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Bram Stoker
Dracula
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THE WORLD'S CLASSICS
DRACULA
Bram Stoker was born in Dublin in 1847. He was
christened Abraham after his father, a civil servant
inDublinCastle. In1863,afterasemi-invalidchild-hood,
he entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he achieved
notable success not only as a mathematician and in the
PhilosophicalSocietybutalsoasanathleteAftergraduat-
ing, and during a ten-year period as a civil servant, he
made the acquaintance of Henry Irving, and between
1878 and 1905 he acted as Irving's touring manager and
secretary. Hecametoknowallthemajortheatricalmen
andwomenofthe age. He diedin London in1912.
Bram Stoker's first book was The Duties ofClerks of
PettySessions inIreland(1878). He wenton towrite short
stories andseveral novels, ofwhich Dracula (1897) is the
bestknown; as well ashis PersonalReminiscencesofHenry
Irving(1906).
A. N. Wilson is the authorofseveralnovels as well as a
study ofSir Walter Scott, TheLairdofAbbotsford(1980),
TheLifeofJohnMilton(1983),andanacclaimedbiography
ofTolstoy.
THE WORLD'S CLASSICS
BRAM STOKER
^racula
WithanIntroductionandNotesby
A. N. WILSON
Oxford NewYork
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
I
OxfordUniversityPress, WaltonStreet, Oxford0x26DP
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OxfordisatrademarkofOxfordUniversityPress
Introduction, Bibliography, Chronology, Notes,
© A. N. Wilson, 1983
Thiseditionfirstpublished1983asa World'sClassicspaperback
Reprinted198s, 1986{twice),1987, 1988, 1989, 1990(twice),1991(twice),
1992 (twice)
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BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData
—Stoker, Bram
Dracula. (The World'sclassics)
1. Title
82j'.8[F] PR6037.T617
ISBN0-19-281598-9
LibraryofCongressCataloginginPublicationData
Stoker, Bram, 1847-1912.
Dracula. (The World'sclassics)
Bibliography:p.
I. Wilson,A. N. (1950- ). II. Title.
PR6037.T617D7 1983 823'.8 82-22324
ISBN0-19-281598-9(pbk.)
PrintedinGreatBritainby
BPCCHazellsLtd
Aylesbury, Bucks.
Introduction vii
FurtherReading xxi
A ChronologyofBram Stoker xxiii
"HP APTTT A
I
ExplanatoryNotes 379
INTRODUCTION
Cases ofvampirism may be said to be in our time a rare occult
phenomenon. Yet whether we are justified in supposing that they
areless frequenttoday than in pastcenturies I am farfrom certain.
One thing is plain: - not that they do not occur but that they are
carefullyhushedupandstifled.
So wrote the Reverend Montague Summers, the leading
English authority on the subject, in The Vampire in 'Europe
(1929). Since his day, the vampires have been so successful in
hushing up their nocturnal operations that many ofus would
behardputtoittonamemorethanahandfulofyoungvirgins
in our acquaintance who have been bothered by thirsty visits
from the living dead.
Vampires, as Montague Summers implied, come and go.
There are more in Hungary (for example) than have ever
been spotted in England. They seemed to be thicker on
(under or over) the ground in the eighteenth century than in
the seventeenth or the twentieth. It was only in 1824 that the
Laws of England felt safe enough to allow suicides to be
buried without the customary safeguard ofdriving a wooden
stakethroughthevictim'sheart(topreventthecorpseturning
into a vampire). Ninety years before, in 1732, Herbert Mayo
described a vampire being dug up in Belgrade in his book
On truths Containedin Popular Superstitions. When disinterred,
itleanedtooneside, theskinwasfreshand ruddy, thenails grown
long and evilly crooked, the mouth slobbered with blood from its
last night's repast. Accordingly a stake was driven through the
chest of the vampire who uttered a terrible screech whilst blood
pouredinquantitiesfromthewound. Thenitwas burnedtoashes.
Moreover, a number ofother persons throughout the district had
beeninfectedwithvampirism. Ofthefactstherecanbenoquestion
whatsoever- the documents are above suspicion, and in particular
the mostimportantofthese, which was signed by three regimental
surgeons, and formally counter-signed by a lieutenant-colonel and
sub-lieutenant.
TheBelgradeVampireis onlyonementionedbyMontague
Vm INTRODUCTION
Summers's first book on the subject (1928). It is a disturbing
work, for, as Summers shows, the evil eflfects ofthe vampire
extend far beyond their immediate victims. As well as the
living dead (their ectoplasm escaping through holes in their
graves and assuming bodily shape once above ground) there
are ofcourse the imitators those who have not yet died and
:
therefore have no excuse for their unwholesome cannibalistic
tastes. Summers recounts in punctilious detail the story of
Fritz Harmann of Hanover, who was beheaded on 15 April
1925. Harmann was, before his decapitation, a homosexual,
and his victims were exclusively adolescent boys. At least
twentyofthemwerenamedatthetrial,ashavinggonemissing
some time between Harmann having bitten their throats and
his selling mysterious carcases to a butcher's shop near the
railway stationinHanover. Itwill neverbe knownhow many
of the *mannliche Prostituierten' of Hanover's red-light
district ended up in Harmann's apparently very palatable
sausages. Butallhad died, accordingto theclericalchronicler,
in the same way. 'The violent eroticism, the fatal bite in the
throat, are typical of the vampire.' Summers believed, with
Havelock Ellis, that the motive of sexual murders *is nearly
always to shed blood and not to cause death'.
Sadly believable as that may be, what ofthe vampire in the
morecomfortingconfinesofpoetry,thedrama,andthenovel?
It is striking, again as Summers observed, how little there is
of the vampire in literature. German superstition is full of
tales ofblood-sucking. And it was German superstition, very
largely, which fired the imagination of *Monk' Lewis; to a
slightly lesser extent the much richer imagination of Charles
Maturin.Theyconceive,betweenthem,ofalmosteveryhorror
which a haunted Gothic castle, or a Spanish convent riddled
with sadists, or a graveyard at midnight could provide.
Banditry,lunacy,sexualperversion,and tortureenlivenalmost
every chapter they wrote; but they did not choose to write
about vampires. It was not until 1819, indeed, when John
Polidori published The Vampjre, that the idea seems to have
got itself into English fiction. Polidori had cribbed it from
Byron,whosepublisher,JohnMurray,furiouslyissuedtheorig-
inalasafragmentinthesameyear.Neitherisparticularlygood.
The first really extended treatment of the theme is Varney
