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First published by Archibald Constable and Company 1897
This edition first published in Penguin Classics 1993
Revised edition with new appendices and preface published 2003
This edition published 2011
Editorial material copyright © Maurice Hindle, 1993, 2003
Preface copyright © Christopher Frayling, 2003
The moral rights of the editor and author of the preface have been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-141-91093-2
Preface
A Note on the Text
Introduction
CHAPTER I Jonathan Harker’s Journal
CHAPTER II Jonathan Harker’s Journal
CHAPTER III Jonathan Harker’s Journal
CHAPTER IV Jonathan Harker’s Journal
CHAPTER V Letter from Miss Mina Murray to Miss Lucy Westenra
CHAPTER VI Mina Murray’s Journal
CHAPTER VII Cutting from the Dailygraph, 8 August
CHAPTER VIII Mina Murray’s Journal
CHAPTER IX Letter, Mina Harker to Lucy Westenra
CHAPTER X Letter, Dr Seward to the Hon. Arthur Holmwood
CHAPTER XI Lucy Westenra’s Diary
CHAPTER XII Dr Seward’s Diary
CHAPTER XIII Dr Seward’s Diary
CHAPTER XIV Mina Harker’s Journal
CHAPTER XV Dr Seward’s Diary
CHAPTER XVI Dr Seward’s Diary
CHAPTER XVII Dr Seward’s Diary
CHAPTER XVIII Dr Seward’s Diary
CHAPTER XIX Jonathan Harker’s Journal
CHAPTER XX Jonathan Harker’s Journal
CHAPTER XXI Dr Seward’s Diary
CHAPTER XXII Jonathan Harker’s Journal
CHAPTER XXIII Dr Seward’s Diary
CHAPTER XXIV Dr Seward’s Phonograph Diary, spoken by Van Helsing
CHAPTER XXV Dr Seward’s Diary
CHAPTER XXVI Dr Seward’s Diary
CHAPTER XXVII Mina Harker’s Journal
Appendix I: Bram Stoker’s Correspondence with Walt Whitman (1872–6)
Appendix II: Charlotte Stoker’s Account of ‘The Cholera Horror’ in a Letter to Bram Stoker (c. 1875)
Appendix III: Bram Stoker’s Article ‘The Censorship of Fiction’ (1908)
Appendix IV: Bram Stoker’s Interview with Winston Churchill (1908)
Notes
Chronology
Further Reading
Follow Penguin
Dracula first appeared in bookshops on 26 May 1897, price 6 shillings, in a print run of three thousand copies. It was bound in yellow cloth, with red lettering. Four years later, Dracula was reissued in a slightly abridged form as a sixpenny yellow-covered paperback – with, on the jacket, one of the only illustrations Bram Stoker ever had the chance to approve himself. This shows the Count as a white-haired military commander, with a bushy moustache and bat-like cloak, shinning down the stone walls of Castle Dracula – a very far cry from the seductive lounge lizard of countless movie versions (more than two hundred, at the last count), the charismatic man in evening dress and opera cloak who says portentously ‘children of the night. What music they make!’ It is almost impossible today to exorcize visual images of Max Schreck in Nosferatu or Bela Lugosi in Dracula or Christopher Lee in The Horror of Dracula or Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula to reach back to the novel as Stoker wrote it.
The original reviews were so-so. The Athenæum, which in the past had panned all the fiction Stoker had put his name to, reckoned that Dracula was wanting in ‘constructive art as well as in the higher literary sense. It reads at times like a mere series of grotesquely incredible events’: Gothic novels came in one of two categories – the suggestive ones and the blood-and-thunder ones; Dracula was definitely in the latter category. Others were more kind, after a fashion: ‘we read nearly the whole thing with rapt attention,’ said the reviewer in the Bookman. Most found that the book made them feel uneasy, for one reason or another, but not nearly as uneasy as the works of Oscar Wilde, the plays of Henrik Ibsen and the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley. Dracula was probably transgressing something – but the critics weren’t quite sure exactly what. And they weren’t sure whether the author was sure either. Late Victorian readers seem to have read the book as an early piece of techno-fiction: blood transfusions, phonograph recordings and shorthand typing in an adventure yarn about a committee of the forces of good (science, religion and social connections) versus the demon king and his ilk from the land beyond the forest in the east.
Actually, the Count as originally conceived – according to one of Bram Stoker’s earliest manuscript notes, written on Lyceum Theatre notepaper when Dracula was still called ‘Count Wampyr’ – would have been very much at home with Wilde and Beardsley at a Lyceum opening night. Stoker’s list of vampire characteristics at this early stage of drafting includes:
‘power of creating evil thoughts or banishing good ones in others present’
‘goes through fog by instinct’ and can ‘see in the dark’
‘insensibility to music’
‘Painters cannot paint him. His likeness always like someone else’
‘could not Codak [photograph] him – comes out black or like skeleton corpse’
‘No looking glasses in Count’s house – never can see his reflection in one – no shadow?’
‘never eats nor drinks’
Stoker’s fin-de-siècle vampire cannot appreciate good music, loves to create evil thoughts for the hell of it, cannot possibly have his portrait painted or his studio photograph taken, seems to be on a diet and cannot stand looking in a mirror: all of which give him a family resemblance to Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), with its society aesthete who has a passion for the latest French yellow-backed novels. But by 1897, most of these vampire characteristics had been jettisoned from the finished novel. Perhaps out of deference to his employer Henry Irving’s very public prejudices – and in the wake of Wilde’s trial of 1895, with subsequent hue and cry – Stoker had decided to repress the aesthetic side of his demon’s personality; as indeed he tended to repress his own. He was later to write a spirited article in support of the censorship of ‘unclean’ contemporary novels (see Appendix III), and in a note attached to one of the five hundred presentation copies of Dracula he enthusiastically sent out to the great and the good, Stoker wrote to W. E. Gladstone no less that he sincerely hoped there was ‘nothing base in the book’: ‘the book is necessarily full of horrors and terrors,’ he continued defensively, ‘but I trust that these are calculated to cleanse the mind by pity and terror’.
The writing certainly seems from the evidence to have been an act of cleansing. On the surface, Bram Stoker was a pillar of late Victorian respectability – a man who was, in the rather patronizing words of one recent critic, ‘a master of the commonplace’ in most of what he wrote. An ex-clerk in the fines and penalties section, and later the petty sessions office, of Dublin Castle, who grew up in the seaside suburb of Clontarf, he had become the business-manager, box-office administrator and front-of-house master of ceremonies at the Lyceum Theatre, off the Strand in London – a career move which led to him routinely rubbing shoulders with the artistic and political establishment of the day. He was by all accounts a hearty, down-to-earth and meticulous man. Doing the accounts for actor-manager Henry Irving at his most flamboyant, keeping the Lyceum solvent and persuading Irving not to overdo the special effects was more than a full-time job. Stoker seldom left the theatre before one in the morning, because his boss liked him to organize regular dinners after the show, in the Beefsteak Room behind the stage which, with typical extravagance, Irving had decked out as a Gothic parlour (complete with its own chef), for the purposes of making useful contacts. Stoker made careful lists of them, in a tiny and tidy handwriting. He missed out Oscar Wilde for some reason.
But beneath this glittering surface, Bram Stoker had something gnawing away at his mind. The event which seems to have unlocked his imagination – possibly for the one and only time in his life – leading indirectly to the book which caused everyone who knew him well to say I had no idea Stoker had it in him; he was such a feet-on-the-ground sort of person – the event seems to have happened on the night of 7 March 1890. It was a bad dream, which on 8 March Bram Stoker dutifully jotted down on another piece of Lyceum headed notepaper: ‘Young man goes out,’ he wrote, ‘sees girls one tries to kiss him not on lips but throat. Old Count interferes – rage & fury diabolical – this man belongs to me I want him.’ This bad dream was eventually to turn into Jonathan Harker’s fictional journal entry for the night of 15 May in the novel: ‘I suppose I must have fallen asleep; I hope so, but I fear … I cannot in the least believe that it was all sleep …’ (here). It was the origin of Dracula. Among the many changes that happened to the book between March 1890, the month of the dream, and May 1897, the month of publication, one incident and one alone remained constant: the dream which was a bizarre mixture of the witches from Macbeth (one of Irving’s favourite plays), Stoker’s own anxieties about his masculinity – ‘This man belongs to me,’ says the Count – a tug-of-war over his sexuality, a domineering employer whom he worshipped and a voyeur’s fantasy of hungry female vampires. All couched in the rhetoric of the Gothic. As a critic has written, ‘when such a man as Bram Stoker, just once, is thoroughly afraid, the charade stops and what you get is Dracula’.
The novel was to be full of references to the plays which Henry Irving put on at the Lyceum in the 1880s and 1890s – including a misquotation from Hamlet which introduces Harker’s waking nightmare and which Irving always insisted on including in his version of the tragedy: ‘My tablets! quick, my tablets! ’Tis meet that I put it down’ (here); a process which George Bernard Shaw wittily called ‘performing Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted’. At one point, the book itself had the traditional four-act structure of a play: Transylvania to Whitby, in which the Count arrives from the east on to English soil – bringing his own soil with him so he can get a good day’s sleep; Tragedy in Whitby and London, in which the Count attacks Jonathan Harker’s fiancée and her friend Lucy Westenra, and threatens to start an epidemic; Discovery by the intrepid vampire-hunters, including Professor Van Helsing; and Punishment, in which the forces of Victorian normality counter-attack, and put the vampires back in their boxes so Mina Harker can become a conventional, repressed young lady again. But the sheer intensity of the primal scene was never to be repeated anywhere else in Stoker’s writings. Harker, incidentally, was the name of the Lyceum’s in-house designer, and throughout the novel writes in the no-nonsense style of a junior civil servant. He was evidently a surrogate for Bram Stoker himself.
To judge by the many different headed notepapers he used, Bram Stoker tended to write on the run in hotels, on trains, in libraries and on leave from the Lyceum: Irving allowed him little time for such pursuits in the normal schedule and what today we would call staff development was not his strongest suit. Stoker’s first jottings were developed into the beginnings of a story during a wet family holiday in Whitby, Yorkshire, in July–August 1890. He found the name ‘Dracula’ in a dull book about Wallachia and Moldovia written by a retired diplomat (see note 7 to Chapter III), shelved in Whitby’s Museum and Subscription Library. Between Summer 1890 and Summer 1896, and between several major writing assignments including three other novels, he methodically worked on the longest piece of work he had ever undertaken: he worked in the British Museum, on summer holidays along the Buchan coast of Scotland, on tour with the Irving Company and at home in Chelsea. The form of Dracula matched the fragmentary way in which the book was assembled: a collection of letters, diary and journal entries, press cuttings, transcribed phonograph recordings – the documents in the case, from the points of view of all the main characters except the Count himself. At the very last minute, Stoker sensibly changed the novel’s title from ‘The Un-Dead’ to Dracula.
When Bram Stoker died in 1912 (leaving just £4,723), not a single newspaper obituary mentioned Dracula by name: today, the obituaries would mention little else. In the intervening century, and especially since the 1970s, the literary-critical context of Dracula has shape-shifted beyond all recognition.
In the 1950s Maurice Richardson famously called the text: ‘… a kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match’. Others have more recently related it to civilization and its discontents, the return of the repressed, sex from the neck up, homo-eroticism, bisexuality and gender bending; reverse colonialism (the East getting its own back on the West) and a cosmic racial conflict between modern Anglo-Saxon stock and the 1,400-year-old bloodline of Attila the Hun; hysteria, the empowerment of women, the disempowerment of women; the sense of displacement of a middle-class Protestant Dubliner, complete with retreat into the occult, crumbling aristocracy and sense of being strangled by red tape. And so on. Dracula contains legions.
Stoker himself – as a straight-down-the-line science graduate – would have been amazed at all this analysis, and at the public discussion of themes which he considered as among the great unmentionables: one reason why he was so very frightened by his dream in the first place. He would have been equally amazed at Dracula’s assured status as a literary classic, its continuation in print all over the world and its pivotal place within popular culture. He listed as his recreation in Who’s Who ‘pretty much the same as those of the other children of Adam’. The ambiguities of that Whitman-inspired statement, when read over a century later, combined with Stoker’s determination to appear so very conventional, are part of the novel’s continuing appeal.
Christopher Frayling
1847 8 November Abraham Stoker (Bram) born at 15 The Crescent, Clontarf, Dublin, to Charlotte and Abraham Stoker, the third of seven children.
1854–64 After long incapacitating childhood illness attends private day school of Rev. William Woods in Dublin.
1864–70 Successful career at Trinity College, Dublin: becomes University athletics champion, unbeatable road walker and capped footballer; active speaker at the Philosophical Society, which eventually makes him President; graduates with Honours degree in Pure Mathematics.
1867 28 August Sees Henry Irving acting for the first time at Theatre Royal, Dublin, and develops passion for theatre. Takes a week’s holiday in London.
1868 Deeply impressed by Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, declares himself ‘a lover of Walt Whitman’.
1870 Following in his father’s footsteps, enters the Civil Service as a clerk in Dublin Castle.
1871 4 May Opens debate on paper entitled ‘Walt Whitman and the Poetry of Democracy’. In May sees Irving again at the Vaudeville Theatre, Dublin. In November writes unpaid theatre review for Dublin Mail, the first of many. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla published.
1872 18 February Writes long, admiring and confessional letter to Whitman (does not send). Elected Auditor of Trinity College Historical Society. Becomes a regular guest of Sir William Wilde and his family.
1873–4 November–March Becomes (part-time) editor of the short-lived Halfpenny Press.
1875 First horror story ‘The Chain of Destiny’ published in the Shamrock, in four parts.
1876 14 February Writes again to Whitman, enclosing his first letter; Whitman replies on 6 March (see Appendix I). Irving plays Hamlet at Theatre Royal, Dublin. After Stoker’s momentous meeting with Irving on 3 December, they become friends. Stoker is promoted to Inspector of Petty Sessions.
1877 June Irving gives reading at Trinity College; thirteen days later Stoker spends annual holiday seeing Irving at Lyceum Theatre, London, meeting him most days. In late November Irving performs two-week season in Dublin, playing Hamlet, Richard III and Matthias in The Bells. On 22 November Stoker writes ‘London in view!’ in his diary.
1878 June Visits and assists Irving at Lyceum to rewrite Wills’s play Vanderdecken. In August Irving gives reading for charity in Dublin, lodging with surgeon William Stoker, Bram’s older brother. In mid November Stoker accepts Irving’s invitation to become his acting (i.e. business) manager at the Lyceum Theatre, which he has acquired. Stoker leaves the Civil Service, marries 20-year-old Florence Balcombe on 4 December at St Ann’s Church, Dublin and joins Irving on tour in Birmingham on 9 December. Ellen Terry joins Irving company as Ophelia for opening of Hamlet on 30 December.
1879 The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland published. On 29 December Florence gives birth to Noel, the Stokers’ only child.
1881 Autumn Organizes the first provincial tour of Irving and Ellen Terry. In November collection of children’s stories Under the Sunset published.
1883 October Manages Irving’s first tour of USA. Meets Whitman in Philadelphia at the house of a mutual friend.
1885 Second American tour. On 28 December Stoker gives lecture at the Royal Institution, ‘A Glimpse of America’.
1886 October Visits USA to arrange tour of Faust for 1887. Visits Whitman at Camden, New Jersey. ‘A Glimpse of America’ published.
1889 The Snake’s Pass appears as a serial story in the People and several other provincial papers.
1890 8 March Makes first notes for what will become Dracula. On 30 April called to the Bar of the Inner Temple, and that night at the Lyceum meets Hungarian scholar and traveller Arminius Vambéry. Spends summer holiday at Whitby. In November The Snake’s Pass published.
1893 Spends first of many holidays at Cruden Bay. In September the Irving company embarks on extensive tour of Canada and the USA.
1895 January The Watter’s Mou published as companion volume to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite. In September Irving company undertakes fifth American tour, during which Stoker meets and becomes admirer of Theodore Roosevelt. In October The Shoulder of Shasta published.
1897 26 May Dracula published.
1898 February Miss Betty published. The same month the Lyceum Storage burns down, destroying all the Irving company’s scenes and props.
1901 April Constable publish a sixpenny paperback edition of Dracula abridged by Stoker.
1902 July The Irving company plays its last performance at the Lyceum. The same month The Mystery of the Sea published and is found to be ‘admirable’ in a congratulatory note sent by Conan Doyle. In December Ellen Terry leaves the Irving company.
1903 November The Jewel of the Seven Stars published.
1905 September The Man published. In October, while on his farewell tour at Sheffield, Irving collapses and dies.
1906 October Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (2 vols.) published. Stoker suffers a stroke laying him unconscious for twenty-four hours, and leaving his walking and sight impaired.
1908 15 January Interview with Winston Churchill published in the Daily Chronicle (see Appendix IV). In June Lady Athlyne published. In September ‘The Censorship of Fiction’ published in The Nineteenth Century and After. Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party also published this year.
1909 July The Lady of the Shroud published.
1910 December Famous Imposters published.
1911 November The Lair of the White Worm published.
1912 20 April Dies at 26 St George’s Square, London; later cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, where his ashes remain.