Dracula

In brief

A young English solicitor, Jonathan Harker, travels to Transylvania to complete the sale of a London property to a Count who proves to be his jailer and something worse. The Count ships himself to England with fifty boxes of earth, comes ashore at Whitby from a wrecked ship, and begins to drink the life of Lucy Westenra. Her three suitors and a Dutch professor, Van Helsing, fail to save her, drive a stake through her in her tomb, and then, with Harker and his wife Mina, turn hunters. They assemble every diary, letter and clipping into one file, destroy his lairs, and chase him back across Europe, reaching him with knives minutes before sunset at the gates of his own castle.

Almost everything the film-goer expects is missing or different. Stoker’s Count first appears as “a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache” (ch. 2), with hair on his palms and no cape. He walks about London by day. Sunlight does not kill him. Nor does a stake: he dies by a kukri across the throat and a bowie knife in the heart (ch. 27).

The argument

Dracula stages a contest between two kinds of power. The Count has age, appetite and a single will. His hunters have what Van Helsing calls the “power of combination—a power denied to the vampire kind” (ch. 18): trains, telegrams, shorthand, transfusion apparatus, Winchester rifles, and above all shared information. Harker sees the terms of the fight early, writing up his diary in the castle: “It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance” (ch. 3). He then adds the doubt that gives the book its charge, that the old centuries “had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.”

Stoker’s most unsettling idea is that the old power is wanted. Harker, lying on a couch as three vampire women approach, records “a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips” (ch. 3). Lucy has joked to Mina, “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (ch. 5) and adds that this is heresy. The plot grants her wish in ghastly form. Four men pour their blood into her, and Van Helsing laughs hysterically that “this so sweet maid is a polyandrist” (ch. 13). What the Count threatens is not only death but the discovery of what respectable people want.

So the hunters’ victory is less clean than they believe. The staking of Lucy is the most violent scene in the book, performed by the man who was to marry her, who looks “like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell” (ch. 16), and it is told as a sacrament. Stoker means us to feel relief at her restored face. A modern reader feels something else as well.

The shape of the file

The novel presents itself as a dossier. A short unsigned preface (at the opening) promises that “There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err,” and what follows is journals, letters, telegrams, a ship’s log, newspaper cuttings and a phonograph diary, in the manner Wilkie Collins had made famous in The Woman in White. The Demeter’s log reaches us translated and pasted into Mina’s journal (ch. 7).

The book falls into four movements. The first four chapters are Harker’s imprisonment. Then the scene shifts to Whitby and Hillingham for Lucy’s long decline and her end as a vampire (ch. 5 to ch. 16). The third movement is the hunt in London, which turns when the men decide that the fight “is no part for a woman” (ch. 18) and leave Mina out of their councils, exactly as the Count begins to feed on her. The last is the pursuit by sea and rail to the Carpathians, a chase run on timetables (ch. 26).

The file also has a hole at its centre. The Count keeps no journal in it. Beyond a few courteous notes to Harker, his words survive only as others report them, and after the castle he is scarcely seen. Then comes the twist, in Harker’s closing note seven years on (Note). Opening the papers, the survivors find “hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting.” The preface swore to the record’s exactness, and the last page admits that it proves nothing. “We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us!” says Van Helsing. A book that has fought superstition with evidence ends by asking for faith.

The voices

Stoker is no stylist, and the voices are the reason it hardly matters. Each diarist has a trade and a tone: Harker the clerk noting recipes and train times, Seward the alienist dictating case notes to his phonograph, Mina the schoolmistress practising to be a “lady journalist,” Lucy gushing to her friend. Van Helsing’s broken English is a trial to some readers, but it carries the book’s central demand: “I want you to believe” (ch. 14).

The best voice belongs to the man who keeps no diary. At the castle the Count talks like a ruined grandee with a taste for epigram: “Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make!” (ch. 2), or “Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace” (ch. 3). He is also a diligent student of the English. Harker finds him on a sofa reading “an English Bradshaw’s Guide” (ch. 2), a railway timetable, the same weapon that Mina, “the train fiend,” will later turn against him (ch. 25).

The name and the Impaler

The popular story says that Stoker based his vampire on Vlad III of Wallachia, the fifteenth-century prince called the Impaler. The evidence is much thinner than that. Stoker’s notes, now at the Rosenbach in Philadelphia, show a villain called Count Wampyr. Stoker met the name Dracula in William Wilkinson’s 1820 history of Wallachia and Moldavia, which he consulted during a visit to Whitby in the summer of 1890, and he copied out a note saying that the word meant devil. The notes do not name Vlad.

What reached the novel is a few scraps. The Count boasts of “one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground” (ch. 3), and Van Helsing, citing his friend Arminius of Buda-Pesth, decides that “He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk” (ch. 18). The novel contains no impaling, and the word does not occur in it. Its Count claims descent from Attila through the Szekelys, whereas Vlad ruled Wallachia. The identification was pressed by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu in In Search of Dracula (1972), who also proposed that the Hungarian scholar Ármin Vámbéry had briefed Stoker on Vlad, though nothing about Vlad appears in Vámbéry’s published papers or in Stoker’s notes of their meeting. Elizabeth Miller, the scholar who did most to examine the claim, concluded that Stoker knew too little about Vlad for him to count as the inspiration.

Two related legends do no better. Miller and Robert Eighteen-Bisang found no evidence that Countess Elizabeth Báthory influenced Stoker, who took no notes from the short passage on her in one of his sources. Bran Castle, sold to tourists as Dracula’s, has only slight ties to Vlad, and nothing shows that Stoker knew of it. Stoker put his castle near the Borgo Pass, working from books, and he never visited Eastern Europe.

The people

Count Dracula

The Count is less a seducer than a conqueror who has done his reading. He buys property through a solicitor, plans to live among London’s “teeming millions” (ch. 4), and scatters his boxes across the city like an investor. When Harker’s knife slashes his coat, what falls out is “a bundle of bank-notes and a stream of gold” (ch. 23). At the instant of death there is “a look of peace” on his face (ch. 27), which the book never explains.

Mina Harker

Mina does the decisive work. She types the journals, collates the dates, deduces the Count’s route and masters the timetables. The men’s highest praise is that “She has man’s brain” (ch. 18). They shut her out for her own protection, and the Count forces her to drink from his breast, calling her “flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood” (ch. 21). When the wafer burns her forehead she cries, “Unclean! Unclean!” (ch. 22). She then makes the men promise to kill her if she turns, and uses the link to him as a means of tracking him. She mocks the New Woman (ch. 8) and is the novel’s intelligence.

Lucy Westenra

Lucy is the book’s sacrifice: three proposals in a day, then sleepwalking and a long wasting. Returned from the grave, she preys on children as the newspapers’ “bloofer lady” (ch. 13), and Seward’s horror fixes on the change from purity to “voluptuous wantonness” (ch. 16). Her fate and Mina’s are one story told twice, the first woman destroyed and the second rescued.

Abraham Van Helsing

Van Helsing is doctor, lawyer and something close to a priest, carrying a consecrated Host alongside his surgical bag. He cites Charcot to prepare Seward for vampires (ch. 14) and speaks of the hunters as “ministers of God’s own wish” (ch. 24). The films’ cool scientist is not this emotional, garrulous old man.

The men around them

Jonathan Harker begins as a clerk and ends as a killer, and his breakdown in Buda-Pesth (ch. 8) is treated with real tenderness. John Seward, Arthur Holmwood and the Texan Quincey Morris are the three suitors, bound by Lucy and then by blood; Morris alone dies, and the Harkers’ son is named for him. The asylum patient Renfield, whom Seward classes as a “zoöphagous” maniac (ch. 6), eats flies and spiders and shouts “The blood is the life!” (ch. 11). He begs to be sent away before he does harm (ch. 18), and pays with his life for trying to protect Mina (ch. 21).

How it was made

Bram Stoker, born in Dublin in 1847, worked in the civil service at Dublin Castle and reviewed plays before Henry Irving hired him in 1878 to run the Lyceum Theatre in London. His notes for Dracula run to more than a hundred pages, the earliest dated March 1890, and by February 1892 he had a 27-chapter outline. Early plans set the story in Styria, the setting of Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and included a detective and a psychical investigator who did not survive the drafting. Much of the writing seems to have been done on summer holidays at Cruden Bay in Scotland.

He borrowed widely. Polidori’s “The Vampyre” and Carmilla gave him literary models, and Emily Gerard’s 1885 article on Transylvanian superstitions supplied folklore. A Russian ship, the Dmitry, wrecked at Whitby in 1885, became the Demeter, and Whitby gravestones gave him names such as Swales. Some of the rules were his own, including the missing reflection and the need for an invitation: “Enter freely and of your own will!” (ch. 2). Many writers see Irving in the Count, though Miller doubts it.

The printer’s typescript was headed The Un-Dead, and it contains a cut passage destroying the castle in a volcanic eruption. Archibald Constable published the novel in yellow cloth in May 1897, probably on the 26th, at six shillings. To protect his stage rights, Stoker organised a single reading of a dramatised version at the Lyceum in the week before.

Readers and critics

Reviews in 1897 were largely good and sometimes queasy. Critics reached for Collins, Radcliffe and Poe; the Manchester Guardian thought there was too much horror; and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to congratulate Stoker on “so fine a book.” It did not make him rich, and he died in 1912 better known for his work with Irving.

Academic attention grew heavy from the 1970s. Christopher Craft’s 1984 essay, which takes its title from Harker’s line about red lips, argued that the book’s real anxiety is about desire between men, displaced onto women. Franco Moretti read the Count as monopoly capital, always accumulating. Stephen Arata’s 1990 essay, “The Occidental Tourist,” named the fear of “reverse colonization”: an imperial Britain invaded by the sort of people it had learned to rule. Carol Senf examined the New Woman, and Jack Halberstam the antisemitic features in the Count’s money and looks. The novel bears all this because it is frightened of so many things at once.

Afterlives

Popular memory comes from the stage and screen more than from the page. Murnau’s unauthorised Nosferatu (1922) renamed the Count and invented death by sunlight; Florence Stoker’s lawsuit ended with an order to destroy its copies, some of which survived. The stage play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston helped fix the caped aristocrat, whom Bela Lugosi carried into Tod Browning’s 1931 film. Christopher Lee’s Hammer Count of 1958 made him overtly sexual and popularised fangs on screen, Coppola’s 1992 film added a love story Stoker never wrote, and Robert Eggers returned to Murnau in 2024.

Stoker’s failure to comply with American copyright law left the novel in the public domain in the United States, which helped the Count multiply. “Dracula’s Guest,” published by Florence Stoker in 1914, is often called a deleted chapter, though that is disputed.

How to read it

• Keep the dates in view. Notice who knows what on which day. The newsletter Dracula Daily sends the entries out on their dates.
• Do not stop at the castle. The idea of the book only appears when the file comes together in ch. 17.
• Watch Mina’s exclusion. Read ch. 18 to ch. 21 as a single sequence. The men’s chivalry is what lets the Count in.
• Use a good edition. The Norton Critical Edition, edited by Nina Auerbach and David Skal, adds sources and early reviews, and Stoker’s notes appear in the facsimile edited by Miller and Eighteen-Bisang (2008).

Read next

• Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859). The model for a novel told as testimony, with a foreign nobleman in it.
• Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla (1872). An earlier vampire story, shorter and quieter, and frank about desire between women.
• Richard Marsh, The Beetle (1897). The same year’s other tale of a shape-changing Eastern invader in London.
• Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot (1975). Stoker’s plot moved to small-town Maine, with the community as the thing that fails.