Dracula

Dracula

File:Dracula 1st ed cover reproduction.jpg First edition cloth cover (1897)
Author	Bram Stoker
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	Gothic Horror
Publisher	Archibald Constable and Company (UK)
Publication date	May 1897
OCLC	1447002
Text	Dracula at Wikisource

Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. The narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist and opens with English solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Revealing his true nature as a vampire, Dracula moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. Harker joins a group led by Abraham Van Helsing who hunt and kill the Count.

The novel was mostly written in the 1890s, and Stoker produced over a hundred pages of notes, drawing extensively from folklore and history. Scholars have suggested various figures as the inspiration for Dracula, including the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler and the Countess Elizabeth Báthory, but recent scholarship suggests otherwise. He probably found the name "Dracula" in Whitby's public library while on holiday, selecting it because he thought it meant 'devil' in Romanian.

Following the novel's publication in May 1897, some reviewers praised its terrifying atmosphere while others thought Stoker included too much horror. Many noted a structural similarity with Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1859) and a resemblance to the work of Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe. In the 20th century, Dracula became regarded by critics as a seminal work of Gothic fiction. Scholars explore the novel within the historical context of the Victorian era and regularly discuss its portrayal of race, religion, gender and sexuality.

Dracula is one of the most famous works of English literature and has been called the centrepiece of vampire fiction. In the mid-20th century, publishers and film-makers realised Stoker incorrectly filed the novel's copyright in the United States, making its story and characters public domain there. Consequently, the novel has been adapted many times. Count Dracula has deeply influenced the popular conception of vampires; with over 700 appearances across virtually all forms of media, the Guinness Book of World Records named Dracula the most portrayed literary character.

Plot

Jonathan Harker, a newly qualified English solicitor, visits Count Dracula at his castle in the Carpathian Mountains to help the Count purchase a house near London. Ignoring the Count's warning, Harker wanders the castle at night and encounters three vampire women; Dracula intervenes and gives the women a bag containing a kidnapped child. Six weeks later, Dracula leaves the castle, abandoning Harker to the women. Harker, having realised Dracula's real nature, escapes and ends up delirious in a Budapest hospital. Dracula takes a ship called the Demeter for England with boxes of earth from his castle. The captain's log narrates the crew's disappearance, until only he remains. When the ship runs aground at Whitby, a large dog is seen leaping ashore and the captain's corpse is found tied to the helm.

Lucy Westenra's letter to her best friend, Harker's fiancée Mina Murray, describes her marriage proposals from Dr John Seward, Quincey Morris, and Arthur Holmwood. Lucy accepts Holmwood's, but all remain friends. Mina joins Lucy on holiday in Whitby. Lucy begins to sleepwalk, unaware that the Count is influencing her mind. Mina receives a letter about her missing fiancé's illness and goes to Budapest to nurse him. Lucy becomes very ill; Seward's old teacher — Professor Abraham Van Helsing — determines the nature of her condition, but he refuses to disclose it, instead diagnosing it as acute blood-loss.

Lucy is given fresh blood and placed in a room filled with garlic flowers. Unaware that vampires cannot tolerate garlic, her mother removes the flowers. While Seward and Van Helsing are absent, Lucy and her mother are confronted by a wolf, causing her mother to die of a heart attack. Lucy dies shortly thereafter. After her burial, newspapers report children being stalked in the night by a "bloofer lady" (beautiful lady), and Van Helsing deduces it is Lucy. Seward, Morris, Holmwood, and Van Helsing go to her tomb and see that she is a vampire. They stake her heart, behead her, and fill her mouth with garlic. Harker and his new bride Mina return and join the campaign against Dracula.

The group moves to Seward's asylum, and Van Helsing explains that they must destroy the boxes of earth to weaken Dracula's power. Dracula communicates with Seward's patient, Renfield, an insane man who eats vermin to absorb their life force. After Dracula learns of the group's plot against him, he uses Renfield to enter the asylum. He secretly attacks Mina three times, drinking her blood before forcing her to drink his on the final visit, thereby cursing her to become a vampire after death. The men discover that Dracula has distributed his boxes of earth around various properties in London. After sterilizing most of the boxes, the group fails to trap the Count in his Piccadilly house and learns that Dracula is fleeing to his castle in Transylvania with his last box. Using hypnosis, Van Helsing exploits Mina's faint psychic connection to Dracula to track his movements and they pursue, guided by Mina.

In Galatz, Romania, the hunters split up. Van Helsing and Mina go to Dracula's castle, where the professor destroys the vampire women. Harker and Holmwood pursue Dracula's boat on the river, while Morris and Seward follow them on land. Dracula's box is loaded onto a wagon by Romani men; the hunters attack and rout the Romani. Harker decapitates Dracula as Morris stabs him in the heart. Dracula crumbles to dust, freeing Mina from her vampiric curse. Morris is mortally wounded in the fight against the Romani. He dies, at peace knowing that Mina is saved. A note by Jonathan Harker seven years later states that the Harkers have a son, named Quincey after their friend.

Background

Author

Bram Stoker was born in Clontarf, Dublin on 8 November 1842 as the third of seven children. A sickly child, he was homeschooled before attending a private day school. Stoker attended Trinity College Dublin in the 1860s and began writing theatre reviews in the early 1870s. After Stoker wrote a review of a performance by stage actor Henry Irving, the two became friends. In 1878, Irving offered Stoker a job as the business manager of London's Lyceum Theatre, which he accepted. He married Florence Balcombe later that year. Biographer Lisa Hopkins notes that this role required Stoker to be sociable and introduced him to the elites of Victorian London. Nonetheless, Stoker described himself as a private person who closely guarded his thoughts.

Stoker supplemented his theatre income by writing romance and sensation novels, but was more closely identified during his lifetime with the theatre than he was with the literary world. By the time of his death in 1912, he had published 18 books. Dracula was his seventh published book, following The Shoulder of Shasta (1895) and preceding Miss Betty (1898). Stoker's great-nephew, Daniel Farson, wrote that Stoker may have died from syphilis, but this is widely disputed by scholars. Novelist and playwright Hall Caine, a close friend of Stoker's, wrote in Stoker's obituary in The Daily Telegraph that—besides his biography on Irving—Stoker wrote only "to sell" and "had no higher aims".

Inspiration

Drawing of Henry Irving on stage with right hand extended upright

Henry Irving is widely considered to have inspired Dracula.

Folkloric vampires predate Stoker's Dracula by hundreds of years. Stoker adopted some characteristics of folkloric vampires for his own, such as their aversion to garlic and staking as a means of killing them. He invented other attributes—for example, Stoker's vampires must be invited into one's home, sleep on earth from their homeland and have no reflection in mirrors. Sunlight is not fatal to Dracula in the novel—this was an invention of the unauthorised Dracula film Nosferatu (1922)—but it does weaken him. Some of Stoker's inventions applied unrelated lore to vampires for the first time; for example, Dracula has no reflection because of a folkloric concept that mirrors show the human soul. Some Irish scholars have suggested Irish folklore as an inspiration for the novel, for example the revenant Abhartach, and the 11th-century High King of Ireland Brian Boru. Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller notes that in his childhood Stoker was exposed to supernatural tales and Irish oral history involving premature burials and staked bodies.

Count Dracula has literary progenitors. John William Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819) includes an aristocratic vampire with powers of seduction. The lesbian vampire of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) can transform into a cat, as Dracula can transform into a dog. Dracula resembles earlier Gothic villains in appearance, with Miller comparing him to the villains of Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1796) and Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk (1796).

There is almost unanimous consensus that Dracula was inspired, in part, by Henry Irving. Scholars note the Count's tall and lean physique and aquiline nose, with Dracula scholar William Hughes specifically citing the influence of Irving's performance as Shylock in a Lyceum Theatre production of The Merchant of Venice. Stoker's contemporaries remarked upon the similarity. Stoker had praised a performance of Irving as "a wonderful impression of a dead man fictitiously alive [with eyes like] cinders of glowing red from out the marble face". Louis S. Warren writes that Dracula was founded on "the fear and animosity his employer inspired in him". Miller contests this, describing Stoker's attitude towards him as "adulation".

Historical figures have been suggested as inspirations for Count Dracula but there is no consensus. In a 1972 book, Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu popularised the idea that Ármin Vámbéry supplied Stoker with information about Vlad Dracula, commonly known as Vlad the Impaler. Their investigation, however, found nothing about "Vlad, Dracula, or vampires" within Vámbéry's published papers, nor in Stoker's notes about their meeting. Miller calls the link to Vlad III "tenuous", indicating that Stoker incorporated a large amount of "insignificant detail" from his research, and rhetorically asking why he would omit Vlad III's infamous cruelty. McNally additionally suggested in 1983 that the crimes of Elizabeth Báthory inspired Stoker. A book used by Stoker for research, The Book of Were-Wolves by Sabine Baring-Gould, does contain some information on Báthory, but Stoker never took notes from the short section devoted to her. Miller and her co-author Robert Eighteen-Bisang concur that there is no evidence Báthory inspired Stoker.

Textual history

Composition

The author's handwritten notes about the novel's characters

Handwritten notes about the novel's characters

Prior to writing the novel, Stoker researched extensively, assembling over 100 pages of notes, including chapter summaries and plot outlines. Stoker undertook some of his research at a library at Whitby in the summer of 1890 but most was done at the London Library. The earliest dated notes are from 8 March 1890, comprising an outline of the novel's opening. Joseph S. Beirman notes that it differs from the final novel "in only a few details": The Count and Harker are not given names. The word vampire is not used explicitly, but it depicts the Count's possessive fury over Harker and a female who attempts "to kiss him not on lips but throat". In February 1892, Stoker wrote a 27-chapter outline of the novel; according to Miller, "all the key pieces of the jigsaw were in place".

Stoker's notes reveal other scrapped concepts. Joseph S. Bierman says that Stoker always intended to write an epistolary novel but originally set it in Styria instead of Transylvania. Other concepts from the notes include a German professor called Max Windshoeffel confronting a "Count Wampyr" and one of the vampire hunters would have been slain by a werewolf. Stoker biographer Barbara Belford notes evidence that Stoker intended to write a detective story, with a detective called Cotford and a psychical investigator called Singleton.

Stoker took the name Dracula from William Wilkinson's history of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820), which he probably found in Whitby's public library while holidaying there in 1890. Stoker copied the following footnote from the book: "Dracula means devil. Wallachians were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous by courage, cruel actions or cunning".

Stoker stated that it took him about three years to write the novel, and it is likely that he wrote most of the manuscript during his summer holidays in Cruden Bay, Scotland from 1893 to 1896. Stoker generally wrote in spare time from his duties as Irving's business manager, and the long gestation of the novel is indicative of the importance he placed on it.

Publication

Book cover of 1899 edition. It has the name and title of the novel on a yellow-orange cover, depicting Dracula's castle upon a hill

1899 first American edition, Doubleday & McClure, New York

Early Stoker biographer Barbara Belford noted the novel looked "shabby" because of a last-minute title change; the printer's copy of the typescript, with hand-written amendments, is titled The Un-Dead. The surviving typewritten publishing agreement was signed and dated 25 May 1897; Peter Beal of Sotheby's suggests its signing one day before the official publication date indicates that it was a formality. To protect his copyright interest for adaptations, Stoker organised a reading of his stage adaptation of the novel in the week before publication in the Lyceum Theatre. A small group, primarily theatre staff, attended the reading, and Edith Craig played Mina.

Bound in yellow cloth and titled in red letters, Dracula was published in May 1897 by Archibald Constable and Company. It cost 6 shillings. Uncertainty exists around the exact date of publication, but it was probably published on 26 May 1897. Stoker wrote to William Gladstone that the novel would be released on the 26th. Paul McAlduff writes that it was published "on or about May 26". Eighteen-Bisang states it could have been published anywhere from late May to June 1897.

Stoker's mother, Charlotte Stoker, enthused about the novel and predicted it would bring her son immense financial success. She was wrong: the novel, although reviewed well, failed to earn Stoker much money and did not establish his critical reputation until after his death. For the first thousand sales of Dracula, Stoker earned no royalties. Following serialisation by American newspapers, Doubleday & McClure published an American edition in 1899 with some textual changes. A cheaper paperback version was published by Constable in 1901, but few copies have survived. The text is around 15% shorter than the original but it is not known if Stoker made the amendments. Since its publication, Dracula has never been out of print.

An edition of the novel edited by McNally and Florescu in 1979 was the first to include Dracula's "missing chapter", "Dracula's Guest". Bram's widow Florence Stoker included the chapter as a short story in Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Tales (1914), two years after his death. While some commentators have described the prose as Dracula's discarded first chapter, Clive Leatherdale contests this, arguing that the material was incorporated into the published novel.

Style

Epistolary structure

Dracula is an epistolary novel. Compared to other elements of the novel, critic David Seed writes that its epistolary structure has been neglected in analyses. Critics note Stoker's decision to structure the novel this way may relate to a 19th-century trend of publishing diaries and travelogue accounts, especially with Harker's account of the journey to Transylvania. Seed writes that Harker's initial four chapters function as a "miniaturised-pastiche-Gothic novel"—replacing Radcliffe's use of the Apennine Mountains in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) with the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania—and places this within the Gothic tradition of intertextuality.

David Seed argues that the structure only provides a narrative voice to Dracula's opponents, while Miller writes that the "collaborative narration" reinforces the idea that Dracula must be defeated by a combined effort. Allison Case says Seed views that Dracula's absence generates tension by offering only "tantalizing glimpses" of his activities, while literary critic Franco Moretti writes that it highlights the power struggle between the vampire and his hunters. Similarly, Allison Case views the structure as representing a power struggle between Mina and the male protagonists for "narrative mastery". Seed notes that the narrative's style distances the reader from its plot. Dracula's journey on the Demeter is captured by the captain on the logbook, then "translated by the Russian consul, transcribed by a local journalist, and finally pasted by Mina into her journal".

Gothic genre

Dracula is an enduring work of Gothic literature, with some critics locating it within the traditions of Irish Gothic or Urban Gothic. John C. Tibbetts considers Dracula a prototype for later themes in the Gothic genre. The novel is characteristically Gothic in its depiction of the supernatural, preoccupation with the past, and embodying of the racial, gendered and sexual anxieties of fin de siècle England. Count Dracula generally represents these tensions: cultural critic Jack Halberstam notes that he is masculinised and feminised; Jerrold E. Hogle highlights his attraction to both Jonathan and Mina, and his appearance as racially western and eastern. Miller notes that the Count's physical characteristics were typical of Gothic villains during Stoker's lifetime, specifically citing his hooked nose, pallor, large moustache and thick eyebrows as influenced by his villainous predecessors. Dracula deviates from other Gothic tales before it by firmly establishing its time as the modern era, a point raised by one contemporary reviewer. Writers of the mode were drawn to the Eastern Europe setting because travelogues presented it as a land of primitive superstitions.

Reception

Modern critics frequently write that Dracula had a mixed critical reception upon publication. Carol Margaret Davison, for example, notes an "uneven" response from critics contemporary to Stoker. John Edgar Browning, a scholar whose research focuses on Dracula and literary vampires, conducted a review of the novel's early criticism in 2012 and determined that Dracula had been "a critically acclaimed novel". Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu's In Search of Dracula (1972) mentions the novel's "immediate success". Other works about Dracula also published in 1972 concur; Gabriel Ronay says the novel was "recognised by fans and critics alike as a horror writer's stroke of genius", and Anthony Masters mentions the novel's "enormous popular appeal". Since the 1970s, Dracula has been the subject of significant academic interest; the novel has spawned many nonfiction books and articles, and has a dedicated peer-reviewed journal. Publishers started creating editions aimed at classroom teaching in the 1980s, providing the novel alongside historical context and scholarly analysis. The novel's complexity has permitted a flexibility of interpretation, with Anca Andriescu Garcia describing interest from scholars of psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, social class and the Gothic genre.

It is said of Mrs. Radcliffe that, when writing her now almost forgotten romances, she shut herself up in absolute seclusion, and fed upon raw beef, in order to give her work the desired atmosphere of gloom, tragedy and terror. If one had no assurance to the contrary, one might well suppose that a similar method and regimen had been adopted by Mr. Bram Stoker while writing his new novel Dracula.

The Daily Mail, 1 June 1897

Contemporary reviewers frequently compared the novel to other Gothic writers. Comparisons to novelist Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White (1859) were especially common, owing to similarities in structure and style. A review appearing in The Bookseller notes that the novel could almost have been written by Collins, and an anonymous review in Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art wrote that Dracula improved upon the style of Gothic pioneer Ann Radcliffe; Radcliffe was also referenced by The Daily Mail, which also highlighted The Mysteries of Udolpho, Frankenstein (1818), and The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). Another anonymous writer described Stoker as "the Edgar Allan Poe of the nineties". Other favourable comparisons to other Gothic novelists included the Brontë sisters and Mary Shelley. Arthur Conan Doyle sent a letter to Stoker after reading Dracula, writing: "The old Professor is most excellent and so are the two girls. I congratulate you with all my heart for having written so fine a book."

Many of these early reviews were charmed by Stoker's treatment of the vampire myth. The Daily Telegraph called it the best vampire story ever written. The Daily Telegraph's reviewer noted that while earlier Gothic works, like The Castle of Otranto, had kept the supernatural far away from the novelists' home countries, Dracula's horrors occurred in foreign lands and at home in Whitby and Hampstead Heath. An Australian paper, The Advertiser, regarded the novel as simultaneously sensational and domestic. One reviewer praised the "considerable power" of Stoker's prose and described it as impressionistic. They were less fond of the parts set in England, finding the vampire suited better to tales set far away from home. The British magazine Vanity Fair found Dracula's disdain for garlic unintentionally funny.

Dracula was considered frightening. A review appearing in The Manchester Guardian in 1897 praised its capacity to entertain, but concluded that Stoker erred in including so much horror. Likewise, Vanity Fair opined that the novel was "praiseworthy" and absorbing, but could not recommend it to those who were not "strong". Stoker's prose was commended as effective in sustaining the novel's horror by many publications. A reviewer for the San Francisco Wave called the novel a "literary failure"; they elaborated that coupling vampires with frightening imagery, such as insane asylums and "unnatural appetites", made the horror too overt, and that other works in the genre, such as Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), had more restraint.

Context and interpretation

Sexuality and gender

Sexuality and seduction are two of the novel's most frequently discussed themes, and modern critical writings about vampirism widely acknowledge its link to sex and sexuality. Across the novel's critical history, Miller writes that theorists have collectively argued that the Count breaks virtually "every Victorian taboo", including "non-procreative sexuality, abnormal sexuality, fellatio, bisexuality, incest and the abuse of children".

Transgressive or abnormal sexuality within Dracula is a broad topic. Some psychosexual critics explore the novel's disruption of Victorian gender roles; within the Victorian context, Christopher Craft writes males had "the right and responsibility of vigorous appetite" while women were required to "suffer and be still". Critics highlight the many places in which the novel disrupts these social mores: Jonathan Harker's excitement over the prospect of being penetrated; Dracula's resulting anger and jealousy; and Lucy's transformation into a sexually aggressive predator who drains "vital fluid". Some critics, including professor Carol Senf, argue that the novel reflects anxiety about female sexual awakening as a threat to established norms.

Dracula contains no overt homosexual acts, but homosexuality and homoeroticism are elements discussed by critics. Christopher Craft argues that the primary threat Dracula poses is that he will "seduce, penetrate, [and] drain another male", and reads Harker's excitement to submit as a proxy for "an implicitly homoerotic desire". Victorian readers would have identified Dracula with sexual threat. Some critics note that changes made to the 1899 American version of the text reinforce this subtext, wherein Dracula states he will feed on Harker. Critics have variously linked these themes to homoerotic letters Stoker wrote to Walt Whitman, his friendship with Oscar Wilde, his intensely emotional relationship with Irving, and contemporary rumours of Stoker's almost sexless marriage. David J. Skal acknowledged the letters' subtext but cautioned against applying anachronistic modern sexual labels to Stoker.

Many critics have suggested that the novel reveals a "reactionary response" to the New Woman phenomenon. This is a late-Victorian term used to describe an emerging class of women with increased social and economic control over their lives. Several critics describe the battle against Dracula as a fight for control over women's bodies. Senf suggests that Stoker was ambivalent about the New Woman phenomenon, while Signorroti argues that the novel's discomfort with female sexual autonomy reflects Stoker's dislike for the movement. Both Lucy and Mina have characteristics associated with the New Woman; Mina, who plays an important role in Dracula's defeat, repeatedly expresses contempt for the concept. Senf notes that Lucy is punished for expressing dissatisfaction with her social position as a woman. After her transformation into a vampire, her defeat by the vampire hunters symbolises the re-establishment of "male supremacy".

Race

Dracula, and specifically the Count's migration to Victorian England, is frequently read as emblematic of invasion literature, and a projection of fears about racial pollution. In an influential postcolonialist analysis, Stephen Arata describes the novel's cultural context of mounting anxiety in Britain over the decline of the British Empire, the rise of other world powers, and a "growing domestic unease" over the morality of imperial colonisation. Arata regards the novel as representing "reverse colonisation": fear of other races invading England and weakening its racial purity. Patricia McKee writes that Dracula represents a negation of white culture while Mina represents "pure whiteness". Dracula can be said to both kill white bodies and turn them into the racial Other in death. Some critics connect the racialisation of Dracula to his depiction as a degenerate criminal.

Critics frequently identify antisemitic themes and imagery in the novel. Between 1891 and 1900, the number of Jews living in England increased sixfold, mainly due to antisemitic legislation and pogroms in eastern Europe. Examples cited by Halberstam of antisemitic connections include Dracula's appearance, wealth, parasitic bloodlust, and "lack of allegiance" to one country. Dracula's appearance resembles some other cultural depictions of Jews, such as Fagin in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838), and Svengali of George du Maurier's Trilby (1895). Jewish people were frequently described as parasites in Victorian literature; Halberstam highlights fears that Jews would spread diseases of the blood, and one journalist's description of Jews as "Yiddish bloodsuckers". Daniel Renshaw writes that any antisemitism in the text is "semi-subliminal"; he writes that Dracula is not Jewish but does reflect the 19th-century conception of Jewish people. Renshaw frames the novel more broadly as a general suspicion of all foreigners.

The novel's depiction of Slovaks and Romani people has attracted limited scholarly attention. In the novel, Harker describes the Slovaks as "barbarians" and their boats as "primitive", reflecting his imperialistic condescension towards other cultures. Peter Arnds writes that the Count's control over the Romani and his abduction of young children evoke folk superstitions about Romani people stealing children, and that his ability to transform into a wolf is related to xenophobic beliefs about the Romani as animalistic. Croley argues that Dracula's association with the Romani made him suspect in the eyes of Victorian England, where they were stigmatised owing to beliefs that they ate "unclean meat" and lived among animals.

Religion, superstition and science

Dracula is saturated with religious imagery, but this has traditionally been explored with less frequency by critics. Christopher Herbert regards the novel as a parable about conflict with an enemy who opposes Christ and Christianity, and argues that Van Helsing is characterised as more of a priest than a scientist, "and the novel's main religious authority". Scholars discuss the novel's depiction of religion in relation to late Victorian anxieties about the threat which secularism, scientific rationalism and the occult posed to Christian beliefs and morality. Stoker himself had a lifelong interest in supernatural inquiry, and Herbert writes that he mixes the supernatural and superstitious beliefs with religious elements, resulting in metaphors about moral uncleanness becoming literal elements of the text's "occult reality". Herbert notes that the blood of Christ is important to Christian ritual and imagery, and Richard Noll notes that actual consumption of human blood is one of the oldest Judeo-Christian taboos.

The vampire hunters use many weapons—including Christian practices and symbols (prayer, crucifixes and consecrated hosts), folkloric practices (garlic, staking and decapitation) and contemporary technology (typewriters, phonographs, telegrams, blood transfusions and Winchester rifles)—in their battle against Dracula. Sanders argues that Stoker presents Christianity as a religion that can be instrumentalised and incorporated into scientific knowledge. Herbert describes Van Helsing's "Christian purification" of Lucy as punitively addressing her promiscuity, and the resulting framing of Christianity as a means towards the "eradication of deviancy".

Political and economic

Critics discuss the novel in relation to British rule in Ireland and Irish nationalism. Considerable debate exists over whether Dracula is an Irish novel; while it is largely set in England, Stoker was born in British-ruled Ireland and lived there for the first 30 years of his life. Though born into a Protestant family, he was distanced from the religion's more conservative factions.

Raphaël Ingelbien notes that "recognizably nationalist" critics like Terry Eagleton and Seamus Deane favoured readings of Dracula as "a bloodthirsty caricature of the aristocratic landlord" where the vampire represents the death of feudalism. Bruce Stewart changes the focus to the lower classes, suggesting Dracula and his Romani followers more likely represented violence by Irish National Land League activists. Michael Valdez Moses compares Dracula to the disgraced Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Home Rule movement from 1880 to 1882. Robert Smart argues that Stoker's experience during the Great Famine (1845–1852) influenced the novel, with Stewart also noting this as historical context.

Some critics discuss Count Dracula's noble title. Literary critic Franco Moretti writes that he is an aristocrat "only in a manner of speaking", citing his lack of servants, simple clothing, and lack of aristocratic hobbies. Moretti suggests that Dracula's blood thirst represents capital's desire to accumulate more capital. More generally, Moretti argues the novel evinces cultural anxiety about foreign capitalist monopolies functioning as a return of feudalism. Chris Baldick maintains this line of analysis, describing Dracula as an undead symbol of feudalism but concluding that the novel is more concerned with "sexual and religious terrors". Mark Neocleous writes that Dracula symbolises the victory of the bourgeoisie over feudalism. In Das Kapital, Karl Marx compared the bourgeoisie's exploitation of workers to a vampire draining blood. He uses vampires as a metaphor three times in Das Kapital, but these predate the writing of Dracula.

Disease

Contagious disease was a topic of social and medical concern in late Victorian England. Vampirism can represent disease, being both an initial infection and the resulting illness. The novel characterises vampirism with terms from social degeneration theory, an 18th- and 19th-century social and biological concept arising from fear over the deterioration of the "human condition"; Victorian psychiatry, known then as "alienism"; and anthropology. Theories of degeneracy propagated Victorian-era beliefs about poor moral character being transmissible like a pathogen. Halberstam writes that Dracula and Renfield's relationship suggests that vampirism is "a psychological disorder, an addictive activity". He notes that Renfield, and by association Dracula, is described by doctors using terminology more appropriate for describing animals. Brian Aldiss writes that Count Dracula represents the initial disease while Renfield's madness is a symptom of advanced infection. Halbertstam highlights that disease was frequently associated with Jews during the period. Sexually transmitted infection, particularly syphilis, is a frequent topic. Literary critic Martin Willis writes that the novel depicts Victorian discourse over the origin, cause and treatment of disease, especially in the context of Lucy's treatment and eventual death.

Legacy

Adaptations

Further information: Count Dracula in popular culture

File:Dracula trailer (1931).webm

Bela Lugosi as Dracula in a 1931 adaptation

Man with bloodshot eyes and a wide-mouthed and bloody smile, showing exposed fangs

Christopher Lee as the title character in Dracula (1958)

Dracula has been adapted many times across virtually all forms of media. Scholars John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan S. Picart note that the novel and its characters have been adapted for film, television, video games and animation over 700 times, with nearly 1000 additional appearances in comic books and on the stage; in 2015, the Guinness Book of World Records named Dracula the most portrayed literary character, noting he had appeared almost twice as much as Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Literary critic Roberto Fernández Retamar deemed Count Dracula—alongside Frankenstein's monster, Mickey Mouse and Superman—to be a part of the "hegemonic Anglo-Saxon world['s] cinematic fodder". Across the world, new adaptations can be produced as often as every week.

Adaptations were produced during Stoker's lifetime. Stoker's first theatrical adaptation, Dracula, or The Undead, was read once at the Lyceum Theatre. While the manuscript was believed lost, the British Library have extracts of the novel's galley proof with Stoker's handwritten stage directions and dialogue attribution. A Swedish newspaper serialised an adaptation from June 1899 to February 1900 as Mörkrets Makter ("Powers of Darkness"). This version is almost twice as long as Stoker's novel, containing elements included in Stoker's notes but not in the published novel. The adaptation contains an author's preface signed "B. S", which Eighteen-Bisang and Miller conclude was not written by Stoker. The Swedish adaptation was rediscovered and republished in 2017. In 1901, Valdimar Ásmundsson translated a heavily abridged version of the Swedish adaptation into Icelandic under the title Makt Myrkranna ("Powers of Darkness"). The adaptation included an abridged author's preface, purportedly by Stoker. Scholars knew the Icelandic version had existed since the 1980s because of the preface attributed to Stoker. When the Swedish translation was rediscovered, scholars learned that the Icelandic version had been translated from it rather than Stoker's Dracula.

The first film to feature Count Dracula was a Hungarian silent film—Károly Lajthay's Drakula halála (transl. The Death of Dracula). The film allegedly premiered in 1921 but this release date has been questioned by some scholars. Very little of the film survives, and David J. Skal notes that the cover artist for the 1926 Hungarian edition of the novel was more influenced by the second adaptation of Dracula, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922). Critic Wayne E. Hensley writes that the narrative of Nosferatu differs significantly from the novel, but that characters have clear counterparts. Bram Stoker's widow, Florence, initiated legal action against Prana, the studio behind Nosferatu. The legal case lasted two or three years, with Prana agreeing to destroy all copies in May 1924.

Visual representations of the Count have changed significantly over time. Early treatments of Dracula's appearance were established by theatrical productions in London and New York. Later prominent portrayals of the character by Béla Lugosi (in a 1931 adaptation) and Christopher Lee (firstly in the 1958 film and later its sequels) built upon earlier versions. Chiefly, Dracula's early visual style involved a black-red colour scheme and slicked back hair. Lee's portrayal was overtly sexual, and also popularised fangs on screen. Gary Oldman's portrayal in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), directed by Francis Ford Coppola and costumed by Eiko Ishioka, established a new default look for the character—a Romanian accent and long hair. The assortment of adaptations feature many different dispositions and characteristics of the Count.

Influence

Graffiti image of Dracula, with large fangs, spray-painted onto a shutter

2019 graffiti of Dracula, the archetypal vampire

Dracula is one of the most famous and influential works of English literature. Although not the first novel to depict vampires, the work dominates both popular and scholarly treatments of vampire fiction. For many people, Count Dracula is the first character to come to mind when discussing vampires. Dracula succeeded by drawing together folklore, legend, vampire fiction and the conventions of the Gothic novel. Humanities scholar Wendy Doniger described the novel as vampire literature's "centrepiece, rendering all other vampires BS [Before Stoker] or AS [After Stoker]". William Hughes argues that the Count's cultural omnipresence negatively impacted academic analyses of the undead; Dracula is "the reference point" to which all other vampires are compared.

It profoundly shaped the popular understanding of how vampires function, including their strengths, weaknesses, and other characteristics. Bats had been associated with vampires before Dracula as a result of the vampire bat's existence—for example, Varney the Vampire (1847) included an image of a bat on its cover illustration—but Stoker deepened the association by making Dracula able to transform into one. That was, in turn, quickly taken up by film studios looking for opportunities to use special effects. Novelist Patrick McGrath notes that many of the Count's characteristics have been adopted by artists succeeding Stoker in depicting vampires, turning those fixtures into clichés. Aside from the Count's ability to transform, McGrath specifically highlights his hatred of garlic and crucifixes. William Hughes writes critically of the Count's cultural omnipresence, noting that the character of Dracula has "seriously inhibited" discussions of the undead in Gothic fiction.

In the 1930s, Universal Studios initiated development on a Dracula film and learned Stoker failed to comply with United States copyright law. This prematurely placed the novel into the public domain in the United States. It was not until the 1960s that publishers recognised the novel's copyright status. Coinciding with the mass-market paperback's rising popularity, publishers began to produce their own versions. Stoker's mistake prevented his descendants from collecting royalties but provided ideal conditions for the novel to endure because writers and producers did not need to pay a licence fee to use the character of Count Dracula.

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Contemporary critical reviews

• "Book Reviews Reviewed". The Academy: A Weekly Review of Literature, Science, and Art. 31 July 1897. p. 98.
• "Current Literature: Hutchinson & Co's Publications". The Advertiser. 22 January 1898. p. 8.
• "Untitled". The Bookseller: A Newspaper of British and Foreign Literature. 3 September 1897. p. 816.
• "Untitled". The Daily Mail. 1 June 1897. p. 3.
• "Books of the Day". The Daily Telegraph. 3 June 1897. p. 6.
• "Dracula". The Glasgow Herald. 10 June 1897. p. 10.
• "Supped Full with Horrors". The Land of Sunshine. June 1899. p. 261.
• "A Romance of Vampirism". Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper. 30 May 1897. p. 80.
• "Untitled". Of Literature, Science, and Art (Fiction Supplement). 12 June 1897. p. 11.
• "Novels". The Manchester Guardian. 15 June 1897. p. 9.
• "A Fantastic Theme Realistically Treated". New-York Tribune (Illustrated Supplement). 19 November 1899.
• "Untitled". Publisher's Circular and Booksellers' Record of British and Foreign Literature. 7 August 1897. p. 131.
• "Recent Novels". Review of Politics, Literature, Theology, and Art. 79: 150–151. 31 July 1897.
• "The Insanity of the Horrible". The San Francisco Wave. 9 December 1899. p. 5.
• "Review: Dracula". Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art. 3 July 1897. p. 21.
• "Books to Read, and Others". Vanity Fair: A Weekly Show of Political, Social, and Literary Wares. 29 June 1897. p. 80.

Websites

• Buzwell, Chris (14 May 2014). "Bram Stoker's stage adaptation of Dracula". The British Library. Archived from the original on 29 December 2014. Retrieved 26 July 2025.
• "Most portrayed literary character in film". Guinness World Records. 2015. Archived from the original on 31 January 2025. Retrieved 28 February 2025.

Further reading

Studies on Dracula's notes

The following is a list of books or articles that study all or part of Bram Stoker's notes for Dracula.

• Frayling, Christopher (1992). Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-16792-0.
• Leatherdale, Clive, ed. (1987). The Origins of Dracula: The Background to Bram Stoker's Gothic Masterpiece. Kimber. ISBN 978-0-7183-0657-1.
• McNally, Raymond T.; Florescu, Radu (1973). Dracula: A Biography of Vlad the Impaler. Hawthorne Books. ISBN 9780801522208.
• Roth, Phyllis A. (1982). Bram Stoker. Twayne's English Authors Series. Twayne Publishers. ISBN 978-0-8057-6828-2.
• Stoker, Bram (2007). Dracula: A Centennial Edition. New York: Signet Classics. ISBN 978-0-451-53066-0.
• Stoker, Bram; Klinger, Leslie S. (2008). The New Annotated Dracula. W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN 978-0-393-06450-6. OCLC 227016511.

Other

• Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie (1977). "Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'". Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 2 (3): 104–113. doi:10.2307/3346355. ISSN 0160-9009. JSTOR 3346355.
• Houston, Gail Turley (2005). From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-511-12624-7. OCLC 61394818.
• Hughes, William (2000). Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker's Fiction and Its Cultural Context. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-349-40967-9. OCLC 1004391205.
• Keogh, Calvin W. (2014). "The Critics' Count: Revisions of Dracula and the Postcolonial Irish Gothic". Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. 1 (2): 189–206. doi:10.1017/pli.2014.8. ISSN 2052-2614. S2CID 193067115.
• McNally, Raymond T. (1983). Dracula Was a Woman: In Search of the Blood Countess of Transylvania. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0070456716.
• Spooner, Catherine (2006). Contemporary Gothic. Reaktion Books. ISBN 978-1-86189-301-7.
• Subotsky, Fiona (2020). Dracula for Doctors: Medical Facts and Gothic Fantasies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-911623-29-8.

External links

• Dracula at Standard Ebooks

• Dracula at Project Gutenberg, text version of 1897 edition.
• Template:Librivox book
• Journal of Dracula Studies