Dracula

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 something like a violent fit of hysterics. 2

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. 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 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 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 meta phors 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, 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 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 trans-historical (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 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 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 Baring-Gould. 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 folk-hypothesis 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 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 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 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.