moldavia as it was in Stoker’s time; to compare late-nineteenth century Moldavia
with the present situation; or to concentrate the entire history of the province in a few lines.
Leatherdale is the only one who makes a comparison between the 1890s and the 1990s:
“Moldavia was, in 1893, and is today a part of Romania. Its eastern portions, however,
were annexed by the Soviet Union after World War II. Today they constitute the
independent state of Moldova” (29 n. 18). He, too, starts by mentioning the historical
principality, which makes both sentences inexact: Russia first annexed the eastern part of
Moldavia as early as 1812, which means that the province was fragmented not only today,
but also in 1893; and the Soviet Union further divided the seized territory, the north and
south of which are today not in the Republic of Moldova, but in Ukraine.
Two editions portray Moldavia solely as it was in the late nineteenth century. One is
quite correct in saying that, around the time that Stoker wrote Dracula, “Moldavia was a
province of Romania, which had become a kingdom in 1881” (Auerbach and Skal 10 n.
8).117 The other is surprisingly off the mark: “A district of Romania from 1861 to 1940,
covering 13,000 square miles. Its capital was Kishinev” (Wolf 3 n. 13). Based on the area
provided and the name of the capital (the Russian version of the name Chişinău), Wolf
117
More accurate would have been to say that Harker refers to a part of the historical principality of
Moldavia, which formed a province of Romania at the time.
229
clearly refers not to the historical principality, to the Romanian province of the 1890s, to
the Romanian province of the 1990s, to the governorate of Bessarabia as it was in Stoker’s
time, or even to the present-day Republic of Moldova. His note describes the Soviet
Socialist Republic of Moldova as it was in 1975, when he published the first annotated
edition of Dracula and Russian was one of the two official languages of the country. He
only changed one thing between 1975 and 1993: in the first version, the note ended with the
words “See map, p. 335” (Wolf 1975, 3 n. 11). No maps are provided in the 1993 edition,
but the one included in 1975 clearly shows that “Kisinew” (the map is German) was not in
Romania at the time when the novel was written (see Wolf 1975, 335). Even the years
provided suggest that Wolf refers to the eastern part of Moldavia, which belonged to
Romania only between the two world wars (1918-1940) and then between 1941 and 1944.
However, there were no frontier changes in 1861.118 Also, the territory is too large to be
called a “district.” Nevertheless, another editor – who does not annotate “Moldavia,” but
one of its rivers – seems to follow Wolf when he writes that “[t]he Pruth formed the eastern
boundary of Romania, separating the district of Moldavia from Russia” (Riquelme 346).
The two most recent editors concentrate several centuries of the history of Moldavia
in a few lines: “A former principality, Moldavia, together with Wallachia, was part of the
Kingdom of Romania, which gained its independence in 1878, after publication of the
Boner and Crosse books on which Harker apparently relied for his information. Its chief
town was Jassy, not far from the Pruth River” (Klinger 17 n. 21); “Moldavia was an
independent state, which combined with Wallachia to form the basis of modern Romania in
118
Wolf may have remembered the year 1861 because that is the year when the union between the
principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (realised in 1859) was recognised by the Western powers and
Turkey. The territory he describes, with Chişinău as its capital, was not part of this unifying effort. One
should note that Harker correctly uses the term “district” for a smaller subdivision of a “state” like
Transylvania or Moldavia.
230
1859. The territory is now divided between Romania and the Republic of Moldova”
(Luckhurst 363). Both editors gloss over the fact that Moldavia as part of Romania does not
cover the same territory as the historical province – and this is all the more contradictory in
Klinger’s note which, as stated above, also gives Moldavia’s boundaries as being the
Carpathians, Wallachia and the Dniester River. Both offer reasons for Stoker’s mistake of
calling Moldavia a “state” in an 1897 novel. Luckhurst very generously calls Moldavia
before 1859 “an independent state,” although it was only autonomous and although almost
four decades separate its union with Wallachia from the publication of Dracula. Klinger
uses the fact that both Boner’s and Crosse’s books were written before Romanian
independence as justification,119 although other major sources for the novel (E.P. Johnson,
Emily Gerard, Mazuchelli) were published after the Treaty of Berlin and although a new
country called Romania had already existed since 1859. Perhaps more importantly,
Klinger’s 2008 edition calls Moldavia’s capital “Jassy” (in Romanian Iaşi). The city is not
mentioned in Dracula and the only reason why a twenty-first-century editor would want to
call it “Jassy,” as it would have appeared on an Austro-Hungarian map, is to keep the
reader anchored in the novel’s German-sounding toponymy even while he is reading the
annotations.
Another “state” mentioned by Harker is Bukovina (in Romanian, “Bucovina”). The
name appears eight times in the novel – after all, “the Borgo Pass leads from [Bistritz] into
Bukovina” (Dracula 34) – including once in the last chapter, because the vampire-hunters
have to go through this territory on their way to Castle Dracula. Bukovina is in fact just
another part of the historical principality of Moldavia. It was seized by the Austrians in
119
Charles Boner’s Transylvania: Its Products and Its People (1865). Andrew Crosse’s Round about the
Carpathians was published in 1878, but it narrates a trip taken in 1875 and it only mentions that, at the time
the manuscript was ready, “the Russo-Turkish war began” (Crosse 209).
231
1774 (the annexation was made official in January 1775) and held until 1918. The
Austrians gave it its name, since for Moldavians it had never been a distinct province.120
The territory reunited with Romania after World War I, but the Soviet Union seized the
northern half of the former Austro-Hungarian province in 1944 and this is now a region in
Ukraine. Again, the editors of the novel had to choose to describe Bukovina before, during
and after the time of Dracula. Only one edition gives a description of “before” and
“during”:
In 1775 the Hapsburg emperors obtained part of northwest Moldavia together with
Suceava, the ancient capital, from the Turks who technically violated the treaty
stipulations (they did not have the legal right to cede Romanian territory). The
Austrian authorities baptised the district “Bukovina,” meaning “beechnut country”
because of the many beechnut trees in the area. In 1790 Bukovina was reunited121
with Galicia up to 1849. Then it was reconstituted into an autonomous duchy
(which was its status when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula) and administered by an
Austrian governor who resided in the capital of the new province, Gernauti [sic]
(Czernowitz). (McNally and Florescu 53 n. 11)
Despite the fact that they stopped their narrative at the time when Stoker wrote the vampire
novel, McNally and Florescu are the only twentieth-century editors of Dracula who
mention the fact that Bukovina is an old Romanian land.
120
Historically, Moldavia was divided into the Upper Country (Ţara de Sus) and the Lower Country (Ţara de
Jos). The territory seized by Austria in 1774 was the northeastern quarter of the Upper Country. In 1812,
Russia (and in 1944 the Soviet Union) seized the eastern half of both the Upper Country and the Lower
Country.
121
The word “reunited” seems out of place here. It is possible that this note was abridged from a longer one.
Bukovina was united with Galicia between 1786 (rather than 1790) and 1849, and later briefly reunited in
1860-1861.
232
The other twentieth-century editors choose to speak of Bukovina during and after
the 1890s and their notes – all too brief for a territory covered by the vampire-hunters in the
entire last week of the events narrated in Dracula – both omit the fact that only the southern
part of the territory is now in Romania, and give the impression that Romania has seized
Bukovina from the Austrian Empire, not vice versa: “A former possession of Austria now a
province in northeast Romania, covering an area of 14,031 square miles” (Wolf 3 n. 14);122
“In the 1890s, Bukovina was an autonomous duchy within the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it
too [like Moldavia] is now part of Romania” (Auerbach and Skal 10 n. 8); “Former
possession of Austria, now a part of Romania” (Byron 32 n. 3). One other editor from the
1990s speaks only of the time when Dracula is set: “Bukovina, wedged to the north of
Transylvania and Moldavia, was in 1893 an autonomous duchy administered by an
Austrian governor” (Leatherdale 29 n. 10). Unlike Moldavia, which is presented to the
reader of Leatherdale’s edition with a complete narrative about the way it was before,
during and after the events in the novel, Bukovina seems to belong solely to the universe of
Dracula, and the reader has no inkling of the subsequent fate of this autonomous duchy.123
The editions published in the twenty-first century (with the exception of Riquelme,
who does not provide annotation for either Moldavia or Bukovina) have tried to give a
more exact representation of the territory by summarising its entire history. The most
accurate is that of Luckhurst, who writes that “Bukovina (‘the land of the beech’) was part
of Moldavia but annexed to the Austrian Habsburg Empire in 1775. This territory is now
122
This is clearly a typo. The 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica gives 4,035 square miles (IV, 771). More
modern estimates give 4,031 or 4,032.
123
Both Auerbach/Skal and Leatherdale seem to have borrowed this slightly misleading term from
McNally/Florescu. In reality, Bukovina was a province of the crown, nominally a duchy, but the title of duke
belonged to the Austrian emperor.
233
divided between Romania and the Ukraine” (363-364). Klinger provides more details that
include several errors:
The Bukovina, as the 1896 Austria “Baedeker” calls it, was severed from Moldavia
and annexed to Austria in 1786. A hilly, wooded region, it had a population at the
time of Dracula of about 600,000, consisting of Ruthenians, Roumanians, Hermans,
Poles, and Armenians. Gernauti [sic] (Czernowitz) was its capital, from which it
was administered by an Austrian governor, and German was its principal language.
(Klinger 17 n. 22)
The annexation year is 1775 (although the occupation started in 1774), but Klinger may
have confused it with the year when Bukovina was incorporated into Galicia, which is 1786
(Magocsi 420). The population could have been rounded up to 650,000 – the 1890 Austrian
census gives 646,591 inhabitants (Special-Orts-Repertorium 42). By “Hermans,” Klinger
obviously means Germans. However, he forgets the Jews, who were more than 60 percent
of the German-speaking population (42). Finally, he seems to have taken the name of the
capital from McNally/Florescu, without noticing the mistake: the Romanian name is not
“Gernauti,” but Cernăuţi.
Transylvania, the first “state” mentioned by Jonathan Harker, also has a complicated
geography. As one of the commentators of the novel has noticed, “Today, the term
[Transylvania] is sometimes used to embrace not only the original principality but also the
regions of Maramures [in Romanian, Maramureş], Crisana [in Romanian, Crişana] and the
Banat – an area of some 39,000 square miles with a population of seven million” (Miller,
Sense & Nonsense 118-119). The original principality of Transylvania, founded in the
twelfth century, is completely surrounded by the Carpathians, whereas Crişana and Banat
begin on the western slopes of the mountains and spread westward across a plain; and
234
Maramureş is a mountainous region in the Northern Carpathians.124 There are several
reasons why the name of Transylvania is sometimes applied today to all four provinces.
First, while the original principality of Transylvania is now preserved entirely within
Romania’s frontiers, all the other three historical provinces were cut in half after World
War I: Crişana was divided between Romania and Hungary; Banat between Romania and
Serbia; and Maramureş between Romania and Czechoslovakia, although the northern half
was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1944 and is now in Ukraine. Second, the three smaller
provinces were, at one time or another, in total or in part, incorporated into the principality
of Transylvania: Maramureş from the twelfth century until 1711; and parts of Crişana and
Banat between the mid-sixteenth and the late-seventeenth centuries. Third, with the
possible exception of Banat – sometimes called the Banat of Temesvar (after its capital, in
Romanian “Timişoara”) – they never enjoyed Transylvania’s level of autonomy and, for a
long while, were simply regarded as part of Hungary.125
It is quite possible, therefore, for the term “Transylvania” to be used in a stricter or
larger sense in Romanian historical discourse; when necessary, the term “Transylvania
proper” is used for the original principality. This is how a Romanian historian settled in
Britain and writing in English describes the Hungarian military campaigns eastwards: “St.
Stephen’s expedition into Transylvania had been more in the nature of a small crusade than
of a war of conquest; the Hungarians do not seem to have penetrated into Transylvania
proper before the victory of St. Ladislas over the Cumans in 1070; they had up to that time
occupied the districts between the Tisza and the western Transylvanian mountains” (Ghyka
124
After going full circle around the Transylvanian plateau, the Carpathians stretch in a wide straight line
across Maramureş all the way into Slovakia.
125
A good account of these historical changes can be found in the two sources mentioned above: SetonWatson (1934) and Georgescu (1991).
235
37; emphases mine). In one sentence, the historian refers to all four provinces as
“Transylvania,” then distinguishes between the principality (“Transylvania proper”) and the
other lands identified as “districts” (they were quickly organised into counties) between the
Tisza River and the Western Carpathians.126 When a major political organisation of
Romanians was formed in 1880 in the Kingdom of Hungary of the dual Austro-Hungarian
monarchy, it was called “the national party of Roumanians in Transylvania, Hungary and
the Banate” (Ghyka 95). Both Transylvania and Banat were individualised in the name,
whereas Crişana and Maramureş were simply referred to as “Hungary.”
Bram Stoker was aware of at least some of these distinctions. In one of his working
notes he shows signs of a desire to understand the lay of the land in which he was about to
set his tale: “Ancient Kingdom of Dacia = Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania and
Temesvar – finally conquered by Romans” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 246-247). This is placed
at the top of a typewritten page of quotes taken from Wilkinson’s Account, between the
note about the Voivode Dracula (19) and a note about the Voivode Michael the Brave (26).
Stoker had these notes typed, but the anonymous typist did not always understand his
longhand. The sentence appears as: “Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania and,” after which
“Temesvar” is handwritten. Although the note is unsourced, Stoker clearly tried to
reproduce this sentence from the beginning of the Account: “It is sufficiently ascertained
that these two provinces [Wallachia and Moldavia], joined to those of Transylvania and
Temesvar, composed the kingdom of Dacia, finally conquered by the Romans” (Wilkinson
2).
126
The same historian makes a similar distinction between Wallachia and Wallachia proper, that is without
present-day Oltenia, sometimes known as Little Wallachia: “The kneze Litovoi became a Voivode in 1251;
his voivodate was on the right bank of the Olt; on the left bank, in Wallachia proper, was the voivodate of
Seneslas” (Ghyka 58; emphasis mine).
236
Two editions of Dracula introduce the distinction between the stricter and larger
sense of the name “Transylvania,” but without escaping its ambiguity. One edition first
delimits “Transylvania” with the boundaries of Transylvania proper: “The name is derived
from chronicles of the first Hungarian historians who saw the Carpathian mountains as a
vast forested range, as they settled the Transylvanian plateau during the tenth century”
(McNally and Florescu 52 n. 10). Then it describes the Carpathians as a range of mountains
which “separates Transylvania proper from the other two Romanian provinces – Wallachia
to the south and Moldavia to the East” (McNally and Florescu 52 n. 9). The formula “the
other two Romanian provinces” excludes the provinces located west of Transylvania
proper, from which they were also separated by the Carpathians. Another edition borrows
the description but tries to correct it: the Carpathians are a “mountain range separating
Transylvania proper from other Romanian provinces: Moldavia to the east and Wallachia to
the south” (Auerbach and Skal 9 n. 5). By writing “other” instead of “the other two,”
Auerbach and Skal try to be more accurate than their source (McNally and Florescu).
However, by providing only Moldavia and Wallachia as examples, their edition remains
ambiguous about the territories west of the Carpathians.
The confusion in the first of these editions is enhanced by the way Transylvania,
described as just the plateau surrounded by mountains (in other words, Transylvania
proper), is also sized up as “approximately 43% of the territory” of Romania (McNally and
Florescu 52 n. 10) – this is repeated in the other edition: “about 43 percent of the territory”
(Auerbach and Skal 9 n. 7). The surface indicated clearly refers not just to Transylvania
proper, but also to Maramureş, Crişana and Banat. The confusion between the stricter and
the larger sense of the name slips in unexpected places. One of the editors writes “Oravicza,
Transylvania” (Klinger 23 n. 42) even though he is paraphrasing one of Stoker’s sources,
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who, in fact, says “Oravicza in the Banat” (Crosse 4). A better understanding of the
differences between Transylvania proper and the neighbouring western provinces is not
without its merit. Although he does not describe it, Jonathan Harker travels through Crişana
for most of his trip from Buda-Pesth to Klausenburg. In Dracula: The Connoisseur’s Guide
(1997), Leonard Wolf introduces a map of Romania, erroneously called Transylvania, and
in which the names of cities and rivers are confusingly multilingual, some in English, some
in Hungarian, others in Romanian, plus a bilingual (German/English) name for the main
river – “Donau (Danube)” (viii). However, the rivers and the mountains (perfectly round)
are well drawn and the location of the historical provinces is well indicated: Moldavia in
the east, Wallachia in the south, Transylvania proper in the middle, with the three western
provinces ranged (a little too tidily) one beneath the other: Maramureş in the north, Crişana
in the centre, Banat in the south.
As with other provinces, Transylvania’s history is variously described by the editors
of Dracula. Some point to the way it was in Stoker’s time and today – and again this can
give the impression that Romania has simply annexed a Hungarian territory: “A region in
eastern Europe, now part of Romania but at the time Dracula was written a part of
Hungary” (Riquelme 27); “In Stoker’s time it was a province of Hungary; now it is a part
of Romania” (Byron 32 n. 1). Other editors begin with ancient history and show how
Transylvania was a part of Roman Dacia, later overrun by migratory tribes and conquered
by Hungarians; how it became a Turkish dominion, then an Austrian province, and finally
part of Romania: “After World War I, Transylvania became Romanian” (Auerbach and
Skal 9 n. 7); “Not until after World War I was Transylvania reconstituted as a province of
modern Romania” (Leatherdale 29 n. 16); “now part of Romania” (Riquelme 27). From
these accounts, it is unclear why Transylvania ended up being Romanian, as nothing in its
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history appears to connect it with Romanians. Even more ambiguous are the inconclusive
accounts of editors who stop their narrative at the time of the events in Dracula, without
mentioning anything about the future of the province: “Originally part of Roman Dacia,
Transylvania became part of Hungary in the eleventh century. . . . Transylvania remained a
semi-independent principality under the Turks until the beginning of the eighteenth
century. In Stoker’s day it was a Hungarian province” (Wolf 3 n. 12); “Transylvania
belonged to the Roman province of Dacia until the eleventh century, when it became a part
of Hungary. Conquered by the Turks in the fifteenth century, it was a semiautonomous
principality until annexed to Austria in 1713” (Klinger 15 n. 17).127
One editor leaves out both the medieval and the Victorian parts of the account and
focuses only on ancient history and the contemporary situation: “Transylvania (‘beyond the
forest’) is located in the central part of modern Romania, high in the mountains, but formed
the core territory of the ancient kingdom of Dacia” (Luckhurst 363). Only one edition
makes it clear that Transylvania has a Romanian past, which explains its being part of
Romania today: “After the Roman withdrawal in the fourth century, Transylvania became
‘the cradle of the Romanian race’. . . . The region became Romanian as a result of World
War I in accordance with the Wilsonian principle of self-determination” (McNally/Florescu
52-53 n. 10). Historical geography complicates simple geographical descriptions and
sometimes the older disposition of boundaries can replace contemporary ones – as is the
case with one of the editors, who uses the simple present to describe Transylvania as an
autonomous region between two countries: “it lies between Hungary on the west and
127
Klinger seems to borrow the dates from Wolf but, by simplifying the narrative, he exaggerates the length
of the Roman occupation in Dacia; it ended in the third, not the eleventh century. Also, the principality was
abolished by the Austrians in 1711 (not 1713); however, the Turkish occupation had officially ended in 1699
(Treaty of Karlowitz). Finally, the Turks did not occupy Transylvania in the fifteenth, but the sixteenth
century.
239
Roumania on the east” (Klinger 17 n. 20). Based on the spelling “Roumania” and the
location of the province, the editor seems to be describing nineteenth-century Transylvania;
however, this is contradicted by the verb tense.
7.2 Landscapes
Another geographical ambiguity has to do with the Carpathian mountains, which are
a crucial setting element in Dracula. The Carpathians are usually described as a long range
covering a large part of East-Central Europe, but the name is also used in reference only to
the mountains that surround Transylvania. On the map, the former appears as a broken line,
comparable with the letter “V” or with a semicircle, whereas the latter form a closed,
almost circular, chain in the middle of the Carpathian mountain system. The Encyclopaedia
Britannica, which Stoker could have consulted, calls the whole range “Carpathians” and
gives the name “Transylvanian Mountains” for that part of the range where the beginning
and the end of the novel are set. “Transylvanian Mountains” is an exonym that neither
Romanian nor Hungarian authors use. Arminius Vambéry, who gives a detailed description
of the groups and subgroups of the Carpathian range, calls the mountains of Transylvania
“Southeastern Carpathians” (Vambéry, Hungary 4). In fact, neither Stoker nor his sources
ever use the term “Transylvanian Mountains” even when they speak specifically of the
mountains in Transylvania. However, the existence of such a term and of a specially
assigned encyclopaedia entry shows that the Romanian Carpathians can and are often
viewed as a range apart. As David Turnock shows, although the Carpathians cover areas in
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several countries, they are most frequently associated with Romania or, in Stoker’s time,
with Transylvania and Romania.128
Most of the editors of Dracula define the Carpathians as a long range of European
mountains: “A mountain range extending 800 miles from northeast Czechoslovakia to
northern Romania” (Wolf 2 n. 9); “Mountain range extending from Czechoslavakia [sic] to
Romania” (Byron 31 n. 5)129; “A major mountain system of Central Europe that links the
Alps with the Balkan Mountains” (Riquelme 27); “Second only to the Alps as the greatest
mountain range of central Europe, the Carpathians extend . . . over a distance of 880 miles”
(Klinger 13-14 n. 13); “eastern central European mountain range” (Luckhurst 363). These
annotations are misleading or at least indeterminate, as the Carpathians in the novel are
actually the “Transylvanian Mountains.” They are first mentioned by Harker when he is in
Klausenburg, well inside Transylvania (Dracula 31), shortly before placing Castle Dracula
“in the midst of the Carpathian mountains” (32). Although Harker would have seen
mountains before on his trip from Vienna, it is in Bistritz that he is greeted in a letter from
Count Dracula with the formula “Welcome to the Carpathians” (34). In his working notes,
Stoker wrote simply “Carpathians” every time he mentioned the mountains of
Transylvania, with two exceptions: he took from Mazuchelli’s Magyarland the formula
“Northern Carpathians” about the mountains in present-day Ukraine (Bram Stoker’s Notes
200-201) but never used the passage; and he transcribed Andrew Crosse’s observation
128
See David Turnock, “Settlement History and Sustainability in the Carpathians in the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries,” in Review of Historical Geography and Toponomastics 1: 1 (2006), 31-60.Turnock
explains that, although the Carpathians are in six countries today, they cover a small and peripheral area in
Poland and Ukraine and are quite insignificant in Hungary and the Czech Republic. By contrast, the landscape
of Slovakia and Romania is dominated by the Carpathians, but only in the latter country are the mountains
held to be symbolically crucial and “the basis of the Romanian state” (Turnock 34).
129
As she often does, Byron summarises Wolf. Czechoslovakia no longer existed in 1998, when Byron’s
edition was first published (the mistake persists in the 2000 reissue) and it had just dissolved (1 January 1993)
when Wolf’s second edition (1993) was published. Instead, Byron is right to correct Wolf’s formula “northern
Romania” and write simply “Romania.”
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about “weeping birch trees in Southern Carpathians” (210-211) but, in the novel, he
transferred them from Banat (Crosse 108) to the Borgo Pass (Dracula 38).
Stoker’s sources, in general, also use the term “Carpathians” to speak exclusively of
the mountains in Transylvania and Romania. William Wilkinson (1820) uses it to describe
the border separating the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia from “the Austrian
dominions” (Wilkinson 72). Due to the particularity of their subjects, Charles Boner, author
of Transylvania: Its Products and Its People (1865), and Emily Gerard, author of The Land
beyond the Forest (1888), speak exclusively of the mountains of Transylvania every time
they mention the Carpathians. In Round about the Carpathians (1878), Andrew Crosse
confines his movements to the mountains that circle Transylvania; the only time he steps
out of Transylvania proper, into Maramureş, he drops the term “Carpathians” and prefers to
speak of “the Marmaros Mountains” (Crosse 346). When he describes the “Southern
Carpathians” (108), he clearly means the southern part of the mountains of Transylvania. In
his voyage recounted in On the Track of the Crescent (1885), E.C. Johnson mentions the
presence of the Carpathians north of Debrecen, in today’s Hungary (Johnson 169) and
glimpses “the Gallician Carpathians” (269). When he enters Transylvania, he speaks of “the
Transylvanian Carpathians” (194), which he later calls simply Carpathians. The only
traveller read by Stoker who describes the whole range is the mountaineer Nina Mazuchelli,
in Magyarland (1881). Although a “fellow of the Carpathian Society” exploring the range,
Mazuchelli rarely uses the name of the mountains. She calls the mountains of Transylvania
alternatively “the Eastern Carpathians” (I, 61), “the South-Eastern Carpathians” (I, 368)
and “the Southern Carpathians” (II, 96). However, Stoker did not take down (Bram
Stoker’s Notes 201-205) any description of the mountains from her book, but mainly
observations about Szeklers and Slovaks.
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Two editions include the mountains of Transylvania in their definitions of the
Carpathians, but they remain ambiguous because their notes begin with a description of the
whole range and then transition abruptly to the second meaning of the term. McNally and
Florescu write that “The heavily forested Carpathian mountains form a V-shaped mountain
range, which is connected to the Slovakian foothills in the north and the Dynaric Alps of
Yugoslavia to the south. In essence, this range of mountains with few peaks reaching eight
thousand feet, separates Transylvania proper from the other two Romanian provinces –
Wallachia to the south and Moldavia to the east” (McNally and Florescu 52 n. 9). Here, the
transition between the more general to the more particular meaning is expressed through
the formula “in essence” and the note is somewhat comprehensible. However, when
another edition summarises it, the transition disappears: “A heavily forested, V-shaped
range separating Transylvania proper from other Romanian provinces: Moldavia to the east
and Wallachia to the south” (Auerbach and Skal 9 n. 5). Here, the V-shaped range130 no
longer goes from Slovakia to Serbia, but appears to be entirely situated within Romania.
Unlike Auerbach/Skal, Leatherdale refers to the whole range when he describes the
Carpathians as a “Horseshoe-shaped mountain range with the ‘open end’ to the west. . . .
The highest peak is Gerlachovka in Slovakia” (Leatherdale 28 n. 13). However, since the
note is supposed to explain the Carpathians present in Dracula, and Stoker only names and
describes the mountains of Transylvania, this can be just as confusing. From the note in
Auerbach/Skal, the reader could understand that the Romanian Carpathians are V-shaped,
from Leatherdale’s that they have the form of a horseshoe; from both, that they have an
“open end.” Leatherdale clearly took the idea about the shape of the mountains from
130
The shape of the whole range can be likened to that of the letter, but one arm of the “V” is much longer
than the other. The “Transylvanian Mountains,” on the other hand, are described alternatively as circular or
quadrilateral (trapezoidal).
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Jonathan Harker, who announces that he is going among the Szeklers, descendents of the
Huns: “when the Magyars conquered the country in the eleventh century they found the
Huns settled in it. I read that every superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe
of the Carpathians” (Dracula 32). Stoker borrowed this information from Round about the
Carpathians, whose author writes that “the Magyars . . . found the Szeklers already in
possession of part of the vast Carpathian horseshoe – that part known to us as the
Transylvanian frontier of Moldavia” (Crosse 205). Stoker evidently liked the image of the
horseshoe, associated by Crosse with the whole range, but dismissed the fact that the
traveller located Szeklers in “a part” of it.131
Figure 7.4 Map of Romania with the Carpathian Mountains (source: Romanian Ministry of
Education).
131
Elizabeth Miller quotes Stoker’s Notes to suggest that the author used the phrase “specifically for ‘that part
known as the Transylvanian frontier of Moldavia’” (Sense & Nonsense 45 n. 26). However, she truncates the
note, which speaks of a “part of the vast Carpathian horse-shoe” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 214-215). Neither
Crosse nor Stoker sees the Transylvanian frontier of Moldavia (which is a fairly straight line) as horseshoeshaped. Miller probably confuses here Crosse’s phrase with the so-called Curvature Carpathians, accurately
described by the traveller on the same page: “the chain of the Carpathians takes a bend” (Crosse 205).
244
The mountains of Transylvania do not have an open end but are, on the contrary, a
closed chain, usually called an “arc” by contemporary scholars: “Transylvania is an upland
plateau lying within an arc of the Carpathian Mountains” (Light 28). According to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica available to the original readers of Dracula, the “Transylvanian
Mountains” are a “mountain system which surrounds the Transylvanian highland or plateau
on all four sides” (XXVII, 211). Another sentence, stating that the “Transylvania
quadrilateral . . . possess[es] many low and easy passes toward the Hungarian plain”
(XXVII, 212), may give the impression of a westward opening. For the reader of the
McNally/Florescu, Auerbach/Skal and Leatherdale editions, this impression may be
enhanced by the fact that Harker says nothing of his trip from Budapest to Klausenburg.
However, Stoker could have known from his sources that there is no real “open end”
westward and that, soon after crossing the river Tisza, Harker would have seen “the
commencement of the Transylvanian Carpathians” (Johnson 194); “Coming from the
Hungarian plains, the entrance into Transylvania is very striking, as the train dashes along
narrow winding valleys . . . and above, the cliffs are piled up so high” (Gerard, The Land
beyond the Forest I, 30). Other sources consulted by Stoker describe Transylvania as
“locked in all sides by the Carpathian mountains” (Boner 93), which “enclose the territory .
. . in an almost quadrangular shape” (Vambéry, Hungary 4).
McNally and Florescu incorrectly explain that “The term Transylvanian Alps is also
commonly used” as a name for the Romanian Carpathians (McNally and Florescu 52 n. 9).
In reality, the term is only used for the southern branch that borders Transylvania and
Wallachia.132 The same editors also speak of “some of the most scenic alpine views of the
132
In Romanian, they are called “Carpaţii Meridionali.” The term “Transylvanian Alps” was made current by
the French geographer Emmanuel de Martonne (1873-1955), who described them in his Recherches sur
245
Carpathians: forested ranges, rocky formations, and mountain lakes” (52 n. 9), but they
describe the area surrounding Castle Poenari (in the Transylvanian Alps), which they
propose as the “real” Castle Dracula, placed by Stoker in the north-eastern part of the
Romanian Carpathians. Another editor replies to McNally/Florescu and, very likely, to
Stoker’s descriptions of the mountains around the Borgo Pass, when he insists that the
Carpathians “are scenic rather than spectacular, with slopes covered by forests of oak,
beech, fir and pine” (Leatherdale 28 n. 13). When confronted by a an American reporter
from the Cincinnati Tribune who revealed that he had never been to Transylvania, Stoker
replied that “Trees are trees, mountains are, generally speaking, mountains, no matter in
what country you find them, and one description fits all” (Belford 220).133 However, all his
sources describe the Carpathians as spectacular; and the passages he took down in his
working notes indicate that one of the reasons that he chose to set Dracula in the mountains
of Transylvania was that he found their “savage grandeur” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 230-231)
fit for his vampire tale.
In Dracula there are almost forty descriptive passages about nature and the
countryside in Transylvania and Romania: only one is about the Transylvanian plateau, in
Chapter 1 of the novel (in Jonathan Harker’s journal); two are about north-western
Moldavia, in Chapter 26 (in Jonathan Harker’s journal and Mina Harker’s journal,
respectively); and no fewer than thirty-five are about the Borgo Pass and the surrounding
area – in Chapters 1-3 (Jonathan Harker’s journal) and Chapter 27 (in Mina Harker’s
l’Evolution morphologique des Alpes de Transylvanie (Karpates méridionales), Paris: Delagrave, 1906.
Mazuchelli uses it ambiguously in her Magyarland (1881). Leatherdale also mentions the term, but it is
unclear if he refers to the southern branch of the Romanian Carpathians or to the whole mountainous system
of Romania: “The Carpathians [understood as a Central European range] are sub-divided into several
constituent ranges, among them the Transylvanian Alps” (Leatherdale 28 n. 13).
133
Stoker’s reaction is similar to that of Bernard Shaw after Bulgarian protests against his play Arms and the
Man: “Shaw’s efforts to achieve a quasi-realistic, ‘authentic’ setting contradict his oft-repeated claims about
the irrelevance of the locale for this particular play and its concerns” (Goldsworthy 125).
246
journal and Van Helsing’s memorandum). This is the only description included by Jonathan
Harker in his account of the railway trip from Klausenburg to Bistritz:
All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of
every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such
as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed
from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods. It
takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear.
(Dracula 33)
Wolf (5 n. 25), Leatherdale (30 n. 35) and Klinger (19-20 n. 34) comment on the
exaggerated length of the trip; only Leatherdale and Klinger comment on the human
presence in the region; and only Leatherdale discusses the action of rivers.
Leatherdale insists that “Hilltop towns are generally found in warmer climates, such
as Italy or Spain, not in mountainous regions such as the Carpathians, which are
snowbound in winter. Citadels are another matter, and may be strategically sited as high as
is practicable” (Leatherdale 30 n. 36). Klinger disagrees, because “The grade approaching
the Borgo Pass is gentle, and hillsides rolling” (Klinger 20 n. 35), which would make the
presence of towns possible. However, Harker is on the road between Klausenburg and
Bistritz, not yet close to the Borgo Pass. The Transylvanian plateau is used for agriculture
and Stoker would have found in his sources that “The ridges of the hills, and the sides,
when not too steep, form excellent arable land” (Boner 348) and many villages are situated
“upon the hills” (280). “Citadels” are not typical to Transylvania; instead, villagers who
lived on top of hills or among the mountains usually built “peasant-fortresses” (Mazuchelli
II, 46) and “fortress-churches” (Crosse 171-173). The latter drew Stoker’s attention and he
took note of their existence (Bram Stoker’s Notes 214-215).
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Leatherdale, the only editor who comments on the action of rivers on the
Transylvanian scenery, believes that here “Stoker’s landscape exists in his mind and is
shaped by scripture. Water is a cleansing agent. Strength of water is a symbol of God’s
power” (Leatherdale 31 n. 37). He also discusses the passage in his “Introduction,” where
he sees it as containing in a nutshell Stoker’s Christian message: “this is not so much a
face-value description as a reference to the cleansing power of water, theologically
speaking, as the narrator crosses the threshold between Christian West and pagan East”
(Leatherdale 10). However, the passage probably comes from a description of Boner’s trip
through the Transylvanian Plain (the author uses the Hungarian name “Mezőség”), that is,
precisely between Klausenburg and Bistritz. The traveller saw rivers not bordered by trees,
as “the earth on the steep hillsides is washed away by the flood of water that pours down
them, leaving only the stiffer clay behind, or a stony soil” (Boner 322). This sentence is not
present among Stoker’s working notes; yet, the novelist uses not only the image but also
some of its vocabulary (“stony”; “flood”; “steep hillsides” became “margin” of “steep
hills”) and, unless he committed the passage to memory, this shows that Stoker took from
his sources more information than it has been preserved in the Notes.
Stoker does this quite often: he combines information from two or several sources
or at least from two or several passages in the same source – and not all the information can
be traced back to his working notes. To describe the Borgo Pass, Stoker could rely on a
single eyewitness testimony: that of Charles Boner, from whom the novelist took down
observations about the surrounding area and the condition of the roads (Bram Stoker’s
Notes 242-243). Stoker had a fairly accurate idea about the location of the pass and he
complemented Boner’s description with passages from Crosse and Johnson, both of whom
travelled close to Borgo but approached it from the south, while Harker comes from the
248
west, through a different yet nearby territory. He also added information from Wilkinson,
who had never stepped inside Transylvania, but whose Account includes descriptions of
mountain passes on the other side of the Carpathians, in Wallachia and Moldavia. On the
road to Borgo Pass, Harker notices that “the falling sunset threw into strange relief the
ghost-like clouds which among the Carpathians seem to wind ceaselessly through the
valleys” (Dracula 39). This seems to be inspired by the following sentence: “It is curious to
notice sometimes in the higher Carpathians how the clouds march continuously through the
winding valleys” (Crosse 271). Stoker took it down entirely and placed it between
quotation marks (Bram Stoker’s Notes 216-217). Three editions offer the quote as source:
McNally/Florescu (61 n. 43); Leatherdale (39 n. 110); and Klinger (33 n. 79). The notes are
insufficient, however, as they do not explain why in the novel the clouds are “ghost-like.”
What appears to be Stoker’s addition is in fact gathered from a different place in the same
source: the phrase “grim phantom-haunted clouds” (Crosse 223), which was also taken
down by the novelist (Bram Stoker’s Notes 214-215).
On the road to Borgo Pass, Harker notices “everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit
blossom – apple, plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I could see the green grass under
the trees spangled with the fallen petals” (Dracula 37). Only one edition annotates this
sentence and reminds the reader of the darker days ahead: “This springtime landscape is in
sharp contrast to the wintry heights to which Jonathan is being borne” (Wolf 11 n. 43). Yet,
Stoker probably still fills in the scenery with passages taken from his sources, one of which
notices “the wild cherry and pear . . . in full bloom, whilst plum-trees of immense size
growing by the road-side, shower their petals on us as we pass” (Mazuchelli II, 33). The
tableau described here is somewhere in Banat, but Stoker often deliberately misplaces such
descriptions, opportunistically taking whatever he needs to compile his own fictional
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travelogue. He obviously intended the last chapter of the novel to be read as “a Tourist’s
Tale” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 30-31); a “Traveller’s Story [in] Transylvania” (76-77); the
“story of a traveller” (80-81); and again “A Tourist’s Tale” (82-83).
The provisional title of the last chapter, whether it is a tale or a story, referring to a
traveller or a tourist, is conspicuous when compared to other titles like “Arrival at Whitby,”
“Mina’s Marriage,” “Council of War” and “The Professor Speaks” (Bram Stoker’s Notes
76-77).134 It appears that Stoker did not simply intend to narrate a journey to Transylvania
(or else he would have noted “Trip to Transylvania” or something similar); his plan was to
imitate the style of a travelogue. One commentator has noticed that “the novel participates
in more than one genre. Stoker maps his story not simply onto the Gothic but also onto a
second, equally popular late-Victorian form, the travel narrative” (Arata, Fictions of Loss
112). What has remained overlooked, however, is the fact that Stoker very likely tries to
imitate the style of the travellers he has read. One important thing that is common to all of
these authors is that they borrow information from each other, going so far as to plagiarise.
The editors of Dracula have noticed that Stoker does the same thing and often reproduces
almost verbatim sentences from Boner, Crosse, Mazuchelli, Johnson or Gerard. What
should be added is that this only happens in Harker’s original trip through Transylvania.
The style of the “traveller’s story” that Stoker wishes to impose on the first chapters of the
novel could also mean quasi-plagiarising. The novelist was aware that it was common
practice among travellers; so he deliberately has Harker do the same thing and never tries to
hide it.
134
Very probably, these are not provisional titles but simple reminders about the main plot element of each
chapter; but this does not change the fact that words identifying the last chapter stand out.
250
This also means that much more than has been identified as quasi-plagiarising in the
first chapters could have its source in the texts that Stoker read in the 1890s or before. The
editors who try to find the origin of the descriptions in Harker’s journal on the road to
Borgo Pass – McNally/Florescu, Leatherdale and Klinger (Wolf does it, too, but without
Stoker’s notes he cannot find them) – put to use the author’s working notes and discover
them especially in Boner, Johnson and Crosse. Stoker clearly chose to illustrate the journey
with details from Boner since he was the only one who had travelled in the Borgo Pass; and
from Johnson and Crosse, because they had come very close to it and described the nearby
area. However, if a passage borrowed from a traveller is not to be found in Stoker’s
working notes, it is also not signalled as a source in the editors’ annotations. For example,
when Harker describes a “pine-clad rock” (Dracula 43) in the vicinity of the Count’s castle,
he probably uses an image from Magyarland, describing a Romanian monastery high up in
the Carpathians, surrounded by “pine-clad mountains” (Mazuchelli II, 155). Harker notices
how “the snowy mountain-top still held the sunset, and seemed to glow out with a delicate
cool pink” (Dracula 38), a phrase likely borrowed from another source, which describes
“snow-draped summits [that] displayed every shade of pink” (Johnson 262). Sometimes, in
one sentence, Stoker seems to take one word from a source, then a phrase from another. He
read his sources more carefully than is apparent from his notes; identifying the origin of the
information he provides in the novel means showing the reader what Stoker knew.
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7.3 Cityscapes
Three cities during Harker’s first trip seem to be worth discussing in the text of the
novel, in the editors’ annotations or in both; and three more during his second: Budapest,
Klausenburg, Bistritz, Varna, Bucharest and Galatz. To Jonathan Harker, Budapest “seems
a wonderful place, from the glimpse [he] got of it from the train and the little [he] could
walk through the streets” (Dracula 31). One editor does not agree with this statement: “We
may conclude that Harker had not been to Paris previously, for otherwise he surely would
have commented on the City of Light, a much more impressive sight than Buda-Pesth”
(Klinger 11 n. 6). Although no descriptions of Budapest have survived in Stoker’s working
notes, several of his sources praise its beauty – “one of the finest capitals in Europe”
(Crosse 257); “one of the most beautiful capitals in the world” (Mazuchelli I, 125) – and he
could have been inspired above all by the phrase “this most wonderful, and romantic of
cities” (Johnson 162-163). From what he read in Johnson’s account, only details of a meal
in Pest survive (Bram Stoker’s Notes 232-233), but that does not mean he did not remember
more or, very likely, that he had another, earlier, set of working notes. After all, nothing
about the Széchenyi Bridge exists in the notes, yet Harker speaks about it in the first lines
of Dracula.
Harker notices “the most Western of splendid bridges” (Dracula 31), a rather
surprising formula, possibly inspired by one of Stoker’s sources, who describes it as “the
most splendid suspension bridge the world yet boasts” (Mazuchelli I, 4). The fact that
Stoker added “Western” suggests he knew that the bridge had been built by “English
engineers” (Luckhurst 363), “William Tierney Clark and Adam Clark” (Klinger 12 n. 8).
Two of Stoker’s sources mention this, although they misspell the name of the main builder:
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“It is a grand monument of English enterprise and skill, having been built by Mr. Tierney
Clarke” (Johnson 166), “a triumph of engineering skill accomplished by an Englishman,
Mr. Tierney Clarke” (Mazuchelli I, 127). All the editors, along with Stoker’s sources, say
that the bridge was completed in 1849 (this is confirmed by modern encyclopaedias), with
the exception of Wolf and Byron, the latter summarising as usual the former: “Count
Széchenyi’s great bridge over the Danube linking Buda and Best took nearly twenty years
to build, from 1854 to 1873, and was considered a marvel in its day” (Wolf 1 n. 5); ‘Count
Széchenyi’s bridge linking Buda and Pest was completed in 1873” (Byron 31 n. 3). Wolf
and Byron135 may have been misled by the fact that Buda and Pest became Budapest in
1873, when the bridge no longer linked two cities, but two parts of the same city.
If he has no time in Budapest, Harker conveniently arrives “after nightfall”
(Dracula 31) in Klausenburg and “on the dark side of twilight” (33) in Bistritz. From his
experiences in the former, we only find out that he spent the night in the Hotel Royal
(Stoker spells “Royale”) and that “There was a dog howling all night under [his] window”
(33), hindering his sleep. Harker calls the city “Klausenburgh,” whereas Sister Agatha, in
the letter to Mina, calls it more appropriately “Klausenburg” (134). Nothing else is said
about the capital of Transylvania and, consequently, little else is reported in the
annotations. The editors usually note simply the city’s “contemporary,” that is, Romanian
name of “Cluj” (Byron 31 n. 4; Leatherdale 28 n. 10; Luckhurst 363) or add the population
it had at the end of the nineteenth century (Wolf 2 n. 6). McNally and Florescu describe the
city as it was in the times of King Mathias Corvinus and Vlad Ţepeş, in the second half of
the fifteenth century (McNally and Florescu 51 n. 7). Klinger offers a quote from the 1896
135
They are not alone. At least one edition (2010) of the Frommer’s travel guide to Budapest and the Best of
Hungary gives 1873 as the year when the construction of the bridge ended.
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Baedeker for Austria, Southern Germany and Hungary, according to which, “this was a
town of 33,000 inhabitants, ‘very animated in winter’ and ‘the headquarters of the
numerous noblesse of Transylvania’” (Klinger 13 n. 10). This sentence alone adds a
quantum of local colour to a city that is not properly described in Dracula. However, it has
little bearing on the novel, since Jonathan Harker does not visit it in winter and does not
meet with any nobles. Instead, it gives the reader the impression that the capital of
Transylvania is a winter resort. Klinger could have chosen many other things from the
guide, for example the previous sentence, which reports that the city has a “university
established in 1872” (Baedeker 404).
The information about Klausenburg being fashionable in winter is repeated by
several of Stoker’s sources: Boner (123), Crosse (294-295), Johnson (296), Gerard (The
Land beyond the Forest I, 31), but this does not appear in the novelist’s working notes.
Instead, he wrote down from Johnson that in “‘Kolozsvar’ = ‘Klausenburg’ six gulden for
drive 12d” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 232-233), which he never used. He may have wished to
have Harker hitch a drive in downtown Klausenburg, although six gulden was probably
much more than twelve pence. In fact, Johnson paid that amount for a trip from Dej to Cluj
(60 kilometres in six hours). Stoker also noted: “In Szamos. 25,000 Magyars and Szekely.
Houses of German character. Mathias Hunyadi born here – large Squares and wide streets”
(232-233). In the original, the city is said to be “situated in a valley by the [River] Szamos”
(Johnson 295) – so again Stoker’s abridgement was confusing, which may explain why he
did not use this. The information about Corvinus is on the next page in Johnson’s account,
along with the description of the city’s “old houses [which] are all of German character”
(296). The original version of Stoker’s last note appears as such: “I was sorry that I could
not make a longer stay in Koloszvár, for it is a very fine town, with large squares and wide
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streets, and I should have liked to visit its museum, library and churches” (297). Harker has
supper, sleeps, has breakfast and leaves. He has no time and perhaps no desire to take in the
sights as he is travelling on business.
About Bistritz, Harker first writes that it is a “post town . . . a fairly well-known
place” (Dracula 32), then, when he gets there, notices that it shows marks of “a very
stormy existence” (34), of which he names a seventeenth-century siege and more recent
fires. Five editions (Wolf 6 n. 28; McNally and Florescu 56 n. 22; Leatherdale 31 n. 43;
Klinger 21 n. 40; Luckhurst 364) confirm all these facts with references from Boner and the
1896 Baedeker, while the place itself remains faceless. Boner identifies it as a Saxon city
(Boner 102), although he notes that the majority on the city council are Romanians (379);
he sees a wolf on the outskirts (142) and bears in the vicinity (149). None of these has made
its way into the novel. Yet, there existed a brief description, which Stoker dropped at the
last moment. In the letter he left for Harker at the hotel, Dracula advised him to “[s]leep
well tonight” (Dracula 34). Klinger indicates that “The Manuscript contains the following,
which does not appear in the published narrative: ‘and in the morning see something of the
beautiful bastioned town, Bistritz.’ Stoker evidently deleted this unexpected tour-guide
advice from Dracula as inconsistent with the dark picture he intended to paint in the
narrative” (Klinger 23 n. 45). However, Harker enters unawares into the land of vampires
and there is nothing dark about the places he sees before Borgo. The image of the beautiful
bastioned town, which Stoker may have taken from a travel guide describing the “walls and
towers, with which it is still surrounded” (Baedeker 407), would have contrasted not with a
dark picture, but with the deliberate absence of descriptions.
Nothing is said in the novel about Varna, in eastern Bulgaria; the reader only learns
that it has a “port” (Dracula 378) and a British Consulate and the vampire hunters stay at a
255
hotel called “Odessus” (374). Very little is also said by the editors: “Varna is Bulgaria’s
chief port on the Black Sea. At the time of Stoker’s writing it was an unprotected harbour”
(McNally and Florescu 256 n. 350); “A major city on the Black Sea” (Auerbach and Skal
275 n. 4); “Bulgarian port on the Black Sea from where the Demeter sailed. It has a
cosmopolitan population” (Leatherdale 434 n. 23); “Its population was a mixture of Greeks,
Bulgarians, Turks, Jews, and gypsies” (Wolf 375 n. 6). Of Stoker’s sources, only Johnson
mentions briefly both the harbour and the railway station in Varna and there is nothing
about the city in the author’s working notes. However, Stoker could easily have asked his
younger brother George for a description. The absence of any words on the Bulgarian city
in the novel is undoubtedly the most conspicuous, since the novelist had direct access to
information and especially because his heroes spend no less than two weeks (15-29
October) in Varna.
When the posse led by Van Helsing arrives in Bucharest, on the other hand, the
vampire hunters do not have any time to spare. The capital of Romania is merely the place
where they change trains in order to get to Galatz. The brief mention of the city in the novel
– “at Bucharest, we are three hours late” (Dracula 386) – appears in Dr Seward’s diary.
Most of the annotations are brief (or absent, in Byron and Luckhurst): “Bucharest is the
capital of Romania, then and now” (Leatherdale 468 n. 10); “The capital of Romania”
(Riquelme 333); “The capital of Romania; a large and lively city” (Auerbach and Skal 299
n. 2). Klinger (462 n. 2) discusses only the tardiness of the train, while McNally/Florescu
(257 n. 351) add that the name of the city was first mentioned in a document issued by Vlad
Ţepeş. The only editor who gives a lengthy note on Bucharest is Wolf:
At the end of the nineteenth century, when Seward and his companions were in
Bucharest, it had a population of 250,000 people. The ninth edition of the
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Encyclopaedia Britannica says of the city that it had picturesque churches and many
trees. Bucharest’s streets were irregular, poorly paved, or not paved at all. In
summer public transportation was by means of 500 droshkis; in winter a similar
number of sledges took their place. Our travellers would have been pleased to know
that an English company had recently built Bucharest’s first tramway system. Count
Dracula, for his part, was no doubt pleased to know that more than 20,000
Transylvanians held civil service positions in Bucharest. Ironically enough, for our
delayed travellers, the word ‘Bucharest’ means ‘city of joy.’” (Wolf 409 n. 2)
The editor probably chose the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published
between 1875 and 1889, because it was the most recent version available to Stoker and to
his readers. However, since no information about Bucharest is provided in the novel, and its
readers probably did not know very much about the Romanian capital, this cannot function
as a note of recovery.
Instead, Wolf’s annotation contributes to the othering of the place by providing
obsolete information from an edition of the encyclopaedia with data from the mid-1870s,
instead of the eleventh edition, whose information is from around the turn of the century,
closer in time to Dracula’s year of publication. First, the editor summarises the following
passage from the ninth edition:
The number of its cupolas and minarets,136 and the profusion of acacia, poplar, and
other trees that fill the numerous spaces of unoccupied ground, give it a picturesque
136
This is obviously a mistake. There were no minarets in Bucharest. None of the travellers, including
Stoker’s sources, mentions minarets. In fact, although the article later enumerates “116 Greek churches . . . [a
Catholic] parish-church in the centre of the town and several chapels . . . Lutheran and Calvinistic churches . .
. ten synagogues” (IV, 414), no mosques are mentioned. The treaty between Radu the Handsome and
Mohamed the Conqueror included a clause respected until the end of the Ottoman suzerainty: “no Turkish
mosque shall ever exit on any part of the Wallachian territory” (Wilkinson 22). The first Bucharest mosque
257
appearance from a distance. The arrangement of its streets is very irregular, and in
many districts it cannot be said that there are streets at all. In general the roadways
are either unpaved or only laid with rough blocks of different sizes. A few streets,
indeed (and notably the Podo Mogochoi, which is the most important), have been
paved with Aberdeen granite. The city is lighted with gas produced from English
coal. (EB9 IV, 414)
Some of the information is obviously from before 1878, when the most important street in
Bucharest was renamed Calea Victoriei (Victory Road), in honour of the military success
against Turkey. This was the first street illuminated by electric light, beginning on 27 May
1882 (Cebuc 11). The details about irregular, unpaved streets seem to be about half a
century older.137 When Wilkinson was staying in Bucharest, its streets were paved with
wooden boards – that is why many were called bridges. Stone paving was inaugurated only
in 1824 (Cebuc 14). Until 1870, stones (granite) were imported from Scotland; afterwards,
they were brought from local sources and new paving methods were introduced: asphalt,
stones inserted in concrete foundations, but also wooden cubes after a so-called “Morris
method”138 (Cebuc 16). In the eleventh edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wolf could
have found that “the city is modern. . . . From the accession of Prince Charles, in 1866, a
gradual reform began. The river was enclosed between stone embankments; sewerage and
pure water were supplied, gas and electric light installed . . . the principal thoroughfares . . .
was built three decades after Romanian independence, in 1906 (King Charles I’s forty-year jubilee), as a
gesture of generosity towards the declining Ottoman Empire.
137
Ion Ghica, mentioned before, grew up in Bucharest in the 1820s and, in his Letters to V. Alecsandri,
speaks of the absence of streets in the areas inhabited by aristocrats, who held domains rather than houses in
the middle of the city. He also relates the radical changes introduced during the Russian occupation of
Bucharest (1828-1834), when P.D. Kisseleff, the military governor, started cutting through the city with wide
boulevards.
138
Known in the United States as “Nicolson pavement.” One of Charles Dickens’s frequent collaborators to
Household Words noticed them in St. Petersburg: “the hexagonal wooden pavement with which, in London,
we are all acquainted” (Sala 169-170).
258
were paved with granite or wood” (EB11 IV, 717). Stoker read a similar account in Johnson
(115-116), who visited the city in 1881 and saw rapid changes.
Wolf then summarises the following sentence from the ninth edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica: “Public locomotion is facilitated by about 500 droshkas in
summer and as many sledges in winter; and a tramway has recently been laid down by an
English company” (EB9 IV, 414). The “droshka” (the Romanian term at the time was, in
fact, “birjă”) was in steep decline throughout the second half of the nineteenth century
(Cebuc 71-74) and by the time Stoker published Dracula it had almost completely been
replaced by omnibuses and horse-driven tramways, introduced in 1871 by a British
company.139 These were still in use more than twenty years later, but in the late 1890s they
were being replaced by “electric tramways” (EB11 IV, 717), introduced in 1894 by a joint
Belgian-British venture (Cebuc 127). When he wrote about 20,000 Transylvanians “who
held civil service positions,” Wolf very likely misread the following passage: “Division
into classes and nationalities is a marked feature of the whole Bucharest population. . . .
There are about 20,000 Transylvanians who fill subordinate positions” (EB9 IV, 414). The
eleventh edition gives “53,056 aliens, mostly Austro-Hungarian subjects” (EB11 IV, 717)
with no mention of positions, social or otherwise. The ninth edition also speaks of
Bucharest, “or, as it is called by the inhabitants, Bucuresci (that is, according to their own
etymology, City of Joy)” (EB9 IV, 414). According to the eleventh edition of
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “the meaning of Bucharest is much disputed” (EB11 IV, 718),
but “Bucharest is often called ‘The Paris of the East’” (IV, 717). The meaning of “city of
joy” is also mentioned in one of Stoker’s sources (Johnson 115), although another source
139
The principal investor was Harry Hubert de Merve Slade (Cebuc 103), third baronet, of a prestigious
military family. His niece, Madeleine, became famous as Mirabehn, devotee of Gandhi.
259
reproduces the Romanian consensus that the name means simply “the lands belonging to
Bucur” (Wilkinson 86).
The last city in which the characters in Dracula spend some time is Galatz (in
Romanian, “Galaţi”), the seat of the European Commission of the Danube, located
upstream from the place where the river splits into a massive delta. For the first editors,
however, Galatz is “a Romanian Black Sea port” (McNally and Florescu 252 n. 342); “a
Romanian Black Sea port” (Wolf 398 n. 15); “a Romanian port on the Black Sea”
(Auerbach and Skal 292 n. 8); “Romanian Black Sea port” (Byron 378 n. 1). Only the more
recent ones correct this (Leatherdale 458 n. 75; Riquelme 332; Klinger 452 n. 30;
Luckhurst 389) and place it on the Danube. The most recent, in fact, writes that “Galati is a
city on the River Danube, now in Moldavia” (Luckhurst 389), although the city has always
been in Moldavia.140 Wolf is again the only editor who provides more information on the
city, and his mistake is surprising, as he relies, once again, on the Encyclopaedia
Britannica. The ninth edition, which he used for his note on Bucharest, does not have an
article on Galatz, so Wolf takes his information from the eleventh edition, which says that
the city is “on the left bank of the river Danube” (EB11 11, 396), not on the Black Sea. The
anonymous author of the article also notices that,
towards the close of the 19th century . . . the city improved rapidly. Embankments
and fine quays were constructed among the Danube; electric tramways were opened
in the main streets, which were lighted by gas or electricity, and pure water was
supplied. The higher, or north-western part of the city, which is the more open and
comfortable, contains many of the chief buildings. These include the prefecture,
140
Due to its location well within the boundaries of the province, Galaţi has escaped Turkish and Russian
occupation and has never been involved in frontier changes, as Luckhurst’s formula suggests.
260
consulate, prison, barracks, civil and military hospitals and the offices of the
international commission for the control of the Danube. . . . But the main
importance of the city is commercial. Galatz is the chief Moldavian port of entry,
approached by three waterways, the Danube, Sereth and Pruth, down which there is
a continual volume of traffic, except in mid-winter; and by the railways which
intersect all the richest portions of the country. . . . The shipping trade is largely in
foreign hands, the principal owners being British. (EB11 11, 396)
Wolf summarises this as follows: “Our band of murderers would have found that the main
thoroughfares were paved, and the streets lighted with gas, and the quays with electricity.
Among other signs of progress, Galatz boasted a fine prison” (Wolf 398 n. 15). The
encyclopaedia speaks of the streets being lighted “with gas or electricity,” but Wolf moves
the electricity to the quays and keeps the gas for the streets. From the list of “chief
buildings,” Wolf retains only the prison, although the encyclopaedia does not say if it was
“fine” or if the city was proud of it. The editor’s intention here is probably that of giving
the city an aura of nefariousness, while adding a caustic remark about the prison as a “sign
of progress.” Otherwise, the information remains unjustified, since there are no prisons in
the novel and the vampire hunters would not be interested in incarcerating Dracula. More
useful information, such as the presence of British traders, is not employed by any of the
editors, although Stoker was well aware of it and has Harker, Seward and Van Helsing visit
the agents of the London trading company that operated the Czarina Catherine.
The sparse comments on cities and landscapes follows Stoker’s practice of not
describing any of these places. This is noticed in two editions, but only for the second trip,
as an incongruity in relation to the beginning of the novel. Although no details are given in
the novel about what Harker could have seen in Budapest (apart from the bridge),
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Klausenburg or Bistritz and although only the area around the Borgo Pass is described in
the beginning of the novel, set in an Austrian-Hungarian dominion, Auerbach and Skal
write that “most of this return journey . . . is a modernised contrast to Jonathan’s eerie
introduction to Romania at the beginning” (299 n. 2). Similarly, when Van Helsing asks
“When does the next train start for Galatz?” (Dracula 379), one of the editors comments:
“Van Helsing reflects Stoker’s ignorance of eastern Europe. Whereas Stoker filled in the
background detail of Transylvania by reference to variously named source works, he
appears to have done little or no research on Bulgaria and Romania. These [last] chapters in
consequence lack local colour” (Leatherdale 459-460 n. 81). In reality, Stoker was well
informed about both Bulgaria and Romania; as recounted in Chapter 4, his brother had
spent two years in the former and he read about the latter in several of his sources,
especially in Johnson, who has much to say about Bucharest in 1881. He knew all about the
British presence in Galatz and he takes his travellers on a sinuous itinerary back to
Transylvania, proving that he studied places, roads and timetables. The absence of
descriptions is therefore deliberate and part of a larger strategy of presenting the people and
the places encountered by his travellers as belonging to a distinct world, remote both in
space and in time.
262
Chapter 8
Othering: Time
From the first pages of the novel, Jonathan Harker’s meticulous diary entries signal
the fact that the reader will follow not just an English solicitor’s trip to Transylvania, but
rather an anthropologist’s. In Dracula, Time becomes an important component of the
journey as Harker discovers the land beyond the forest to be the land beyond Time. One of
the editors has noticed that “Stoker was obsessed by time, and in Dracula he uses it to good
effect to put his larger theme of Life-in-Death into sharp relief” (Wolf 1 n. 4). Dracula’s
country bears a striking resemblance to the vampire Count. On the one hand, the way it is
presented in the novel, it has a violent history that has kept it out of touch with the progress
of the civilised world. Indeed, “Jonathan Harker discovers a country that is still the victim
of its own history, in which the inhabitants are terrified of and terrorised by the barbarian
elements in their midst” (Glover 40). On the other hand, by being on the fringes of
humankind, Transylvania belongs with all the distant peripheries in which many late
Victorian colonial novels are set and which remain “in some form of time-warp . . . such
unexplored strange areas are essentially timeless and without history (in that they are
‘barbarous’ and tribal, and as such outside the historical timescale of civilisation)”
(Leerssen 292). Like the vampire who is both dead and alive, the distinction of Stoker’s
Transylvania comes from being at the same time a land of history and a land without
history.
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Before Stoker’s novel, such a representation of Transylvania already existed in the
accounts of travellers that inspired him. Faced with the unknown land and its people, the
travellers, the novelist (or, rather, his narrators – especially Jonathan Harker), but also the
editors of the novel find themselves in a position that is very similar to that of the
anthropologist. As Johannes Fabian has shown in Time and the Other: How Anthropology
Makes its Object (1983), there is a contradiction inherent to the discipline: anthropological
knowledge is produced by intersubjective communication between anthropologists and
their interlocutors; however, in the traditional ethnographic representation, the dialogical
realities of the process are suppressed. The “others” do not appear as partners in a cultural
exchange, but as the remote and peculiarly different group. Distance, both spatial and
temporal, is the most important factor in constructing the Other. The anthropologist and his
readers are placed in a privileged time frame, while the very objects of the anthropological
study are temporally relegated. Fabian calls this practice “allochrony”; the most common
method of time-relegation he names “denial of coevalness” (Fabian 31), the latter being a
term by which he understands both contemporaneity and simultaneity.141 Following his
sources, the author of Dracula insists on the temporal alterity of the “remote” lands he
describes. The novel’s editors practice the same allochronic discourse when they confirm or
even enhance Stoker’s late Victorian representations.
141
Fabian uses it to translate the phenomenological category of Gleichzeitigkeit (31), which denotes
contemporaneity and synchronicity.
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8.1 The Time of the Other
In late Victorian colonial novels, “the unexplored regions turn out not to be simply
timeless, but rather ‘othertimely’ or allochronic” (Leerssen 293). In Dracula, the
“othertimeliness” is first suggested by the imprecision of the railway communication and
by the different calendar used by the superstitious locals. The novel’s editors often
intervene not to deny, but to enhance such a representation: they confirm it either by merely
providing its source or by not offering any kind of annotation; or they reinforce it by adding
to the allochronic discourse of the novel. In fact, Dracula begins with such discourse: “3
May. Bistritz. – Left Munich at 8:35 p.m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next
morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. . . . I feared to go very far
from the [Buda-Pesth] station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct
time as possible” (Dracula 31). These are the first sentences recorded in Harker’s journal
and they subtly suggest the beginning of an adventure during which the narrator will find
himself lost not only in space but also in time.
Two of the editors explain that one of “Stoker’s duties as business manager of
Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre” (Leatherdale 27 n. 4) was to be “conversant with train
schedules” (McNally and Florescu 50 n. 5) and that the use of real railway timetables
heightens the realism of the account. Another editor suggests that “it is possible that Harker
was confused about the local time. Standardisation of time was a new phenomenon. . . . The
1896 Austria ‘Baedeker’ advises that Vienna local time is five minutes in advance of
central Europe time, which is observed by the railways” (Klinger 11-12 n. 7). However,
Stoker planned Harker’s trip with the exact times of departures and arrivals as early as 1892
(Bram Stoker’s Notes 84-85) and earlier editions of the Baedeker do not speak of the
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Viennese allochrony. Klinger enhances the illusion of temporal difference with information
not included in the novel or in the author’s working notes. In his previous annotation, he
also uses Stoker’s handwritten note about Harker’s itinerary to retrace the narrator’s steps
from London to Paris, then Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Buda-Pesth, Klausenburg, and
Bistritz (Klinger 11 n. 6). Yet, he does not notice an interesting reminder that Stoker wrote
to himself: “Leave Paris” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 84-85). In the novel, no place west of
Munich is mentioned in reference to Harker’s trip to Transylvania; by not mentioning
familiar names, Stoker enhances the reader’s estrangement.
Leaving Klausenburg early in the morning, Harker and his fellow travellers need
considerable patience: they “dawdle” all day long and only get to Bistritz “on the dark side
of twilight” (Dracula 33). In his notes, Stoker scheduled the trip to last twelve hours (Bram
Stoker’s Notes 84-85) probably not only to suggest that the railroad trip was longer than
normal, but also because he wanted Harker to meet Dracula (disguised as a carriage driver)
late at night and to travel through the Borgo Pass at midnight on St George’s Day. The
novel’s first editor begins by indicating the regular duration of the trip: “The journey from
Klausenberg [sic] to Bistrita, a distance of seventy-four miles, took four and three-quarter
hours. . . . The slow speed of the train was not unusual. Austrian trains seldom went faster
than twenty-five miles per hour” (Wolf 4 n. 23). Then, he calculates the journey’s length in
the novel and finds that “Even at the slow speed noted, that would mean a twelve-hour
journey or nearly eight hours late!” (Wolf 5 n. 25). Despite the exclamation point, he does
not deny the possibility that the train could actually be that slow. McNally/Florescu offer
the same figure for the regular speed and duration of the trip, without commenting on the
unusual length: “From Klausenburgh to Bistritz is a distance of some seventy-four miles.
The train took four and three-quarter hours to cover that distance. In Stoker’s day Austrian
266
trains seldom went faster than twenty-five miles per hour” (55 n. 16). Both editions are
wrong to speak of Austrian trains. Transylvania was part of the Hungarian railway system,
which was different from the Austrian, and which is discussed in detail by Boner (601605), a source that Stoker knew well.142
Another editor mentions the concordance between the author’s working notes and
the novel: “It is 75 miles from Klausenburgh to Bistritz, yet according to Stoker’s notes
Harker does not reach Bistritz till 8 p.m., a journey of twelve hours. Harker shortly
confirms his arrival on ‘the dark side of twilight’” (Leatherdale 30 n. 32). He also
calculates the velocity: “Stoker’s times suggest an average train speed of six or seven miles
per hour” (Leatherdale 30 n. 35), again without denying the possibility that the train could
have moved so slowly. Only one editor finds it unrealistic: “The 1896 Austria ‘Baedeker’
indicates that the journey from Klausenburg to Bistritz is only 74 miles and should take 4 ¾
hours by rail. Although the guidebook warns that trains in Austria do not generally travel
faster than 25 miles per hour, the length of this journey seems excessive” (Klinger 19-20 n.
34).143 The other editors clearly took the information about speeds and the regular duration
of the trip from the same guidebook. However, as stated before, Stoker probably based his
account on an earlier version. The 1887 Baedeker for Southern Germany and Austria,
including Hungary and Transylvania does not mention the speed of Austrian trains and,
more importantly, states that the journey from Klausenburg to Bistritz was supposed to last
“7 hrs.” (Baedeker 406). Either this information was wrong and later Baedekers updated it,
or the railway communications improved. In any case, it seems likely that Stoker used this
142
Boner witnessed all the preparations after the transfer of power from Austria to Hungary. There were no
Hungarian railways yet when he published his account in 1865.
143
Klinger also adds that “This is the first of many geographical lacunae that suggest the region has been
fictionalised rather than actually observed” (20 n. 34). This is not, however, an observation about Stoker’s
“othering” of Transylvania, but part of Klinger’s overarching editorial conceit of viewing the events in
Dracula as “real”: he repeatedly suggests that Stoker tries to conceal the real location of Castle Dracula.
267
figure and calculated a delay of five hours, rather than eight, as Wolf, McNally/Florescu,
Leatherdale and Klinger suggest.
The train is late when Harker departs from Klausenburg: “after rushing to the station
at 7:30 I had to sit in the carriage for more than an hour before we began to move. It seems
to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be
in China?” (Dracula 33). One editor explains that “Stoker chastises other nations for their
inability to run trains on time, a popular yardstick by which to measure progress and
civilisation. The idea may have been implanted by Jules Verne’s Around the World in
Eighty Days” (Leatherdale 30 n. 33). Then, he refutes the narrator’s implication: “Harker’s
jest is misplaced. Chinese railways of the time were engineered by Western companies and
were well-managed. Under communist rule they are admirably punctual” (Leatherdale 30 n.
34). Another editor does the same: “The limited Chinese railroad lines that were
constructed in the nineteenth century (the first was not built until 1876) were largely
financed and built by foreign concessionaires; the two main Manchurian lines, the Chinese
Eastern Railway and the South Manchurian Railway, were Russian ventures with little
Chinese participation, and the Shantung railway from Kiaochow to Tsinan was a Germanfinanced and –operated line” (Klinger 19 n. 33). Neither editor says anything about
Transylvanian railways, although they are the primary target of Harker’s imputation. They
could have mentioned, for instance, that they were started by the famous London
contractors, Waring Brothers and Eckersley (who built the St Pancras station in London),
then taken over by the Hungarian government, with British engineers and even rails
imported from Britain (Rosegger and Jensen 439-441).
Three editions (McNally and Florescu 55 n. 17; Leatherdale 30 n. 33; Klinger 19 n.
32) suggest that Stoker got the idea about the unreliability of Transylvanian trains from
268
Emily Gerard’s book The Land beyond the Forest, in which she wrote that “The railway
communications are very badly managed” (Gerard, The Land beyond the Forest I, 30).144
No other source that may have inspired the author of Dracula is provided by any of the
editors. However, out of all of Stoker’s sources that talk about railway trips (Crosse,
Mazuchelli, Johnson and Gerard; the Transylvanian railways were still being projected
when Boner travelled in the region), Emily Gerard is without a doubt the least edifying. In
her 1888 book, Gerard complains only once about railway communications. This occurs in
a passage from which McNally/Florescu, Leatherdale and Klinger quote, out of context, the
beginning of the first sentence. In it, Gerard actually describes a voyage by train from
Lemberg (today Lviv; at the time, in Galicia) to Klausenburg; only the last part of the trip
took her through Transylvania and she did not use the Hungarian Railways that, in the
novel, carry Harker from Klausenburg to Bistritz.
It seems more likely that Stoker was inspired by any or all of the other three
travellers. He may, in fact, have drawn inspiration from any account of a railway trip going
eastwards on the continent and comparing the speed of the trains and the pace of life with
those in Britain. Deploring their slowness was a feature of all “Victorian narratives of travel
in Eastern Europe” (Arata, Fictions of Loss 121). The slow, laggard rhythm of the trains is
a major topos in these travelogues, part of the larger theme of the “othertimeliness” of the
people. A contemporary expert study of the British Railways (London: Cassell, 1893) by J.
Pearson Pattinson also starts with a comparison between the trains at home and those in the
rest of Europe. Pattinson discusses speed, punctuality, frequency, fares, and
144
First McNally/Florescu, then Leatherdale (the latter may borrow this from the former) give “p. 16” as the
place in Gerard’s book where the citation exists. In 1888, the book had a British edition in two volumes
(Blackwood) and an American edition in one volume (Harper). The page provided is consistent with the
American edition. Here and elsewhere, I give the pages from the British version.
269
accommodation. He finds that Austro-Hungarian trains are relatively slow in the
mountainous regions; that the faster trains have lower travel classes; and that “the fares are
as low as (or lower than) any in Europe. . . . At present it is cheaper to travel second class
on the Hungarian State lines than third on British railways” (Pattinson 5). Trains in Britain
were faster and much more frequent than in other countries, with a record of forty-five
trains daily between Liverpool and Manchester (7). The railway systems at the time were
actually “utterly dissimilar” (10) between Britain and the continent, which explains the
different advances of both sides.
Where Britain lagged behind, despite Harker’s complaint in the Klausenburg
railway station, was in regards to punctuality. Pattinson tries to combat the general
impression “that British railways, and particularly those in the Southern part of the island,
pay but little attention to ensuring a punctual arrival for their trains” (Pattinson 9), yet has
to admit “that punctuality on the Continent is rather in advance of what it is here, but not
nearly so much as is generally supposed” (10). He goes on to explain that continental trains
are differently timed so that they waste time in standby but make up for it between stations
and that “their trains get a clear course on a road only moderately filled with trains, while
ours have to run the gauntlet of numerous trains of all descriptions . . . and it is really very
creditable to the British lines that they have approached so closely to the Continental
systems while working under such disadvantages” (Pattinson 10). Many travellers,
including those whose accounts Stoker read while working on Dracula, try to combat the
same belief in the superior punctuality of non-British trains.
Andrew Crosse often admires the feats of engineering he encounters in Banat and
Transylvania (including railways) and notes that Transylvania “is fairly well off for iron
roads” (Crosse 139) and that “The railway system has been enormously extended in this
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country during the last ten years” (339). His complaints, instead, are consistent with the
differences explained by Pattinson: the trains are not late, but few and far between. Once, in
Banat, “there turned out to be no train till the evening. . . . If there is anything I hate, it is
waiting the livelong day for a railway train” (4). Another time, in Hungary, “we stopped at
some small station, for no particular reason . . . but looking out I saw the stokers, pokers,
and engine-driver all calmly enjoying their pipes. . . . Some one or two people remarked
that the officials in this part of the world were lazy fellows, but the passengers generally
appeared in no great hurry” (342). Still, Crosse suggests that it is a matter of national
temperament: “The Wallacks are the most dilatory people in the whole world” (283). He
believes that “a change will come to all this substratum of humanity, but it takes time. Even
the railways in these wilder parts have not exactly settled themselves down to the
inexorable limits of ‘time tables’” (342).
Such observations were made by travellers even before the introduction of railways.
Charles Boner notes in his 1865 account Transylvania: Its Products and Its People: “in my
life I never met such want of punctuality as here . . . in this country absolutely no one kept
to time. For a person you had ordered punctually at seven to make his appearance at nine
was not thought extraordinary. Punctuality is simply a thing unknown” (Boner 227;
emphasis his). He later suggests that “There must be something in the air of Transylvania
which prevents people from keeping time, for no one seems capable of doing so” (307).
E.C. Johnson, the author of On the Track of the Crescent (1885), also mentions the
Hungarian railway worker who has “breakfast, luncheon, dinner, pipe, and coffee, and has
arranged all his family affairs” (Johnson 297), although the trains he takes are never late.
He waits one hour in Varna and the same amount of time in Budapest because of the poor
frequency. Still, in Budapest, he notes that “The train arrived at five o’clock, or as near to
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that hour as Hungarian punctuality will allow” (161). He finds several journeys too slow
(185), but when he misses a connection and loses his luggage, he thinks that “the train
started, at a speed very unusual on Hungarian railways” (208). When he has found the link
he needs, again he complains that “the guard made me hop out nimbly, as the train only
stopped two minutes” (209). Apart from this subjective view of train speeds, Johnson’s
account does not leave a lasting impression about the unreliability of Transylvanian
railways.
By contrast, Nina Mazuchelli, the author of Magyarland (1881), is, together with
Crosse, very likely Stoker’s main source for railway travel. In the third chapter of her
account, titled “A Caution to Snails,” she uses complaints, jokes and euphemisms, not
unlike Harker in Klausenburg, to describe a Hungarian145 trip: “Our train was announced to
leave at ten minutes to ten; but overdue, it did not arrive from Trieste until half-past eight
o’clock, and how could any one be so unreasonable as to expect it to be got ready to start
again in the short space of one hour and twenty minutes?” (Mazuchelli I, 31). She quickly
draws conclusions about the natives’ notion of time: “No one thinks of hurrying himself in
Hungary, where everybody has plenty of time for everything . . . where persons take life
easily” (I, 32). On the Hungarian plain, “the speed, as may be imagined, is not very
alarming . . . scarcely exceeding ten miles an hour; besides which we linger at the various
stations, time, as we have seen, being no object in this primitive country” (I, 32-33).
Otherwise, she notices that trains are punctual in the larger stations (I, 31) and the trains in
which she travels are delayed on account of a robbery (II, 9) or to add more carriages for
145
She is actually in Pragerhof, Slovenia but, like other travellers, she makes use of a special rhetorical
device: she rarely mentions the places in order to give the impression that the story is set in the middle of
nowhere. The reader follows her over dozens of pages without any clear indication of her actual location.
272
emigrants to America (II, 205-206). Once she almost misses the train (II, 40) because she is
too busy trying to buy a Romanian traditional blouse worn by a young girl.
There are several conventions of an Eastern European travelogue, which the reader
or the publisher probably expected to find, and which show up in several accounts. Like
Boner, Mazuchelli complains of the carriage she has ordered at six o’clock: “at half-past
seven it came dashing under the old archway with ‘exemplary punctuality’ according as
that substantive is understood in Hungary” (II, 135). Like Crosse and Johnson, she uses the
image of the petty railway official who delays the train: “At the time specified the enginedriver, seated on a heap of sand outside the platform, was dozing over his pipe, and the
guard leisurely finishing his breakfast in the inn kitchen” (I, 31). She repeats this later: “as
soon as the engine-driver and guard have charged their pipes afresh, the heavy, lumbering
machine slides out of the station, and we drag on again as though it were a matter of the
most sublime indifference as to what time we arrive at the end of our journey – if we ever
do” (I, 35-36).
In Stoker’s novel, the second trip to Transylvania, undertaken by the group of
vampire hunters, includes a railway journey from Varna to Galatz. The travellers need to
change trains in Bucharest where, according to Dr Seward’s diary, they are “three hours
late” (Dracula 386). One editor remarks that “The novel opened with Harker bemoaning
the unpunctuality of trains in the East and ends with Seward observing the same”
(Leatherdale 468 n. 11). Nevertheless, they manage to arrive in Galatz in a little over
twenty-four hours, which means they could have made the trip in only twenty-one. This is
contested in one of the editions of the novel: “The most direct train from Varna to Galatz
would have been by way of Ruschuk, Giurgiu, Bucharest, Ploesti, Buzau, Braila, and
Galatz – a distance of over 200 miles, which would have taken several days in Stoker’s
273
time” (McNally and Florescu 256 n. 350). Another editor repeats this, although he reduces
the number of days from “several” to only two: “The entire trip, a straight-line distance of
150 miles, took the hunters almost twenty-four hours, although McNally and Florescu (The
Essential Dracula) calculate that it should have taken them at least two days” (Klinger 462
n. 2). Neither McNally/Florescu nor Klinger provide a source for their suggestion that
Stoker should have at least doubled the duration of the trip between Varna and Galatz.
However, Stoker’s numbers are consistent with those provided by Johnson,146 the only one
of his sources who made half of the trip (Varna-Bucharest) in 1881 in under twelve hours
(Johnson 99-110). Moreover, George Stoker also travelled between Varna and Ruschuk and
could have offered his brother the necessary information. Doubling or tripling the duration
of the trip to Galatz, as McNally/Florescu and Klinger do, contributes to the characters’
sense of alienation in a way not imagined by Bram Stoker.
One of the most confusing passages in the novel is the brief dialogue between
Jonathan Harker and the wife of the innkeeper in Bistritz: “‘Do you know what day it is?’ I
answered that it was the fourth of May. She shook her head as she said again: ‘Oh, yes! I
know that, I know that! but do you know what day it is?’ On my saying that I did not
understand, she went on: ‘It is the eve of St George’s Day’” (Dracula 35). It is not an
important passage; still, it is heavily annotated and it often resurfaces in commentaries on
the novel. It is true that the woman’s voice forewarns the reader about the appearance of the
mighty villain of the story when she asks Harker: “Do you not know that tonight, when the
clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway? Do you know
where you are going, and what you are going to?” (35). However, in light of the future
146
Pattinson does not provide an average speed for British trains, but he gives an average of 28 miles per hour
for Austria and Hungary and 25.75 miles per hour for Romania (16).
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developments both in Transylvania and in London, it matters little that Harker meets
Dracula on St George’s Eve, when nothing of consequence occurs.147 The annotations in
several editions focus on information taken from Emily Gerard, Montague Summers and
others about Romanian superstitions and legends concerning Saint George, who is
celebrated by all Christian denominations on 23 April. These editors (Wolf 7-8 n. 32;
Byron 35 n. 1; Luckhurst 364-365) either quote Gerard or place St George’s Day on 23
April without mentioning the fact that the dialogue in the novel occurs on 4 May.
The discrepancy in the novel is clearly an allusion to the twelve-day difference (in
the late nineteenth century) between the Julian and the Gregorian calendars. Until the First
World War, Orthodox countries like Russia, Romania or Greece still followed the Julian
calendar.148 However, Austria had switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1583 and Hungary
(although under Turkish rule at the time) in 1587 – exactly 165 years before England. In
Transylvania, Catholic and Protestant officials adopted the innovation between 1602 and
1611; and, after the annexation by the Habsburgs at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, “the Gregorian calendar . . . became official to all religions” (Repciuc 84),
including the Orthodox Church. As citizens of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Romanians
in Transylvania used the Gregorian calendar in their daily life, while the Orthodox Church
and its flock followed the Julian calendar for the religious feasts.149 This is why the
peasants encountered by Harker celebrate St George’s Day on 5 May instead of 23 April.
147
A little later, when the woman implores Harker to wait a day or two, one editor rightly asks: “Why would
waiting improve Harker’s chances of survival? Dracula certainly is not a creature of the forces of the eve of
St. George’s Day” (Klinger 25 n. 50).
148
E.C. Johnson, for example, attends the coronation of King Charles I of Romania on 22 May 1881 (Johnson
111-124), although Romanians celebrated it on 10 May. More famously, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in
Russia is also known as the October Revolution, although it occurred on 7 November, according to the
Gregorian calendar. The Churches in Romania and Greece switched to the Gregorian calendar after 1918,
whereas the Russian Church did not.
149
This is still true today in Russia, Ukraine, Serbia and a few other places. The civic calendar is Gregorian,
but the religious one is Julian, so that Christmas, for example, is celebrated on 7 January.
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The innkeeper’s wife does not suggest that the day is 22 April; on the contrary, she
acknowledges that it is, in fact, 4 May.
Stoker’s only source for the discrepancy is Emily Gerard’s 1885 article in
Nineteenth Century: “Perhaps the most important day in the year is St. George’s, the 23rd
of April, (corresponds to our 5th of May), the eve of which is still frequently kept by occult
meetings taking place at night in lonely caverns or within ruined walls, and where all the
ceremonies usual to the celebration of a witches’ Sabbath are put into practice” (Gerard,
“Transylvanian Superstitions” 134). Gerard was probably confused150 by what she
undeniably perceived as an anomaly, the fact that Romanian peasants believed St George’s
Day should be celebrated on 5 May rather than 23 April. Still, she never states
unambiguously that Romanians in Transylvania followed the Julian calendar in their daily
life. Stoker took note of the discrepancy: “St George’s Day 23 April (corresponds to our 5
May) eve of which is for witches Sabbath” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 120-121). He probably
believed at first that Transylvanian Romanians (or even Transylvanians in general)
followed the Julian calendar, because in an early note on the plot he planned to include two
letters from Count Dracula to Harker’s employer, Peter Hawkins: one from 16 March,
“dated 4 March old style,” and one from 30 March, “18 old style” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 9293). However, he later changed his mind, probably because he found out that this was not
true. The “old style” letters were not included in Dracula and the date is the same (4 May)
for both Harker and the innkeeper’s wife.
Nevertheless, several editors seem to believe that Jonathan Harker’s time is twelve
days ahead of that of the natives he meets in Transylvania. Those who address the anomaly
150
She seems even more confused in her 1888 book, The Land beyond the Forest, where she writes twice that
St George’s Day is on “24th April (corresponding to our 6th of May)” (I, 335; II, 59).
276
are McNally/Florescu, Leatherdale, Riquelme and Klinger. After quoting Gerard, the first
editors state that “In the Romanian Orthodox calendar St. George’s day falls on April 23”
(McNally and Florescu 56 n. 24). The mention of a specific calendar seems intended to
mark a temporal difference, especially as it comes after the quote from Gerard about “23
April (corresponding to our 5 May)”; yet, the date they provide for the feast is the same in
both the Julian and the Gregorian calendars151 and it is not clear why the woman in Bistritz
believes it is the eve of St George. Another editor explains that “The reason for the
discrepancy is that in 1752 Britain switched from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar.
Russia and Greece did not switch till after World War I. Several countries affiliated with
the Greek Orthodox Church still retain the old, Julian Calendar for the celebration of
church feasts” (Leatherdale 33 n. 56). The information provided is correct, but it does not
concern the people and the places described in Dracula.
Two of the more recent editors also address the calendar difference on the eve of St
George: “The evening before May 5 by the Eastern calendar and before April 23, by the
Western calendar, which was changed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582” (Riquelme 30); “The
date Harker reckoned as 4 May (presumably using an English, Gregorian calendar) would
have been denoted as 22 April on the Julian calendar, still in use in Transylvania at that
time” (Klinger 25 n. 48). Riquelme seems to suggest that Romanians in Transylvania
followed the Julian calendar, which is in fact made clearer by the political-geographical
terms that the editor prefers: the Julian calendar becomes “Eastern” and the Gregorian
becomes “Western.” As such, they seem to apply more objectively to people who live in
151
It is possible that, by “Romanian Orthodox calendar,” McNally/Florescu mean the calendar followed by
the Romanian Church at the time when their edition was published (1979), when the Romanian calendar (both
civic and religious) was already Gregorian. Even if this is the case, the fact that St George is celebrated twelve
days earlier in Stoker’s Bistritz remains unexplained.
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different parts of the world rather than to religious beliefs. Klinger is less ambiguous about
this and clearly states that Transylvanians used the Julian calendar. The Gregorian calendar
takes on the mark of ethnic difference and becomes the “English” calendar. When Stoker is
imprecise in his attempt to induce the temporal relegation of his subjects, some of the
editors intervene to render his discourse more unambiguously allochronic.
8.2 The Burden of History
Time and timekeeping in Dracula mark the encounter of two different worlds; or, as
one commentator of the novel puts it, the “contrasting attitude towards time is supposed to
be a differentia specifica between the East and the West” (Goldsworthy 79). One of the
most memorable sentences in the novel, announcing the danger that lies ahead waiting for
Harker in Transylvania, refers to his crossing the bridge across the Danube in Budapest:
“The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most
Western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took
us among the traditions of Turkish rule” (Dracula 31). Harker indicates here that he
changes worlds; not just the geographical world of the West and the East, but also the
world of the present with one of the past. Conquered by the Turks in 1541, Budapest was
freed in 1686, less than a century and half later, and more than two centuries before the
events in Dracula. Stoker knew this from his sources (Crosse 194; Johnson 178); Vambéry
also makes it clear in his country monograph (Hungary, 332). At the time of Harker’s
journey, Hungary had long ceased its connection with the Ottoman empire, yet in the eyes
of the Englishman Budapest still shows signs of “Turkish rule.”
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Three editions comment on Harker’s statement; only one gives the exact length of
the “Turkish rule” and none denies the possibility that its signs were still visible right after
crossing the bridge connecting Buda and Pest. The first of these editions explains that
“Transylvania passed from Turkish dominion to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1711”
(Auerbach and Skal 9 n. 4). The two editors obviously refer to the year when Transylvania,
already liberated by Austria in 1699, ceased to be an autonomous principality and became a
mere province of the Habsburgs. However, this annotation about Transylvania cannot
explain Harker’s statement, which is made from a bridge in Budapest and is about the
“Turkish rule” in Hungary. Another editor recounts that, “Having conquered Hungary, the
Turkish westward advance was halted in Vienna in 1529. Ottoman rule presented Europe
with an anti-Christian foe” (Leatherdale 28 n. 9). The reference here is to the 1529
unsuccessful Siege of Vienna, following the defeat of the Hungarian forces in 1526 at the
Battle of Mohács. The twin cities of Buda and Pest had not been conquered yet, but
Leatherdale’s note gives the impression that Turkish occupation began before the Siege of
Vienna. More importantly, just as Auerbach/Skal makes no reference to when the “Turkish
dominion” (of Transylvania) started, Leatherdale does not say when (and if) the 145-year
“Ottoman rule” in Hungary ended.
The third edition that explains Harker’s statement is the only one that mentions the
duration of the Turkish occupation of the Hungarian capital: “Buda was captured by Sultan
Süleyman in 1541, who garrisoned the town and established a vizier’s seat there. It
remained under Turkish control for nearly 150 years, until the allied Germans (under
Charles of Lorraine and Lewis of Baden) expelled the Turks in 1686” (Klinger 13 n. 9).
The editor has the right dates, although he mixes up a “vizier” (a prime minister of the
Ottoman Empire) with a “pasha” (a provincial governor). Between 1541 and 1686, part of
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Hungary, including the cities of Buda and Pest, was officially known as the Pashalik (or
Eyalet) of Budin. Klinger does not deny the possibility that Harker could see the signs of
the distant “Turkish rule” just by crossing a bridge between two river banks, both of which,
in fact, had been occupied by the Turks. Also, none of the editors discusses the likely
inspiration for the passage. Since Stoker never visited the area, he relied on sources that
make very similar observations: “wherever the observant traveller goes in Hungary, he is
struck with two peculiarities: one consisting in the relics of Orientalism possessed by the
people, as exhibited in their costume, manner of cooking food, and many other domestic
habits, the other, in the resemblance their dwellings of to-day bear – in form and
arrangement at any rate – to those of their Turanian ancestors” (Mazuchelli I, 81). Despite
its Orientalism, Hungary is kept by this traveller within the limits of the civilised world,
since she also writes that “Transylvania . . . now forms the border-land separating
civilisation from barbarism” (II, 96).
Similarly, another source suggests that the Carpathians separate “civilisation on one
side from barbarism on the other” (Boner 73) and that Romanians “have nothing to do with
the West” (394). The frontier between the West and the East is placed by another traveller
read by Stoker either in “Buda-Pest, with its magnificent river embankments . . . The
Magyar does everything with a degree of splendour that savours of the Oriental” (Crosse
257-258) or even closer to home: “Once past Vienna, your moorings are cut from the old
familiar West; the costumes, the faces, the architecture, even the way of not doing things,
have all a flavour of the East” (Crosse 2). The same sources, which are not mentioned by
the editors of the novel, could have led Stoker to believe that the Turkish rule had ended
shortly before Harker’s fictional trip eastwards: “The Hungarians are a manly, brave, and
chivalrous race, but lately emerged from barbarism, for the Turks held the greater part of
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their country in possession until a comparatively recent date” (Mazuchelli I, 21). Both the
travellers from whom he draws inspiration and Stoker himself inflate the turbulent history
of the region they describe because they wish to underline its temporal distance.
In Dracula as well as in other late-Victorian novels set in “remote” places, the
insistence on history has two distinct albeit related purposes: to show that that those places
are remnants of a bygone era; and to prove that they owe their current underdeveloped state
to their past. Its supernatural elements notwithstanding, “Horror fiction is, essentially,
fantasy about history” (Sage 234). It is “a specialised form of the historical romance,
perhaps, but it does not merely toy with ‘history,’ it inserts itself directly into a propaganda
war” (68). Such fiction needs to convince the readers that they enter a world whose
antiquity explains, rationalises even, the extravagant plot and cast of characters. It is a
world that does not obey the scientific rules of modernity. That is why novels like Dracula
need to be set in “places where a living past is to be encountered. In these areas, time has
moved more slowly, or ‘time has stood still.’ Remnants of primeval history are to be
observed in working condition” (Leerssen 293).
Both Stoker and his sources use at least three methods in their “propaganda war” (as
Sage puts it): they use history instead of geography to describe a place; they insist on the
ubiquitous presence of the signs of the past; and they use antithetical comparisons between
these remote places and England, identifying them as representatives of the past and of the
future, respectively. The editors of Dracula often use the same methods in their explanatory
notes. For example, on the road from Constantinople to Bucharest, E.C. Johnson, the author
of On the Track of the Crescent, sails to Varna, whence he takes the train to the Romanian
capital. In Varna, he describes the people in the railway station, speaks of the Bulgarian
national character, of the Russian danger, and of the past and present state of the country
281
(Johnson 98-100). The train takes him then through the countryside and he recounts the
history of Bulgaria (101-103). He relates the hassle of going through Romanian customs
(104) and then tells the history of Romania from its beginnings as Dacia until Charles I
who was about to be crowned as king (105-108). Right after his last sentence about
Romania’s new monarch, he continues: “As soon as the train stopped, I seized my small
things and bolted” (Johnson 108). There are no other ways of introducing the places to the
readers; the countries are identified by their past and described through the personal
experiences of the traveller.
Jonathan Harker arrives in Klausenburg “after nightfall” (Dracula 31). He sees the
city the following morning but has nothing to say about it. Neither do the editors, with two
exceptions. One edition starts by saying that the city “was built on the ruins of the old
Daco-Roman city of Napoca, hence its current name, Cluj-Napoca” (McNally and Florescu
51 n. 7) and continues with a historical account which does not go further than the end of
the fifteenth century, when Vlad Ţepeş and Matthias Corvinus lived. The other edition
summarises the first and describes the city as a “fortified town built on old Roman ruins. It
is called Cluj in Romanian” (Luckhurst 363). The fact, fairly common all over Europe, that
the second-largest city in Romania was first a Roman castrum becomes its defining element
in such annotations. A modern location is described as archaic, either ancient or medieval
or both. Archaisation awaits other places in some of the annotations. Varna is given the
same defining medieval quality in two editions: “In the nineteenth century, Varna . . . was
still a fortified town” (Wolf 375 n. 6); “15 years after liberation from the Turks, was still
fortified” (Leatherdale 434 n. 23). Another edition emphasises the “Turkish rule,” although
this is not mentioned in the novel: “A major port city on the Black Sea. The Turks ruled it
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between 1391 and 1878, when it was ceded to an independent Bulgaria” (Auerbach and
Skal 275 n. 4).
When he arrives in Bistritz, Jonathan Harker identifies it as “a very interesting old
place” (Dracula 33). Several editions insist that nothing has changed and that even today it
is “[s]till a lovely old town in Transylvania” (McNally and Florescu 56 n. 20); a “small
medieval town on the Bistritza River” (Luckhurst 363), “surrounded with the ruins of
ancient bastions and towers” (Wolf 3 n. 16). Harker adds that the city “has had a very
stormy existence, and it certainly shows the marks of it. Fifty years ago a series of great
fires took place, which made terrible havoc on five separate occasions. At the very
beginning of the seventeenth century it underwent a siege of three weeks and lost 13,000
people, the casualties of war proper being assisted by famine and disease” (Dracula 34).
Some editors confirm this by invoking a fire in 1857 (Wolf 5 n. 26) and “many hostile
attacks” (Luckhurst 363) mentioned in the 10th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and
the 1896 Baedeker, respectively. These are their own sources, not Stoker’s, since the writer
could not have known the former and very likely used an earlier version of the latter. Just
one editor mentions here Stoker’s real source, Charles Boner (Leatherdale 27 n. 2), but only
in reference to the use of the German name “Bistritz.” Indeed, Boner speaks of “fearful
calamities,” including a devastating siege in 1602, and of five great fires between 1836 and
1850. However, unlike Stoker and the editors of the novel, he insists that the city “has
nothing of that medieval look which distinguishes Hermmanstadt [Sibiu] or Schässburg
[Sighişoara]; the streets are straight and broad, and nearly every building is of modern date,
the place having suffered repeatedly by fire” (Boner 377). Stoker did not write this down;
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he probably wished to say more about the city’s history under Turks152 rather than reveal
anything about the contemporary features of the city. The novel’s editors enhance his view
of “the Turkish rule,” the signs of which are visible everywhere east of Pest.
Transylvania often appears archaic because of the editors’ use of anachronisms.
Wolf and Klinger frequently cite John Paget’s 1839 account Hungary and Transylvania, as
if nothing had changed in the six decades prior to the publication of Dracula. Klinger also
writes that Transylvania “is called Erdély by the Magyars, and Ardealu by the Roumanians,
both meaning ‘forest-land’” (Klinger 17 n. 20). The Romanian name of the province
(besides “Transilvania”) is “Ardeal,” not “Ardealu” – but it did appear with this spelling in
old documents, usually with a Latin breve over the last letter, marking the fact that it was a
short “u.” When Harker mentions the roads in Mittel Land, he adds that “Of old the
Hospadars would not repair them, lest the Turks should think that they were preparing to
bring in foreign troops, and so hasten the war which was always really at loading point”
(Dracula 37). The information comes from Wilkinson (166) and the first two words show
that Stoker was well aware that three quarters of a century had passed. The last clause is
part of Stoker’s effort of presenting the region as the victim of military strife. The first
editors of the novel correct Stoker’s misspelling and provide a definition of the most
unusual term of the sentence: “Hospadars should read hospodar. In the Slavonic
chancellery documents the title of Princess [sic] was often ‘Gospodar.’ Hospodar is a
corruption of the title Gospodar (governor)” (McNally and Florescu 60 n. 34); “The rulers
of Wallachia and Moldavia were called hospodars from the fifteenth century to 1866”
(Wolf 1993: 12 n. 44). This is repeated almost verbatim by subsequent editors (Auerbach
152
He also noted that “In war of 1564 between Transylvania [a Turkish dominion] and Austria, Bistritz had to
furnish 3000 men armed with arquebuses. War contribution of that year was 30,000 florins and 200 horses”
(Bram Stoker’s Notes 240-241).
284
and Skal 1997: 14 n. 5; Byron 1998: 37; Leatherdale 1998: 37 n. 94; Riquelme 2002: 33).
Auerbach/Skal neglect to correct the term and leave it with Stoker’s misspelling, while
Riquelme quotes Wolf directly. Quite unexpectedly, the most recent of the editors turns all
of Romania in Stoker’s time into an Austrian province: “A term of title used in Wallachia
and Moldavia until annexed by the Austrian Empire in 1866” (Luckhurst 2011: 366).
None of these editors mentions that the misspelling is obviously a typo: in his
working notes, Stoker wrote, correctly, that “Hospodars neglect to repair roads for fear of
making Turks think they wish to facilitate entry of foreign troops” (Bram Stoker’s Notes
248-249). The editors, instead, insist that they held power from the Middle Ages until 1866.
Medieval documents of the Wallachian and Moldavian chancelleries were redacted in High
Church Slavonic and called the monarch almost always “gospodin” and very rarely
“gospodar” (Ilie 28-29). The term was discontinued in the mid-seventeenth century, when
Romanian became the language of official documents. The version “gospodar” reappeared
in Russian accounts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when Russia
frequently interfered in the affairs of the two principalities. From Russian, the term was
borrowed into French and English as “hospodar” and referred specifically to the
Phanariotes, that is, the Greek-speaking rulers directly appointed by the Ottoman Porte.153
The two versions survived in the Romanian language as “gospodar” (with the feminine
form “gospodină”), defined by the DEX as the head of a rural household (although the
adjective, meaning “hardworking,” is more common). One of the editors is confused by the
Romanian definition and writes that “‘Hospodar’ or ‘Hospadar,’ as Harker would have it, is
a corruption of gospodar, a common Roumanian word meaning ‘landholder’ or ‘lord’; here
153
Stoker’s source often speaks of the “Greek Hospodars” (Wilkinson 62, 73, 134). Of course, the term
survived in foreign sources long after 1822, when the last of the Phanariotes were replaced by Romanian
rulers.
285
it connotes the aristocracy” (Klinger 31 n. 73). The term does not denote, in fact, a “lord,”
but rather a lowly farmer; the “title” or, rather, the appellation, is similar to the old English
titles of “Goodman” and “Goodwife.”
One of the editors describes the Carpathian Mountains as extending “in a semicircle
from Presburg on the Danube to Orsova on the same river” (Klinger 13-14 n. 13). The use
of the present tense and of the Austrian name of Bratislava – in use only until 1918
(Moravčiková 174) – in the same sentence is a clear anachronism, quite unnecessary since
Stoker does not speak of Presburg in the novel. Similarly, when describing Moldavia, the
same editor says that “Its chief town was Jassy” (Klinger 17 n. 21). The Romanian name is
“Iaşi” and the city is not mentioned in Dracula. The twenty-first-century editor probably
calls it “Jassy,” as it would have appeared on an Austro-Hungarian map, in order to keep
the reader anchored in the novel’s German-sounding toponymy even while he is reading the
annotations. When Mina Harker writes in her journal that she and Van Helsing have
“arrived in Veresti” (Dracula 401), Wolf uses a 1922 edition of the German guide Stielers
Handatlas to write about “Veresci [...] some ninety miles” to the Borgo Pass (Wolf 420 n.
35). What might appear as a misspelling is, in fact, the old spelling of Romanian “Vereşti.”
Because Wolf’s map is too old, he uses a name that is more archaic than the one used a
century earlier by Bram Stoker.
One editor notices that “Stoker continually emphasises the tribal and ethnic conflicts
and violent history of the region” (Luckhurst 364). Sometimes, the editors of Dracula do
the same, even when the author does not. When Harker recounts the murder of Skinsky in
Galatz, he adds: “Those we had been speaking with ran off to see the horror, the women
crying out ‘This is the work of a Slovak!’” (Dracula 391). One of the editors explains that
“Local folk regard Slovak peasants as the lowest of the low, a sign of the ethnic tensions
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endemic in the Balkans and surrounding regions, and which explodes from time to time,
most recently in the 1990s” (Leatherdale 475 n. 58). He probably bases the first part of this
note on his own earlier conclusion that, because “the Slovaks were given some money by
the Szgany” (Dracula 75), “A pecking order operates among Dracula’s minions. The
Szgany pay the Slovaks, who are clearly the foot-soldiers” (Leatherdale 89 n. 48). He then
links a fictional inside-job murder (one Dracula minion kills another) at the end of the
nineteenth century to the conflicts – one hundred years later – in former Yugoslavia,
extended into “the Balkans and surrounding regions.”
When Harker finds himself “on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia,
and Bukovina” (Dracula 32), another edition explains that “The wild border country
through which Jonathan travels teeters on the edge of fragile national independence”
(Auerbach and Skal 10 n. 8). The editors make the region appear politically unstable, rather
than just geographically indeterminate, as it seems to be in Harker’s account.
Auerbach/Skal restate this idea later in the novel, when Van Helsing explains that the
region surrounding Borgo Pass “is full of strangeness of the geologic and chemical world.
There are deep caverns and fissures that reach none know whither. There have been
volcanoes, some of whose openings still send out waters of strange properties, and gases
that kill or make to vivify” (Dracula 360). The two editors refute Van Helsing’s account as
“[o]ne of Stoker’s periodic attempts to identify vampires with the landscape of
Transylvania, ignoring the ease with which they adapt to England” (Auerbach and Skal 278
n. 8). Although they do not deny that this is an accurate description of Transylvanian
scenery, they very likely wish to suggest that it is the history, and not the geography of the
place, that produces vampires. The first time that Transylvania is mentioned in the novel,
they give a summary of its history introduced by the following sentence: “In essence,
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fittingly for vampires, the history of Transylvania is a history of whom it belongs to”
(Auerbach and Skal 1997: 9 n. 7).
Stoker’s motif of the turbulent past is also enhanced by the editors of the novel
whenever they explain the novel strictly through the author’s working notes. Starting from
a passage in Charles Boner’s Transylvania, Stoker describes the territory near the Borgo
Pass as “the ground fought over for centuries by the Wallachian, the Saxon, and the Turk.
Why, there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood
of men, patriots or invaders” (Dracula 52). The editors take Stoker’s word for granted and
do not compare with the source: “‘Near Prund is territory continuously fought for by
Wallachians and Saxons.’ Stoker extracted this from Boner’s book Transylvania, p. 419”
(McNally and Florescu 63 n. 59); “From Boner, p. 419” (Leatherdale 57 n. 91); “[Boner’s]
description is: ‘Pass into Moldavia, scenery increases in picturesqueness – good road. Near
Prund is territory continuously fought for by Wallachians and Saxons’” (Klinger 21 n. 39);
“the Borgo Prund through the mountains begins east of Bistritz and as a border-zone was
subject to repeated warring activity. All the information in this paragraph derives from
Charles Boner” (Luckhurst 364). The quotes are provided as Boner’s, when in fact they are
from Stoker’s working notes. None of these annotations can be considered explanatory
notes; they are, in fact, textual notes, since they use Stoker’s research (a veritable first draft
of the first chapters of the novel) and not his sources.
If one reads Boner’s account, one can see that he describes the border zone as the
scene not of wars, but of minor disputes over land among villagers:
In the neighbourhood of Prund lies a territory, the possession of which has
led to the most flagrant outrages. Commission after commission has been
appointed to decide peremptorily on the line of demarcation, and although
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the existing documents and the boundary marks all prove where it is –
indeed there was never any doubt about it – the Wallacks will not give way,
but come on their neighbour’s land, plough it for their own purposes, or
destroy the harvests which the Saxons have raised. (Boner 419-420)
There are no patriots, no invaders, and no Turks enriching the soil with their blood in
Boner’s account. Stoker managed to include in his version of the passage both motifs of his
theme of the oppressive pressure of the past – the violent history and the orientalising
Turkish rule – announced in Jonathan Harker’s first journal entry. The editors of the novel
contribute to this view of Transylvania154 by adding their own opinions about the turbulent
past of the region, by citing sources that always confirm the version provided by the
novelist, or simply by explaining Stoker through Stoker, rather than through his sources.
A related theme in Dracula is that of the conflict between a frozen past and an evermarching modernity. Stoker’s sources often remark on the dichotomy between the
backward surroundings and the “spirit of the nineteenth century” (Gerard, The Land beyond
the Forest I, 3), noticeable even “in the wilder parts of Hungary. Just outside the railway
station life and manners are what they were two centuries ago, and yet here are the
grappling-irons of civilisation” (Crosse 342). Harker makes a similar observation soon after
witnessing Count Dracula’s escapade down the walls of the castle: “It is nineteenth century
up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had,
and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (Dracula 67). This
thought is triggered by his use of shorthand in correspondence and some editors note that
“‘It’ refers to his shorthand” (Wolf 49 n. 39); “This line comes as a jolt, implying that
154
So do some of the commentators of the novel: “This region, which ethnic Romanians consider the cradle
of their modern nation, has endured a turbulent history” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 119).
289
Western modernity – which shorthand represents – does not know all the answers”
(Leatherdale 77 n. 117). “Shorthand” is one of the first words of the novel and two editions
try to identify the method used by the diarist: “As far as can be determined Stoker had
Harker use the Pitman method of shorthand that had only recently come into general use”
(Wolf 1 n. 2); “Various shorthand systems were employed in the nineteenth century; in
1837, the Pitman method came into general use. This method of speedwriting, in which
geometric shapes replace words, is difficult to learn, but efficient to use” (Auerbach and
Skal 9 n. 1).
The fact that stenography is supposed to symbolise modernity is underlined again in
the novel; when he sees a letter written in shorthand, Dracula suddenly feels angry at his
own powerlessness: “here he caught sight of the strange symbols as he opened the
envelope, and the dark look came into his face, and his eyes blazed wickedly” (Dracula
74). This sentence remains uncommented and the reader cannot find out if shorthand can
really be a differentia specifica between Western modernity and Transylvanian
backwardness at the end of the nineteenth century. Actually, in Romania, shorthand was at
the time a British import: it was practiced after the Taylor system (named after Samuel
Taylor). The first course of stenography was given in 1848 by C.A. Rosetti, a future
prominent politician (and husband of Englishwoman Marie Grant155). Starting with 1860,
the Parliament in Bucharest used stenographers and the first treatise of shorthand (Taylor
system) was published in 1861 by Elie Bosianu. In the meantime, Transylvanian
Romanians used a German system (Gabelsberger), preferred in the Austrian-Hungarian
Empire, which was adapted to the Romanian language in a book published in 1864 by
155
Known in Romania as Maria Rosetti (1819-1893). Revolutionary Romania – Grant’s portrait in Romanian
folk costume by painter C.D. Rosenthal (1820-1851) – is the most famous national personification of
Romania.
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Dimitrie Răcuciu (see Sfinţescu 207). Thus, although Dracula would have found Harker’s
“strange symbols” difficult to transcribe, they would hardly qualify as the quintessential
example of Western modernity at the time that the novel takes place. More importantly, the
fact that the editors of Dracula provide mere notes of recovery identifying for today’s
readers the type of shorthand used by Harker without verifying the situation in
Transylvania and Romania justifies Stoker’s othering.
Stoker would have found many indications in his sources that Transylvania and
Romania were lands frozen in time: “Here motion, being abnormal, explains perhaps why
[progress] proved infecund and resultless” (Boner 104); “The traveller seems here to have
been suddenly carried back to some remote period of the world’s history, everything is so
heavy and so slow” (Mazuchelli I, 31-32). The historical period in which the region has
frozen is either the generic “Middle Ages” (Mazuchelli I, 125), about “five hundred years”
ago (Boner 223); or it is associated with a specific era from English history: “England in
the 17th century” (Mazuchelli II, 147), “the reign of Mary” (Boner 404) or “England in the
thirteenth century” (Crosse 197). Stoker intended to make a similar idea more explicit when
Harker, in Castle Dracula, notes that he “feared to see those weird sisters” (Dracula 80).
One editor observes that three female vampires “echo the three weird sisters in Macbeth”
(Leatherdale 96 n. 112). Klinger, who had access to the manuscript of the novel, notes that
it “contains the following, which is omitted from the published narrative: ‘– how right was
Shakespeare, no one would believe that after three hundred years one should see in this
fastness of Europe the counterpart of the witches of Macbeth’” (Klinger 96 n. 44).
It is worth mentioning that Stoker and his narrators, along with the author’s sources
and many of the travellers of the era, have an ambivalent opinion about the perceived
backwardness of the region. While constantly deploring the poor accommodations, they
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avoid the best hotels; while they find transportation much too slow, they often look for
coaches, carriages156 or horse-driven carts; if they find fault with the wilderness, they also
appreciate “the pleasures of ‘roughing it’” (Crosse 291). For many of them, “traveller” was
a term of distinction and they held in contempt the mere “tourists” who preferred safer
routes and more comfortable hotels (Ford 57-60).157 One such traveller is Jonathan Harker,
who revels in the fact that the inn where he has found shelter is not too cosy: “Count
Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found, to my great
delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways
of the country” (Dracula 34). Many of Stoker’s sources were equally eager to see the
customs and the costumes158 and are afraid of “the silent march of – in this case misnamed
– ‘civilisation,’ which threatens ere long to obliterate all the distinctive external
characteristics of nations and render every country alike” (Mazuchelli II, 59). They want to
find the “old-world charm” and notice that, “[l]ike a subtle perfume evaporating under the
rays of a burning sun, it is growing daily fainter and fainter, and all lovers of the past
should hasten to collect this fleeting fragrance ere it be gone for ever” (Gerard, The Land
beyond the Forest I, 6).
Dracula is the perfect example of Max Müller’s “retrogressive savage.” His intellect
is “child-like” now, but he was great once. In Van Helsing’s words, “was he no common
man; for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most
cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the ‘land beyond the forest.’ That mighty
156
Mazuchelli and her husband, for example, are begged by their guide to take the express train to Pest, but
they prefer a peasant’s carriage (Mazuchelli I, 67-68).
157
One of Stoker’s sources notes: “Although comparatively few English travellers come to Pest . . . we took
care here, as we invariably do when ‘pilgriming’ abroad, to avoid hotels recommended by Murray or
Bradshaw, preferring not only to mingle with the natives of the place rather than our own countrymen, but to
fall in with the national customs as well” (Mazuchelli I, 189).
158
After he describes the costume of a Romanian peasant, one of Stoker’s sources laments: “I much wished
that I had been similarly accoutred” (Johnson 200).
292
brain and that iron resolution went with him to his grave, and are even now arrayed against
us. The Draculas, were, says Arminius, a great and noble race” (Dracula 280). In Stoker’s
sources, the Saxons of Transylvania, who set up a system of self-government in the Middle
Ages, are another example: “Institutions are flourishing with us in the West – institutions
that we Englishmen are proud of – which, centuries ago, were here looked on as a birthright
when we had them not. And now those same have here passed away. Such are the
mutations in this world’s history” (Boner 202). Although they appear backward to the
contemporary travellers, “in not a few instances these people have anticipated by some
centuries the liberal ideas of Western Europe in our own day” (Crosse 213). Civilisation is,
however, once more within the reach of Transylvanians and of Dracula himself. The
retrogressive savage may “become once more progressive” (Müller, “The Savage” 123),
and the vampire Count may begin to evolve once again: “With the child-brain that was his
to him he have long since conceive the idea of coming to a great city. . . . What more may
he not do when the greater world of thought is open to him” (Dracula 361).
8.3 The Unbearable Lightness of Ahistoricity
Müller’s theory of the two types of primitivism makes it seem less paradoxical that
the same country and the same people can appear burdened by a violent history and, at the
same time, ahistorical. The defining element of the Szekler and the Romanian nations to
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which Count Dracula belongs is the fact that they have roots in ancient history: the former
are “descended from Attila and the Huns,” the latter are “descendants of the Dacians”
(Dracula 32). Both nations are deeply anchored in a time from before the fall of the
Western Roman Empire. Nothing else is said in the novel about the history of these nations,
with the exception of the Count’s speech, which is more genealogical than historical, as it
relates the story of the many Draculas. It also stops conveniently at the battle of Mohács in
1526, that is, at the beginning of the “Turkish rule,” while the Szeklers are reduced to the
sole role of fierce warriors, carrying on the “endless duty of the frontier guard” (Dracula
60). In Stoker’s sources, the Szeklers are always identified as descendants of the Huns
(Boner 624; Crosse 206; Mazuchelli II, 164; Johnson 205; Gerard, The Land beyond the
Forest II, 143) and one author suggests that their very name means “at the frontier” or
“beyond” and, as such, it “does not imply a distinctive race, but merely those Hungarians
who live beyond the forest – near the frontier, and cut off from the rest of their
countrymen” (Gerard, The Land beyond the Forest II, 147).
As it is manifest in Dracula and its sources, history in Transylvania and Romania
may be oppressive, but it is ancient history. Stoker, who, as mentioned above, was quite
curious about Dacia and the Dacians, understood this quite well from the very first of his
sources, which promises to recount “the struggles of two nations [Wallachia and Moldavia]
between a strong remnant of Dacian barbarism and the influence of modern civilisation”
(Wilkinson iii). Although it summarises twenty centuries of Romanian history, Wilkinson’s
1820 Account emphasises the traces of old, pre-Roman traditions. Subsequent authors read
by Stoker exacerbate them. Charles Boner, in Transylvania: Its Products and Its People
(1865), makes a distinction between Wallachians (natives of Romania) and “Wallacks,”
“the original dwellers in Transylvania” (Boner 66). He thinks the Wallacks are a mixture of
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Dacians and “Sclave and German races [although their] language received a Roman stamp”
(93). He sees them as “hordes . . . a wild uncultivated people, without a sense even of law
or property” (100).159 To prove how primitive they are, he shows them full of wonderment
before a simple screw: “It is to them what the thunder and lightning of fire-arms were to the
savage who had never seen a European; an inexplicable contrivance calling forth their
marvelling admiration. . . . It is a machine whose working he cannot fathom; it is in
concrete form ‘the incomprehensible,’ and he stands in presence of it overwhelmed with a
feeling of his incapacity” (521). Possibly inspired by such an observation, Stoker mentions
that Harker and Godalming meet with other boats during their journey up the Siret River,
sometimes at night: “The men were scared every time we turned our electric lamp on them,
and fell on their knees and prayed” (Dracula 399). No editor comments on this, which
upholds Stoker’s suggestion that the Moldavian boatmen have never seen electricity and,
moreover, find it miraculous, possibly diabolic.160
To help his readers understand his ideas about Transylvanian Romanians, Boner
compares them with nations more commonly associated with primitivism in the Victorian
era. He describes their 1848 revolution as a revolt of vicious natives against civilised
colonisers: “They took life, like the King of Dahomey, for the exquisite excitement it gave.
. . . The dread they inspired was as great as the sound of the Indian war-whoop would cause
in some English settlement” (Boner 229). He insists that Romanians ought to forget their
pastoral ways and become an agricultural people: “We find that by wise measures such
change has been effected among the Caffres, and they have acquired habits of industry
159
He repeats this: “The Wallack population . . . a wild horde” (Boner 228); “the wild hordes of Wallacks”
(230).
160
These boatmen and raftsmen traded between Galaţi and Bucovina. Wolf could have annotated the passage,
since he is the only one who mentions that the Galaţi harbour was lighted with electricity (398 n. 15).
295
unknown to them before. . . . If such a conversion could be brought about with those South
African people, the Wallacks will surely allow the possibility of the same being done with
them” (284). He also thinks that “[t]he Caffres in South Africa are as wasteful as the
Wallacks” (323) because the latter cut down too many trees.
In Boner’s view, such a nation could hardly have a Roman ascendancy and, while
he accepts the Dacian ancestry of Romanians, he pokes fun at their Latin origin: “In their
schools, so I was informed, the children are catechised thus: –‘Of whom are we
descendants?’ – ‘Of Romulus.’ – ‘What were our progenitors?’ – ‘Demigods.’ – ‘Name
some of our great forefathers.’ – ‘Virgil, Cicero, Livy,’ etc. etc. During the revolution, the
Wallack force was organised according to the Roman division of an army, with ‘phalanx’
and ‘tribunes,’ just as their ‘ancestors’ had” (Boner 66). A similar reaction of exasperation
at the pretensions to Roman origins occurs in one of the editions of Dracula, even though it
annotates Stoker’s passage about “the descendants of the Dacians” which says nothing of
Romans: “Dacia, whose area corresponds roughly to twentieth-century Romania, became a
province of the Roman Empire under the Emperor Trajan in A.D. 105. As late as June
1995, a Romanian patriot boasted in a letter to the New York Times of his Roman
inheritance, scrupulously differentiating Romanians from the ‘Romanay [sic] Gypsies’
who, in Dracula, prove to be treacherous allies of the vampire” (Auerbach and Skal 10 n.
3). The note explains neither the text nor the context of the novel, but a letter to the editor
of a newspaper published one century after Dracula and entirely unrelated to Stoker’s
novel161 – which is probably why the two editors try to connect it to the vampire Count in
their last sentence.
161
The letter was published in the 17 June 1995 issue of the New York Times. The author, identified by
Auerbach and Skal only as a “Romanian patriot,” was Justin Liuba, an American of Romanian origin, former
296
Other sources used by Stoker are just as insistent about the primitivism of a
population that cannot be related to the Romans: “With all their ignorance and lawlessness,
it is curious that they pride themselves on being descendants of the ancient Romans,
ignoring their ‘Dacian sires’” (Crosse 98). Romanians are found to “possess even yet the
reflection of the Thracian blood of their ancestors” (Mazuchelli II, 145). Even their sheep
show them anchored in a time before history; they are “never being driven. They follow the
shepherd as in ancient scripture times” (I, 315). They are ontologically identical with the
Dacian ancestors of Classical Antiquity: “On Trajan’s Column in Rome is sculptured the
history of this first compaign [sic] of the young and ambitious Emperor, and the forms, cast
of features, and dress of the Dacians, as there minutely represented, correspond, strange as
it may seem after the lapse of sixteen centuries, in almost every particular with those of the
Wallachs of the present day” (Mazuchelli II, 61-62). Yet another of Stoker’s sources
confirms the uncanny but perfect similarity: “The Wallachs are assumed by most writers to
be the descendants of the Dacians. Certainly their faces are strangely like those on Trajan’s
column” (Johnson 107).
Emily Gerard is the only one of Stoker’s sources who accepts the Latinity of
Romanians as well as the fact that “Wallachian,” along with other versions of this term, is
an exonym. She does this, however, not in “Transylvanian Superstitions,” but in The Land
beyond the Forest, the book that Stoker may or may not have read. In it, she writes that
Director of Radio Free Europe. His was in fact a reply to a previous letter, by Hungarian-American engineer
Bela Liptak (published by the same newspaper on 19 May 1995). Both letters are quite brief. Liptak stated
two things: that the Daco-Roman origin of Romanians is a “farcical” theory; and that the Romanian
Parliament had decreed that “Gypsies in Romania cannot call themselves Romany.” Liuba argued instead that
the Roman origin is not theory, but historical fact; and that such a legislative decision is “understandable” to
avoid confusions. He seems not to have verified this: no such “decree” existed at the time, nor does it exist
today. In the Romanian language, the confusion between the name of Romania and the Romany people is less
obvious, as the latter are called “Rom” (plural: “Romi”).
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Wallack, or Wlach, by which name this people was generally designated [in
Transylvania] up to the year ’48, points equally to Roman extraction – Wallack
being but another version of the appellations Welsch, Welch, Wallon, &c., given by
Germans to all people native of Italy. It may, however, not be superfluous here to
mention, that at no period whatever did these people describe themselves otherwise
than as ‘Romans,’ Roumanians, and would have been as little likely to speak of
themselves as Wallacks as would be an American to call himself a Yankee, or a
Londoner to designate himself as a Cockney. (I, 216)
Gerard sees Romanians as “gradually emerging from barbarism into civilisation, [caught in
a] struggle between past and future, between darkness and light, between superstition and
science” (II, 181), while to others they seem frozen like prehistoric fossils: “as for time,
they must have come into the world before it was talked about” (Crosse 181; emphasis his).
In his notes, Stoker mentions “Dacia” four times and “Dacians” another four times.
Like other Victorians, he probably needed this historical reference162 to help him
understand the geographical location of the places he was writing about. In the novel, he
only uses a single reference to Romanians as being descendants of the Dacians. Harker’s
observation about the descendants of the Dacians and those of the Huns is made while in
Klausenburg, after his decision to give a rigorous characterisation of the place with notes
taken before the trip at the British Museum in London: “I shall enter here some of my
notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina” (Dracula
32). However, he has nothing else to say about either Klausenburg or Transylvania, except
the list of nationalities. The editors, instead, provide a history of the place, helping the
162
Curiously, the editors of Stoker’s notes include Dacia, together with the modern countries Bulgaria,
Hungary, Moldavia, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia and Wallachia, in an index entry about “Eastern Europe”
(Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 325).
298
reader to situate it in time. With the sole exception of Byron – who is very brief and writes
simply that “In Stoker’s time, [Transylvania] was a province of Hungary; now it is a part of
Romania” (32 n. 1) – the other editors mention its ancient past, sometimes beginning before
the Christian Era: “Once the centre of the pre-Roman Dacian state” (McNally and Florescu
52 n. 10); “The region has had a turbulent history. It formed the nucleus of the Dacian
kingdom until incorporated by Rome in 106” (Riquelme 27). Sometimes the account starts
with the Roman conquest: “Originally part of Roman Dacia” (Wolf 3 n. 12); “From the
second to the fourth centuries, Dacia, as it then was, was incorporated into the Roman
empire” (Auerbach and Skal 9 n. 7). The last edition quoted here identifies Transylvania
with Dacia, rather than with a part of the ancient kingdom. Other editors seem to believe
that the Roman province lasted well into the Middle Ages: “originally part of Dacia but was
conquered by Hungarians (Magyars) in the 11th century” (Leatherdale 29 n. 16);
“Transylvania belonged to the Roman province of Dacia until the eleventh century, when it
became part of Hungary” (Klinger 15 n. 17).
Most editors end their account in 1867, when the dual monarchy (AustrianHungarian) was created and Transylvania became part of Hungary. However, Klinger ends
his (inaccurately) in 1713, when Transylvania was “annexed to Austria” (15 n. 17). The
most recent editor, instead of a longer story, simply identifies the province with its preRoman past: “Transylvania (‘beyond the forest’) is located in the central part of modern
Romania, high in the mountains, but formed the core territory of the ancient kingdom of
Dacia” (Luckhurst 363). Without exception, the travellers through Transylvania and
Romania that Stoker read when he was working on Dracula also speak of Dacia and the
Dacians when they introduce the territories inhabited by Romanians to their readers, very
likely because educated Westerners were better acquainted at the time with the history of
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ancient Greece and Rome than with the recent history of the “other Europe.” Although he
ended up by using a single phrase about the Dacian ancestry of Romanians, Stoker took
down this information several times in his working notes.
There is little or no information in Stoker’s sources about contemporary Romanians
(and Szeklers) except for the constant association with their ancient forefathers, proving
that nothing has changed for centuries or millennia. According to Johannes Fabian,
anthropological allochronism is based on the evolutionary foundations of the discipline. In
the nineteenth century, with the “discovery” of prehistory,163 populations previously
identified as “savages” began to be seen as “survivals” of more or less ancient states of
cultural development. This progressive view of human society meant that the Other was no
longer seen as ontologically, but rather as historically, different. “Savages” from all corners
of the world, including the “remote” places of Europe, were understood as belonging to an
earlier stage of historical development. In individuals, this also translated into earlier stages
of human evolution. Despite his cunning, Dracula’s “intellect is small” (Dracula 383) and
“his child-mind only saw so far” (384). His planned invasion of England is a sign of the
momentousness and of the peril164 associated with the new-fashioned discovery of the
Other. At the same time, the study of these “survivals” seemed important in an era in which
– as Müller’s or Nordau’s notion of “retrogression” warned – evolution was understood
together with its corollary, devolution, which threatened civilisations already advanced.165
163
Thanks especially to John Lubbock’s 1865 influential Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient
Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages (Daniel 48-49). Lubbock coined the terms
“Palaeolithic” and “Neolithic” and proposed a Darwinian philosophy of history, later expanded in On the
Origin of Civilisation (1870).
164
For more details, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration (1989), especially Part III: England (155-221).
165
A view that Tennyson summarises in “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” (1886): “Evolution ever climbing
after some ideal good / And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.”
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Going in search of underdeveloped people and places causes the traveller to face the
danger of getting lost out of time, in a world where the supernatural can easily usurp
reality. The anonymous author of an article about travelling through the Carpathians,
published in 1867 in The Saturday Review put together much of the same ideology that
underlines the works of Boner, Crosse, Mazuchelli, Johnson, Gerard and Stoker when he
(or she) wrote that:
The inhabitants, those few whom the traveller meets, belong to strange outlandish
races, of whose speech and habits he knows nothing – Slovaks and other Slavic
tribes, Wallachians, and Szeklers.166 The mountains have had no history, have never
come forward on the theatre of the world, or become associated in our minds with
great men and great events, like the Alps and Pyrenees and Apennines. One hears
indeed of castles built by the Huns, and is told that here or here [sic] the Tartar
invaders poured across to ravage the plans and carry Christians into captivity; but
Huns and Tartars seem more than half mythical,167 and the only bit of living history
one gets is when some indignant patriot points out a pass through which the
Russians marched, in 1849, to crush the independence of Hungary. So it comes that
in traversing these forests one has a sense of loneliness and desolation, of the
majestic gloom of the wilderness, such as is hardly to be felt elsewhere on this side
of the Atlantic. We seem carried back into primitive Europe as we gaze over vast
tracts unchanged since the days when an adventurous trader brought down to the
Greek colonies on the Pontus those strange tales of savage tribes which Herodotus
records – tales of the gold-bedecked Agathyrsi, and the cannibal Androphagi, and
166
The author refers to the entire chain of the Carpathians, covering not only Romania, but also present-day
Slovakia and southwestern Ukraine.
167
The mythical is timeless and non-evolving.
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the Neurians,168 who turn themselves once a year into wolves. (“The Carpathians”
428-429)
The same traveller can be inspired to describe in the most minute details a landscape
that he or she associates with historical and cultural facts, and have little to say about a
place that brings nothing to his memory and imagination. The feeling of loneliness and
desolation that prompts the traveller to notice nothing in such a landscape is perhaps best
expressed in a page from John Ruskin’s diary. While at Champagnole (in the Jura
mountains of eastern France, close to the border with Switzerland), on 19 April 1846, he
realised the difference between the feelings evoked by the history-laden Alps and a place
his memory could not associate with anything in particular: “it struck me how utterly
different the impression of such a scene would be, if it were in a strange land, and in one
without history; how dear to the feeling is the pine of Switzerland compared to that of
Canada . . . if that pine forest had been among the Alleghenys [sic], or if the stream had
been Niagara, I should only have looked at them with intense melancholy and desire for
home” (Ruskin I, 325). Jonathan Harker in Dracula, as well as the travellers whose works
Stoker read in preparation for the novel, also find themselves “in a strange land, and in one
without history,” which makes for descriptions filled with desolation and even desperation.
They often see nothing and no one where a local would see plenitude.
Emily Gerard expresses Ruskin’s idea in very similar words. It is the lack of
familiarity with Transylvania that makes her unable to relate with the people and the places
and that ultimately breeds contempt:
168
The Neuri, as Herodotus (iv, 105) calls them, although the Greek historian reports the story of lycanthropy,
then adds, “I do not believe this tale” (Herodotus 249).
302
Not the mere distance which separates Transylvania from Western Europe gives to
it this feeling of strange isolation. Other countries as far or farther off are infinitely
more familiar even to those who have never visited them. We know all about
Turkey, and Greece is no more strange to us than Italy or Switzerland. But no one
ever comes to Transylvania in cold blood, unless it be some very rabid sportsman
eager for the embrace of a shaggy bear. (The Land beyond the Forest I, 3-4)
Another traveller read by Stoker expresses her desperation in alarming tones: “Pragerhof169
in its absence of human life and maddening isolation is just one of those places in which
more than one day’s sojourn must end in suicide” (Mazuchelli I, 28-29). Complaining
about the slowness of railway travelling in Hungary, she notes with dark humour that it has
“frequently been known to produce in the passenger – especially if he happen to have come
from Western Europe – a species of temporary insanity; the particular form which the
malady assumes causing the unfortunate sufferer to lose for the nonce all sense of his own
individuality, and to imagine himself the ‘Wandering Jew,’ destined to go on to all time” (I,
33). Yet another traveller attributes the same feeling to the leiterwagen (a type of peasant’s
cart often mentioned by Harker in Dracula), although the ultimate source is, of course, the
place itself: “But to thoroughly realise the strange weariness which is engendered by these
places, the traveller should charter a lieterwagen [sic], and drag his drowsy way along the
parched and dusty road. Then he will feel that all around him slumbers in lethargic languor
under the scorching summer sun; that he is a lost soul condemned à la Juif errant, to
wander for eternity through a never-ending and unchanging landscape” (Johnson 185;
emphasis his).
169
In present-day Slovenia, but at the time in Styria.
303
In Dracula, Stoker signals Harker’s isolation by explaining that he finds himself in
“one of the . . . least known portions of Europe [and] not able to light on any map or work
giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to
compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps” (Dracula 32). Transylvania is unknown
and unknowable. One of the editors comments that “Stoker sites Harker’s destination as the
back of beyond, where few foreigners ventured, and where anything might happen.
Transylvania is to Stoker what the ‘Lost World’ is to Arthur Conan Doyle” (Leatherdale 29
n. 20). Several editions explain briefly that the Ordnance Survey maps were military maps
(Wolf 3 n.15; Auerbach and Skal 10 n. 1; Riquelme 27). Klinger thinks they were started
“in 1791, in part to prepare for impending war with France” (17 n. 23), while Luckhurst
states that “the Ordnance Survey began as surveys of terrain by the British military in
1746,170 following the Scottish rebellion. Geographical knowledge and mapping was seen
as intrinsic to British modernity; Castle Dracula is thus off the map, in a pre-modern space”
(364). Luckhurst is the only one who sheds some light on Stoker’s intentions. However,
none of the editors questions Harker’s statement about the absence of similar maps for the
area east of Bistritz.
The idea that there were no accessible, detailed maps of Transylvania is part of
Stoker’s strategy of presenting the territory through which Harker advances as a sort of noman’s-land. In reality, “[a]t the time Dracula was written, highly detailed maps of
Transylvania did exist” (de Roos, “Location of Castle” 6; emphasis his). Almost
simultaneous with the British cartographic effort, the Austrian Surveys “were initiated by
Empress Maria-Theresa in May 1764 after the Austrian troops during the Seven Years’
170
They are both right: the survey began in 1746, but the actual work for a specific map to be made widely
available began in 1791; see Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (London:
Granta, 2010).
304
War had suffered serious setbacks due to a lack of reliable maps” (6 n. 11). By the midnineteenth century several series of surveys had been conducted and all the territories of the
Austrian Empire had been mapped in detail, for census and for military purposes. Maps of
Transylvania of the same rigour and quality as those of the Ordnance Survey were available
in many libraries of the empire and outside it.171 Stoker’s effort of othering Transylvania is
supported by the fact that the existence of these maps is not mentioned in the editors’
annotations.
In fact, Stoker himself very likely used one or more of these Austrian maps,
discovered in the library of the British Museum. When he traces the final voyage through
places like Veresti, Fundu, and Strasba, up the Bistritza River and through the passes on the
eastern slopes of the Carpathians, he uses sources better informed than the Baedeker.
McNally and Florescu admit that “it is clear that he [Stoker] had studied the geography of
the Transylvanian, Bukovinan, Moldavian and Wallachian areas meticulously. He must
have had access to a very detailed survey map, which no longer exists” (McNally and
Florescu 22-23). Even in this last part of the novel, however, Stoker is very careful to
conceal any information about the area immediately surrounding Dracula’s castle,
including the Borgo Pass. During the last stage of the trip, no other places are named, then
no other places seem to exist. Van Helsing notes in his diary: “All yesterday we travel, ever
getting closer to the mountains, and moving into a more and more wild and desert land”
(Dracula 406). The roads are suddenly very bad, it is unexpectedly cold, and Mina remarks
the dreariness of their situation: “we were in a perfect desolation, and, so far as we could
see through the snow-fall, there was not even the sign of a habitation” (413).
171
See de Roos, “Location of Castle” (8-21), where several of these maps are used and reproduced.
305
Van Helsing and Mina Harker, the two narrators of this last part of the journey,
seem to have travelled back in time, all the way to an ancient period when the distinction
between civilisation and barbarity was based on the axis South-North, rather than WestEast. Ever since Varna, they have been travelling north and, like in the old representations
of the frozen lands of the barbarous Goths over the Danube, the vampire hunters can barely
suffer the cold, even though it is only the end of October and the beginning of November
and they have not yet reached the mountains. Jonathan first notices “the cold from the river
seeming to rise up and strike us” (Dracula 398); he feels tired and sleepy because of the
cold, then he imagines himself on a new kind of adventure: “I wish it wasn’t so cold. There
are signs of snow coming; and if it falls heavy it will stop us. In such case we must get a
sledge and go on, Russian fashion” (400).172 Still in central Moldavia, like her husband,
Mina complains that “It is very cold” (403) and Van Helsing that “It is cold, cold; so cold
that the grey heavy sky is full of snow” (404).
More than just desolate, an unmapped territory is a place without history. The
reference to the Ordnance Survey maps is meaningful when one considers that Stoker
owned the entire Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, as revealed by the posthumous sale of
his library (Stoker, Forgotten Writings 228). The Ordnance Survey maps were very
detailed, including “stone circles, lynchets, barrows, megalithic tombs, hut circles, hill forts
– these things, the cultural fossils of prehistory which are part of our present-day cultural
landscape – the dead, non-functional part of the landscape” (Daniel 161). In the absence of
such a map, the traveller necessarily feels like Ruskin in a strange place without history.
The rocks and the hills, however handsome, remain meaningless. Even places bearing
172
This may have been inspired by one of the books Stoker mentions in his notes: William Spottiswoode’s A
Tarantasse Journey through Eastern Russia.
306
names seem hollow and insignificant. That is why, perhaps, one of the editors believes he
has “traced the course of the Bistrita River north from Baku” (Wolf 423 n. 41) and also
writes that “The Bistrita joins the Siret below Baku” (417 n. 28). The Romanian name of
the city is “Bacău,” but the editor very likely misspelled the Germanised name “Bakeu”
(also used by Klinger) – as it would have appeared on old Austrian maps – and turned it
into the capital of Azerbaijan.
The ideas and the vocabulary of the novel have permeated the discourse about it.
Critics often place the story in “the remote mountains of eastern Europe” (Bigelow 53),
without raising the possibility that this is a misrepresentation inherited from Stoker and his
sources. In his anthology of excerpts from these source texts, one of the editors borrows
their imagery: “Surrounded on three sides by the rocky barrier of the Carpathians, and on
its western approaches by one of Europe’s most impenetrable forests, it is little wonder that
‘Transylvania,’ when translated from the Latin, means ‘the land beyond the forest’”
(Leatherdale, Origins 108-109). There is, of course, no “impenetrable forest” to the west;
Harker comes to Transylvania from that direction and he does not mention a single tree
before approaching Borgo Pass. Another editor describes the province as “chiefly a land of
wheat fields, orchards, and vineyards, though sulphur, lead, timber, and iron were being
exploited” (Wolf 3 n. 12). Transylvanian economy is thus reduced to agriculture and raw
materials, the first of which is sulphur, commonly associated with hell and the devil. In
reality, sulphur does not appear to have been exploited at all. Among Stoker’s sources, the
author of Transylvania: Its Products and Its People notices it only as a possibility and
deplores the locals’ lack of entrepreneurial skills while at the same time inviting British
investors: “Here were a field for English enterprise!” (Boner 312). However, subsequent
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travellers only speak of sulphur baths (Mazuchelli II, 37) or sulphur springs. Even Crosse, a
chemist interested in local industry, only mentions sulphur in a cave (Crosse 225-228).
The reference to sulphur enhances the representation of Transylvania as a sinister
and eerie place. So do frequent decoding of symbols, either over-interpretive or
idiosyncratic. Where Stoker writes, “There were dark, rolling clouds overhead, and in the
air the heavy, oppressive sense of thunder. It seemed as though the mountain range had
separated two atmospheres, and that now we had got into the thunderous one” (Dracula
40), Wolf adds: “Stoker had been letting us know, a bit melodramatically, that Harker is
passing from the civilised to the primordial; from the known to the unknown” (Wolf 14 n.
52), while Leatherdale writes that “The Borgo Pass separates two atmospheres, the good
and the bad, west and east, the Christian and the pagan” (Leatherdale 40 n. 117). However,
the passage is primarily descriptive and was likely inspired by one of Stoker’s sources,
describing a “curious atmospheric effects produced by the coming storm. The clouds rolled
up behind us in dense masses, throwing the near mountains into deep shadow, while the
plain far beneath was flooded with bright sunshine” (Crosse 26). Leatherdale similarly
comments when Harker crosses the bridge in Budapest: “Though still within the AustroHungarian Empire, Harker senses he is leaving the known world and entering the unknown.
Good, the sun, and the Three Wise Men come from the East, but so does Evil, an echo of
Babylon” (28 n. 7). While Stoker is using the usual Gothic strategies of building tension,
and probably furthering the otherness of the place, Leatherdale’s eschatological readings of
Harker’s eastward journey shepherd the reader on the way to the land of sorcery and
obscurantism.
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Chapter 9
Othering: People
A closer look at Stoker’s sources shows that the travellers he was reading in
preparation for the novel had exoticised and orientalised Transylvania both in the passages
selected by the author of Dracula and elsewhere in their books. With rare exceptions,
however, the annotations provided by the novel’s editors identify Stoker’s research notes as
sources and even present them as quotations from the authors read by the novelist. Thus,
they do not notice how the actual sources prepared Stoker for an orientalising look in
Dracula. Moreover, this means that they ultimately explain Stoker through Stoker, with
uneven results, since the way in which the novelist summarised long passages was, at
times, misleading for him and can often mislead the reader of the working notes today.
It seems fair to assume that, meticulous as he was in all his undertakings, Stoker
read from his sources more than just the pasages preserved in his notes. When he read
Wilkinson’s Account, which has 294 pages with the appendices and 197 pages without,
Stoker started taking notes from page 18 and ended on page 234, well into “Appendix No.
5.” From Boner’s 627-page Transylvania, Its Products and Its People, he took notes
beginning on page 66 and ending on page 419. From Johnson’s On the Track of the
Crescent (316 pages), he only started taking notes on page 105 (understandably, since the
first hundred pages are set south of the Danube) and did not stop until page 295, when he
went back and wrote down some more from pages 168-170. The notes taken from Crosse’s
375-page Round about the Carpathians are the most thorough, beginning on page 5 and
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ending on page 373. From Mazuchelli’s Magyarland, Stoker started taking notes on page
45 and stopped on page 316, but they are all from the first volume (of 379 pages) and, since
he used several passages from the second volume in the text of the novel, it is clear that at
least some pages of his notes have not survived. To give a single example, Jonathan
Harker’s observation that the district where Castle Dracula is located “is in the extreme east
of the country” (Dracula 32) remains unexplained by the editors173 because they have not
considered the second volume of Magyarland, in which the traveller speaks of “Szeklers, a
people occupying a large tract of country in the extreme east of Transylvania” (Mazuchelli
II, 164).
All the research notes on Transylvania and Romania, with the exception of those
taken down from Gerard’s article on “Transylvanian Superstitions,” are typewritten, very
likely by somebody else, probably a typist on the payroll of the Lyceum. Here and there are
blanks filled out in longhand by Stoker, usually with the more obscure and foreign words,
such as “boyars,” “hospodars” or “Galatz,” which an outsider would have ignored, but
which Stoker himself knew and added to the typescript. This means that the original,
handwritten research notes may have been more extensive and that, when the novelist had
them typed, at a later date, he only selected the ones he thought he would include as such in
the text of Dracula. Beginning with McNally/Florescu, all editors have noticed that Stoker
used his sources almost verbatim. In fact, this is only partly true: he did not use his sources
directly, but rather his research notes with ideas and partial quotes from the sources,
including many re-workings of the original information and even mistakes and
173
With the exception of Leatherdale, who comments that “Evil comes from the East; extreme evil comes
from the ‘extreme east’” (29 n. 17).
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misinterpretations on Stoker’s part. The parts of the books that were likely read but not
included in these research notes can also be useful and should not be entirely neglected.
9.1 Exotic Transylvania
While travelling through the “Mittel Land,” Jonathan Harker notices “a green
sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps
of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road” (Dracula 37). It seems an
innocent enough sentence and it has not been annotated by any of the editors. Nevertheless,
the ending (about the “blank gable end to the road”) seems quite mysterious. The surviving
typewritten note is not very helpful – Stoker took it down from Crosse and simply wrote:
“p. 7. Houses (Hungarian) Separate. Blank gable to road” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 210-211).
This is, in fact, the first note he took from Crosse, after which he went back towards the
beginning and summarised another passage from page 5, which means that something had
caught his attention in the description of the houses. The whole passage in Round about the
Carpathians is certainly more revealing: “Hungarian towns look like overgrown villages
that have never made up their minds seriously to become towns. The houses are mostly of
one stor[e]y, standing each one alone, with the gable-end, blank and windowless, towards
the road. This is probably a relic of Orientalism” (Crosse 7). While Stoker’s note is very
pithy, the original source can turn a mysterious sentence into a meaningful one.
Stoker appears to have read Crosse’s book very carefully (thirty-seven notes from it
have been typewritten) and he included a description of the “gable ends” in the novel
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perhaps in part because the traveller mentions them three more times. First, he narrates a
leisurely stroll back to the inn (he is in Oravicza, in Banat) and he notices “in the
foreground quaint gable-ends mixed themselves up with the shadows and the trees” (Crosse
13). Stoker was usually unconcerned with regional differences and often transferred an
observation about Banat or even Moldavia to north-eastern Transylvania. However, in this
case, the traveller later suggested that “throughout the country [the cottages] are built with
the gable-end to the road” (265). Finally, in an area very close to the Borgo Pass, when the
traveller was completely alone and facing a snowstorm, he found shelter in an abandoned
house: “Here then, in this dreary spot, with its gable-end to the road, and turning away from
the prospect – and no wonder – stood the carcass of a cottage. My horse and I scrambled
over the breach in the wall, where a garden never had smiled, and got into the roofless
house” (270). Stoker probably also read Gerard’s 1888 book, where he could have noticed
her description of Szekler houses which, with “their narrow gable-ends all turned towards
the road, have something camp-like in their appearance, and have been aptly compared to a
line of snowy tents ready to be folded together at the approach of an enemy” (Gerard, The
Land beyond the Forest II, 151). The fact that Stoker inserted such a minor detail about
houses because they seemed to represent “a relic of Orientalism” is not too surprising. All
the travellers he drew upon in his descriptions of Transylvania insist on the Orientalism of
the province.
On his way to Dracula’s residence somewhere around the Borgo Pass, Harker
exhibits nostalgia for the first time – he feels it again later, seven years after the events
when the survivors “got to talking of the old time” (Dracula 419). As the coach is leaving
the inn, the Englishman takes a mental picture of the place: “I shall never forget the last
glimpse which I had of the inn-yard and its crowd of picturesque figures, all crossing
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themselves, as they stood around the wide archway, with its background of rich foliage of
oleander and orange trees in green tubs clustered in the centre of the yard” (Dracula 37).
The presence of the orange trees in the middle of the town, even planted in tubs, is unlikely
in north-eastern Transylvania, and is rather reminiscent of Levantine imagery. The passage
is discussed in a single edition of the novel:
The oleander is a plant that arouses mixed feelings. For the Chinese it symbolises
beauty and grace. Because of its poisonous leaves, the Hindus call it ‘the horse
killer,’ and yet decorate their temples with it and bind wreaths of it on the brows of
their dead. In Christian lore it is a plant capable of producing health-giving miracles
under the auspices of St. Joseph. The orange is, of course, the golden apple that was
given to Hera on her wedding day by Gaea, the goddess of earth and fertility. It is
likely to have been the golden apple used by the crafty Hippomenes in escaping
Atalanta. Orange blossoms are still popular at weddings as a symbol of happiness
and fecundity. (Wolf 11 n. 41)
Wolf’s explanatory note first sends readers to more exotic China and India, then brings
them home to “Christian lore,” although the trees are clearly used in Dracula for decorative
purposes and not for “health-giving miracles.” The orange is placed in the context of Greek
myths, but its presence so far north of Greece remains unexplained.
Stoker’s research notes show that the novelist based this description on a passage
from Crosse’s Round about the Carpathians about a market day in Kronstadt (Sibiu), in
southern Transylvania: “p. 202. Kronstadt. Picturesque inn-yard seen through wide arched
doorway – open arcade surrounds it – oleander trees in green tubs in centre, long wagons
four horses abreast, peasantry with snow-white sheepskins or embroidery, white leather
coats lined with black fur, flat caps, peaked hats, drum-shaped hats for girls – matrons wear
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close twisted white kerchiefs” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 214-215). The passage is, in fact, quite
long (it ends not on the page indicated by Stoker, but on page 203), and it can help one
understand how the author constructed his descriptions of people and places:
As far as the buildings are concerned, Kronstadt has much the air of an oldfashioned German town. As you pass along the streets you get a peep now and then
of picturesque interior courtyards, seen through the wide-arched doorways. These
courts are mostly surrounded by an open arcade. Generally in the centre of each
[courtyard] is set a large green tub holding an oleander tree. This gives rather an
Oriental appearance to these interiors. The East and West are here mixed up
together most curiously. Amongst the fair-haired, blue-eyed Saxons are dusky
Armenians and black-ringleted Jews, wearing strange garments. By the way, the
merchants of these two races have ousted the Saxon trader from the field; commerce
is almost completely in their hands. The market-day at Kronstadt is a most curious
and interesting sight. The country-people come in, sitting in their long waggons
[sic], drawn by four horses abreast, they themselves dressed in cloaks of snow-white
sheepskins, or richly-embroidered white leather coats lined with black fur. The
head-gear too is very comely, and very dissimilar; for there are flat fur caps – like
an exaggerated Glengarry – and peaked hats, and drum-shaped hats for the girls,
while the close-twisted white kerchief denotes the matron. The Wallack maiden is
adorned by her dowry of coins hanging over head and shoulders, and with braids of
plaited black hair – mingled, I am afraid, with tow, if the truth must be spoken.
(Crosse 202-203)
Stoker was probably enticed by the traveller’s promise to show what a “German
town” in Transylvania looked like at the time, as he probably remembered from a different
314
source that Bistritz, where he actually places the scene, was also a “Saxon town” (Boner
349).174 Then, as he wrote about people’s “picturesque interior court-yards,” he likely
visualised the scene through Jonathan Harker’s eyes, because he turned them into a single
“picturesque inn-yard,” as it is in the novel. He noted the wagons with four horses abreast,
which were later used in the first chapter of Dracula and placed in the same area of northeast Transylvania. The coach that takes him from Bistritz to the Borgo Pass is pulled by
“four small horses, which ran abreast” (Dracula 37). The size of the horses seems quite
unlikely for a coach carrying many passengers (speaking, as Harker notices, in various
languages), whereas the four horses that pull the calèche sent by Dracula for a single
passenger (Harker) are all “splendid animals” (40). Here, Stoker used another note taken
down from Crosse: “p.5 Horses four abreast and small” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 210-211).
Interestingly, he had first taken down a note from Crosse’s page 7 (about the “blank gable
to road”), then he went back to page 5 to look for horses. He seems to have forgotten that,
in the respective passage, the traveller speaks not of a diligence, but of a peasant’s cart in
Banat pulled by “four horses abreast . . . the smallest horses I almost ever saw” (Crosse 5).
The other two things that interested Stoker in Crosse’s description “orientalise” the
place and the people. The traveller speaks of “the East and West . . . mixed up together” in
the population of the town; Stoker took down most of the details provided, and later
summarised them as “picturesque figures, all crossing themselves.” There is no mention in
Crosse of the sign of the cross but, along with the “picturesqueness” of the faces, this plays
in Dracula the same orientalising role as the traveller’s more detailed descriptions. The
oleander trees are specifically said by Crosse to give “rather an Oriental appearance,”
174
This information from Boner does not survive in Stoker’s typewritten notes – but he certainly knew from
Boner that there were Saxons in the area around the Borgo Pass (Bram Stoker’s Notes 242-243).
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which may have appealed to Stoker’s pictorial sense.175 The traveller’s observation may
have also persuaded the novelist to give the scene a Mediterranean touch and add “orange
trees” in the yard of the Bistritz inn. Moreover, the writings of other travellers read by
Stoker could have contributed to the description. The author of Magyarland saw more than
oleanders in a region traversed by Harker on his way to Klausenburg. When she
approached a “Greek church” in a valley near Oradea (about halfway between Budapest
and Klausenburg), she walked “by a pathway of trees and flowers growing in large tubs –
oleanders, geraniums, roses, lilies, and a variety of other plants” (Mazuchelli II, 72). In a
hotel in Kashau (present-day Košice, in Slovakia), Emily Gerard also noticed “the rigid
leaves of the oleander trees in the balcony outside, doing their best to grow in tubs much
too small for them” (The Land beyond the Forest II, 204). More importantly, while in
Sibiu, the city described in Crosse’s passage, Gerard purchased “a delicate little piece of
fancy porcelain. . . . About ten inches high, it represents a miniature citron-tree with
blossoms and fruit, growing in a gold-hooped tub of exactly the same shape as the wooden
cases in which real orange-trees are often planted” (II, 213-214; emphasis mine). An old
lady later recognised it as part of an old porcelain set, “pomegranates and citron-trees
alternately, with which the table [at the Brukenthal Castle, in Sibiu] used to be decked out
on the occasion of large dinner-parties” (II, 214). Although there are no surviving notes
from Gerard’s 1888 travelogue, Stoker could have remembered this passage about “fancy
porcelain” and memories of different places when he visualised the orange trees in Bistritz.
A much more elaborate transfer of meaning, location and usage operates in Stoker’s
construction of the picturesque quality of Transylvanian food. The editors closely follow
175
The surviving research notes include some of Stoker’s drawings of Whitby, showing he wished to “see”
the scenes from the novel.
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the author’s descriptions in the novel and his pithy research notes without questioning them
and without noticing the differences between Dracula and Stoker’s sources. Jonathan
Harker has “dinner, or rather supper” (Dracula 31) and then breakfast (33) at the Hotel
Royale in Klausenburg and carefully notes the dishes. On the evening of 2 May, he has “a
chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem., get
recipe for Mina.) I asked the waiter, and he said it was called ‘paprika hendl,’ and that, as it
was a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians” (31). During
the night that follows, he “did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I
had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which
may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink all
the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty” (32-33).
The dish appears three times in Stoker’s research notes, but only once with a very
brief recipe, taken from Johnson’s On the Track of the Crescent. In Eighteen-Bisang and
Miller’s edition of Bram Stoker’s Notes, this mention accompanied by a recipe appears last
rather than first. The typewritten note includes only the Hungarian name and two
ingredients: “p. 271 PAPRIKAS CZIRKE = chicken and cayenne pepper” (Bram Stoker’s
Notes 232-233).176 It is, however, this recipe that the novelist remembered when he had
Harker admire the meal and later suffer from thirst:
At dinner [in the house of a Count not far from Târgu-Mureş] the chief dish was, as
is usual in Hungary, Paprikás csirke. This is prepared by giving some ancient
chanticleer the “happy despatch,” cutting his remains into small pieces, and putting
them into water, in company with flour, cream, butter, and a great deal of paprika,
176
The editors transcribe “SZIRKE” (233). The word is handwritten and there is an obvious hesitation over
the first letter, but it is also quite clear that the writer used a capital “C” (232).
317
or red pepper. This is a dish to dream of, though at first dreaming is out of the
question, for the “griff,” after his first taste of the delicious condiment, is usually
kept awake by a throat compared with which a lime-kiln in full blast would be
coolness itself. (Johnson 221)
Stoker seems a bit confused of the meaning of “paprika,” since he wrote down “cayenne
pepper” although Johnson spoke of “red pepper.” However, the more exotic association
also comes from Johnson. It appears that Stoker remembered it later, because he continued
his notes from page 271 to page 295 of the travelogue, then he went back to page 168 to
page 170 and took down the description of a fish dish “with red pepper (‘Paprika’)” (Bram
Stoker’s Notes 232-233), although this time Johnson spoke, in fact, of “the national Paprika
– a form of cayenne” (Johnson 169). There are at least three reasons to consider On the
Track of the Crescent as one of the first books on Transylvania read by Stoker: he is still
hesitating about ingredients; he only took down the recipe from here; and the name of the
dish appears in Hungarian, rather the German form used in the novel, which he took from
later sources.
He must have encountered the dish again in the first volume of Magyarland and, as
a sign of recognition and relief at discovering the German name, he simply wrote
“‘PAPRIKA HENDL’” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 200-201), without page number. These are in
fact the first words reproduced from Mazuchelli’s travelogue. Clearly, Stoker already knew
their meaning and wrote down a more preferable German version of the name of the dish.
Perhaps at an even later time, he also wrote briefly from Crosse’s Round about the
Carpathians about “p. 141 Maize variously cooked – water melons – paprika hendl and
‘gulyas’ (sort of Irish stew)” (212-213). This time the dish appears familiar and placed in
the company of other, lesser known courses. The novel’s first editor (and the only one not
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to use Stoker’s notes) provides a recipe for paprika hendl from a twentieth-century
cookbook (Marcia Colman Morton’s The Art of Viennese Cooking) and another from John
Paget’s 1839 travelogue, which Stoker probably did not know (Wolf 2 n. 8). Klinger
repeats Paget’s recipe and he also inserts “a more modern . . . low-cholesterol version”
(Klinger 13 n. 12). McNally and Florescu identify the source of the recipe as Magyarland
and invite the modern “visitor to Transylvania [to] order the Romanian version of that dish:
chicken paprikash or tocana de pui (tokana dei pooee) today” (McNally and Florescu 52 n.
8). Leatherdale reproduces, without quoting, McNally and Florescu’s information about a
Romanian version, and indicates that the dish “is described in two of Stoker’s source books
– Magyarland and Crosse” (Leatherdale 28 n. 12). None of the editors mentions Johnson’s
book, the only one from which Stoker’s typewritten notes include a brief recipe, very likely
because the name of the dish appears in Hungarian and they did not associate it with the
dish mentioned in the novel.
A more important detail that remains unnoticed is that Stoker exoticises
Klausenburg by having a rural recipe served at the “Hotel Royale” in the Transylvanian
capital. The author of Magyarland, who mentions the dish three times, always avoids the
big hotels (Mazuchelli I, 189). In fact, the first time she mentions “paprika hendl” she
indicates that it is to be found “at small out-of-the-way inns” (I, 12). The second time, the
dish appears more specifically at a “small fogado (inn) . . . [a] lonely fogado” (I, 18) in the
small Slovenian town of Pragerhof, consisting of the railway station, the inn, and “three or
four sheds” (I, 18). The third time she has “paprika hendl,” it is on the road to Debreczin, in
northern Hungary, having stopped at “a tolerable inn [in a] mezőváros [i.e., town] . . .
contain[ing] an exclusively agricultural population” (II, 172). Crosse also mentions it three
times: first, in a private dwelling, in the Hatzeg Valley, his “first visit to a Hungarian house
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. . . we had paprika hendl (chicken with red pepper), and gulyas, a sort of improved Irish
stew” (Crosse 141); then, at a village inn, in the village of Büksad (Bixad), in Covasna
(224-225); finally, during a shooting party “in Baron Beust’s forests” (356), in the Tokay
area, presumably in a hunting chalet.
Harker’s observation that he could get the dish “anywhere along the Carpathians”
echoes Crosse’s insistence that “In all parts of the country where travellers are possible, the
invariable reply to a demand for something to eat is the query, ‘Would the gentleman like
paprika hendl?’ and he had better like it, for his chances are small of getting anything else”
(Crosse 224-225). At the Count’s dinner, quoted above, no fewer than six courses are
served, but E.C. Johnson only names one. Over the many days that follow, he eats and
wonders at the number of meals and courses; still, he fails to name another dish. In a paper
presented in 1991 at the “Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery,” Andrew Dalby, the
food historian and classicist, analysed the omnipresence of paprika hendl in British
travelogues, some of which had been used by Stoker in Dracula, and suggested that
“travellers, even the most observant, do sometimes see – and eat – what earlier authors
have told them to see and eat” (Dalby 74). In the period analysed, Dalby notices, British
travel guides recommended the dish, whereas the French Guide-Joanne made no mention
of paprika hendl.
The way travellers came to Hungary and Transylvania and, one after the other,
rediscovered this dish is similar to the reaction generated by Byron’s 1810 poem “Maid of
Athens, Ere We Part,” in which he expressed his admiration for the young Teresa Macri. In
the decades that followed, “British travellers would frequently make a point of reporting on
her looks” (Goldsworthy 22). Her house had become a sort of pilgrimage site: the travellers
went to see what somebody else had seen. The same thing, apparently, happened with food.
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Dalby came to the conclusion that the Western visitors to places like Hungary and
Transylvania liked to confirm, rather than discover: “the English travellers appear, on the
whole, to have stuck to the one cooked dish that they knew the name for and that Murray [A
Handbook for Travellers in South Germany and Austria] had told them to expect. The
name they gave it, by the way, was not incorrect (they might have spelt it Paprikahähnl),
but rather Austrian dialect than standard German” (Dalby 73). In fact, the Murray guide
calls it Paprikas Csirke in the original Hungarian and, although it is identified as a
“national dish,” it is mentioned specifically as a staple of “country inns” (A Handbook for
Travellers 531). About paprika, the Murray guide explains that “the taste for it marks the
Eastern origin and descent of the Magyars” (531), and this mark or exoticism and
Orientalism might account for the hold it had over British travellers.
A similar yet even more outlandish aliment mentioned in Stoker’s novel is “a sort of
porridge of maize flour which they said was ‘mamaliga’” (Dracula 33). All of Stoker’s
sources correctly indicate that mămăligă was a staple food of the Romanian peasantry and
none places it in an urban environment. In today’s Romania, mămaligă can be had in a few
peasant-style restaurants,177 but it seems highly unlikely that anyone would have
encountered it in a hotel restaurant in a city controlled by Hungarians. In Stoker’s notes, it
appears as a summary from E.C. Johnson: “P. 120: Favourite dish of peasant ‘Mamaliga’ –
maize flour stirred in water and consistency of hasty pudding and eaten with salt” (Bram
Stoker’s Notes 222-223). The original is not much different: “The favourite dish of the
‘Terranu,’ or peasant, is ‘Mamaligă’ – maize flour stirred up in water to the consistency of
hasty pudding, and eaten with salt” (Johnson 120). Here, the traveller describes a meal in
Romania, near Bucharest, and there is no comparison with porridge. Stoker may have taken
177
Despite its simplicity, it requires the use of a special cast-iron pot.
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down another fragment which he did not have typed, or he simply remembered a passage in
which the same traveller, now in Transylvania, pokes fun at fasting: “The diet of the
Wallach peasants – when they are allowed to eat anything – is very simple. It consists
principally of a porridge, made of the meal of maize, like the polenta of Italy, and called
‘Mamaliga.’ Of this meal they also make a cake, which serves them as bread” (Johnson
251).
In his other sources, Stoker would have found that mămăligă is a foodstuff that
replaces bread in the diet of the Romanian peasant: “All his field labour is confined to
sowing a patch of maize, which supplies him abundantly with meal for his mamaliga; he
has absolutely no wants, and can even do without bread” (Boner 283); “Their [The
peasants’] ordinary food is composed of a kind of dough to which they give the name of
mammalinga [sic], made of the flour of Indian wheat, sometimes mixed with milk”
(Wilkinson 158). The best informed is Emily Gerard: “The food of both children and adults
chiefly consists of maize-corn flour, which, cooked with milk, forms a sort of porridge
called Balmosch, or if boiled with water, becomes Mamaliga – first cousin to the polenta of
the Italians. This latter preparation is eaten principally in Lent, when milk is prohibited
altogether” (The Land beyond the Forest I, 243-244). The only one who seems to have
tasted it is Andrew Crosse, whose Romanian guide once informs him “that he must return
to his hut, for he had not breakfasted. Not to lose sight of him, I returned too. He then with
Oriental deliberation set about making a fire, and proceeded to cook his polenta of maize. I
had got hungry again by this time, though I had breakfasted at Petroseny before starting, so
I partook of some of his mess, which was exceedingly good, much better than oatmeal
porridge” (Crosse 163).
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Some of the editors of Dracula simply explain the meaning of the Romanian word,
with no reference to Stoker’s source or to the fact that it is eaten exclusively in the
peasants’ homes: “maize flour stirred in water” (Luckhurst 364); “A dish like the Italian
polenta, simple boiled cornmeal” (Klinger 19 n. 30). One editor gives a “recipe for
mamaliga” (Wolf 4 n. 21), which includes butter, sour cream and feta cheese.
McNally/Florescu present as a quote from Johnson’s On the Track of the Crescent what is
in fact Stoker’s note, and they too give a recipe “with butter, cheese, sour cream, garnished
with a poached or fried egg” (McNally and Florescu 54 n. 15). Such recipes give the food
an air of slight sophistication and justify somewhat its presence on the table of the “Hotel
Royale.” However, there is no mention of such ingredients in Dracula; Harker appears to
indicate that the mămăligă was used instead of bread for his paprika hendl, which is
consistent with the way it is mentioned in Stoker’s sources.
Harker exaggerates again and exoticises his trip when he describes his meal at the
Bistritz inn: “lest who reads . . . may fancy that I dined too well before I left Bistritz, let me
put down my dinner exactly. I dined on what they called ‘robber steak’ – bits of bacon,
onion, and beef, seasoned with red pepper, and strung on sticks and roasted over the fire, in
the simple style of the London cat’s-meat” (Dracula 36). Relying exclusively on Stoker’s
working notes helps to enhance the author’s “othering” discourse. With the exception of
Luckhurst, the editors define “cat’s-meat” without noting the uncomplimentary comparison
with Harker’s last supper in Bistritz. It is “cooked horse flesh, sold in the streets from a
barrow” (Wolf 9 n. 36); “horse flesh” (Byron 36 n. 1; Leatherdale 35 n. 76); “horse flesh
prepared by street dealers as food for domestic cats” (Riquelme 31); “little bits of meat on
skewers for consumption by cats” (Klinger 27 n. 57). Auerbach and Skal do not mention
the disdain, only the comparison, and extend to all the food consumed by Harker in
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Transylvania: “Jonathan compares his meals to the horsemeat fed to animals in London”
(Auerbach and Skal 13 n. 9). The source (Andrew Crosse) is mentioned by a few of the
editors: “‘Bits of beef, bacon and onion strung on stick, seasoned with paprika and salt, and
roasted over a fire.’ Crosse, Round about the Carpathians, p. 84” (McNally and Florescu
58 n. 27); “This description of ‘robber steak’ is taken from Crosse, p. 84. Stoker perhaps
plays upon the name, for Satan is a ‘robber’” (Leatherdale 35 n. 75); “Andrew Crosse
reports an identical dish in his 1878 travelogue Round about the Carpathians, which
appears among the sources listed in the Notes” (Klinger 27 n. 57); “in Notes, Stoker takes
from A.F. Crosse’s Round about the Carpathians (1878) the detail that robber steak are
‘bits of beef bacon and onion strung on a stick, seasoned with paprika and salt, and roasted
over a fire.’ ‘Cat’s meat’ is a disparaging tourist’s comment that equates the dish with the
horseflesh sold for cat meat in Victorian London” (Luckhurst 365).
Despite the references to Crosse, none of the editors actually quotes the traveller,
but Stoker’s note. In fact, the author of Round about the Carpathians mentions the “robber
steak” five times and, unlike the disdainful Harker, he describes it as the best possible dish:
“The robber steak is capital . . . delicious” (Crosse 84-85); “excellent” (270); “I never
enjoyed anything more” (361). More importantly, every time he has it, he is outdoors: first
during a camping trip in Serbia (84-85); then while travelling with only a Wallack guide
through the Southern Carpathians, from Petroşani to Sibiu: “an ascent over roughish ground
all the way. Arriving at the summit, we made a noonday halt. A fire was soon burning,
whereat our dinner of robber-steak was roasted” (165-166). The third time he was alone in
the Eastern Carpathians, not far from the Borgo Pass, in a “roofless house,” close to a road
to Moldavia: “It was with considerable difficulty that I found sticks enough for my kitchen
fire. . . . The result of my trouble was a blazing fire, whereat I cooked an excellent robber-
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steak. I made myself some tea, and afterwards enjoyed – yes, actually enjoyed – my pipe”
(270). The fourth time he mentions it during the six weeks spent “most agreeably in the
chateaux of some of the well-known Transylvanian nobles. For the time my wild rovings
were over. The bivouac in the glorious forest and robber-steak cooked by the camp fire –
the pleasures of ‘roughing it’ – were exchanged for the charms of society” (291). Finally,
while bear hunting in northern Hungary, he describes “a good fire blazing, at which robbersteak was nicely cooked” (361). Even a full quote of Stoker’s summarising note would
show that this food is not even supposed to be eaten at a table. The recipe taken down by
the novelist and truncated by McNally/Florescu and Luckhurst continues with the mode of
preparation: “lower end of stick being rolled backwards and forwards between palms as
you hold it over the embers” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 210-211). Stoker knew very well that
the “robber steak” was something one makes for himself in front of the fire, but chose to
place it in the exotic kitchen of the Bistritz inn.
No other food in Stoker’s novel is more heavily annotated than “impletata,”
described by Harker as “eggplant stuffed with forcemeat, a very excellent dish” (Dracula
33) that he has for breakfast in Klausenburg, along with “mamaliga” and “more paprika.”
The word178 comes from one of Stoker’s sources, E.P. Johnson’s 1885 travelogue On the
Track of the Crescent, which provides a very brief description: “Egg-plant (better known
by its French name of ‘Aubergine’) stuffed with chopped meat, is also a national dish, and
is called ‘Uă impletata’” (Johnson 120). Stoker wrote it down without the parenthesis and
capitalised the name: “Egg plant stuffed with chopped meat is National dish and called
178
The editors do not insist on the strangeness of the word. Johnson probably heard “vinete umplute”
(“stuffed eggpants” and turned it into something more musical – he does this often, for instance when he turns
“Podul Mogoşoaiei” (an important street in Bucharest; today “Calea Victoriei,” i.e., “Victory Road”) into
“Podoi Mogoshoi” (Johnson 115). Sanda Marin’s Carte de Bucate, the veritable “Bible” of Romanian cuisine
(countless editions since 1936), contains three different recipes for “vinete umplute.” However, pace Johnson,
it is not a “national dish.”
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“UA IMPLETATA” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 222-223). Leonard Wolf, who never uses
Stoker’s working notes, guesses that “Stoker may mean patlagele impulute” (Wolf 4 n. 22),
and gives cooking instructions from the washing of the eggplant all the way to the oven.
McNally and Florescu suggest that Johnson’s word is “a corruption of the word umplatura
[,] ‘filling’ in Romanian. In this case it is an eggplant dish; the modern visitor to
Transylvania would ask for vinete umplute pronounced veeneti oomploota)[,] ‘stuffed
eggplants.’ We shall provide here the exact recipe that Harker would like to obtain”
(McNally and Florescu 54-55 n. 15). They, too, go to great lengths to explain how to chop
the onions and how and when to add the spices.179
Another recipe, with breadcrumbs and butter, is provided by Leslie Klinger who
makes no mention of Johnson or of Stoker’s note and who does not suggest a more accurate
name for the dish. Instead, he proceeds to give a recipe to the fictional “impletata” (Klinger
19 n. 31). Two other editors (Leatherdale 30 n. 30; Luckhurst 364) note briefly that the
name and the description comes from Johnson’s Track of the Crescent. None of the editors
seems to have noticed that Stoker turned Johnson’s “chopped meat” into “forcemeat,”
although two editions annotate this instead of “impletata” (Auerbach and Skal 10 n. 5;
Riquelme 28). Stoker may have remembered forcemeat from his days as a Dublin Castle
clerk, because in his diary he mentions clerks cooking late meals in the office, even a
dinner for eight that included “a roast turkey stuffed with forcemeat” (The Lost Journal
176-177). More importantly, Stoker must have been aware, when he took down the
information about “impletata” from Johnson, that the dish he had Harker appreciate in the
179
This is not much of a guess on their part. Both Johnson and Stoker make it clear that it is an eggplant dish
and that the eggplants are stuffed. Both editions have trouble with the Romanian words for “filling” (it is
“umplutură” not “umplatura”) and “filled” (the feminine plural participle would be “umplute” not
“impulute”). The Romanian word(s) for “eggplants” used to be “pătlăgele vinete,” but they are called simply
“vinete” today, which indicates that the source for Wolf’s recipe must be older than McNally and Florescu’s.
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capital of Transylvania was found by his source during a folk celebration near Bucharest,
on the occasion of the coronation of Charles I as King of Romania in May 1881. Johnson
dined outdoors with Romanian peasants and had both “mamaliga” and “impletata.”
Thereafter, he travelled through Transylvania but he never once mentioned such a dish.
What may have drawn Stoker’s attention is the sentence immediately following the word
“impletata”: “Pilaff, good roasting, and capital sweets help to complete a cuisine quite
Oriental” (Johnson 120). Neither the desire to exoticise Transylvania, nor the fact that
“impletata” was discovered near Bucharest, in the Romanian Kingdom, has been noticed by
the editors of Dracula, who too often rely on Stoker’s summarising notes.
9.2 The Whirlpool of Races
Count Dracula refers to Transylvania as “the whirlpool of European races” (Dracula
59), a formula annotated by a single editor, who explains “whirlpool” as “a loaded racial
term in the late Victorian period, often referring to the poor areas of uncontrolled
immigration, such as London’s East End” (Luckhurst 368). When they annotate “Leeds”
(in Chapter 6 of the novel), McNally and Florescu suggest that “Stoker was acquainted with
the work of A.R.T. Colquhoun, a former counsul [sic] to the Romanian Principalities, who
afterwards wrote a book entitled The Whirlpool of Europe” (McNally and Florescu 89 n.
138). This is an interesting suggestion (based on letters found in the collection of the Leeds
University library), especially since Colquhoun’s book (co-authored by his wife, Ethel) is
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about a larger area in East Central Europe that includes Transylvania. However, the book
was first published in 1907, which means that, if the two authors knew each other, they
may have exchanged ideas and notions, but Stoker could not have borrowed the formula
from the title of Colquhoun’s book.180 If he inherited it, as Luckhurst suggests, from
general Victorian terminology, he certainly found many implications about racial
amalgamation in Transylvania and Romania in all his known sources.
The oldest of the travellers used by Stoker indicates that “from long intercourse with
foreign nations, their [the Romanians’] blood seems to have become a mixture of many”
(Wilkinson 158). Boner’s similar historical account of Transylvania claims that “when at
last, threatened constantly by neighbouring barbarians, the conquerors [Romans] withdrew,
they left behind them a people in whom admixture of race was, in varied wise, indubitably
marked” (Boner 93). At Baziaş, the first Romanian town he visited, this traveller found “a
strange admixture of different nationalities, and altogether it was a wild barbaric scene”
(10). In The Land beyond the Forest, Emily Gerard is “interested in the wild beauty of the
country, the strange admixture of races by which it is peopled, and their curious and varied
folk-lore” (I, v), while she suggests that “Transylvania [is] a vast storehouse of different
nationalities” (I, 11-12). The author of Magyarland notices that, among “the many
peculiarities which exist in this interesting country, there is not one that perhaps strikes the
stranger so forcibly as the variety of races” (Mazuchelli I, 38). “What a hotch-potch of
races, so to speak,” exclaims another traveller read by Stoker (Crosse 2); “The mixture of
races in Hungary is a puzzle to any outsider” (46).
180
McNally and Florescu also seem to have mixed up Archibald Ross Colquhoun (1848-1914), author of The
Whirlpool of Europe, who was only 11 years old when the Romanian Principalities became Romania, and
Robert Gilmore Colquhoun (1803-1870), consul to Bucharest from 1835 to 1854.
328
Stoker’s sources also warn that the presence of so many ethnicities in Transylvania
means that “it is not easy to travel without some one who can speak at least three of four
languages unfamiliar to civilised ears” (Mazuchelli I, 35); “Go where you will in this
country, there is a Babel of tongues” (Crosse 357). Harker confirms when he hears “a lot of
words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd; so I
quietly got my polyglot dictionary from my bag and looked them out” (Dracula 36). In
their edition of the novel, Auerbach and Skal suggest that “One dictionary definition [of the
word “polyglot”], ‘a mixture or confusion of languages,’ anticipates the linguistic
cacophony that threatens to overwhelm Dracula’s characters” (13 n. 1). When Harker
indicates simply that “there are four distinct nationalities” (Dracula 32) in Transylvania,
most editors (McNally and Florescu 54 n. 13; Wolf 3-4 n. 18; Leatherdale 29 n. 25; Klinger
17-18 n. 26; Luckhurst 364) refer to long quotes from the 1896 Austria Baedeker, Emily
Gerard’s The Land beyond the Forest and especially E.C. Johnson’s On the Track of the
Crescent. In his collection of excerpts from Stoker’s sources, Clive Leatherdale also gives
his own opinion about the country’s population: “Transylvania was, and is, a hotch-potch
of races and nationalities, a consequence of interminable wars and migrations” (Origins
97). Despite such “balkanisation,” Transylvania had – and has – three major communities,
Romanians, Hungarians (including the Szeklers) and Germans, along with a series of small
minorities.
Like his sources, Stoker hesitates to give the largest community a single name and
calls them, alternately, “Wallachs,” “Wallachians” and “Roumanians.” Christopher
Frayling has noticed that the novelist “did not take any notes” (“Mr Stoker’s Holiday” 192)
on the many comparisons made by E.C. Johnson between this community and the Irish.
One cannot state, however, with absolute certainty that Stoker’s typewritten notes represent
329
all that he took down. On the contrary, despite Frayling’s suggestion that “we do not even
know if he read those passages” (192), it seems obvious that he did. One of the surviving
notes from Johnson states simply: “p. 249. Many crosses by roadside” (Bram Stoker’s
Notes 230-231), but the full passage makes an unambiguous comparison with the Irish:
The Wallach has many points of resemblance to our friend Paddy. He is grossly
superstitious, as the number of crosses by the roadside and on every eminence
testify; and, like his prototype, he lives in abject terror of his priest, of whose
powers he has the most exalted ideas. . . . He is, too, a lazy, pleasant, good-natured,
drunken, careless, improvident fellow; living like the grasshopper while the sun
shine, and “the divil may care for the morn.” (Johnson 249)
Stoker’s typewritten notes include a long series of summarising quotes from fifty-odd
pages in Johnson’s travelogue that include several of these comparisons: “The fence around
these [Wallachian] cottages was broken, and, altogether, reminded me very strongly of a
cluster of cabins in the Emerald Isle” (Johnson 219); “There are other and darker shades in
the Wallach character, and in these, alas! he much resembles his Hibernian prototype. He is
much given to treacherous revenge, and is capable of the most awful atrocities when
aroused” (251); “He further resembles the Irish peasant in his hospitality to pigs, and his
simplicity” (250).
There are such associations in many of Stoker’s sources and the novelist could not
have missed them. One of the travellers was convinced that “In the language of the
Wallacks (Roumains) there is a decided Celtic element; and this is natural; for their
ancestors – those Romanised Dacians, who lived here after Trajan’s time, – were, there is
no doubt, a Celtic tribe” (Boner 525). At a mine in eastern Transylvania, he found that the
Romanians were “very diligent, [an] effect of example and companionship with the
330
Hungarian and Saxon miners; just as, in England, the Irishman is as steady a workman as
those about him” (329). In Boner, there are intimations about superstitions and the power of
the clergy: “Like the village priest in Ireland, the popes here determine the attitude a
community is to take, or on what side votes are to be given; they are the leaders for evil as
well as for good. And here, too, as in the Sister Island, where blind obedience is not
yielded, the offender is denounced, and he and his children are threatened with a curse”
(Boner 369). It is also interesting, since Stoker made Count Dracula a Romanian and a
Szekler at the same time, that Johnson, who compares Romanians with Irishmen, describes
Szeklers as “a curious combination of the canny Scot and the imprudent Irishman. Like the
former, they are plucky, industrious, and frugal. Like the latter, they are excitable, and,
consequently, despondent under reverses” (Johnson 235). The passage is not to be found
among Stoker’s typewritten notes, although they include information taken down from
page 234 and 238.
One of the minorities mentioned in the novel seems problematic to several of the
editors. In Bistritz, Jonathan Harker sees “Slovaks, who are more barbarian than the rest,
with their big cowboy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shorts, and
enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails”
(Dracula 33). Two editions express doubts regarding their presence in north-eastern
Transylvania: “The chances that Harker might have met Slovaks in the Bistrita region seem
slender: there are only a few Slovak villages representing less than .5% of the total
population of Transylvania” (McNally and Florescu 55 n. 19); “census data from the late
nineteenth century show that Slovaks were a tiny fraction of the Transylvanian population”
(Klinger 21 n. 37). However, they all indicate E.C. Johnson as the source: “Slovaks are
defined by Johnson as Transylvanian peasants” (Leatherdale 31 n. 39); “Harker seems to
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rely on Johnson’s somewhat distorted account” (Klinger 21 n. 37); “Slovaks
(Transylvanian peasants) . . . Johnson, On the Track of the Crescent” (McNally and
Florescu 55 n. 19). Luckhurst also refers the reader to “Stoker’s Notes on Johnson’s Track
of the Crescent: ‘SLOVAKS (Transylvanian peasants)’” (Luckhurst 364). Nevertheless, the
editors have not checked the passage in Johnson, only Stoker’s summarising note; they also
did not check all the notes.
Stoker’s typewritten note from Johnson is very similar to part of the sentence in the
novel: “SLOVAKS (Transylvanian peasants) white linen shirts, loose white trousers
enormous broad leather belts – long straight hair about shoulders, heavy black moustaches,
immense hats. Knee boots” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 230-231). However, this note does not
say anything about the belts being “nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails,” as
they appear in Harker’s description. Another note, taken from the first volume of
Mazuchelli’s Magyarland should also be considered: “p. 191. Rusniaks and Slovaks wear
loose jacket, large trousers of coarse wool, once white – round waist enormous belts leather
more than ½ inch thick 12 to 16 inches broad, studded with brass headed nails in various
patterns. In these belts, they keep knives, scissors, tobacco pouch, light box etc.” (204-205).
More importantly, though, it is Stoker’s note that is distorted, not Johnson’s account. The
migration of the Slovaks began in the second half of the eighteenth century and continued
in the first half of the nineteenth century, and they settled especially in four regions of
present-day Romania: the flat areas of Arad county and of the Banat; the forested areas of
Bihor and Sălaj counties, the flat areas and the mining areas of Satu-Mare and Maramureş
counties, as well as in north-east Bucovina (see Štefanko 22). There were no Slovak
villages in Transylvania proper and none of Stoker’s sources states the opposite.
332
Boner and Gerard, the only ones whose accounts are limited to Transylvania proper,
simply do not mention any Slovaks. Crosse sees them while hunting in the Tokay region,
which is divided today between Hungary and Slovakia: “They were a wild-looking crew
were those Slovacks [sic], with shaggy coats of black sheepskin, and in their hands the
usual long staff with the axe at one end. Notwithstanding their uncouth appearance, later
experience has shown me that the Slovacks, as a rule, are patient, hard-working people”
(Crosse 359-360). Mazuchelli, who travelled farther north in the Carpathians, simply places
them in present-day Slovakia: “Near [the oxen] stand the Slovak drivers in large felt hats,
shoes made of hide, and their legs bound with thongs of leather; formidable-looking men
enough, with their large knives stack in their girdles, but in reality as harmless as mice”
(Mazuchelli I, 174). In the passage summarised by Stoker, Johnson speaks of “the wildlooking Slovaks . . . I was, however, assured that these apparently ferocious individuals are
among the mildest of mankind. Excessive indulgence in vile brandy has, however, reduced
their mental capacity below zero, and the ghostly counsel they get from their illiterate
priests is not such as to make them less bigoted or superstitious than their Wallach
neighbours, or to elevate their moral tone” (Johnson 243-244).181
However, unlike Stoker, the author of On the Track of the Crescent never identifies
Slovaks as “Transylvanian peasants.” At the railway station in Budapest, he first sees
“Slovachs [sic] from the Eastern Carpathians” (Johnson 182), which means they could have
come from Bucovina, in the vicinity of the Borgo Pass, but not in Transylvania. He later
speaks simply of “Slovak Raftmen” (Johnson 242-243) coming down the river from the
Eastern Carpathians and going, in all likelihood, to Galatz to sell their timber. Stoker places
181
This was a common view of Slavs in general with Johnson and other travellers used by Stoker. Johnson
also states that “the Bulgar is intensely stupid, even for a Slav, and, like the rest of that race, very docile and
good-natured, though ferocious in appearance” (100).
333
them in that Danubian port – information which may have come from the 1892 book The
Danube from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, written by his friend F.D. Millet, who also
saw in Galatz “Slovac [sic] raftsmen in their skin-tight woollen trousers” (Millet 279). Both
Johnson’s and Millet’s Slovaks probably came from Bucovina. Stoker’s confusion did
probably come from Johnson, who provides the drawing of a “Slovak Peasant” (244), even
though the Slovaks he speaks of in that passage are not local peasants and are only seen “as
they whirled past on the rapid river, on their way down from the Carpathians” (243). So,
despite the editors’ complaint about Johnson’s mistake, it is Stoker who is at fault here,
which could have been revealed if they had compared the research notes with the actual
sources.
One notable discrepancy that should have warranted the editors’ exasperation is in
the scene where the innkeeper’s wife warns Harker that it is the eve of St George’s Day and
offers him a crucifix for protection (Dracula 35). The editors explain (many of them in
minute detail, with long quotes from Emily Gerard and Montague Summers) both the
alleged superstitions that Orthodox Romanians have about that day and how they used to
follow the Julian calendar, which means that the eve of St George (23 April) fell on 5 May
(the calendar difference is discussed in the previous chapter of this study). Crucifixes,
however, are used by Catholics, not by the Greek Orthodox; and if the woman is Catholic,
then she should follow not the Julian, but the Gregorian calendar. It seems quite evident
that Stoker made a mistake here. He clearly intended this character to be an Orthodox
Romanian who follows the Julian calendar and believes in the presence of evil spirits on the
eve of St George. He took all the information from Emily Gerard’s article on
“Transylvanian Superstitions,” which attributes the beliefs about St George’s Eve to
Romanian peasants. Stoker understood this too well and in one interview he mistakenly
334
spoke of Gerard as the author of “‘Essays on Roumanian Superstitions’” (Byron 487). The
only inaccuracy is the presence of the crucifix.
The novel’s editors make the character either Orthodox or Catholic (or both) rather
than correct the error. McNally and Florescu avoid mentioning the crucifix and explain
instead that “the Romanian Orthodox church is traditionally very ritualistic and symbol
oriented” and speak of “remarkable examples of peasant wood carving [which] are the twin
or treble crosses one finds all over Romania” (McNally and Florescu 47 n. 25). A more
recent editor transitions swiftly and inexplicably from Orthodoxy to Catholicism when he
comments that “Harker is a Protestant, ill at ease with the rituals of the Orthodox Church.
Protestant fear of European Catholic ‘priestcraft’ and superstition is central to the rise of the
Gothic novel in England” (Luckhurst 365). Others suggest simply that the woman is
Catholic (Auerbach and Skal 13 n. 8; Leatherdale 34 n. 63; Riquelme 31) without any
mention of the discrepancy. Klinger notices the significance of the crucifix and arrives at
the same conclusion: “The woman’s slight knowledge of German and her gift of a cross
suggest that she (and her husband) were Hungarian Catholics” (Klinger 25 n. 51). He does
not explain, however, why Hungarian Catholics would follow the Orthodox calendar and
would credit Romanian superstitions.
No crucifixes are mentioned in Stoker’s typewritten research notes, but his
confusion very likely stems again from one of his sources. Towards the end of the first
volume of Magyarland, Mazuchelli visits several Slovak communities in the northern
Carpathians. Her narrative covers, in fact, two different visits, one year apart, and she
appears to be moving to and fro, and the reader can find it difficult to understand the time
and the place of narration. While in Gallicia (in today’s Poland), the traveller visited
Neumarkt (today Nowy Targ), where she encountered “Rusniaks, here called Ruthenians, a
335
people speaking a dialect of the Russian, and belonging, like the Slovaks, to the Greek
Church” (Mazuchelli I, 262). Stoker took this down and had it typed: “p. 262. Rusniaks are
called ‘Ruthenians’ in Gallacia [sic] (Poland) and are, like Slovaks, of Greek Church”
(Bram Stoker’s Notes 204-205).182 Later in the same volume, Mazuchelli inserts a
description of Slovak houses, “full of dirt and discomfort. The room in which they live,
adorned with crucifixes, grotesque coloured prints” (I, 317). Stoker’s last typewritten note
is from page 316 of the first volume of Magyarland, but he may have seen this description
and concluded that Orthodox Christians, such as the Slovaks, also use crucifixes. Here,
however, Mazuchelli describes Slovaks from Altendorf (today, Spišská Stará Ves, in
Slovakia), “a long day’s journey” (I, 252; her emphasis) from the Gallician town where she
had seen Orthodox Slovaks, in a region she had previously identified as “being divided
between [German] Lutherans and [Slovak] Roman Catholics” (I, 242).
One of the most conspicuous examples of the editors’ reliance on Stoker’s research
notes without verifying the actual sources is in another episode from the first chapter of the
novel. In Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, Stoker
found a description of more remote places in the “inner parts of the Carpathians”
(Wilkinson 165), which he used for the landscape surrounding Castle Dracula, although
Wilkinson’s account is about the eastern and southern slopes of the mountains, which are in
Wallachia and Moldavia, not in Transylvania. Stoker also noticed the following passage:
Few peasants inhabit this part of the country; during the summer they cut
down wood, and supply with it the inhabitants of the plains, who burn
182
Orthodox Slovaks are a rare occurrence, but Mazuchelli remembered it too well, because in her second
volume, when she entered Transylvania and met Romanians, she writes that, “like the Slovaks, [they] belong
chiefly to the Greek rite” (II, 70). No research notes covering the second volume of Magyarland have
survived, although there are sufficient indications that Stoker read it; after all, this is the part about
Transylvania.
336
nothing else. The most stationary are attached to the post-houses, situated
here and there for the purpose of assisting the necessary communications
between the Austrian and Ottoman states. Their long residence in this
neighbourhood is generally marked by the glandular accretion, common to
the inhabitants of the Alps. (Wilkinson 166-167)
In his notes, Stoker wrote down simply “Inhabitants have goitre” (Bram Stoker’s Notes
248-249). In the novel, this became part of a sentence in Harker’s journal: “Here and there
we passed Cszeks [sic] and Slovaks, all in picturesque attire, but I noticed that goitre was
painfully prevalent” (Dracula 38).
Some of the editors define “goitre,” mentioning the enlargement of the thyroid
gland and its association with iodine deficiency (Wolf 12 n. 47; Byron 38 n. 1; Lukhurst
366), without discussing Stoker’s source, the fact that Stoker attributes it to Czechs and
Slovaks, or its “prevalence.” Others quote Stoker’s pithy note and identify Wilkinson as the
source (McNally and Florescu 60 n. 38) or quote the note and give a brief definition of
goitre (Leatherdale 38 n. 101). Klinger writes that Wilkinson “noted the high prevalence of
goitre among Transylvanians, and the condition has persisted, with data from the 1960s and
1970s showing over 60 percent of the adult population of the Carpathians suffering from
the disease” (Klinger 33-34 n. 76). The editor does not provide a source for the “data”
suggesting that 3 out of 5 inhabitants of the Carpathians suffered from goitre in the 1960s
and 1970s; and in his observation about Wilkinson he clearly relies on Stoker’s statement
in the novel rather than Wilkinson’s account, which says nothing of Transylvania, let alone
“goitre among Transylvanians.” In fact, Stoker’s source speaks about the mountainous
passes in Wallachia and Moldavia, where the traveller notices “few peasants,” and only
337
“the most stationary” of these few, the ones “attached to the post-houses,” suffer from
goitre.
Auerbach and Skal also go further than Stoker in their definition of goitre as a
condition which “may cause brain damage” (15 n. 6), although there is no mention of such
dangers in Dracula or in the editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that the author could
have consulted.183 Moreover, two of Stoker’s brothers were physicians and both advised
him while he was writing the novel (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 185), which means that he
would have known if such a danger was part of the current understanding of goitre. Yet
another proof that Stoker took notes from the second volumes of Magyarland is the
following passage: “Several of these poor women [in the Roter Thurm Pass, today Pasul
Turnu Roşu, connecting southern Transylvania and Wallachia] I observed had goitre, that
disease so prevalent in all mountainous districts” (Mazuchelli II, 141). Despite the note
from Wilkinson, Stoker may have used the information from Mazuchelli, while turning her
phrase about the disease being prevalent in the mountains in general into Harker’s
suggestion that it was prevalent in the Borgo Prund area.
.
9.3 Nosferatu
On the subject of vampire beliefs in Transylvania and Romania (the Romanian
sailors on both ships carrying Dracula also believe in vampires), Bram Stoker found only a
183
Nor do modern editions of the encyclopaedia.
338
brief passage in Emily Gerard’s 1885 article on “Transylvanian Superstitions.” Everything
else about vampires in Dracula comes from various other sources unrelated to the Count’s
place of origin, including fiction, and from Stoker’s own imagination. To explain this
information, the editors of the novel, from the earliest (Leonard Wolf) to the latest (Roger
Luckhurst) rely on two sources published much later than Dracula and which Stoker could
not have known, but which support the idea expressed in Gerard’s article: Agnes Murgoçi’s
essay “The Vampire in Roumania” (1926) and Montague Summers’s book The Vampire,
His Kith and Kin (1928). Both Murgoçi and Summers were vampire enthusiasts who
looked for proof that Stoker’s account of Romanian vampires was well-founded.184
More recent authors such as Harry A. Senn, who has conducted field research in
Romania, and Duncan Light, who has consulted with Romanian folklorists, state that
Romanians do not believe in vampires, but only “in the existence of the magical powers
[of] the other world, the realm of fairies and of the dead” (Senn 50) and that the word
“vampire” itself “is almost unknown in Romania: the word entered Romanian from French
in the nineteenth century and its use was largely confined to literary works. As for
Nosferatu, the word has never been encountered in over 200 years of recording Romanian
folklore” (Light 29). The editors of Dracula prefer to think that “Stoker was acquainted
with some Romanian superstitions” (McNally and Florescu 23), especially from Gerard’s
essay, “a gold mine of information about what was then an obscure part of Europe [and]
Stoker had the good sense to use it well” (Wolf, The Connoisseur’s Guide 20-21). McNally
saw himself as a “latter-day vampirologist” (A Clutch of Vampires 5) in line with Augustin
Calmet and Montague Summers. In his anthology of excerpts from Stoker’s sources,
184
Montague Summers studied vampire beliefs and the related apotropaic measures because he believed
vampires were real. Agnes Murgoci (née Kelly) married leading Romanian mineralogist Gheorghe MurgociMunteanu (1872-1925). In 1926, she began publishing about Romania.
339
Leatherdale introduced fragments from Calmet’s eighteenth-century treatise on vampires,
even though Stoker did not use it. From Herbert Mayo’s On the Truth Contained in
Popular Superstitions, the title of which appears only on a list of books that Stoker
intended to read, Leatherdale inserted two rather long fragments (Origins 57-74 and 193204), in which there is no mention of Transylvania.185 Instead, there are no excerpts from
Charles Boner, Andrew Crosse and Nina Mazuchelli, whose books were used at times
verbatim in Dracula.
In several instances, the editors do not provide a source for their statements about
Romanian vampire beliefs or they simply reproduce each other’s assertions: “In Romanian
folklore the vampire and werewolf are often connected” (McNally and Florescu 62 n. 52)
becomes two decades later “Werewolves and vampires are often allied in Romanian
folklore” (Auerbach and Skal 14 n. 2), but it remains without a source. Another sentence
from McNally/Florescu about the evil eye that, according to Romanian peasants, “can be
caused by those who have intercourse with vampires, devils, and other evil spirits” (59 n.
31), is quoted without explanations by Luckhurst (366). However, the origin of most
statements about Romanian vampire beliefs is to be found in the two texts from the 1920s
mentioned above. Though much more copiously quoted (especially by Wolf and Klinger),
Summers made no original research on vampire beliefs in Romania; instead, he reproduced
all the information provided by Murgoçi. This information, in turn, is largely fabrication, as
Murgoçi simply takes the fantastic creatures of Romanian folk beliefs (strigoi, moroi,
pricolici, zmeu, vârcolac) and states that they are all various types of vampires.186
185
186
He also reissued Mayo’s book in 2003 (Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert Island Books).
A more detailed discussion of these creatures will follow later in this chapter.
340
At least in matters concerning Transylvania and Romania, the editors of Dracula
accept Stoker’s sources as accurate and well-informed. In fact, they generally believe that
“What distinguishes Dracula from the vampire fictions that preceded it, as well as from
those that subsequently appeared, is the way in which folklore and authentic history merge
to give Stoker’s tale the texture of something long known or naturally remembered” (Wolf
xiii). After the text of the novel, Riquelme inserts “Contextual Illustrations and
Documents,” which include extracts from Major E.C. Johnson’s On the Track of the
Crescent, Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves and Emily Gerard’s The Land
beyond the Forest, without shedding a doubt on their reliability. Other editors introduce
Emily Gerard as the author of “a popular Victorian travelogue” (Byron 439), “[p]robably
the richest single source of folklore information for [Stoker], a fine travel book . . . which,
in addition to giving him a lively and extraordinarily circumstantial account of daily life in
Transylvania circa 1888, is crammed with information about its history and folkways”
(Wolf xiii).
Gerard’s reliability is supported by the fact that she “was married to a Hungarian
cavalry commander and lived for two years in Transylvania, giving her research a firsthand immediacy” (Auerbach and Skal 331). In fact, her husband, Mieczislas de Laszowski,
was a Polish officer in the Austrian army (Gerard, The Land beyond the Forest II, 192),
stationed in Transylvania between 1883 and 1885. Gerard spoke to her informants in
German, a language she spoke fluently – which hardly gives her “first-hand immediacy” in
the matter of “Romanian Superstitions” – and instead tried to communicate with
Romanians “by pantomime” (I, 95). The extracts from her travelogue provided by
Auerbach/Skal (331-335) speak of primitive, superstitious peasants. In another edition,
Charles Boner is said to have “a keen eye for Transylvanian scenery, particularly the
341
human female variety” (Byron 444). In Byron’s edition, Sabine Baring-Gould is the last
source quoted in a section called “Transylvania: History, Culture, and Folklore,” although
his books (and the extracts provided) do not speak of Transylvania or Romania, but of
werewolves and vampires that the author locates elsewhere in the world (Byron 448-450).
By presenting Baring-Gould as a source on Transylvania, however, Byron suggests that
vampires are a staple of Romanian folklore.
This is, in fact, true of all the editors of Dracula. Although Stoker drew inspiration
from a single paragraph in Emily Gerard’s article on “Transylvanian Superstitions,” in
which she states that Romanians believe in “the vampire, or nosferatu” (Gerard,
“Transylvanian Superstitions” 142), an unusual term that perhaps should have been a
warning signal, no editor contradicts either Stoker or Gerard when it comes to Romanian
vampire beliefs. As for “nosferatu,” some editors prefer merely to report its source – “The
word nosferatu comes from ‘Transylvanian Superstitions’” (Leatherdale 308 n. 62) – or
even accept it as Romanian: “Vampire (Romanian) (Gerard)” (Riquelme 222); “A
Romanian word meaning ‘not dead’” (Wolf 261 n. 17). Others believe that Gerard simply
“misunderstood the actual Transylvanian word . . . a derivative of the Greek word
nosophoros, meaning ‘plague carrier,’ . . . [or] a corrupted or misunderstood version of the
Romanian adjective ‘nesuferit’ from the Latin ‘not to suffer’” (Klinger 310 n. 24), or
perhaps “a distortion of one of the Romanian words for devil, necuratru [sic], which also
means ‘unclean’” (McNally and Florescu 178 n. 264). Finally, the most recent editor states
all three possibilities (Luckhurst 384), including McNally and Florescu’s own misspelling –
it should read “necuratu[l].” However, none of the editors suggests the possibility that
Gerard misunderstood not only the word (she misspells many other words), but its
meaning.
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“Necuratul” (literally, “the unclean one”) is just a euphemism for the devil.
“Nesuferit” (i.e., “insufferable”), although more similar in form with “nosferatu,” is more
urban and literary and seems unlikely on the lips of nineteenth-century Transylvanian
peasants. The 1825 polyglot dictionary known as Lexiconul de la Buda (The Buda
Lexicon), edited by a group of Romanian intellectuals from Transylvania, does not include
“nesuferit.” A more likely source187 for “nosferatu” is another euphemism for the Devil:
“nefârtatu(l),” which in the 1860s – and especially in Transylvania188 – would have been
spelled “nefêrtatu(l)” or “nefěrtatu(l).” In Gerard’s essay, the word stands out:
More decidedly evil, however, is the vampire, or nosferatu, in whom every
Roumenian peasant believes as firmly as he does in heaven or hell. There are two
sorts of vampires – living and dead. The living vampire is in general the illegitimate
offspring of two illegitimate persons, but even a flawless pedigree will not ensure
anyone against the intrusion of a vampire into his family vault, since every person
killed by a nosferatu becomes likewise a vampire after death, and will continue to
suck the blood of other innocent people till the spirit has been exorcised, either by
opening the grave of the person suspected and driving a stake through the corpse, or
firing a pistol shot into the coffin. (“Transylvanian Superstitions” 142)
187
This suggestion has already been made by Romanian anthropologist Şerban Anghelescu (see Navadaru).
“Nefârtatu” (the final “– l” is dropped in spoken Romanian) is a made-up word, quite popular in folktales,
which could be loosely translated as “the Un-brother” or “the Un-fellow.” Whereas the Romanian “frate,”
plural “fraţi” means “brother/brothers,” the more archaic “fârtat,” plural “fârtaţi” usually means
“brother/brethren.”
188
At the time, Romanian words were spelled slightly differently in Romania and the Austrian-Hungarian
Empire. The reasons were political and religious: whereas in Orthodox Wallachia and Moldavia, Romanian
had been written in the Cyrillic alphabet until 1860 (although many publications had gradually switched to the
Latin alphabet in the previous decades), Romanian intellectuals from Transylvania had started using Latin
letters in the eighteenth century. As no Orthodox was accepted in the universities of the Empire, these
intellectuals were Greek-Catholics and did not feel bound by the same spelling tradition. For a history of the
transition to the Latin alphabet, the polemics and the compromises, see Ştefan Cazimir, Alfabetul de tranziţie
(Bucharest: Humanitas, 2006).
343
Until very recently, Gerard was considered the primary source for the unusual word and
none of the editors could have known of the existence of an earlier text.
In a brief article entitled “Vindicating Gerard,” published in 2011 in the journal The
Borgo Post, independent researcher Anthony Hogg identified Wilhelm Schmidt, author of
an article from 1865, expanded into a small book issued in 1866, as “a source predating
Gerard’s article by twenty years . . . Did Gerard obtain nosferatu from him? She does not
list his article in citation or reference. Either way, even if another Pandora’s Box has been
opened, we can now relieve Gerard of nosferatu’s origins” (Hogg 3). Hogg’s article was
accompanied by an “Addendum” signed by Elizabeth Miller, the journal’s publisher:
This is fascinating stuff. I have always assumed that Emily Gerard misunderstood
what she heard while in Transylvania and transcribed a word incorrectly. (Indeed,
this is the position for which I argue in my book Dracula: Sense & Nonsense.)
Apparently this is not so! The word clearly predates Gerard. The likelihood that
both Gerard and Schmidt misheard the actual word and rendered it identically is
remote. It would appear that there was such a word after all, Romanian linguists
notwithstanding. It is quite possible that it was a localism that never made it into a
Romanian dictionary. (Miller, “Addendum” 3)
Elizabeth Miller’s slighting opinion of Romanian linguists notwithstanding, a cursory
glance at the two texts immediately shows that, whereas Schmidt very probably misheard
the word, Gerard did not. Rather, she simply plagiarised Schmidt: not only “nosferatu,” but
also the Scholomance, used by Stoker as the Devil’s “school” attended by Dracula, as well
as most of Gerard’s other misspellings come directly from Schmidt; even her footnotes are
copied verbatim from the German.
344
His book, Das Jahr und seine Tage in Meinung und Brauch der Romänen
Siebenbürgens was published in Sibiu, where Schmidt was a teacher at the local public high
school (or KK Staatsgymnasium). The various spellings of Romanian words show that he
took them from different sources: German, Hungarian, Romanian. Even taking into account
the ways in which such words may have been spoken and spelled by mid-nineteenthcentury Romanians in southern Transylvania (where Sibiu is) and other regions, the ways
in which these words may have been pronounced and transcribed by non-Romanian
informants, and the ways the German author may have heard them, the sheer number of
misspellings suggests the author did not speak Romanian.189 Schmidt’s book is an exercise
in comparative mythology and his main purpose is to prove that Transylvanian legends are
similar to Slavic myths. Thus, although he attributes to Romanians the belief in the two
types of vampires that Gerard borrowed from him verbatim, he calls “the Vampire –
nosferatu . . . the most uncanny spawn of panslavic fantasy” (Schmidt 34). Interestingly, he
does not speak of blood-sucking; his “nosferatu” is more of a shape-shifter, being able to
turn into “a dog, a cat, a toad, a frog, a louse, a flea, a bug; in short, in any form he wishes”
(34).190 It is Gerard who added the information about blood-sucking, perhaps so as to make
the “nosferatu” more easily associated with the common conception of the vampire.
It is very possible, in fact, for Schmidt to call “nosferatu,” this evil spirit with
metamorphosing powers, a “vampire” only because the German language lacked an exact
equivalent. Emily Gerard went forth and added the blood-sucking element for a more
thorough identification with the figure of the vampire. In the late nineteenth and early
189
There is another reason to believe this: he writes “begiessen” (Schmidt 9), which is the Austrian version of
“giessen” (“to pour”), uncharacteristic to Transylvanian Saxons, who came from Luxembourg and the
Moselle River region and spoke a West Central dialect of German. He also uses it to translate the Romanian
“a se uda,” which actually means “to get wet.”
190
In the original German: “der als Hund, Katze, Kröte, Frosch, Laus, Floh, Wanze, kurz in jeder Gestalt
erscheinen Kann.”
345
twentieth century, such a semantic mutation occurs very often in German and English texts
that translate or explain supernatural creatures from Romanian folk beliefs. If Agnes
Murgoçi went so far as to redefine them all as vampires, even though there was no bloodsucking involved, other authors simply use “vampire” and “werewolf” for lack of a better
word. There are no real werewolves in Romanian folklore, and the “vârcolac,” which
clearly comes from a Slavic word for “werewolf,” is generally understood as a supernatural
being that can temporarily swallow the moon but that does not interfere with people. The
authors of the polyglot dictionary mentioned above, who only give a definition when there
is no equivalent in Latin, German or Hungarian, list it only as a plural word, “vercolaci,”
with the following explanation: “simple folk say of these that they are some living creatures
that eat the moon” (Lexiconul de la Buda 750), then translate it as “lunar eclipse” in the
other three languages.
In Bistritz, Harker hears – and then checks in his own polyglot dictionary – the
words “‘vrolok’ and ‘vlkoslak’ – both of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and
the other Servian for something that is either werewolf or vampire” (Dracula 36). The
novelist here misspelled a word he had taken down correctly from Sabine Baring-Gould’s
The Book of Were-Wolves: “Among Bulgarians & Slovakians ww. is called vrkolak” (Bram
Stoker’s Notes 130-131). This is noticed by some of the editors (McNally and Florescu 58
n. 30; Leatherdale 36 n. 83; Luckhurst 365). Agnes Murgoçi, however, describes the
Romanian “vârcolac” as a “third type of vampire . . . which eats the sun and moon during
eclipses” (Murgoçi 321) and identifies the plural form as “sometimes dead vampires, and
sometimes animals which eat the moon” (322). Several pages later, she gives a longer
account of these creatures, writing that, according to folk beliefs, “as the moon is really
stronger than the vârcolaci, they are just able to bite it, but in the end the moon conquers”
346
(336), and concludes that the word “is only exceptionally used to mean a vampire in
Roumania” (337). Two of the editors quote Montague Summers to say that the word means
“a third type of vampire” (Wolf 10-11 n. 39) or Summers and Agnes Murgoçi to say it is a
“dead” vampire (Klinger 29 n. 65). Emily Gerard makes no mention of the “vârcolaci” and
her source defines them only as “rodents” (“Nagern”) (Schmidt 26), probably because they
gnaw at the moon.
Another fantastic creature often associated with werewolves and vampires for lack
of an exact equivalent is the Romanian “pricolici.” Schmidt defines the “Prikolitsch” as a
werewolf, or “wehrwolf” (Schmidt 33), and Emily Gerard conforms: “First cousin to the
vampire, the long-exploded were-wolf of the Germans is here to be found, lingering under
the name of the Prikolitsch” (“Transylvanian Superstitions” 142).191 Stoker wrote down
“werewolf or prikolitsch” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 126-127), but did not use the word in the
novel. Both Schmidt and Gerard correctly speak of the creature’s shape-shifting powers
which, however, should not warrant its direct association with werewolves.192 The authors
of the 1825 polyglot dictionary call it “preculiciu” or “precollici,” and define it simply as
being able to transform into various animals; the authors provide a Latin explanation:
“vertumnus, proteus, qui se in diversa animalia trasnfigurare novit” (Lexiconul de la Buda
536). They were also able to run very fast, which is why, in a well-known fairy-tale (“Zâna
Zorilor”) written by Ioan Slavici, the main character and his horse are said to run as fast as
the “pricolici do it at midnight.” The tale was translated in 1882 by German author Mite
Kremnitz (a long-time Romanian resident) in her anthology of Rumänische Märchen, in
191
She kept the sentence in her 1888 book, but it is slightly anglicised: there is no definite article and the first
letter of the Romanian word is a lowercase.
192
Murgoçi goes further and calls them “dead vampires” (322), but she also writes that they are the same as
the vârcolaci (335).
347
which the phrase appears as “um Mitternacht die Vampyre jagen” (Kremnitz 259). In an
English version of the anthology, adapted from the German three years later, the duo
“hurried as . . . vampires hunting at midnight” (Percival 210). Generally regarded as the
greatest Romanian author of nineteenth-century Transylvania (although he was born in
Banat, not Transylvania proper), Slavici knew Emily Gerard, who calls him “One of the
most enlightened Roumanian authors” (The Land beyond the Forest I, 215), but cites him
only as a source for the Roman and Dacian origin of Romanians. Like many of his
generation, he was deeply interested in folklore and certainly knew what a “pricolici” was.
A noted Germanophile, he was also a good friend of his translator Mite Kremnitz, and
probably sanctioned her use of the word “vampire.”
If Slavici seems unconcerned about this association, he probably would have
disliked Wilhelm Schmidt’s methods. The German-speaking author mentions all the
notions and beliefs that Gerard borrows from him without any references to his sources.
Instead, in the middle and towards the end of his study, he inserts folkloric texts in two
columns, in the original Romanian with a German translation, which gives the impression
of authenticity. Apart from a few misspellings, these songs are genuine and Schmidt
provides their sources: they were gathered by other German and Romanian folklorists.
However, they include none of the notions or the beliefs that he analyses in the first part of
the essay. The first text is a ballad using the allegory of a deer hunt (very common in
Romanian folklore) to narrate a wedding (Schmidt 23-24); six shorter ones are incantations
against illnesses – the last of which is against the evil eye (35-37). This last incantation
includes the possibility of the evil eye originating with a male or a female “strigoi” – which
Schmidt defines as “Zauberer [sorcerer]” (27) – and casts a brief spell according to which
the “strigoi” will meet with “iron and vinegar.”
348
The word strigoi, heard by Harker on his way to the Borgo Pass (Dracula 36) does
not appear in English-language encyclopaedias – and several editors (Auerbach and Skal;
Byron; Riquelme) leave it unexplained. Other editors define it as “undead vampire”
(McNally and Florescu 58 n. 30); “vampires, dead and alive” (Wolf 10 n. 39); “male
undead vampire” (Klinger 28 n. 63), even though Stoker himself defines the word as
“witch,” exactly as he found it in his sources. Both Wilkinson and Gerard define the strigoi
not as vampires, but rather as “witch[es]” (Wilkinson 213) or as “restless spirits . . . not
malicious, but their appearance bodes no good, and may be regarded as omens of sickness
or misfortune” (Gerard, “Transylvanian Superstitions” 142). The sources used by the
editors who define strigoi as vampires are again Montague Summers (quoted in Wolf’s
note, but only as an authority on werewolves) and Summers’s own source, Agnes Murgoçi,
both unknown to Stoker. Only the most recent editor of Dracula (Luckhurst 365) mentions
Wilkinson’s and Gerard’s less sinister definitions.
At the same time that the word strigoi is uttered in the novel, everyone in the crowd
gathered in front the Bistritz inn makes the sign of the cross and points two fingers in
Jonathan Harker’s direction. A fellow coach passenger explains “that it was a charm or
guard against the evil eye” (Dracula 36). This prompts Wolf to explain the difference
between three basic gestures involving two fingers (mano fica, mano cornuta and mano
pantea) that are supposed to thwart the evil eye (Wolf 10-11 n. 40). Here, Wolf uses,
without mentioning, a late Victorian treatise on The Evil Eye published by Frederick
Thomas Elworthy in 1895. Later editors (Klinger 29 n. 68; Luckhurst 365-366) mention
Elworthy and quote from his book, but do not explain if there is a connection between his
findings and Transylvanian superstitions. Meanwhile, another editor quotes Wolf directly
and draws the conclusion that the gestures he mentions are “acknowledged in Romanian
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folklore” (Leatherdale 36 n. 87). In reality, Elworthy takes all of his examples from ancient
Greece, China, Italy, Spain and England, and makes no mention of Transylvania, Romania,
Hungary, Russia or the Balkan nations.
As a rule, the editors of Dracula take Stoker’s message further and find new ways
of vampirising Transylvania. The McNally/Florescu edition begins with a study of
vampirism, “In Search of Vampires” (McNally and Florescu 9-15), taking the reader from
ancient Indian myths to Stoker’s 1897 novel. The two editors often associate Romania and
Romanians with vampires. When Quincey Morris says, “I understand that the Count comes
from a wolf country” (Dracula 365) and decides to bring Winchester rifles, the two editors
see a connection with Dacians, the pre-Roman ancestors of modern Romanians, and
suggest “that the very word ‘Dacian’ meant ‘wolfman’ in the Dacian language, which has
not survived” (McNally and Florescu 244 n. 333). Another editor speaks here of
“werewolfism” (Klinger 437-438 n. 37), even though Morris wishes to hunt and refers to a
similar experience in Tobolsk. When the characters in the novel have dinner in Varna,
another editor observes: “Dracula might not appear, but, according to Montague Summers,
Bulgaria is vampire country” (Leatherdale 454 n. 41). Transylvania itself is further
vampirised with the help of a reference to its history of barbarism and conflict: “In essence,
fittingly for vampires, the history of Transylvania is a history of whom it belongs to”
(Auerbach and Skal 9 n. 7).
Auerbach and Skal’s vampirising effort may have been inspired by the passages
from Stephen Arata’s 1990 essay “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of
Reverse Colonisation,” included in the “Criticism” section of their edition. Here, Arata
argues that Dracula is a “narrative of reverse colonisation” founded on the Britons’ fear of
being “deracinated.” He suggests that “nowhere else in the Europe of 1897 could provide a
350
more fertile vampiric breeding ground than the Count’s homeland” (qtd. in Auerbach and
Skal 463).193 He tries to connect vampires and empires by suggesting that, “As Van Helsing
says, vampires follow ‘in [the] wake’ of imperial decay. Vampires are generated by racial
enervation and the decline of empire, not vice versa. They are produced, in other words, by
the very conditions many perceived as characterising late-Victorian Britain” (465).
However, with his imperfect grammar, Van Helsing actually says that the vampire (but here
he seems to mean simply Count Dracula) “have follow the wake of the berserker Icelander,
the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar” (Dracula 278); in other words,
the Dutchman only situates the origins of Dracula in the early Middle Ages. He also adds
that the home of vampires is not Transylvania, but that they have been known everywhere
and always, from ancient Greece to China. For a better understanding of Arata’s line of
argument, one should look at a passage from Emily Gerard’s The Land beyond the Forest,
which he quotes in support of his theory of “reverse colonisation.”
In her book (the passage does not appear in the 1885 article that Stoker undoubtedly
read), Gerard writes from the point of view of the Hungarian Transylvanians that:
Few races possess in such a marked degree the blind and immovable sense
of nationality which characterises the Roumanians: they hardly ever mingle
with the surrounding races, far less adopt manners and customs foreign to
their own; and it is a remarkable fact that the seemingly stronger-minded and
more manly Hungarians are absolutely powerless to influence them even in
cases of inter-marriage. Thus the Hungarian woman who weds a Roumanian
husband will necessarily adopt the dress and manners of his people, and her
193
The following passages can also be found in Arata’s 1990 essay (Arata, “The Occidental Tourist” 627631) or, in a slightly modified version, in his 1996 book (Arata, Fictions of Loss 113-117).
351
children will be as good Roumanians as though they had no drop of Magyar
blood in their veins; while the Magyar who takes a Roumanian girl for his
wife will not only fail to convert her to his ideas, but himself, subdued by her
influence, will imperceptibly begin to lose his nationality. This is a fact well
known and much lamented by the Hungarians themselves, who live in
anticipated apprehension of seeing their people ultimately dissolving into
Roumanians. (Gerard, The Land beyond the Forest I, 304-305)
Arata does not take account that this is a common “apprehension” for all communities
living in a multiethnic environment and that Romanians in Transylvania lived in a similar
“fear” of being assimilated by the dominant minority just as much as Hungarians dreaded
assimilation by the underprivileged majority. He does not question Gerard’s paradoxical
account of a community that “hardly ever mingled with the surrounding races” while at the
same time threatened them with assimilation. He also does not query if Stoker actually
knew Gerard’s book from 1888 – his notes only show that he read the 1885 article on
“Transylvanian Superstitions” which makes no mention of identity troubles.
Instead, he bases his whole concept of “reverse colonisation” in Dracula on the
passage from Gerard’s book and suggests that the political threats to Britain “also operate
independently of the Count’s vampirism, however, for the vampire was not considered
alone in its ability to deracinate. Stoker learned from Emily Gerard that the Roumanians
were themselves notable for the way they could ‘dissolve’ the identities of those they came
in contact with” (Auerbach and Skal 466). Dracula’s “ability to deracinate could thus derive
as easily from his Roumanian as from his vampiric nature. The ‘anticipated apprehension’
of deracination – of seeing Britons ‘ultimately dissolving into Roumanians’ or vampires or
savages – is at the heart of the reverse colonisation narrative” (466). Arata agrees with
352
Stoker’s phrase about Transylvania as a “whirlpool of European races,” but warns the
reader against the image of the melting-pot, while going further than the late-Victorian
novelist and associating Dracula’s birthplace with anti-Armenian massacres perpetrated by
Ottomans:
but within that whirlpool racial interaction usually involved conflict, not
accommodation. Racial violence could in fact reach appalling proportions, as in the
wholesale massacres, widely reported by the British press, of Armenians by Turks
in 1894 and 1896, the years in which Dracula was being written. For Western
writers and readers, these characteristics – racial heterogeneity combined with racial
intolerance considered barbaric in its intensity – defined the area east and south of
the Danube, with the Carpathians at the imaginative centre of the turmoil. (464)
Arata’s essay is one of the first interpretations of Dracula as a text motivated by the fear of
the “Other,” which explains why it remains one of the most quoted analyses of the novel,
even though it finds that fear to be entirely justified. However, along with the many
editions of Dracula, it shows how even the best intentions can sometimes pave to road to
the endless validation of Bram Stoker’s representations of Transylvania and Romania.
353
Conclusion
In the introduction to her 1888 travelogue through Transylvania, Emily Gerard
inserts a disclaimer that in some ways fits the scholarly editions of Dracula:
More than one error has doubtless crept unawares into this work; so in order to
place myself quite on the safe side with regard to stern critics, I had better hasten to
say that I decline to pledge my word for the veracity of anything contained in these
pages. I only lay claim to having used my eyes and ears to the best of my ability;
and where I have failed to see or hear aright, the fault must be set down to some
inherent colour-blindness, or radical defect in my tympanum. (The Land beyond the
Forest I, 9-10)
Many errors in the editions of Dracula are due, perhaps inevitably, to such bias; others
originate in the decision not to use Romanian sources, even when they are available in
English; others yet are certainly not “unawares,” but come from a desire to add to the
atmosphere of the novel and to confirm its premise. In “Dracula’s Guest,” included in the
McNally/Florescu edition as a “Prologue” to Stoker’s novel, Jonathan Harker visits the
tomb of “Countess Dolingen of Graz, in Styria, [who] sought and found death, 1801” and
notices that on top of it, “seemingly driven through the solid marble – for the structure was
composed of a few vast blocks of stone – was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the
back I saw, graven in great Russian letters: ‘The dead travel fast’” (McNally and Florescu
40). The editors provide four explanatory notes, of which one suggests that the Countess
was modelled after Le Fanu’s Carmilla, also a native of Styria, and another identifies
Bürger’s “Lenore” as the origin of the quote inscribed on the stake.
354
Another note explains the presence of the iron device to the audience: “The reader is
accustomed to the wooden stake rather the iron one to hold a vampire in its grave.
However, in parts of Romania iron stakes, preferably heated red hot, are plunged into the
suspected vampire grave, causing a kind of sizzling effect, from which the word nosferatu
may be derived, according to some Romanian language specialists” (McNally and Florescu
40 n. 11). The editors do not name the “language specialists” behind this etymology194 and
they do not repeat this claim when the word “nosferatu” actually appears in the novel; nor
do they provide any source for the practice of plunging red-hot stakes into the hearts of
suspected vampires in Romania. Instead, they include a photograph, with what appears to
be a carved staff – made of wood, not iron – holding a vine or some other plant in the
garden of an old church, with the caption: “Anti-vampire stake in Romanian graveyard”
(40). Rather than an obscure “Romanian graveyard,” however, the image represents one of
the oldest Orthodox churches in Transylvania, situated in Strei (Hunedoara county), built in
the early Middle Ages on the ruins of a Roman villa, and easily recognisable by Romanian
readers as a major site from their country’s National Register of Historic Monuments.
The editors do not question the inscription on the stake, but suggest that “Stoker
must be referring to letters in Cyrillic script, so it is safe to assume that the countess must
have been an Orthodox Christian, rather than a Catholic or Protestant” (McNally and
Florescu 40 n. 12). Their suggestion implies not only that Harker can read the Cyrillic
alphabet, but also that Countess Dolingen of Styria belonged to an Orthodox national
church that used that script – very probably that she was Romanian (the Romanian church
was still using it in 1801). Since images speak louder than words, McNally and Florescu
often illustrate their volume with pictures that are taken from Romanian books of mass
194
They seem to refer to the Romanian verb “a sfârâi,” that is, “to sizzle.”
355
circulation. Apart from the church of Strei, mentioned above, and several pictures
representing Vlad Ţepeş, they publish the photograph of a well-known and often
reproduced mask used in the traditional folk theatre on New Year’s Eve as a symbol of the
past winter, but they present it instead as a “ritual anti-vampire mask” (McNally and
Florescu 12). Similarly, one of the most famous and the most easily recognisable of all the
Roman statues preserved on Romanian territory – the statue of the Glykon Snake (dating
from around 200 A.D.) – is introduced in the McNally/Florescu edition as “Rising Dragon
Snake, symbol of Dracula family” (231). The two editors ultimately re-purpose aspects of
Romanian history and culture and thereby support Bram Stoker’s project of re-purposing
aspects of Romanian history and culture.
Another way of enhancing the process of othering carried out in Stoker’s novel can
be found in the choice of annotations. When one editorial duo comments on the vampire’s
reluctance to sup by explaining that “Nineteenth-century gentlefolk dined lavishly at
midday and supped lightly in the evening” (Auerbach and Skal 23 n. 5), they use a note of
recovery, introducing today’s readership to Victorian practices. On the other hand, when
Jonathan Harker hears two words, “one being Slovak and the other Servian for something
that is either werewolf or vampire” (Dracula 36), the same editors use an explanatory note
with the clear purpose of supporting the representation of Transylvania and Romania as the
abode of vampires, rather than explaining the words heard by Harker. Without providing
any source, they write simply that “Werewolves and vampires are often allied in Romanian
folklore” (Auerbach and Skal 14 n. 2), thereby contributing to a general impression left by
the novel, although this comes in a passage in which there is no mention of either
Romanians or their folklore.
356
The othering is also enhanced through the commentaries on the plot of the novel,
whenever the editors consider that Stoker has forgotten to add vital details about the land of
vampires. When Harker enumerates some of the books in Dracula’s library, including
volumes that list names and addresses of people in England, one editor wonders if they are
an indicator of the Count’s future plan, more exactly if they are a “menu” (Klinger 51 n.
39). Some of the editors make suggestions about the potential movements of characters,
which are not mentioned in the novel. Leatherdale and Wolf, for example, follow closely
Harker’s trip from Bistritz to the Borgo Pass and add plot elements: “The peasants are out
and about as dusk approaches on St George’s Eve. They will doubtless hurry home once
their devotions are complete and secure their door with garlic” (Leatherdale 38 n. 102).
When several passengers offer Harker gifts, Leatherdale adds: “The passengers retain more
of the same, for self-protection” (40 n. 115). Harker hears thunder, which the same editor
thinks is “the first sample of Dracula’s powers” (Leatherdale 40 n. 117). When one of the
passengers in the coach “turn[s] his face away, at the same time putting out his two fingers
and crossing himself” (Dracula 41), Wolf wants to know: “Did he put out two fingers and
make the sign against the evil eye (forefinger and little finger) and cross himself with the
other hand? Or did he cross himself with two fingers? Those of the Eastern Orthodox rite
cross themselves from right to left” (Wolf 15 n. 54). He forgets to mention that Orthodox
Christians cross themselves with three fingers, which invalidates his last suggestion.
Not all the plot deficiencies or inconsistencies are noticed and complemented. There
remains a paradox that is never discussed by the editors of Dracula. At the beginning of the
novel’s last chapter, as she approaches the Borgo Pass, Mina Harker sees human
settlements and notes in her journal that “the people are brave, and strong, and simple, and
seem full of nice qualities. They are very, very superstitious. In the first house where we
357
stopped, when the woman who served us saw the scar on my forehead, she crossed herself
and put out two fingers towards me, to keep off the evil eye” (Dracula 402; emphasis in
original). To the amateur anthropologist Emily Gerard, and even to Jonathan Harker at the
beginning of the story, when he ignores the dark secrets of Castle Dracula, Romanian
peasants who believe in evil spirits may appear superstitious and backward. On the
contrary, to the vampire hunters at the end of the story, and especially to Mina Harker,
whose brow bears the mark of her (pre)vampiric state, the same peasants should appear
enlightened. They know the secrets and even have the means to fight the evil dwellers of
Castle Dracula. There are, however, no annotations in any edition commenting on this
inconsistency. The editors reflect the manner of Captain Donelson of the Czarina Catherine
whose Romanian sailors ask him to throw overboard the boxes where the vampire hides.
Donelson concludes “Man! But the supersteetion of foreigners is pairfectly rideeculous!”
(Dracula 389), even though he believes himself that “the Deil” must be involved. No editor
challenges the characters’ consensus that Romanian peasants are superstitious, although
Dracula is a novel in which superstitions are real.
The absence of annotations can help support Stoker’s othering project just as much
as the annotations themselves. Keeping silent before some of the details of Stoker’s
fictional travelogue enhances the representation that Transylvania and Romania had “in the
British geographical imagination as a peripheral zone of barbarism and conflict”
(Hammond 602). The editors make no comment, for example, when Harker and Godalming
travel up the river in a steam launch at night and from time to time encounter boats manned
by Romanians who “were scared every time we turned our electric lamp on them, and fell
on their knees and prayed” (Dracula 399). When Stoker writes that the Budapest nuns saw
from Harker’s “violent demeanour that he was English” (Dracula 134), the editors quote
358
from Hamlet (Auerbach and Skal 95 n. 8) or note that “Harker speaks German, but lacked
the presence of mind to do so. The locals took him for an English madman. The question is,
what made Harker mad?” (Leatherdale 167 n. 145). A more important question concerns
the fact that the locals are able to recognise Harker as English thanks only to his
“demeanour.” Other editors suggest later that the English are racially different – that Harker
and Godalming appear to “any native Romanians [as] obvious foreigners” (Wolf 422 n. 40;
emphasis mine) because they “do not look or behave like locals” (Leatherdale 486 n. 134;
emphasis mine). This is consistent with the accounts of the British travellers read by
Stoker, who constantly meet people who “could hardly believe that a real [Englishman]
could find his way [there]” (Johnson 307), where “not many strangers pass” (Crosse 9) and
an Englishman, especially “a mad Englishman” (Gerard, The Land beyond the Forest II,
284), is always conspicuous and seems eccentric.
Stoker’s account of the historical Dracula is ambiguous: there is no mention of
cruelty, while Arminius and Van Helsing admire his life and original character. The editors
of the novel reconstruct the portrait of the medieval ruler without taking account of the
opinion (available in English) of Romanian experts on Vlad Ţepeş who insist that the
German and Slavic tales of the Impaler’s cruel deeds are mostly slander. In fact, they often
take the gruesomeness further. Wolf states that “Vlad Ţepeş . . . was one of Europe’s
bloodiest tyrants” (Wolf xiv) and Leatherdale suggests that he represents “extreme evil”
(Leatherdale 29 n. 17). Wolf even believes that “The historical figure on whom Stoker
based his Dracula, is infinitely fiercer [than the vampire Count]” (The Connoisseur 58).
Accepting the medieval poems and legends about Vlad as true supports Stoker’s narrative
of Romanian vampirism. This is, for example, what Leonard Wolf does in his edition of
Dracula: “One thing must be granted to him – if it matters. Vlad Ţepeş was not a vampire.
359
That attribute was given him by Bram Stoker who, it seems to me, saw the proper metaphor
lurking in the man. . . . Stoker invested Vlad Dracula with it for the sake of his fiction. In
the circumstances, it hardly seems libellous” (Wolf xv). In the “Annotated Filmography” of
their edition, McNally and Florescu summarise the recent Romanian film Vlad the Impaler
(1979): “A 35 mm three-hour spectacular based upon the life and times of Dracula. . . . The
shooting in Romania in colour is truly spectacular and Stefan Sileanu, who plays Vlad and
who bears a remarkable resemblance to the Impaler, has moments of greatness. The film,
however, is too concerned with historical accuracy and apologetics” (McNally and Florescu
299).
None of the editors challenges the idea that Romanian folklore includes a belief in
vampires. Internationally recognised as an expert on Dracula, Elizabeth Miller expressed
the sentiments of many when she castigated a “widespread tendency among Romanians
today (including Transylvanians) to deny the existence of vampire figures in their folk
beliefs” (Sense & Nonsense 129).195 One commentator, more sympathetic to the vampiredenial mentioned by Miller, noted that “many countries might be unhappy at being
regarded by the West as the home of vampires (which are unknown in Romanian folklore)
and the supernatural” (Light 2). Still, the stress should probably be placed on Light’s
parenthesis: Romanians are unhappy because vampires do not exist in their folklore, while
they are constantly being told the opposite. It is, unfortunately, much more difficult to
prove that something does not exist than it is to prove that something exists. However,
195
Miller also disagrees with Sabina Ispas, who claims that the vampire does not belong in Romanian folklore
(Sense & Nonsense 147 n. 21), although Ispas, a member of the Romanian Academy and director of the
Romanian Institute of Ethnography, has been a student of Romanian folklore for half a century. See especially
her Cultură orală şi informaţie transculturală (2003) for differences between vampires and the Romanian
“strigoi.” The latter are defined as “immaterial, pure energy” that punishes transgression against traditional
rituals.
360
Romanian folklore was abundantly collected in the nineteenth century and neither vampires
nor creatures similar to vampires were found.
The best source for late-nineteenth-century customs and beliefs of the Romanian
peasant is Simion Florea Marian’s Sărbătorile la Români (Romanian Holidays). Born in
1847, like Stoker, Marian was a clergyman from Bucovina. He graduated with a degree in
theology from the University of Cernăuţi in 1875 and was the curate of several villages in
the area crossed by the vampire hunters in Dracula, including Poiana Stampii, a village
situated on the Moldavian side of the Borgo Pass. From 1885 until his death in 1907, he
worked as a teacher in Suceava, the capital of Bucovina, and worked on his ethnographic
masterpiece. He gathered the customs related in his work via three methods: he interviewed
villagers from his own parishes, from the surrounding counties, and even from other
regions, either in Austria-Hungary (Transylvania and Bucovina) or in the Kingdom of
Romania; he sent questionnaires to curates of rural churches and especially to village
schoolteachers, asking them to report on local customs related to holidays, agricultural and
pastoral activities, natural phenomena and life-course events; and he used earlier studies
based on the two methods previously mentioned. All these are reported in his two-volume
work in abundant endnotes. Marian and his correspondents entertained the very romantic
idea that the village folk could do no wrong and that all their legends and superstitions
represented “Romanian mythology” (Marian I, 3). Consequently, he did not let his own
Christian belief censure the customs reported.
Marian’s study follows the traditional calendar of Romanian peasants and includes a
long chapter on Saint George and Saint George’s Eve (see Marian II, 254-313), which
confirms many of the superstitions reported by Emily Gerard in her article and subsequent
book. None, however, can be linked to vampires, but only to witches and spirits, especially
361
strigoi. The witches and the spirits, however malevolent, can be defeated and the whole
point of the customs is to teach or to remind the villagers of the ways in which one can
prevail over them. Incidentally, Marian, whose work was quickly recognised as an
important contribution to Romanian culture, was very close to many of the great writers of
the era, most of whom were deeply concerned about folklore and often drew inspiration
from it. If today the association with vampires might seem demeaning, for many latenineteenth-century Romanian writers (starting with Mihai Eminescu, a poet very attached
to the tradition of German Romantic literature and philosophy, and who also found
inspiration in folkloric supernatural themes), the vampire would have seemed exciting. The
fact that there are no poems or tales about vampires in nineteenth-century Romania could
be considered further proof that vampire beliefs did not exist either.
Although much was written by nineteenth-century British authors about remote
places of Europe, these places remained virtually unknown to their fellow nationals. When
Charles Boner sent Charles Darwin a copy of his Transylvania, Its Products and Its People,
the latter replied: “My Dear Sir, I am very much obliged for your extremely kind note and
the really valuable present of your work on Transylvania. I do not think I ever read a word
about that country, and I am ashamed to confess that I had to look at a map to be sure
where it lay” (Kettle I, 77-78). Some of the editors of Dracula, as mentioned at the
beginning of this study, were just as uninformed about Transylvania. Consequently, they
visited the lands described by Stoker and found ways to narrate their journeys.
Following in the footsteps of Harker through Transylvania and the vampire hunters
through Romania, the editors of Dracula often explain the novel with their own traveller’s
accounts. The first scholarly edition of Dracula (Wolf 1975) is also the first to make use of
the editor’s travel experience through the lands described in the novel. Throughout the
362
volume, Wolf uses photographs taken by himself on his trip through Transylvania, thereby
illustrating Stoker’s Victorian-era settings with their contemporary version; Stoker’s
nineteenth-century Gipsies with 1970s Gipsies; the Romanian peasants in Stoker’s novel
with his own photographs of Romanian peasants. The second scholarly edition promotes
the Dracula Tours (McNally and Florescu 314-320) and reproduces Castle Bran on the back
cover and “Whitby Harbour by Moonlight” on the endpapers. The editors give directions to
Castle Dracula, identified by them as Poenari, in the manner of a travel guide: “The castle
can be reached from Bucharest by taking the highway to Pitesti – it is twenty-five miles
north of Curtea de Arges on highway thirteen. Steps have been built reaching to the top.
The site is just as eerie as [Count] Dracula describes. If you start early in Bucharest you can
return within a day – the drive back should take two or three hours” (McNally and Florescu
64 n. 69).
In the absence of any Romanian sources, some of the editors intersperse their
editorial narrative with accounts of their own cultural and culinary adventures through
twentieth and twenty-first-century Romania. Klinger explains that “Slivovitz is a Slavic
Balkan plum brandy. The Roumanian [sic] variety is known as ţuică and is made by both
private and commercial distillers; traditionally, every meal begins with a shot of it. In order
to research its efficacy, this editor consumed a great deal of ţuică on a recent trip to
Transylvania and can report that it staves off chills, even on hot May nights” (Klinger 36 n.
91). When Harker reports having heard “the churning sound of [the] tongue” (Dracula 70)
of one of the three female vampire in Castle Dracula, one of the editors attempts to emulate
her for the benefit of the reader: “I have tried, calmly as well as passionately, to reproduce
this churning sound with my tongue but without success. It may be a noise that only a
363
passionate vampire can make” (Wolf 52 n. 49). Such dedication to the mission of
explicating the novel is not, however, customary in the scholarly editions of Dracula.
The present research is grounded in discourse analysis and is informed by
postcolonial theory and practice. The chief aim was to understand the origins of the
discourse about Transylvania and Romania that informs the editorial annotations of the
various editions of Bram Stoker’s vampire. It traced the origins of this discourse to
nineteenth-century travellers and to the British involvment in the region. As shown in this
dissertation, the circumstances in which Stoker wrote Dracula are more complex than
previously thought. Understanding that the travellers’ writing was informed by the colonial
entreprise at the mouth of the Danube is an aspect that was not previously considered and
that informs the editors’ annotations. It is my hope that once the link between the novel and
the complex British involvement in the region becomes known, the future editors of
Dracula will re-examine the politics of annotations and produce editions that will be
sensitive to Romanians and to Romanian culture and history.
364
365
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