The storm comes up out of a flat August calm. By night the sea off Whitby is mountainous, the new searchlight on the East Cliff is sweeping the water, and a foreign schooner with every sail set comes racing between the piers with a corpse tied at the helm, its head swinging with each roll. The ship, says the local paper, found harbour “unsteered save by the hand of a dead man!” The moment she grounds, an enormous dog bounds from below decks, over the sand and up the steep cliff towards the churchyard, and is gone. Dracula by Bram Stoker has many famous scenes, but this one, told as a reporter’s breathless column pasted into a young woman’s journal, may be the best piece of writing in it.
Bram Stoker Gives Whitby to the Women
The surprise for a first-time reader is how much of the novel belongs to two friends on a seaside holiday. Lucy Westenra, nearly twenty, has written to Mina Murray to report three marriage proposals in a single day, and to ask, half joking, why a girl cannot simply marry all of them. Mina, an assistant schoolmistress, has come up to the Yorkshire coast with her shorthand, her worry about a fiancé who has stopped writing, and a plan to keep a journal like a lady journalist. They sit on a bench above the abbey ruins while a nearly hundred-year-old former whaler tells them, in dialect thick as tar, that half the gravestones around them are lies. Soon afterwards the wrecked schooner’s log, translated and printed in the local paper, lands in Mina’s pages: a captain’s terse record of a crew vanishing one man at a time on the voyage from Varna, as complete and chilling as a short story.
Stoker lets this stretch breathe, and the patience pays. Lucy begins to sleepwalk. One night Mina wakes to an empty bed, runs through the sleeping town and up the long flight of steps, and finds her friend on their favourite seat with something dark bent over her. She puts her own shoes on Lucy’s feet, and on the walk home she smears her bare ones with puddle mud so that nobody they meet will notice, anxious for her friend’s health and for her reputation in equal measure. That small, practical, absurdly decent act tells the reader everything about who will hold this story together. Dracula by Bram Stoker is often remembered for its Count, yet he barely speaks here. The dread is carried by a bat at the window, a pair of tiny marks, a mother with a weak heart, and a summer that will not stay bright.
Mina Harker, Detective
Later, in London, the papers begin reporting children on Hampstead Heath who come home late with small wounds at the throat and stories of a beautiful lady, a bloofer lady in their lisping, who asked them to play. The men gather to hunt, and the novel becomes a kind of detective story. But the detective, in practice, is Mina. She types up every journal and recording, collates the newspaper files, and memorises the train times so thoroughly that the others treat her as a living timetable. When the trail finally runs cold, it is her careful written reasoning that picks it up again.
The irony is sharp, and Stoker seems only half aware of it. Mina mocks the New Woman, the independent, educated, self-supporting figure that late Victorian journalists loved to satirise, while being the most capable person in the book. Her male allies kiss her hand, call her their little girl, praise her as having a man’s brain, and then shut her out of their councils for her own protection. Dracula by Bram Stoker lets her be patronised, and then makes the plot quietly prove the men wrong. Modern readers will notice this more keenly than the author’s first audience did, and the book is the richer for it.
Van Helsing deserves a word too. He arrives as the expert, all broken English and confident pronouncements, but the novel also gives him private sorrows, a wife lost to madness and a son long dead, and a terrible fit of laughter after a funeral that he cannot stop. He is stranger and sadder than his reputation.
The three men who once proposed to Lucy end up in the same company, and that is one of the quieter pleasures of Dracula by Bram Stoker. The rejected doctor, the rejected Texan with his tall talk and his rifles, and the accepted fiancé who inherits a title halfway through become a band of friends who would die for one another. Stoker writes male loyalty with real feeling, even when the feeling spills into tears.
What a Modern Reader Has to Forgive
The reservations are real, and they are of two kinds. The first is pace. Lucy’s illness is treated through a series of near-identical bedside crises, each with its own anxious telegram, and once the hunt reaches the Black Sea there is a week in which almost nothing happens except the daily arrival of messages saying nothing has happened. The heroes weep often, swear oaths on bended knee and make speeches that run long. Readers who come for horror will find the middle of Dracula by Bram Stoker slower than its reputation suggests.
The second is the decade’s prejudice, which the book carries without embarrassment. A Jewish trader at Galatz is drawn as a stage caricature; the Romani who serve the Count are menace without character; whole nations are summed up in a sentence. None of this should be explained away. It belongs to 1897 as surely as the typewriters do, and it sits alongside material that some readers will want to know about in advance: predation, grief, desecration, and the endangerment of children.
Where Bram Stoker Found His Count
Stoker was born in 1847 in Clontarf, on the edge of Dublin, and spent the first seven years of his life bedridden with an illness no doctor named. He recovered to become an athlete at Trinity College, then a civil servant at Dublin Castle who moonlighted as a drama critic for a newspaper part-owned by Sheridan Le Fanu. A warm notice of Henry Irving’s Hamlet in 1876 made the two men friends, and Stoker spent the rest of his working life managing Irving’s affairs in London. Most scholars agree that the actor’s lean height and commanding stare went into the Count.
The places went in too. Stoker stayed in Whitby in 1890 and read up on local history in its library, and he wrote much of the book on summer holidays at Cruden Bay in Scotland, near Slains Castle, whose octagonal hall resembles the eight-sided room Harker passes through on his first night. He never travelled to Eastern Europe. He dedicated the novel to his close friend the novelist Hall Caine, under the Manx nickname Hommy-Beg, and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to congratulate him on it. Stoker died in 1912 without seeing it become a phenomenon.
Where It Leaves You
Read alongside the vampire fiction it made possible, Dracula by Bram Stoker feels less like a monster story than a story about the people who write things down. Readers who want its older cousin, Carmilla, reimagined as a feminist Gothic set in the Peak District should try Hungerstone by Kat Dunn. Those drawn to a Gothic house where a young woman uncovers what an old family feeds on will find a sharp modern descendant in Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. And for the source of Stoker’s method, a mystery told through many witnesses, go back to Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White.
The storm, the dog, the bench above the abbey: the images that last from Dracula by Bram Stoker belong to a seaside town in August. It is a book about a coastline where something came ashore, and about the young woman who refused to let it go unrecorded.