Dracula

• 1. Letters From The Castle

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  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 rescues Harker, and gives the women a small child bound inside a bag. Six weeks later, Dracula leaves the castle, abandoning Harker to the women. Harker 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 he alone remains, bound to the helm to maintain course. An animal resembling a large dog is seen leaping ashore when the ship runs aground at Whitby. Lucy Westenra's letter to her best friend, Mina Murray, describes her marriage proposals from Dr John Seward, Quincey Morris, and Arthur Holmwood. Lucy accepts Holmwood's, but all remain friends.

  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. He diagnoses it as acute blood-loss instead. Van Helsing places garlic flowers around her room and makes her a necklace of them. Lucy's mother removes the garlic flowers, not knowing they repel vampires.

• 2. Victorian Social Fears

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  Scholars explore the novel within the historical context of the Victorian era and regularly discuss its portrayal of race, religion, gender and sexuality. Count Dracula generally represents these tensions: cultural critic Jack Halberstam notes that he is masculinised and feminised. Jerrold E. Hogle highlights his attraction to both Jonathan and Mina, and his appearance as racially western and eastern.

  Transgressive or abnormal sexuality within Dracula is a broad topic. Some psychosexual critics explore the novel's disruption of Victorian gender roles. Within the Victorian context, Christopher Craft writes males had the right and responsibility of vigorous appetite while women were required to suffer and be still. Critics highlight the many places in which the novel disrupts these social mores.

  Jonathan Harker's excitement over the prospect of being penetrated triggers Dracula's resulting anger and jealousy. Lucy's transformation into a sexually aggressive predator drains vital fluid. Some critics, including professor Carol Senf, argue that the novel reflects anxiety about female sexual awakening as a threat to established norms. The battle against Dracula becomes a fight for control over women's bodies.

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• 3. Stoker's Research Notes

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  Bram Stoker spent years compiling notes and drawing from folklore before writing the manuscript during his summer holidays in Scotland. Prior to writing the novel, Stoker researched extensively, assembling over 100 pages of notes, including chapter summaries and plot outlines. He 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 the 8th of 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. 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 by then.

  Stoker took the name Dracula from William Wilkinson's history of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820), which he probably found in Whitby's public library while holidaying there in 1890. Stoker copied the following footnote from the book: Dracula means devil. Wallachians were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous by courage, cruel actions or cunning.

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• 4. Debating The Inspiration

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  Academic consensus rejects Vlad the Impaler as the primary model for Count Dracula, favoring influences like Henry Irving instead. 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. Dracula scholar William Hughes specifically cites the influence of Irving's performance as Shylock in a Lyceum Theatre production of The Merchant of Venice.

  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. Their investigation found nothing about Vlad, Dracula, or vampires within Vámbéry's published papers.

• 5. Public Domain And Adaptation

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  A copyright filing error placed the story into the public domain, enabling hundreds of film, stage, and literary adaptations worldwide. In the 1930s, Universal Studios initiated development on a Dracula film and learned Stoker failed to comply with United States copyright law. This prematurely placed the novel into the public domain in the United States.

  It was not until the 1960s that publishers recognised the novel's copyright status. Coinciding with the mass-market paperback's rising popularity, publishers began to produce their own versions. Stoker's mistake prevented his descendants from collecting royalties but provided ideal conditions for the novel to endure because writers and producers did not need to pay a licence fee to use the character of Count Dracula.

  Dracula has been adapted many times across virtually all forms of media. Scholars John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan S. Picart note that the novel and its characters have been adapted for film, television, video games and animation over 700 times. Nearly 1000 additional appearances exist in comic books and on the stage.

• 6. The Vampire Archetype

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  Count Dracula serves as the central antagonist whose physical traits and powers have defined the modern conception of vampires across media. For many people, Count Dracula is the first character to come to mind when discussing vampires. Dracula succeeded by drawing together folklore, legend, vampire fiction and the conventions of the Gothic novel.

  Bats had been associated with vampires before Dracula as a result of the vampire bat's existence. Varney the Vampire (1847) included an image of a bat on its cover illustration. Stoker deepened the association by making Dracula able to transform into one. That was, in turn, quickly taken up by film studios looking for opportunities to use special effects.

  Novelist Patrick McGrath notes that many of the Count's characteristics have been adopted by artists succeeding Stoker in depicting vampires. Aside from the Count's ability to transform, McGrath specifically highlights his hatred of garlic and crucifixes. The Guinness Book of World Records named Dracula the most portrayed literary character.