Dracula

About this book

Dracula is a Gothic novel by the Irish writer Bram Stoker, published in 1897. Stoker was not the first to write about vampires in English; John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) came before it. His book is the one that established the figure most people now picture: an aristocratic count from Transylvania, the crucifix and garlic, the stake, and the voyage from the Carpathians to England. Stoker spent several years researching Eastern European folklore and geography before writing it.

The novel was reasonably well received on publication but did not become a cultural fixture until the twentieth century, when stage and film adaptations, above all the 1931 film with Bela Lugosi, made the Count universally recognizable. The book itself is more varied, more documentary, and in places more frightening than most of its adaptations.

The story

Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to help a nobleman, Count Dracula, complete the purchase of property in England. His journal records a courteous host, a castle with no servants, and a growing realization that he is a prisoner. Meanwhile in England his fiancée, Mina Murray, is staying with her friend Lucy Westenra in Whitby, where a Russian ship runs aground in a storm with no living crew on board.

Lucy begins to sicken in ways her doctor, John Seward, cannot explain, and he calls in his former teacher, the Dutch professor Abraham Van Helsing. The remainder of the novel follows a small group, including Harker, Mina, Seward, Van Helsing, and two of Lucy’s suitors, as they piece together what they are dealing with and try to stop it.

Themes and historical context

Dracula is an epistolary novel, assembled from diaries, letters, newspaper clippings, a ship’s log, and phonograph recordings. That structure matters: the characters defeat an ancient evil partly by collecting information, typing it up, and sharing it, and the novel is full of the technology of the 1890s, from shorthand and typewriters to blood transfusion and the telegraph. The contrast between modern method and old superstition, and the discovery that both are needed, is central.

The book also carries the anxieties of its moment. The Count is a foreign aristocrat who buys London property and plans to spread his influence from there, which many readers have connected to late-Victorian fears of reverse colonization and decline. The vampire’s attacks on women, and the different fates of Lucy and Mina, have made the novel a standard text for discussions of Victorian ideas about female sexuality and the “New Woman,” a phrase Mina herself uses.

Stoker took the name Dracula from a reference to the fifteenth-century Wallachian prince Vlad III, though how much of Vlad’s history he knew is disputed, and the novel’s vampire owes more to folklore and to earlier fiction than to the historical figure.

Who should read it

Dracula is around 160,000 words, and the pace is uneven: the opening chapters in the castle are gripping, the middle sections in England are slower and more procedural, and the final pursuit moves quickly. The documentary form means several narrators with distinct voices, including Van Helsing’s heavily accented English, which some readers find tiresome. It suits readers of horror and Gothic fiction, anyone interested in the Victorian period, and readers who like novels built from pieces. Those expecting the romantic vampire of later fiction will find something colder.

Edition notes

Project Gutenberg #345 was prepared by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. It is the complete English text.