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 found the name "Dracula" in a history of Wallachia and Moldavia, 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 true 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 move 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 fail 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
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
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.