oxford world’s classics
DRACULA
Bram Stoker was born in Dublin in 1847, a middle-class member
of the small Protestant elite. He was a notable fixture in the social
life of Trinity College Dublin, and followed his father into the civil
service of the colonial government. In his spare time, he wrote theatre reviews and short stories. In 1878 he completely transformed
his life, accepting the offer of the famous actor Henry Irving to
become the manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. Over the
next twenty years, Stoker was at the heart of political and cultural
life of the era. He published his first novel in 1890. Dracula appeared
in 1897; the novel was favourably reviewed yet hardly marked out
as the influential and enduring success it has since become. After
Irving lost control of the Lyceum in 1898, Stoker increased his
production of novels, including the successful Jewel of the Seven
Stars (1903) and his notoriously deranged final work, The Lair of
the White Worm (1911). His last years were marked by poverty and
illness. He died in 1912. Within ten years, the film Nosferatu would
launch Dracula’s second life in the cinema and secure the modern
obsession with vampires.
Ro g er L u ck h u rst is Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck
College, University of London. He is the author of The Invention of
Telepathy (2002), Science Fiction (2005), and The Trauma Question
(2008) and has edited Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde and Other Tales and the anthology Late Victorian Gothic Tales
for Oxford World’s Classics.
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
ROGER LUCKHURST
1
3
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First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1986
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CONTENTS
Introduction
vii
Note on the Text
xxxiii
Select Bibliography
xxxiv
Timeline of Vampire Literature before Dracula
xxxvii
A Chronology of Bram Stoker
xl
DRACULA
Appendix: ‘Dracula’s Guest’ (1914)
352
Explanatory Notes
363
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INTRODUCTION
Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot may prefer to
treat the Introduction as an Epilogue
Very few modern stories exceed their origins to become full-scale
myths, freely adapted into a myriad different forms. In the nineteenth
century, it was the monsters, it seems, that had the demonic energy
to climb free of texts and wreak havoc across the wider culture. There
were brief sensational seasons around the figure of the vampire Lord
Ruthven in 1819 or the evil mesmerist Svengali in 1894, but we could
point to more enduring figures that have continued into the present
day: Victor Frankenstein’s creature, Mr Edward Hyde and, at the end
of the century, Count Dracula. The vampire myth pre-dated Bram
Stoker’s Gothic romance, yet the book crystallized an image, dramatized a certain predatory menace in Queen Victoria’s jubilee year, and
evoked an authentic sense of Christian dread, embodying in one elusive figure everything that shiny modernity was at risk of forgetting
about its blood-soaked history. After the first cinematic appearances
of the Count in the early 1920s, versions of Dracula have proliferated uncontrollably. Buffy the Vampire Slayer might have reduced the
Count to a cameo, casually dispatched in one episode as an unworthy
enemy, but in the era of vampire franchises like Buffy, Angel, Blade,
Underworld, or the Twilight and True Blood series, one could sometimes
be forgiven for thinking Stoker’s Dracula has effectively colonized the
West’s cultural imagination.
It wasn’t always like this. In 1980, the Gothic scholar David Punter
considered Dracula an ‘underrated’ novel that deserved more attention. In 1985, David Seed noted an ‘almost complete critical silence’
on the book.1 When Oxford World’s Classics decided to add Dracula
as the one hundredth book on its list in 1983, there was some press
concern that the notion of the literary classic was being undermined.
The editor, A. N. Wilson, did not seem entirely comfortable with
3
introducing such a potboiler either. Stoker’s other novels, needless to
1
David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the
Present Day (London: Longmans, 1980), 456, and David Seed, ‘The Narrative Method
of Dracula’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 40/1 (1985), 61.
viii
Introduction
say, were considered ghastly, beneath contempt. The Gothic has since
become a respectable genre to study, although Stoker is still often
regarded as a dubious figure. 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. 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.
There might be some truth to the sense that Stoker was merely a
vehicle for the cultural energies of the late Victorian period, currents
that he did not necessarily fully control. Stoker, as Dracula evidences,
was fascinated by the subliminal or unconscious processes of the
mind, and as an Irishman he would have imbibed the view that Celts
had uncanny psychic sensitivities. Yet it was Stoker’s remarkable position in late Victorian cultural life that allowed him to end up as the
writer who could so effectively condense an era’s principal concerns
into one breathless flight of melodrama.
Bram Stoker
Documenting Bram Stoker’s life is not hard. Interpreting key aspects
of it, however, has proved controversial and the author remains rather
enigmatic, tempting many to speculate about the inner meaning of
an outwardly respectable career. Bram Stoker was born in 1847 in
Dublin into a middle-class Protestant family. His father was a lowly
functionary in the Civil Service of the British Government in Ireland,
which in the 1840s was steadfastly doing nothing to alleviate the
appalling starvation conditions of the Catholic peasant majority. The
small social circle of the Protestant elite in Dublin resulted in many
connections. Stoker knew the family of Sir William and Lady Wilde
very well (their son Oscar was born in 1854). Both were fascinated
by Celtic mythology and were sympathetic to Irish demands for selfdetermination; both took an interest in Bram. Their neighbour in
Merrion Square was the Gothic novelist Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu,
whose influence on Dracula was extensive. Le Fanu part-owned the
Dublin Evening Mail, a conservative, anti-nationalist newspaper for
which Stoker wrote theatre reviews from 1871. Such political differences and debates were woven into the heart of cultural life in Dublin.
Stoker came to know every significant Irish writer to emerge from this
sphere in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Introduction
ix
After a sickly childhood, Stoker grew into an athletic giant of a
man, famed for his sporting prowess in racing and rugby. In 1864,
he began to study mathematics at Trinity College Dublin and
threw himself into the debating worlds of both the Historical and
Philosophical societies, where he won awards for his oratory. He met
many distinguished visiting speakers and debated literary and cultural
matters energetically. In 1868, for instance, a controversy erupted
over alleged improprieties of the poetry of Walt Whitman. After
reading Leaves of Grass, Stoker became an advocate of the poet and
wrote to Whitman a number of times before eventually meeting him
in the 1880s. Stoker eventually graduated in 1870, largely because he
followed his father into the Civil Service in 1866, working full-time
as clerk in the department of the Registrar of Petty Sessions, part of
the legal system’s Byzantine structure. This was an era of modernizing ancient systems, and Stoker was part of this professionalization,
a matter not unconnected with the bright young professionals and
their newly minted office systems we meet in Dracula. His first
book was a handbook with the enticing title Duties of Clerks of Petty
Sessions. By the time this book was published, however, Stoker had
resigned his post and utterly transformed his life.
Henry Irving (1838–1905) was considered one of the greatest
Shakespearean actors of the day. Stoker had first seen him perform
in The Rivals in Dublin in 1867 and was star-struck. By the 1870s,
Stoker’s role as theatre critic allowed him to meet the great thespian.
The critic was invited to a meal to celebrate another Dublin performance in 1876, and was treated to Irving’s party trick: a dramatic
recitation of the poem ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’ by Thomas
Hood. Irving would act out the morbid guilt that saturated the poem
with extraordinary physicality. Stoker was entirely overwhelmed:
That experience I shall never—can never—forget. The recitation was
different, both in kind and in degree, from anything I had ever heard . . .
Such was Irving’s commanding force, so great was the magnetism of
his genius, so profound was the sense of his dominance that I sat spellbound. Outwardly I was as of stone; nought in me but receptivity and
imagination . . . As to its effect I had no adequate words. I can only say that
after
a few seconds of stony silence following his collapse I burst out into
3
something like a violent fit of hysterics.2
2
Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann,
1906), i. 29.
x
Introduction
Stoker’s reminiscence insists that he was ‘a very strong man’ yet
proudly and disarmingly confesses that he was utterly unmanned
in this encounter. Two years later, Henry Irving offered Stoker the
chance to become his business manager at the Lyceum Theatre in
London. The salary was three times that of his Civil Service post, yet
without much security or prospects. Stoker agreed, despite anxiety
expressed by his parents for stepping into the déclassé world of the
theatre. He hastily married the Dublin beauty Florence Balcombe,
who had recently refused an offer of marriage from a love-struck
Oscar Wilde, and travelled to London, where he was to manage the
Lyceum for twenty years, between 1878 and 1898, continuing to work
for Irving until the actor died in 1905. Stoker tirelessly managed the
actor’s chaotic personal and financial worlds, often in the face of
Irving’s irksome and quixotic decisions. He paid actors and backstage
staff, organized set-design, read over a thousand submitted scripts,
and organized several tours of America (which raised money to keep
the London theatre working). He worked as a press agent, advertising copywriter, wrote hundreds of thousands of letters on Irving’s
behalf, and helped smooth the way to Irving’s knighthood in 1895,
the first for an actor, by arranging private royal performances. Stoker
also helped manage the careers of two leading actresses who worked
with Irving, Ellen Terry (who called him ‘Ma’) and Geneviève Ward.
Both were much admired, but on the margins of respectability, yet
were unequivocally supported by Stoker. So legendary were Stoker’s
management skills that the bankrupt painter James Whistler begged
Stoker to take on his finances. He became Mark Twain’s London
agent, dabbled in publishing ventures, and had a hand in engineering the astounding literary success of his close friend Thomas Hall
Caine, negotiating contracts, reading and rewriting manuscripts,
ensuring reviews.
Stoker adjusted his clock to Irving’s nocturnal habits, regularly
dining with eminent visitors to the Lyceum after performances into
the early hours. It was at this ‘Beefsteak Club’ that Stoker befriended
political figures like William Gladstone (Liberal prime minister in
the 1880s, controversially advocating Home Rule for Ireland), and
literary figures such as Sir Richard Burton and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Somehow, in his spare time, Stoker studied and took the exams
to become a qualified barrister in 1890. He also published his first
collection of stories in 1882 and four novels between 1890 and 1897.
Introduction
xi
When Dracula appeared in May 1897, it was a modest critical success
as one of those fashionably ‘weird’ tales, yet no one grasped how long
it would endure. Stoker’s output increased with the financial insecurities that lost Irving control of the Lyceum in 1898. When Irving died
in 1905, Stoker promptly composed an adoring two-volume biography. This work rate led to a stroke in 1906, Stoker’s last years being
marked by ill health, poverty, and diminishing returns for his literary
efforts. His last books, such as the notorious Lair of the White Worm
(1911), with its unconstrained phallic imagery and hysterical tone,
were deeply disordered and strange. He died in 1912.
These bare bones already hint at some intriguing ambiguities.
Stoker married Florence Balcombe and had one child in 1879. Yet
Stoker’s life was dominated by intense friendships with men, a fraternal bond celebrated by Whitman’s poetry. Some have speculated that
Stoker’s sexual relationship with Florence ended with the birth of
their son, and that he led a double life, perhaps with actresses or prostitutes. He often toured for months with Irving, leaving Florence, one
of the great beauties of the age, to the flirtatious attentions of society figures like the librettist W. S. Gilbert. In 1975, the biography
of Stoker by his grand-nephew Daniel Farson alleged that Stoker
had contracted syphilis, the then incurable and degenerative sexually
transmitted infection, as a result of these adventures, his long decline
resulting from the tertiary stage of the disease, when spirochaetes eat
away at the nervous system in gruesome ways. Had Florence barred
him from the marriage bed, leaving him to sublimate his desires in
fiction? This remains entirely speculative, as do interpretations of the
nature of Stoker’s relationship with Irving. The writer happily confessed his adoration of the actor, yet he also daily experienced Irving’s
demonic control. Surely knowing it would evoke Count Dracula,
Stoker recalled that Irving in the play Vanderdecken ‘gave one a wonderful impression of a dead man fictitiously alive’, his eyes ‘seemed
to shine like cinders of glowing red’.3 Did Stoker play the hapless
functionary Jonathan Harker to Irving’s Dracula, a weak man from
the provinces unmanned by an overpowering personality?
If Stoker remains a private enigma, it is perhaps because the 1890s
provided enough lessons in the dangers of exposure. Oscar Wilde,
Florence’s one-time suitor, was arrested and prosecuted in 1895 for
3
Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 55.
xii
Introduction
acts of gross indecency with young men in hotels barely a stone’s
throw from the Lyceum Theatre. He was broken down in prison, then
exiled and dead by 1900. The majority of Dracula was composed whilst
Wilde was incarcerated. Wilde’s double life was mercilessly exposed
by Stoker’s Trinity College contemporary, the barrister Edward
Carson. Meanwhile, feminist campaigners were openly declaring
that the sexual incontinence of syphilitic men was a national scandal,
exposing the hypocrisy of respectable pillars of society. A contrasting model of obsessive vigilance over the private life was provided by
the novelist Henry James, about whom we are left guessing so many
things despite his vast published output and surviving letters. Stoker
is a similar figure of ambiguity, a man of contradictions, a public
fixture in London life yet somehow unknowable, a political Liberal
but cultural Conservative, someone who could write in favour of the
censorship of ‘emotions . . . arising from sex impulses’ in literature,
and yet produce a text in Dracula dripping with all manner of perversity.4 It is these tensions and contradictions, ultimately, which work
in Dracula’s favour, frustrating much chance of a narrow reduction
to biographical explanation. But this is also because Dracula derives
much of its power not from an individual’s imagination but by plugging so directly into the history of Gothic literature and two centuries
of folklore about the vampire.
Gothic Romances and Vampire Reports
The Gothic is a thoroughly modern genre, emerging in the eighteenth century, often considered to have been inaugurated by Horace
Walpole’s eccentric tale, The Castle of Otranto (1764). Whilst this
was declared the Age of Enlightenment, its sceptical philosophers
celebrating progress, knowledge, and liberty, the Gothic was a repository for everything modernity hoped it had left behind. The genre
offered a phantasmagorical pre-modern world—a place of feudal
tyrants, arbitrary rule, cruel punishment, corrupt monks, menaced
virgins, and peasants cowering in superstition. Early Gothic novels
were often set in a medieval past and in southern Europe, places of
peasant serfdom and Catholic power. In central ways, Gothic literature helped define a rational modern Protestant England by luridly
4
Stoker, ‘The Censorship of Fiction’, Nineteenth Century and After, 64 (1908), 483.
Introduction
xiii
imagining its other: feudal, fanatical, Catholic, European. Yet this
was not always a comforting genre, for the terrors associated with the
Gothic often derived from the sense that these superseded tyrannies
might return at any moment. Throughout its existence, these Gothic
imaginings have crept closer to the shores of England and nearer to
the present day. Sceptical commentators strongly disapproved of the
artificial stimulation of excessive emotion and superstitious belief
in Gothic literature and lectured the reading public on its dangers,
yet it became an important literary genre by the 1790s, an era of
political instability and revolution. A literary tradition of the Gothic
sputtered fitfully through the Victorian age of Realism, yet there was a
major revival of the form in the late Victorian period, to which Stoker
became a significant contributor.
What did Stoker take from the genre? The plot of Dracula neatly
enacts the trajectory of the Gothic, starting amongst the tyrannical feudal lords and superstitious peasants on the southern edge
of Europe only to bring this monstrous medieval survival into the
heart of modern London, with Dracula’s town house on Piccadilly
very close to Buckingham Palace, the seat of Empire. What Dracula’s
implacable enemy Professor Van Helsing teaches is that the confidence of modern empirical science and rational scepticism is
misplaced, that Victorian naturalism has blinded itself to the continuing terrible powers of the supernal and the supernatural worlds.
Beliefs dismissed as primitive superstitions carry vital truths we
have forgotten, and this is a core element of the Gothic’s constantly
restated criticism of complacent modernity. Similarly, Stoker’s book
explores extreme emotions, sleepwalking, brain fever, madness,
hysteria, and peculiar dreamy trance states. The Gothic began, so
Horace Walpole claimed, with a nightmare, and has always been
associated with disordered reason and excess sensibility. Indeed, for
many critics, the phantasmagoric imagination of the Gothic actually
begins to provide many of the metaphors for how we conceive of our
modern subjectivity, mysterious to itself, labyrinthine, haunted by
half-glimpsed spectres of memory and desire, never quite successfully burying its dead, fearful that all the skeletons in the closet will
one day return.5 Stoker was strikingly attuned to modern psychology,
5
See e.g. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the
Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
xiv
Introduction
as we shall see, and this interest in mental states is intrinsic to the
success of Dracula.
Importantly, too, Stoker borrowed some of the formal innovations
of the Gothic genre. The Castle of Otranto had been passed off on its
first publication as a rediscovered anonymous medieval manuscript,
at once letting the tale be told but allowing the editor to disown any
responsibility for its crude and credulous contents. Gothic excesses
are often given fictitious framings as manuscripts or a mass of fragmentary evidence carefully collated by increasingly terrified editors.
Although Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), a mass of letters, witness statements, diaries, and news reports, was Stoker’s obvious model for Dracula, he also admired Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Strange Case of Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1885), where multiple manuscripts
are pulled together to tell an impossible tale, a trick taken even further into fragmentary form by Arthur Machen in The Great God Pan
(1894). Dracula actually narrates its own construction, as Mina transcribes documents and shuffles them into chronological sequence,
anxiously rushing to be as contemporary as possible, the reports
trying and always failing to become identical with the very events they
describe. All of these Gothic texts foreground their own constructedness, and are often awkward and discontinuous. They offended
neoclassical taste for the beautiful and harmonious in the eighteenth
century and the formal and rhetorical devices of Realism in the nineteenth century. They 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. What Dracula
achieved was a fusion of the fake rediscovered manuscript of Gothic
conventions with the absolutely contemporary world of technological
transcription by shorthand, typewriter, telegram, and phonograph.
The text rattles along at the same speed as the Orient Express, chasing
not only the ancient beast but its own modernity.
The textual ploy of fiction feigning to be true leaves the reader in
a slightly hesitant space, perhaps just a little more prepared to dally
with the notion that what they are reading might, after all, be a documentary record. The last page of Dracula plays on this uncertainty,
Harker noting that ‘in all the mass of material of which the record
is composed, there is hardly one authentic document! nothing but a
mass of typewriting’ (p. 351). This textual hesitancy is generic, but
it also worked in Dracula because the figure of a vampire had always
Introduction
xv
hovered in an uncertain zone between fictional fabrication and folkloric truth.
Although occultists like the antiquarian Montague Summers
would like to claim that the belief in vampires is global and transhistorical (and therefore probably true), the vampire is a thoroughly
modern being.6 Like the Gothic, stories of vampires emerge in the
Age of Enlightenment, as instances of primitive superstition that
help define the rational scepticism of northern, Protestant Europe.
‘Vampyre’ first appeared in English in the London Journal in 1732,
adopting the Magyar word vampyre or the Russian upir. The journal was scoffing at accounts of panics amongst the peasantry of
remote parts of Hungary and the Balkans. Territories like Serbia
and Wallachia had recently come under Austrian imperial control. Soldiers, judges, and surgeons of the new administration were
being confronted with social unrest and the desecration of graves
in villages where the population held unshakeable beliefs that the
dead could return to prey on family and neighbours, killing them
in turn. Administrative documents on these fringe frontier disturbances returned to Vienna and thus began to circulate more widely.
In 1725, Peter Plogojowitz had been dead and buried for ten weeks
but was blamed by villagers for nine subsequent deaths in the village. To avoid a riot, the new Imperial Provisor agreed to open the
grave. The body had not decomposed; hair and nails had continued
to grow; new white skin was growing; there was fresh blood in the
mouth of the corpse. According to tradition, the villagers demanded
that the body of the vampire be pinned to the ground with a wooden
stake, to stop the creature wandering. Officials agreed, ‘whereupon,
as he was pierced, not only did much blood, completely fresh, flow
also through his ears and mouth, but still other wild signs (which
I pass by out of high respect) took place’.7 Another notorious case
was published in 1732, relating to Arnold Paole. Paole, who lived in
the territory between Tokay and Transylvania, had been killed in an
accident, but was seen returning to menace his relatives, who recalled
Paole’s story of having been ‘tormented’ by a Turkish vampire. After
thirty days, the grave was opened and the body was found bloated
6
Montague Summers, The Vampire (1928; repr. London: Studio, 1995).
Report translated in Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 6–7. Barber comments that the ‘other wild
sign’ was probably an erection.
7
xvi
Introduction
with the blood of his victims. Paole was staked, emitting a shriek, his
head was cut off, and the body was burnt. Even so, seventeen further
villagers died because, it was said, they had eaten meat from oxen that
Paole had vampirized. In 1746, the Jesuit monk and antiquarian Dom
Augustin Calmet collected these and other tales for his vast Treatise
on the Apparitions of Angels, Demons and Spirits, and on the Revenants
and Vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. The volume
included a chapter entitled ‘Dead Persons in Hungary who Suck the
Blood of the Living’. Calmet included the traveller Joseph Pitton de
Tournefort’s account of a panic about a vroucolacas on a Greek island
in 1702, which followed the same pattern of a dead man accused,
an exhumation, and a ritual rekilling of the corpse. Calmet, a great
biblical scholar, was caught somewhere between belief and disbelief:
‘Thanks to God, we are by no means so credulous. We avow that all
the light which science can throw on this fact discovers none of the
causes of it. Nevertheless, we cannot refuse to believe that to be true
which is judicially attested and by persons of probity.’8
In England and France, these stories were occasions to reassert the
virtues of rationalism and freedom from the tyranny of superstition.
The commentary in the London press was dismissive yet already
fairly sophisticated at reading the accounts otherwise. The Craftsman
observed that these tales came ‘from the Eastern Part of the World,
always remarkable for the Allegorical Style. The States of Hungary
are in Subjection to the Turks and Germans, and govern’d by a pretty
hard Hand; which obliges them to couch all their complaints under
Figures.’9 The vampire thus has potential as a political allegory from
its earliest arrival in English. Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary (1764)
included a short chapter on vampires, ridiculing the circulation
of tales by the credulous priest Calmet in keeping with his war on
religious fanaticism and superstition. He, too, considered the only
vampires were to be found in London and Paris, ‘stock-jobbers,
brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in
broad daylight’.10 When in 1867 Karl Marx declared that ‘Capital is
8
Augustin Calmet, The Phantom World: Or, the Philosophy of Spirits, Apparitions, etc.,
2 vols., trans. Revd. Henry Christmas (London: Bentley, 1850), ii. 36.
9
‘Political Vampyres’, The Craftsman, 307 (20 May 1732), collected in Gothic
Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820, ed. E. J. Clery and Robert Miles (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000), 25.
10
Voltaire, The Works of Voltaire, vii. Philosophical Dictionary Part V (New York: E. R.
Dumont, 1901), 143.
Introduction
xvii
dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour,
and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’, this was already a firmly
established metaphor, the vampire retooled from a feudal world for
modern times.11
These ‘true’ accounts appeared in obscure reports and foreign
journals, were translated and retranslated, details merging or morphing as they disappeared into the half-light of rumour. They became
the hobby of antiquarians and archivists, chasing footnote trails to
obscure texts. Stoker picked up a number of details from one of these
antiquarian syntheses of curious stories, The Book of Were-Wolves,
published in 1865 by the odd-ball priest and novelist Sabine BaringGould. In this respect, the form of Dracula again bows to the tradition,
for the vampire, one might say, is nothing more than an emanation of
sifted documents, a conjuration of the archive.
Anthropologists worked to demystify this belief. Edward Tylor, the
first academic anthropologist in England, included belief in vampires
in his tome Primitive Culture (1871) as more evidence of ‘primaeval
monuments of barbaric thought and life’ in our midst.12 He viewed
his task as any vampire-hunter might, ‘to expose the remains of crude
old culture which have passed into superstition, and to mark these
out for destruction’.13 Such ‘barbarian’ thought was recorded as late
as 1896 in rural Rhode Island by the American Anthropologist journal, where villagers regarded tuberculosis as a vampiric contagion.
Contemporary anthropology, in contrast, works empathetically to
understand the logical if incorrect causations that result in such a
belief. Paul Barber has argued that vampirism is ‘an elaborate folkhypothesis designed to account for seemingly inexplicable events
associated with death and decomposition’. Vampirism flares at times
of political tyranny and in plague seasons. This is compelling, but
Barber expresses frustration with what he calls the ‘false data’ provided by literary fiction, which has distorted the folklore.14 If we are
11
Karl Marx, ‘The Working Day’, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production,
3 vols. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974), i. 224. The most famous Marxist reading
of Dracula remains Franco Moretti, ‘The Dialectics of Fear’, in Signs Taken for Wonders:
On the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 1983).
12
Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology,
Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871), i. 19.
13
Ibid. ii. 453.
14
Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death, 2.
xviii
Introduction
to understand Dracula’s success, though, it doesn’t help to think of it
as noise disrupting a true signal. In the nineteenth century, folkloric
vampires fused with Gothic tropes, resulting in a whole new range of
resonance.
There are many books written on the tradition of the literary vampire before Dracula.15 The folkloric vampire was a stumbling, bloated
peasant, never venturing far from home, and easily neutralized with
a sexton’s spade and a box of matches. The literary vampire became a
highly mobile, svelte aristocratic rake with the appearance of the short
tale ‘The Vampyre’ in 1819. Lord Ruthven, the undead and murderous womanizer of this story, was written by William Polidori. It was
Polidori’s revenge on his master Lord Byron, who had dismissed him
the previous year as his travelling companion and personal doctor.
Initially mistaken as a creation of Byron, Ruthven embodied the vampire in the trope of the Satanic lord, saturated with Byron’s ruined
reputation as a sexual and political revolutionary, a man who had
fatally dallied in all manner of sins from his ancestral home to the
southern edges of European civilization. Sex with Ruthven/Byron
meant death: it was an intoxicating prospect. The story was retold
and restaged many times, part of the early Byronic cult.
Later, serial fictions like Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood
(started in 1847) entrenched this figure in the conventions of Victorian
melodrama, innocent daughters menaced by an undead ancestor who
flaps at windows with eyes of ‘savage and remarkable lustre’ and ‘lips
receded much from the large canine looking teeth’, surviving bullets
to feast at the necks of his victims and contaminate their bloodline.16
The inversion of this trope, the predatory female vampire (still feasting on young girls), was crystallized by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
in ‘Carmilla’ (1872), a text whose influence weighs very heavily on
Stoker’s early draft ‘Dracula’s Guest’ (see Appendix). All of which is
to say that Stoker was working with very established iconography and
narrative forms, ones that were so hollowed out by 1897 that Stoker’s
15
See discussion by Montague Summers in The Vampire. For recent collections of
some 19th-cent. tales, see Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula
(London: Faber, 1991) and Otto Penzler (ed.), The Vampire Archives (New York: Vintage,
2009).
16
Usually attributed to James Malcolm Rymer, but quoted edition under name
Thomas Preskett Prest, Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, 3 vols. (Gloucester:
Dodo Press, n.d.), i. 13.
Introduction
xix
brilliance was in how he reanimated and redirected these tropes to
address the burning issues of his day.
Reading Dracula
Stoker’s contemporaries read in Dracula routine shivers and a traditional quest romance, whose Christian allegory overtly replays St
George and the slaying of the drakul, or dragon. It has only been subsequently that the book has been transposed from the merely average
to the absolutely exemplary, which is to say that historical distance
reveals the book to be an uncanny echo-box of its place and time.
From a later moment, the text is less a didactic allegory than a rich,
open matrix that is so overloaded with possibility that it is continually
falling into contradiction. What follows is merely indicative of some
of Dracula’s most significant keynotes.
Victorian literature makes the vampire myth a sexual allegory, a
harping on daughters that is always staging how English female
virtue is insistently menaced by (usually male) foreign predators. Dracula is no exception, but its reflections on sex and gender
are freighted with very particular late Victorian concerns. Stoker’s
book wishes to reassert a simple code of masculine action with a
chivalric code that idealizes the feminine and the maternal, a core
Victorian ideology. The shape of the narrative brings together solitary,
disparate men and binds them into a blood-brotherhood that repels
a foreign threat and removes a contaminating stain from English
womanhood. This is a newly professionalized, middle-class fraternity in Dracula, bringing together the lawyer, doctor, psychologist, archivist, and theologian, just at a time when the professions
were acquiring new political and moral authority.17 Stoker’s
novel was also in keeping with a revived literature of adventure romance,
seen by its champions to restore a masculine virility to a worryingly decadent era of novel-writing.18 Dracula, however, never straightforwardly
17
See Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880, 2nd edn.
(London: Routledge, 2002) and Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and
Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
18
For a key contribution to this debate, see Andrew Lang, ‘Realism and Romance’
(1886), collected in Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in
Cultural History c.1880–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 99–104.
xx
Introduction
embodies this ideology: it displays all the symptoms of anxiety
that prompted this restatement of masculine assertion in the first
place.
All of the male heroes in the book suffer moments of collapse that
are explicitly termed ‘hysterical’, a term commonly associated with
the weakness of women. They swoon away at moments of crisis, or
are susceptible to trance, states again associated with women. The
men are lonely, unsociable, and secretive, at least three of them keening over the same impossible object of desire. Seward, the psychologist, fights his urge to seek refuge in drugs, as if he were an effete
decadent. Of them all, Jonathan Harker is the most consistently feminized. Harker narrates the opening section in the convention of travel
notes on a journey into a menacing un-English world, echoing the
heroines from Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels. He becomes the damsel
in distress, trapped in a castle, forced to write false documents home
by the tyrannical lord, just as Emily is compelled by Montoni in The
Mysteries of Udolpho. He even writes at a desk ‘where in old times
possibly some fair lady sat to pen’ (p. 37). Harker’s final unmanning
is at the hands of the three weird sisters whose delicious promise
of surrender leaves him the passive object of their sexual advances.
When the Count holds them off with his dramatic statement ‘This
man belongs to me!’ the innocent Harker perhaps understandably
‘sank down unconscious’ (p. 40), unable to deal with the implications of this declaration of possession. He is carried to bed by the
Count. His remaining adventures in the castle result in ‘brain fever’
(a euphemistic term implying complete mental breakdown), and
in his marriage to Mina the husband is the weak and convalescent
half of the venture. Harker is restored to manhood by his role in the
fraternity of vampire-hunters and is there at the final confrontation,
but he seems a permanently traumatized man.
This depiction is surely partly a record of the anxiety induced by the
Woman Question so widely debated in the last years of the nineteenth
century. Women finally acquired property rights in marriage in 1882
(they were no longer passed on as chattel from father to husband but
could retain their own wealth), were beginning to enter universities
and professions, and there was an organized campaign for women’s
suffrage. The 1891 Census then revealed a gender imbalance, indicating that women substantially outnumbered men, prompting concern
over the ‘odd women’ who would, by simple mathematics, be unable
Introduction
xxi
to marry. In 1894, these elements produced the cultural phenomenon
of the New Woman. The term was coined by Sarah Grand, a feminist who praised the chances of the newly independent woman whilst
contemptuously taking aim at ‘The Man of the Moment’ as suffering
from ‘idleness and luxury’.19 Soon, however, it became a term of abuse,
the New Woman incoherently embodying either a mannish overeducated fanatical spinster in specs or conversely a dangerously assertive, over-sexed vamp. The unnatural prospect of the sexually active
woman had been associated with vampirism at least since Charles
Baudelaire’s poem ‘Metamophoses of the Vampire’ of 1857 (a prostitute ‘so learned in pleasure’ she could ‘smother a man in my fearful
arms’), and reconfirmed by Philip Burne-Jones’s notorious painting
The Vampire, shown in London the year Dracula appeared, in which a
prostrate man swoons on a bed under a snarling predatory woman.20
It has often been observed that Dracula incorporates opposed versions of the New Woman figure.21 Before tragedy strikes, Mina and
Lucy devour their afternoon tea at such a rate that ‘we should have
shocked the “New Woman” with our appetites’ (p. 85). Things then
take a darker turn. Lucy receives three proposals and mourns privately that she cannot have three husbands. Already prone to dreamy
states and sleepwalking, this excess makes her susceptible to the
supernatural advances of the Count and she is found at night in the
town in a state of undress and mental distraction. Descriptions of
her distressed breathing merge with sexual arousal. Some critics have
suggested, in a book stuffed with medical doctors and diagnoses, that
her symptoms here imply either a sexual pathology or a menstrual
disorder.22 Women suffering from anaemia were encouraged to drink
19
Sarah Grand, ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’ (Mar. 1894) and ‘The
Man of the Moment’ (May 1894), both collected in Carolyn Christensen Nelson, A New
Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890s (Peterborough: Broadview Press,
2001), quote from p. 150.
20
Several translations of Charles Baudelaire’s poem are helpfully collected at <http://
fleursdumal.org/poem/186>. The Burne-Jones painting is discussed in Bram Djikstra,
Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986).
21
See Carol A. Senf, ‘Dracula: Stoker’s Response to the New Woman’, Victorian
Studies, 26/1 (1982), 33–49. For a reading of Dracula in a wider New Woman context,
see Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1997).
22
Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Menstrual Misogyny and Taboo: The Medusa, Vampire,
and the Female Sitgmatic’, in Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie (eds.), Menstruation: A
Cultural History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 149–61.
xxii
Introduction
warm animal blood from slaughterhouses into the 1890s. Instead of
this treatment, Lucy gains her symbolic multiple husbands through
successive blood transfusions. Once she has been ‘turned’ by Dracula,
she perverts natural motherhood by feasting on children, and tempts
her betrothed into damned sexual abandon. The brotherhood is
fully forged in the scene in Lucy’s family tomb, where they gather
to ‘correct’ her waywardness. It is a breathtaking scene of sexual
misogyny. In contrast, Mina is the self-supporting schoolmistress
and administrator, the information centre, whose secretarial skills
manage the information systems of the brotherhood. Later, weirdly,
Mina works like a telephone, being used by Van Helsing to dial up
and find out the whereabouts of Dracula. Every time the men decide
to exclude her from the battle they suffer setbacks and lament their
decision. Professional and resourceful, she is praised for her ‘man’s
brain’, yet Mina only seems active; she only ever services her men.
She is the dutiful wife, disdainful of the New Woman’s demands for
equality. Latterly, once she has her own close encounter with Dracula,
she embodies the English womanhood that must be defended. In
the end, the brotherhood is secured around Mina and her newborn
son: the Madonna and Child.
Stoker probably wished to establish simple, conservative oppositions between the sexes, and within the ‘fairer’ sex between ideal and
fallen women. Yet Dracula undoes any stable categories of gender or
sexuality. Two key scenes work as what Sigmund Freud called ‘primal
scenes’, events of profound sexual ambiguity that haunt the memory
and produce all manner of possible interpretations and potential
perversities.23 In the first, Harker’s encounter with the three vampire
women promises sexual abandon to the women only to veer suddenly into his homoerotic repossession by Dracula. In return, these
women are staked for their transgressions yet Dracula is dispatched
in another way, as if the narrative wished to avoid the overt sexual
resonance of staking the male vampire. The second primal scene
is Dracula’s invasion of Mina’s marriage-bed, her husband lying
insensible beside Mina, whilst she is forced to feed from a weeping
23
See the essay by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, ‘Fantasy and the
Origins of Sexuality’, in J. Donald et al. (eds.), Formations of Fantasy (London: Methuen,
1986), 5–27. A sexual primal scene, where a parental sexual act is misinterpreted as an
animalistic act of violence, is central to Sigmund Freud’s case study in ‘From the History
of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918), better known as ‘The Wolf Man’.
Introduction
xxiii
wound on Dracula’s breast, ‘her white nightdress . . . smeared with
blood’ (p. 262). What perverse act has been stumbled upon here?
This is certainly not the missionary position, but nor is it a simple
act of sexual terrorism aimed at a woman. The attack allows Dracula
to taunt the men that ‘Your girls that you all love are mine already;
and through them you and others shall yet be mine’ (p. 285). What,
exactly, are the object choices in Dracula? Who desires whom?
In a compelling series of studies, the critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
argued that the late nineteenth century was a distinct moment
of social pressure on male bonds, a fraternity once so innocently
celebrated. Instead, these bonds became increasingly suspicious
and were policed by the law and pathologized by the new science of
sexology. Homosexuality was a term for a medical pathology, coined
in 1869; English law outlawed ‘acts of gross indecency between
men’ in 1885. Sedgwick proposed that the Gothic novel was one
of the principal places in which this new paranoia was articulated,
in plots that attempt to sort out virtuous homo-social brotherhood
from dangerous homo-sexual desire. The genre is certainly full
of men persecuted by other, menacing men, from James Hogg’s
Confessions of a Justified Sinner to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Does Dracula, too, participate in the
‘homosexual panic’ that marks the genre?24 Talia Schaffer has argued
that the Count is none other than Oscar Wilde, or rather Stoker’s
panicked fantasy of Wilde, languishing in prison, bloated on his
corruption of young men, as Stoker wrote.25 Other ‘Queer Theorists’
avoid such fixed interpretations, emphasizing instead that sexuality
rarely operates in simple ways, but is an ‘open mesh of possibilities,
gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances’.26 Thus Christopher
Craft has argued that ‘the vampire kiss excites a sexuality so mobile,
so insistent, that it threatens to overwhelm the distinctions of gender’,
never finding fixity.27
24
For the quickest introduction to Sedgwick’s ideas, see her chapter on the Gothic
in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985).
25
Talia Schaffer, ‘A Wilde Desire Took Me: A Homoerotic History of Dracula’, ELH
61/2 (1994), 381–425.
26
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994), 8.
27
Christopher Craft, ‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips: Gender and Inversion in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula’, Representations, 8 (1984), 107–33.
xxiv
Introduction
Some of these readings may feel modish, yet the sexual terrorism
of the vampire trope is indisputable. However, it is important to
grasp that Victorians thought about sex in very different ways from
the generations that followed Stoker. We tend to think of sexuality
as a disposition, a product of dynamic psychical processes, which
can veer off in all kinds of directions, thus making it an object of
new sciences and of control by social norms and regulations. But this
analytics of sexuality is very new and is emergent in Victorian society;
it replaces an older model which the historian Michel Foucault termed
a symbolics of blood.28 In this regime, sex is an act rooted in biology
and the mechanisms of alliance, class, and power; sex is a mingling
of blood, resulting in an obsession with the purity of bloodlines and
an attendant anxiety about outsiders who might weaken, poison, or
steal blood. The ‘society of sanguinity’ thus regarded sexual congress
as intrinsically a matter of the future of the blood, of the race, and
latterly of the nation: it is no surprise that semen was long thought
to be a form of condensed blood. This makes the vampire a potent
symbol in this economy, as Foucault elsewhere observed in passing.29
Lucy’s blood transfusions become more than merely symbolic acts of
marriage in this regime.
For Stoker, Dracula’s sexual terrorism thus inextricably raises the
question of race. This has also been a fruitful line of critical enquiry
into the novel. Stephen Arata has crisply defined Dracula’s monstrosity as embodying anxieties of ‘reverse colonisation’ in the late
Victorian period.30 The great paradox of England in the 1890s was
a triumphant and unapologetic colonial policy, annexing vast tracts
of terrain across the globe with a new purpose, alongside a great
concern that the imperial centre was in rapid decline. London staged
huge fairs, such as the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886,
but such advertisements only made London’s wealth a beacon for
immigrants. In the 1890s, a discourse of concern over the unregulated
presence of ‘aliens’ and ‘foreign undesirables’ became an important
political matter, leading up to the immigration controls of the Aliens
28
See Michel Foucault, An Introduction to the History of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 148.
29
See Michel Foucault, ‘The Confession of the Flesh’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 223.
30
Stephen Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse
Colonization’, Victorian Studies, 33/4 (1990), 621–45.
Introduction
xxv
Act in 1905. The deterioration of British blood might have been one
fear, but the discourse of the alien threat to London also swirled in
the air. Dracula chooses safe houses in Mile End and Bermondsey,
poor immigrant areas of London that replicated what the Count calls
the ‘whirlpool of races’ of his own fatally mixed origins. In contrast to
Dracula’s degraded blood, the brotherhood combine the strengths of
Anglo-Saxon bloodlines: English blue blood, American vitality from
Morris, Dutch density from Van Helsing. North fights South, West
will vanquish East.
Dracula is such an over-determined text that we might discern
three distinct racial codings operating simultaneously. Some have
argued Dracula is an allegory of the Irish situation, in the years when
Gladstone’s attempt to give Ireland Home Rule split the Liberal
Party, and more extreme nationalists pushed for armed resistance
to the British occupation, Sinn Fein beginning a bombing campaign
in London in the 1880s. London slums housed a large population
of displaced Irish families, and slum Irish were considered barely
human, a residuum of casual labourers and criminals. Stoker grew
up within the Protestant Ascendancy, the small and crumbling ruling
elite in Dublin. This faction produced a notable tradition of Gothic
writers (including Charles Maturin and Joseph Le Fanu), in which
persecution and paranoia plays a large part. Stoker’s supernaturalism and the occult fascinations of the Irish poet William Yeats in
the 1890s and beyond are called ‘Protestant Magic’ by Roy Foster,
emblematic of the spiritual crisis of this dwindling elite.31 Stoker
had imbibed Irish nationalism from Lady Wilde, yet also worked for
Le Fanu’s pro-imperialist paper. He was an ardent admirer of
Gladstone and Home Rule, but sided with the conservative wing
of the movement when the nationalist leader Parnell was disgraced.
Can we read an allegory of Ireland in Dracula’s desperate attempt to
escape his cursed lands and establish a new foothold in the imperial
centre, his chance blown by his own limited racial inheritance?32
31
Roy Foster, ‘Protestant Magic: W. B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History’, in Paddy
and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (Penguin: Allen Lane, 1993),
212–32.
32
See Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture
(London: Verso, 1995), 215–16 or Alison Milbank, ‘ “Powers Old and New”: Stoker’s
Alliances with Anglo-Irish Gothic’, in W. Hughes and A. Smith (eds.), Bram Stoker:
History, Psychoanalysis, Gothic (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 12–28.
xxvi
Introduction
Yet perhaps Transylvania and the ‘whirlpool’ of south-eastern
Europe are not merely allegorical conveniences, but are meant to be
taken literally. The so-called ‘Eastern Question’ was of major diplomatic concern to British politics in the latter part of the nineteenth
century. The Ottoman Empire had been the predominant rival power
on this edge of the map, where Christian and Muslim had traded
parcels of territory for centuries. The real-life fifteenth-century
Drakula dynasty had been frontier warriors in this ceaseless clash of
fundamentalisms. In the Victorian era, the Ottoman Empire was in a
steady decline, causing anxiety in London because the newly independent states on the frontier would likely move into alliance with
Russia, thus tilting the whole balance of power in Europe. Realpolitik
in the British Foreign Office wished to bolster up Ottoman rule, but
pious William Gladstone became prime minister in 1880 partly as
a result of a righteous campaign against the ‘Bulgarian Atrocities’,
citing evidence that the Ottoman Turks had massacred at least 15,000
Christians in the struggle for Bulgarian independence. His pamphlet,
The Bulgarian Horrors and the Eastern Question (1876), sold hundreds
of thousands of copies.
Van Helsing evokes the Crusades in his battle against Dracula:
for him, their campaign against the vampire renews the violent
defence of Christian Europe against the Infidel. The vampire had
emerged from this border terrain in both folkloric reports and in the
literature (from Greece in Polidori, from Styria in Le Fanu). Bram
Stoker never travelled to this area, constructing Transylvania from
travel books, like an armchair Orientalist. His Count Dracula is a
garbled fusion of sources, what Vesna Goldsworthy calls an ‘exotic
historical amalgam’.33 Yet his brother George Stoker, who lived with
Bram and Florence for over ten years, had been a volunteer medic
in the Bulgarian campaign, publishing his account in 1878, recalling
how he passed ‘amongst acres of dead and dying’ on battlefields.34
The Eastern Question was not an obscure concern: it would have
been central to cultural conservatives for preserving the idea of
33
Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 81.
34
George Stoker, With ‘The Unspeakables’; or, Two Years’ Campaigning in European
and Asiatic Turkey (London: Chapman & Hall, 1878), p. x. Ironically, Stoker found the
Christian Bulgarians degenerate and compulsive swindlers, and praised instead the
honest Turkish peasants.
Introduction
xxvii
Christian Europe. Thus Dracula is ‘a composite figure straining
to represent coherently all the social forces that the disintegrating
Ottoman Empire brought to light’.35
Finally, some of the consequences of these geopolitical shifts on the
edges of Europe were directly brought home to London in the 1890s
in the form of refugees escaping persecution. The overwhelming
number of these refugees were Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe,
seeking protection under England’s laissez-faire attitude to religious
observance. By 1901, the Jewish population of the East End of London
had grown to one hundred thousand. ‘They bring their Ghettos with
them,’ one commentator complained. ‘They herd together, as strangers in a strange land.’36 This unregulated influx became a political
concern in the 1892 general election, when a campaign for an Aliens
Act to control immigration began in earnest. In 1911, the Daily Mail
called the immigrant Jews ‘the scum of Europe’ that risked ‘the moral
and spiritual death of our race’.37
Dracula has some truck with anti-Semitism. This goes beyond
the passing stereotype of the grasping Jew Immanuel Hildesheim
encountered near the end of the book (p. 324) or Dracula’s hook nose
and hoard of gold coins. Since the twelfth century, Europe had circulated stories that Jews kidnap Christian children and ritually murder
them to mix their blood with matza, to make bread for Passover.
Murders of children were often blamed on local Jewish contingents,
who were persecuted for this crime throughout the medieval period.
The so-called ‘blood libel’ developed from divergent Christian
and Jewish interpretation of blood symbolism in their religions.
Jews were forbidden from ingesting blood, and thus were deemed
to be actively bloodthirsty. They were excluded from the Christian
Eucharist, the communion of blood, and so envied and mocked it
in their ritual slaughter of innocents.38 Dracula holds off the three
vampire women from Harker by throwing them a bag which contains
35
Eleni Coundouriotis, ‘Dracula and the Idea of Europe’, Connotations, 9/2 (1999–
2000), 143–59. See also Matthew Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and
French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth-Century Near East (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2006) for a different reading of Balkan politics in Stoker.
36
‘Foreign Undesirables’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 169 (1901), 281.
37
Cited in David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Popular Culture
1840–1914 (London: Yale University Press, 1994), 361.
38
See Alan Dundes, The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook of Anti-Semitic Folklore
(Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
xxviii
Introduction
a baby (whose mother is later destroyed by wolves): this act invokes
the blood libel. In fact, the old medieval belief had never quite
vanished, and there was a major revival of accusations after 1880.
Trials were held in Hungary in 1883 and in Russia in 1911. A Jewish
butcher was suspected to be the likely perpetrator in the Jack the
Ripper murders in London in 1888, the secretive nature of the ghetto
Jews of Whitechapel the reason why the crime was left unsolved.39
In Stoker’s preface to the Icelandic edition of Dracula, he asserted
that the incidents in the book ‘originated from the same source . . .
as the murders of Jack the Ripper’.40 Economic pressures in the East
End intensified the scapegoating of Jews. In 1902, one anonymous
contributor to the East London Observer wrote: ‘We know only too
well what bloodsuckers the Jews are. Here they drive the worker from
his home through their rapacity; they verily suck the life blood of
the nation.’ When the Aliens Act was being debated in 1904, the
Eastern Post asked: ‘Are our people . . . still to have his fangs fastened
in their throats? Is the lifeblood of the nation to be sucked by human
vampires?’41 Nazis in Germany later transposed the Jewish threat into
one of weakened or contaminated Christian blood. ‘A woman defiled
by a Jew’, one Nazi official proclaimed in 1937, ‘can never rid herself
of the transfused poison of foreign blood. She is lost to her people.’42
Such a logic of nationalism, premissed on protecting the purity of
the woman’s blood, is certainly discernible in Dracula’s plot. It was an
honourable form of patriotism in 1897, but in Stoker’s imagination
already murderous in its defence of the realm.
These racial codings are of course incompatible; that they can
all be more or less convincingly sustained says much about the
ultimately ambiguous sign of blood, symbolic of both life and
death, purity and impurity, always ‘connected to the larger historical
field of liquidity, instability and mobility’ when it comes to identity.43
It is also a testament to the flexibility of the vampire metaphor and
39
For the Jewish coding of Jack the Ripper, see Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body
(London: Routledge, 1991).
40
Stoker, ‘Author’s Preface’ (1901), repr. in Leslie S. Klinger’s New Annotated Dracula
(New York: Norton, 2008), 6.
41
Both cited by Colin Holmes, ‘The Ritual Murder Accusation in Britain’, in Dundes,
Blood Libel Legend, 112–13.
42
Cited by David Biale, Blood and Belief (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2007), 139.
43
Ibid. 7.
Introduction
xxix
the open grid of the Gothic form. Dracula is a ‘versatile monster’,
Judith Halberstam observes, the Gothic text he inhabits a machine
that works to ‘produce the monster as a remarkably mobile, permeable, and infinitely interpretable body’.44 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.
The final realm of ambiguity in Dracula that deserves some comment is its heavy investment in the authority of science to destroy the
vampire threat. It is the relatively new science of anthropology that
provides the racial hierarchies that place the brotherhood of northern
European Aryans over the inferior mixed races of the south. It is the
extension of this racial typing into new claims of ‘scientific’ criminology that allows Van Helsing and Mina to diagnose Dracula, finally, as
‘a criminal and of criminal type’ (p. 317). Mina cites the work of the
Italian founder of this science Cesare Lombroso, who influentially
believed that social deviancy such as delinquency or prostitution
was marked in the physiology of the body, allowing new strategies
for the surveillance of populations to anticipate crime and eventually breed it out of the bloodstream of the nation.45 In the dreams of
supporters of eugenics (a term meaning ‘good breeding’ coined by
Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton), racial degeneration could
be eliminated by managed control of reproduction. Dracula’s plan to
contaminate the nation’s women fosters degenerative chaos; it is why
a band informed by anthropological criminology must work to defeat
him.46 Once the Count is scientifically typed as a degenerate criminal,
his threat is diminished, he never speaks again, and he is reduced
to a habitual offender, fatally limited in his decision to turn and run
for home. Similarly, it is the scientific efficiency of the information
systems and technology of data processing, sorting, and circulation,
44
Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 14 and 21.
45
For a brief introduction, see Ernest Fontana, ‘Lombroso’s Criminal Man and
Stoker’s Dracula’, Victorian Newsletter, 66 (1984), 25–7.
46
For commentary on the theory of degeneration in late Victorian culture and Dracula,
see Kathleen L. Spencer, ‘Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late
Victorian Degeneracy Crisis’, ELH 59/1 (1992), 197–225 and Daniel Pick, Faces of
Degeneration: A European Disorder c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989).
xxx
Introduction
that allows them to capture the vampire. The novel exemplifies the
transformation in communication created by the electronic technologies emerging in the 1870s—the telegraph, typewriter, and phonograph. Dracula is, in Friedrich Kittler’s words, ‘the written account
of our bureaucratisation’.47
Yet, as we have seen again and again, the logic of Dracula undercuts
any final security in this investment. Modernity has blinded itself to
the very possibility of monsters in its rational, taxonomic approach to
nature and its refusal to countenance superstitious belief. The asylum
doctor Seward conveys the myopic stance of the psychological ‘specialist’. The structure of the novel always allows the reader to know
more than his blinkered diagnostics of his mania patient, Renfield. Van
Helsing lectures him on the limits of empiricism and teaches his band
of modernizers the virtues of esoteric wisdom. Indeed, Stoker uses his
detailed knowledge of new developments in psychology to ridicule the
blithe confidence of physiological psychology. The psyche in Dracula
splits and doubles, and the hypnotic trance, a condition accepted by
orthodox medicine only in the 1880s, points the way to all manner
of hinterlands beyond the grasp of predominant Victorian theories
of mind. This moment pointed towards the emergence of psychoanalysis (coined by Sigmund Freud in 1896), and the belief in the
dynamic unconscious. The vampire was an early subject of psychoanalytic interpretation. Ernest Jones, Freud’s only English supporter
in the early years, devoted a chapter to this ‘medieval superstition’ in
his book, On the Nightmare.48 But before all this, in the 1890s, psychic
splitting in trance was regularly associated with supernatural phenomena. Early investigations of hypnosis were conducted alongside
experiments in ‘psychical research’, with attempts to test the theory
that the heightened perceptual powers commonly associated with
trance would shortly prove the ability to communicate telepathically,
across vast distances. The researchers who introduced the serious
study of hypnotism into England, Edmund Gurney and Frederick
47
Friedrich Kittler, ‘Dracula’s Legacy’, Stanford Humanities Review, 1 (1989),
143–73. See also his Gramophone Film Typewriter, trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M.
Wurz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), which explores the transformation of
subjectivity by electrical technology between 1880 and 1920.
48
Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare (New York: Woolf, 1931). Psychoanalytic interpretations of Dracula began in earnest with Maurice Richardson, ‘The Psychoanalysis of
Ghost Stories’, Twentieth Century, 166 (1959), 419–31.
Introduction
xxxi
Myers, also coined the term telepathy in 1882 and spent much of
their time in seances with trance mediums. The Gothic potential of
these newly scientized powers prompted a new twist in the genre,
as tales of psychic vampirism emerged. Dracula is an exemplary tale
for an era when the dynamic unconscious emerged in psychological
theory, as scientific advance in understanding the capacities of the
mind seemed only to reconfirm supernatural possibilities.49
This weird occult doubling of science was also evident in the new
electrical technology of the age. There is no Victorian technology that
is not haunted by a supernatural supplement, as spirits telegraphed in
Morse code knockings, swirled out of the chemicals on photographic
plates, crackled in the white noise of telephone lines, or whispered
in the grooves of gramophone recordings. To many Victorians, ‘technological media turn magic into a daily routine’.50 In its technology,
too, Dracula demonstrates a logic of splitting and self-contradiction,
asserting confidence in the order of the modern world only to be
spooked by its continual undoing.
Afterlives
Once unleashed, the vampire has proved impossible to lay to rest.
Having cheated death once, Dracula will always rise again for
another adaptation, another sequel. Florence Stoker tried throughout the 1920s to search out and destroy every copy of the German
expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu because it breached her copyright. Her jealous guarding of the flame failed, although at least she
was paid by Universal Studios for the Dracula filmed in 1931. The
voiceless vampires in Stoker have since been given the chance to tell
their side of the story. In Fred Saberhagen’s witty novel, The Dracula Tape (1975), the Count reveals how the manuscripts collected by
Stoker outrageously misrepresent his wholly innocent actions. Anne
Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, beginning with Interview with the Vampire (1976), also give voice to vampiric history. In the last couple of
49
See Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002).
50
Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 35–6. See also Jeffrey Sonce, Haunted
Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2000).
xxxii
Introduction
decades, whilst Stoker’s novel has generated a vast archive of critical
reflection, the figure of the vampire has manically cycled through its
array of allegorical potentialities, as if to show off its versatility. Vampires have figured for drug addictions, for corporate greed, for empty
consumerism, for genocidal racism, for chaste romantic possibility,
for polymorphous sexuality, for newly identified viruses circulating
in the blood, and for all manner of border violations in films from
cultures as diverse as Korea, Mexico, and Sweden. The vampire has
been a marker of sexual anxiety in the era of AIDS, resexualized by
Buffy, desexualized in the chaste Twilight novels by Stephanie Meyer,
and resexualized again by Charlaine Harris and the whole subgenre
of the vampire romance. At times, the vampire has become so allpervasive that it is the humans who end up as the tiny minority (as in
the film Daybreakers by Michael and Peter Spierig). The undead are
liminal creatures that span so many fundamental questions raised by
modernity that it is difficult to see our appetite diminishing for these
fictions any time soon. Meanwhile, Dracula remains a lodestone in
this large zone of the imagination because for all the cultural weight
it carries it is still a rattling good read retaining a genuine power to
unsettle and unnerve. Keep the lights on.
NOTE ON THE TEXT
The text follows that of the first edition of Dracula, published in May
1897 by Archibald Constable and Company, 2 Whitehall Gardens,
London, at 6 shillings. No corrected editions followed, although a
Constable paperback abridged by Bram Stoker was published in April
1900. The first American edition was published in 1899 by Doubleday
and McClure in New York. A few typographical errors have been
silently corrected.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Stoker’s Life
Farson, Daniel, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker
(London: Michael Joseph, 1975). Controversial theory, disowned by the
surviving family.
Murray, Paul, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker (London:
Jonathan Cape, 2004). Respectful and judicious account of Stoker’s
career.
Sources for Dracula
Leatherdale, Clive (ed.), The Origins of Dracula (London: William Kimber,
1975).
Ledger, Sally, and Luckhurst, Roger (eds.), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in
Cultural History c.1880–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Penzler, Otto (ed.), The Vampire Archives: The Most Complete Volume of
Vampire Tales Ever Published (New York: Vintage, 2009).
Stoker, Bram, Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition, annotated and transcribed by Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008).
Annotated Editions
Auberbach, Nina, and Skal, David J. (eds.), Dracula (New York: Norton,
1997). A fearsome scholarly combination of vampire experts edited
the centenary edition. Fairly minimal notes, but contains a wealth of
contemporary reviews, and edited selections of critical essays.
Klinger, Leslie S. (ed.), The New Annotated Dracula (New York: Norton,
2008). An exhaustively annotated edition, which adopts the odd rhetorical device of presuming the text to be a true record, and thus taking
issue with many of the ‘inaccuracies’ in the text, such as incorrect tidal
and train times.
McNally, Raymond, and Florescu, Radu (eds.), The Essential Dracula (New
York: Mayflower, 1979). One of the first scholarly annotated editions,
making full use of the then recently discovered Notes.
Wolf, Leonard (ed.), The Essential Dracula (New York: Plume, 1993).
Updated from his 1976 edition, this is full of useful information, but has
a rather intrusive editorial line, freely mixing annotation with opinion
and strong interpretation.
Select Bibliography
xxxv
Critical Works
Abbott, Stacey, Celluloid Vampires: Life after Death in the Modern World
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007).
Arata, Stephen, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of
Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, 33/4 (1990), 621–45.
Auerbach, Nina, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995).
Barber, Paul, Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1988).
Biale, David, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between
Christians and Jews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2007).
Bryon, Glennis (ed.), Dracula: New Casebook (New York: St Martin’s
Press, 1999).
Case, Sue-Ellen, ‘Tracking the Vampire’, differences, 3/2 (1991), 1–20.
Coundouriotis, Eleni, ‘Dracula and the Idea of Europe’, Connotations, 9/2
(1999–2000), 143–59.
Craft, Christopher, ‘ “Kiss Me With Those Red Lips”: Gender and
Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Representations, 8 (1984), 107–33.
Dijikstra, Bran, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-deSiècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Frayling, Christopher, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London:
Faber, 1991).
Gelder, Ken, Reading the Vampire (London: Routledge, 1994).
Gibson, Matthew, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French
Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth-Century Near East (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2006).
Glover, David, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the
Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
Greenway, John, ‘Seward’s Folly: Dracula as a Critique of “Normal
Science” ’, Stanford Literature Review, 3 (1986), 213–30.
Halberstam, Judith, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of
Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
Hughes, William, Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Reader’s Guide (London,
Continuum, 2009).
Jones, Ernest, ‘The Vampire’, in On the Nightmare (New York: Woolf,
1931).
Kittler, Friedrich, ‘Dracula’s Legacy’, Stanford Humanities Review,
1 (1989), 143–73.
Latham, Rob, Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of
Consumption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
xxxvi
Select Bibliography
Leatherdale, Clive, Dracula: The Novel and the Legend: A Study of Bram
Stoker’s Masterpiece (Brighton: Desert Island Books, 1993).
Ledger, Sally, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).
Luckhurst, Roger, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002).
Maluf, N. S. R., ‘History of Blood Transfusion’, Journal of the History of
Medicine, 9/1 (1954), 59–107.
Moretti, Franco, ‘The Dialectic of Fear’, in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays
on the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 1983), 83–108.
Pick, Daniel, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder c.1848–c.1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Punter, David, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from
1765 to the Present Day (London: Longmans, 1980).
Schaffer, Talia, ‘A Wilde Desire Took Me: A Homoerotic History of
Dracula’, ELH 61/2 (1994), 381–425.
Seed, David, ‘The Narrative Method of Dracula’, Nineteenth-Century
Fiction, 40/1 (1985), 61–75.
Senf, Carol A., ‘Dracula: Stoker’s Response to the New Woman’, Victorian
Studies, 26/1 (1982), 33–49.
Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle
(London: Virago, 1992).
Skal, David, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to
Stage to Screen, rev. edn. (London: Faber, 2004).
Spencer, Kathleen L., ‘Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic,
and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis’, ELH 59/1 (1992), 197–225.
Summers, Montague, The Vampire (1928; London: Studio Editions, 1995).
Wicke, Jennifer, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media’, ELH
59/2 (1992), 467–93.
Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics
Late Victorian Gothic Tales, ed. Roger Luckhurst.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ed. Roger
Luckhurst.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, ed. Robert Tracy.
Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Tales, ed. David Van Leer.
William Polidori, The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre, ed. Robert
Morrison.
Ann Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée and Terry Castle.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Joseph Bristow.
TIMELINE OF VAMPIRE LITERATURE
BEFORE DRA CULA
1702 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Voyage to the Levant. French traveller
details stories of superstitions about vampires in southern Europe,
focusing on a case in Greece.
1732 London Journal of 11 March reports on the inquiries into ‘vampyres’
at Madreyga in Hungary, thus introducing the word vampire into
English. Reports and discussions continue in the English press
throughout the 1730s.
1746 Dom Augustin Calmet, Treatise on Apparitions of Angels, Demons
and Spirits and on the Revenants and Vampires of Hungary, Bohemia,
Moravia and Silesia. French synthesis of the reports and investigations
in Hungary and elsewhere during the 1720s and 1730s.
1773 Gottfried August Bürger, ‘Lenore’. Popular ballad about returning
(un)dead soldier.
1797 Goethe, ‘The Bride of Corinth’. Female vampire story set in early
Christian era; translated into English in 1835.
1800 Johann Ludwig Tieck, ‘Wake Not the Dead’, first translated into
English in 1823.
1801 Robert Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer. Widely considered the first
poetic treatment of the vampire myth in English literature, including
scholarly footnotes on Tournefort and Calmet.
1812 Lord Byron, ‘The Gaiour’. Orientalist poem, briefly using notion of
‘curse’ of the vampire.
1819 William Polidori, ‘The Vampyre’. Short story about the vampire
Lord Ruthven, initially published under Byron’s name and the first
to introduce the aristocratic vampire lord into fiction. Publication
prompts Byron to publish his own unfinished vampire tale as ‘A
Fragment’ with his poem Mazeppa in 1819.
1820 Cyprien Bérard, Lord Ruthven, ou Les Vampires. Novel-length
extension of Polidori story. At least four versions of Polidori’s story
are staged in Paris.
James Planché, The Vampire, or The Bride of the Isles. Reimports the
Ruthven play to England, staged at Lyceum theatre, London.
1825 Prosper Mérimée, La Guzla, ou Choix de poésies illyriques, recueillies
dans la Dalmatie, la Bosnie, La Croatie et l’Hertzégowine (1825). Fake
folk tales and ballads, some with vampire theme.
xxxviii
Timeline
1836 Théophile Gautier, ‘La Morte amoureuse’. Short story that introduces an intensely desirable, but dead, female figure Clarimonde.
1838 Edgar Allan Poe, Ligeia.
1847 James Malcolm Rymer, Varney the Vampire. English serial melodrama
concerning the adventures of aristocratic vampire, Sir Frederick
Varney, menacing the Bannerworth family.
1850 English translation of Calmet’s collection under the title The
Phantom World.
1852 Dion Boucicault’s three-act play The Vampire. Boucicault played
central role, and held to have consolidated the requisite black cape
for the aristocratic vampire. Seen twice by Queen Victoria.
1857 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Metamorphoses of the Vampire’. Key decadent
poem, where a voluptuous prostitute becomes a predatory undead
creature. Initially censored.
1859 Fitz-James O’Brien, ‘What is It?’ Short story by Irish writer about
invisible vampiric entity.
1860 English translation of ‘The Mysterious Stranger’, a German tale of
a Carpathian vampire.
1862 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, A Strange Story. Margrave, the mesmeric
magician, extends his life through occult means in one of Lytton’s
best Gothic novels.
1865 Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves. Important gathering
of folk tales, used extensively by Stoker.
1870 Richard Burton, Vikram the Vampire. Orientalist ‘translation’ of folk
tale.
1871 Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture. Founding anthropological text,
which discusses superstitions as survivals of ‘savage thought’.
Lengthy discussion of spirits, including the vampire.
1872 Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Carmilla’. Female aristrocatic vampire from
Styria, on the southern edge of the Austrian empire; key influence
on Stoker.
1880 Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Fate of Madame Cabanel’.
1883 Julian Hawthorne, ‘Ken’s Mystery’.
1885 Emily Gerard, ‘Transylvanian Superstitions’. Essay used by Stoker
for folkloric touches.
1887 Guy de Maupassant, ‘The Horla’. Invisible creature: psychic vampire
or psychotic delusion?
1890 Hume Nisbet, ‘The Vampire Maid’.
1891 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Timeline
xxxix
1893 Ambrose Bierce, ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser’.
1894 Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Parasite’. Psychic vampire tale.
George du Maurier, Trilby, introducing the foreign mesmeric Jew
Svengali.
Edvard Munch completes four versions of the painting Love and
Pain, also known as The Vampire for his Frieze of Life series.
Count Stenbock, ‘The Sad Story of a Vampire’, in Studies of Death:
Romantic Tales.
1895 Max Beerbohm Tree’s performance as Svengali in stage version of
Trilby, said to have major impact on Stoker.
1896 Mary E. Braddon, ‘The Good Lady Ducayne’. Ancient aristocrat
extending life with blood transfusions from healthy young girls.
George Stetson, ‘The Animistic Vampire in New England’.
Anthropological discussion of belief that consumption is a form of
vampirism in isolated Rhode Island community.
George Méliès, The Haunted Castle. First vampire film in the first
year of cinema: a bat flies into a castle and transforms into a man.
1897 Exhibition of Philip Burne-Jones painting, The Vampire, prompting
Kipling’s poem ‘The Vampire.’
1897 Florence Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire.
Bram Stoker, Dracula.
A CHRONOLOGY OF BRAM STOKER
1847
Born 8 November, Dublin. Part of Protestant middle-class group
in midst of Catholic majority, although parents not wealthy. In
Dublin, moves in close circle including Sir William and Lady
Wilde (parents of Oscar Wilde) and Gothic writer Joseph
Sheridan Le Fanu.
1863–7 Attends Trinity College Dublin, where active in the Philosophical
Society.
1867
First sees the actor Henry Irving perform.
1868
Enters Civil Service, following his father Abraham. Begins
reading Walt Whitman.
1870
Finally graduates from Trinity, with science degree.
1871
Begins writing play reviews and criticism for Dublin Evening
Mail, part owned by Le Fanu.
1872
Stoker writes letter to Walt Whitman in passionate admiration
of Leaves of Grass, but decides not to send it. Publishes his first
story in London Society.
1873
Sees actress Geneviève Ward on stage for first time; becomes
lifelong friend.
1875
First Gothic story, ‘The Chain of Destiny’, published.
1876
Stoker gives vote of thanks to visiting actor Henry Irving. Stoker
praises Irving’s ‘historic genius’ in his performance and becomes
his ardent admirer.
1877
Irving in Dublin performs both Othello and Hamlet.
1878
Publishes The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland. In
October leaves his Civil Service job to become manager of
Lyceum Theatre in London for Henry Irving, at three times his
annual Civil Service salary. Marries Florence Balcombe days
before leaving Dublin; she had turned down a proposal from
Oscar Wilde. At Lyceum, Stoker begins a lifelong friendship
with actress Ellen Terry.
George Stoker, his brother, publishes With ‘the Unspeakables’,
an account of his time as a doctor in the Russo-Turkish war in
Bulgaria.
1879
Only son born. Christened Irving Noel Thornley Stoker.
1879–84 Lives at 27 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, a fashionable address near
Chronology
1882
1883
1885
1887
1890
1891
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
xli
the homes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne,
and James Whistler. Meets Rossetti’s assistant, Hall Caine, who
becomes close friend and later best-selling author. Through
the Lyceum, Stoker becomes friends with William Gladstone,
Baroness Burdett-Coutts, Richard Burton, and many other
celebrated figures. Florence Stoker considered a great beauty of
the time, and gathers admirers including the librettist and writer
W. S. Gilbert.
First collection of stories, Under the Sunset. Stoker acquires some
fame for jumping into Thames in attempt to rescue a suicide.
First visit to America, touring with Irving (between 1883 and
1905, Stoker estimated he spent four years in America on the
eight tours he took with Irving). Meets Walt Whitman.
Irving plays Faust at Lyceum.
Wife and son shipwrecked in the Channel, but both survive.
Publishes sadistic tale, ‘The Dualitists’.
Publishes first novel, The Snake’s Pass. Qualifies as a barrister,
called to Bar at the Inner Temple. Makes first notes on new
Gothic novel to be called The Undead. Finds Wilkinson’s An
Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia whilst on
holiday in Whitby.
Becomes investor in new publishing venture by William
Heinemann.
Novel, The Watter’s Mou’. Stoker encourages staging of Conan
Doyle’s play Waterloo at the Lyceum.
Novel, The Shoulder of Shasta. Brother, Thornley, knighted for
services to medicine. Henry Irving also knighted, the first actor
to gain the honour. Oscar Wilde imprisoned. On American tour,
Stoker meets Theodore Roosevelt.
Suffers financial difficulties, when investment in Heinemann
fails. Requests loan from friend Hall Caine, on hope that his new
book will allow him to return the money.
Submits novel The Undead to Constable; the book is published
on 26 May under the title Dracula. Stage version read at Lyceum
on 18 May, but Irving refuses to stage it.
Novel, Miss Betty.
Novel, Snowbound.
Irving loses control of the Lyceum, and the theatre is sold on.
Stoker continues as Irving’s personal manager.
xlii
1901
1902
1903
1905
1906
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1914
1922
1924
1927
1931
1937
Chronology
Cheap edition of Dracula, abridged by Stoker, is published.
Novel, Mystery of the Sea.
Novel, The Jewel of the Seven Stars.
Novel, The Man. Death of Henry Irving. Stoker suffers stroke,
affecting his sight.
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, a two-volume hagiography
of his boss.
Novel, Lady Athlyne. Publishes the essay ‘The Censorship of
Fiction’. Interviews William Churchill for Daily Chronicle.
Novel, The Lady of the Shroud.
Famous Impostors.
Last novel, The Lair of the White Worm. Stoker’s illness and
financial difficulty result in appeal to Royal Literary Fund for
pension.
Stoker died 20 April, aged 64. Controversy still attends cause of
death; biographer Daniel Farson first claimed in the 1970s that
Stoker died from the sexually transmitted infection syphilis.
Florence publishes ‘Dracula’s Guest’ in collection of short
stories.
Florence first becomes aware of the German film Nosferatu and
sues the producers for breach of copyright of Dracula, initially
through the Society of Authors. She eventually succeeds in
getting copies of the film destroyed.
Florence agrees to authorized stage version of Dracula adapted
by Hamilton Deane. It opens in the provinces, then transfers to
London in 1927 where it is critically panned yet plays to packed
houses for over a year.
Deane’s script is streamlined by John Balderston, and the play
opens on Broadway with Hungarian-born actor Bela Lugosi in
the role of Dracula. Another great success.
After much negotiation, Lugosi stars in the famous Universal
Studio version of Dracula. Deane, Balderston, and Florence
Stoker are paid for the rights.
Death of Florence Stoker.
DRACULA