This Collins Classroom Classics edition includes an introduction and glossary to support students, written by an experienced teacher.
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Dracula Bram Stoker
‘Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring!’
Dracula Bram Stoker 06/01/2021 09:29
Introduction There is a storm. A sweet young girl lies asleep in her bed – but she is woken by the sound of hail against the window. Is it hail? Or something else? Suddenly, a tall figure appears outside and shatters the glass with his bony hands. This demon seizes the poor innocent by the neck. Her scream is silenced by the vampire’s first bite. These events form the opening episode, not of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but of one of the most successful ‘pennybloods of the Victorian era’1: Varney the Vampyre; or, the Feast of Blood (1847).2 Regular readers of ‘penny-bloods’ – cheap, illustrated weekly serials – enjoyed tales in which the thrills and terrors came hard and fast. For the price of a penny a week, Varney the Vampyre certainly delivered. The figure of the blood-sucking, predatory demon – the dreadful, yet alluring Prince of the Undead – captivated the Victorian popular imagination. The first prose vampire narrative published in English is widely considered to be John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), but for over a century before, blood-sucking vampirelike demons had appeared as characters in poems and in European folk tales.3 The Victorians, therefore, did not invent the vampire story, and neither did the writer who became the most famous proponent of the vampire genre: Abraham or ‘Bram’ Stoker (1847–1912). Yet ultimately it was Stoker, an Irish-born writer with an unlikely background in the civil service and theatrical management, who, half a century after Varney, created the definitive vampire novel Dracula (1897), a Victorian Gothic masterpiece. Stoker’s triumph was to transport the vampire from the realm of the ‘penny blood’
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into mainstream literature; to set a new standard against which all other vampire stories were, and would, continue to be measured.
Contexts
The drama of Dracula: Stoker and Victorian theatre What was so different about Stoker’s vampire tale? Perhaps one answer can be found in Stoker’s unlikely background. His civil service training, with its focus on the collation of official documents and forms, allowed him to shape an almost credible narrative comprised, as Stoker explains in his preface to Dracula, of written ‘records’ and ‘papers…placed in sequence’.4 The horrors in his fantastical story are delivered convincingly through the mundane medium of journal entries, diary notes, letters, telegrams, newspaper clippings – even extracts from a ship’s log. Another masterstroke was Stoker’s creation of the hapless, unassuming character of Jonathan Harker, whose journal opens the novel. Harker is ‘a solicitor’s clerk sent out to explain the purchase of a London estate to a foreigner’ (p.18). He appears to be a simple Victorian official going about his business, yet poor Harker’s mission takes him out of his familiar office and into an abyss of terror. He travels across land and sea, deeper and deeper into an unfamiliar European world of ancient superstitions, an ‘imaginative whirlpool’ of strange customs, cultures and beliefs (p.2). Harker is then delivered – naïve, vulnerable, unaware – directly into the heart of an evil realm, only slowly beginning to suspect what every reader of Dracula already knows. The opening narrative of Dracula therefore relies upon a powerful form of dramatic irony, and this is certainly the case for modern readers steeped in the novel’s profound popular legacy. Even Dracula’s first Victorian readers, well-versed in the conventions of popular vampire tales, knew the reality
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Introduction
of Harker’s situation long before he did; they understood the terrible significance of Count Dracula’s ‘peculiarly sharp white teeth’, his ‘extraordinary pallor’, the ‘hairs in the centre of [his] palm’ and the castle’s lack of mirrors (pp.21–22). When local villagers try to protect Harker, he is bewildered, clueless: ‘What meant the giving of the crucifix, of the garlic, of the wild rose, of the mountain ash?’ he asks (p.34). The villagers may have failed to warn Harker, but they succeed in alerting the novel’s first readers to danger, with clues left like a trail of breadcrumbs. Stoker’s meticulous notes for his novel, seven years in the planning, certainly offer testimony to his administrative skills and civil service training, but it is perhaps more significant that many of his early chapter plans were written on Lyceum Theatre headed notepaper.5 The genesis of Dracula is a theatrical one, which owes much to Stoker’s other (unlikely) professional background as long-time manager to the famous Victorian stage actor Henry Irving.6 Stoker’s theatrical skill is evident in the irony of Harker’s narrative and it lies at the very heart of his portrayal of vampirism. Earlier vampire tales lingered lasciviously over the sensational details of a vampire’s activities. As an example, the first chapter of Varney the Vampyre reaches a frenzied and typically hyperbolic conclusion: ‘With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth – a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows. The girl has swooned, and the vampyre is at his hideous repast!’7 In Stoker’s Dracula, however, the vampire’s violence is mostly unseen, kept offstage, hidden behind a narrative curtain. The focus is on the testimony of the victim, not on the attack itself; only the consequences of the vampire’s ravages are ever described: two tiny marks on a neck, a gradual physical decline, a subtle change in behaviour. Even the most direct account of a vampiric encounter, from the asylum inmate Renfield, provides a description of Dracula
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in which the vampire remains intangible, elusive: he is ‘a red cloud’, ‘a noise like thunder’ and a ‘mist [that] seemed to steal away under the door’ (pp.342–3). The novel’s power, according to the writer and academic Sir Christopher Frayling, is that ‘the nasty is in the corner of the retina’.8 Stoker’s long career as an actor manager had taught him much about the mechanics of melodrama, the dominant theatrical genre of the Victorian period. Dracula is melodramatic in that it pitches the forces of good against the forces of evil; it offers thrills, supernatural horrors and blood in abundance. Before it was published as a novel, Stoker even performed a one-off reading of his manuscript on the Lyceum Theatre stage.9 As Catherine Wynne has noted, Dracula was ‘both stagey…and stageable’.10 Stoker knew all about the possibilities and the limitations of melodrama and applied them to his novel; most of all, the theatre taught him that the worst terrors are those that are merely glimpsed.
Stoker’s Gothic: transforming terror in the 1890s In writing Dracula, Stoker drew upon many well-established conventions of Victorian terror literature, including the triedand-trusted ‘Gothic’ devices that its first readers had come to expect.11 For example, the novel includes supernatural creatures who mysteriously appear and disappear, secrets that are hidden and then revealed, unsuspecting characters who are imprisoned and then escape. The landscape, too, is stereotypically Gothic: Dracula has an ancient castle with labyrinthine passageways, a ruined abbey along with crypts, graveyards and wolf-infested frozen wastelands.12 Yet there are significant differences between Stoker’s novel and Gothic novels of the past. Many of the earliest Gothic tales cast an unsuspecting young female alone into a foreign landscape of terror, with evil male assailants in constant pursuit; in Dracula, the vampire’s first ‘victim’ is male – and he escapes.13
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CHAPTER 1
Jonathan Harker’s Journal (Kept in shorthand) 3 MAY. Bistriz. – Left Munich at 8:35 P.M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule. We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh. Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale. I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem., get recipe for Mina.) I asked the waiter, and he said it was called ‘paprika hendl,’ and that, as it was a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians. I found my smattering of German very useful here; indeed, I don’t know how I should be able to get on without it. Having had some time at my disposal when in London, I had visited the British Museum, and made search among
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the books and maps in the library regarding Transylvania; it had struck me that some foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to have some importance in dealing with a nobleman of that country. I find that the district he named is in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe. I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina. In the population of Transylvania there are four distinct nationalities: Saxons in the South, and mixed with them the Wallachs, who are the descendants of the Dacians; Magyars in the West, and Szekelys in the East and North. I am going among the latter, who claim to be descended from Attila and the Huns. This may be so, for when the Magyars conquered the country in the eleventh century they found the Huns settled in it. I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting. (Mem., I must ask the Count all about them.) I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty. Towards morning I slept and was wakened by the continuous knocking at my door, so I guess I must have been sleeping soundly then. I had for breakfast more paprika, and a sort
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Glossary Chapter 1 1 shorthand: a system of rapid handwriting using symbols, most commonly used by secretaries and journalists to take notes quickly 1 Bistritz: now Bistrata, a city in northern Transylvania (now part of Romania) 1 Vienna: Austrian capital city. At the end of the 19th century, Vienna was a rapidly expanding city at the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It became a flourishing centre for arts and culture at the turn of the century. 1 Buda-Pesth: The capital city of Hungary, now known as Budapest, straddles the River Danube. On one side of the river is the area of ‘Buda’ and on the other side is ‘Pest’ – they were united in 1873 to form a major capital city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Stoker’s novel retains the archaic compounded version of the city name. 1 Klausenburgh: Transylvanian city, now known as Cluj, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until it was integrated into modern-day Romania after the First World War. 1
Mem.: short for memorandum (Latin), meaning ‘note to self ’
1 Carpathians: semicircle-shaped mountain range that runs through seven Eastern European countries including Hungary and Romania. The Carpathians still incorporate areas of remote wilderness inhabited by wolves, bears and wildcats. 2
Transylvania, Moldavia and Bukovina: historic regions that now form part of modern-day Romania. Transylvania and Bukovina were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the First World War; Moldavia included territory that now forms regions of modern-day Romania, Russia and the Ukraine.
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Glossary
2
our own Ordnance Survey maps: British Ordnance Survey maps were originally developed in the 18th century as detailed military survey maps. By the end of the 19th century, colour printing and new photographic processes meant accurate and usable maps were produced that covered the whole of the British Isles.
2
post town: town that houses the main post office of the area
2 Saxons…Wallachs…Dacians…Magyars…Szekelys: ancient peoples from Germany, Moldavia, Romania, Hungary and Central Romania respectively 2
Attila and the Huns: Attila was ruler of the nomadic Hun people from 434–53. Under Attila’s command, numerous attacks and invasions were conducted upon Roman territory and his forces were the scourge of the Roman Empire.
3 missals: illustrated prayer books 3 Slovaks: historic peoples from an area of central Europe that formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which then became Czechoslovakia in the 20th century (and is now the Czech Republic and Slovakia) 3 barbarian: used pejoratively to refer to an uncivilised or violent person 4
Borgo Pass: mountain pass in modern-day Romania (now known as the Tihuta Pass)
4 Herr: German for ‘man’, which is used as title before a name, the equivalent of ‘Mr’ 5
both he and his wife crossed themselves: The local people make the sign of the Christian cross with their hands as a ritual form for protection against evil.
5
St. George’s Day: the feast day of England’s patron saint, usually celebrated on 23 April
6
crucifix: a cross with the figure of Jesus Christ upon it, here offered to Harker as a form of protection against evil
6
English Churchman: member of the Church of England. Jonathan Harker’s rejection of the crucifix given to him by the old lady reflects the Church of England’s historic rejection of Catholic religious practices and rituals. This is indicated by Harker’s use of the critical word ‘idolatrous’, which indicates that such practices were considered a form of false religious devotion.
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