Table Of ContentDracula and the
Eastern Question
British and French Vampire Narratives
of the Nineteenth-Century Near East
Matthew Gibson
Dracula and the Eastern Question
By the same author
YEATS, COLERIDGE AND THE ROMANTIC SAGE
Dracula and the
Eastern Question
British and French Vampire Narratives
of the Nineteenth-Century Near East
Matthew Gibson
© Matthew Gibson 2006
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-9477-6
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Contents
List of Maps vi
Acknowledgements vii
Note on Translations viii
Introduction 1
1 Polidori’s The Vampyreand the Dangers of Philhellenism
to Italian Liberation 15
2 J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmillaand the Austro-Hungarian
Ausgleich(1867) 42
3 Bram Stoker’s Draculaand the Treaty of Berlin (1878) 69
4 Bram Stoker’s The Lady of the Shroudand the
Bosnia Crisis (1908–09) 96
5 The Vampires of Illyria: Nodier, Mérimée and the
French Occupation of the Dalmation Coast 123
6 Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes(1892) and the
Romans of Transylvania 147
Conclusion 173
Appendix: Translations from Mérimée’s La Guzla 175
Notes 188
Short Chronology of Relevant Events 207
Bibliography 209
Index 217
v
List of Maps
1. South Eastern Europe in 1812 35
2. The Balkans after the Treaty of Berlin 72
3. Map of South Western Transylvania in Reclus’ Voyage 155
vi
Acknowledgements
I would like to extend my thanks to Dr Terry Hale of Hull University and
Dr Diane Mason of Bath Spa University College for their willingness to
share vital information with me, and would also like to express my
gratitude to the University of Surrey for having provided research
money which allowed me to undertake valuable trips to the Public
Records Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast and to the Bibliothèque
Nationale de France (François Mitterand) in Paris. In particular, I would
like to thank the staff at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland,
Leeds University Library and Mrs Virginia Murray, curator of the John
Murray Archive, for their generous help while conducting my research.
I should also like to extend a very warm thank-you to my patient
map-maker, Vaughan Allen.
The book is dedicated to the memory of my parents Hugh Ian and
Sheila June Gibson.
The author and publisher would like to thank the following for
permission to reproduce copyrighted material.
An extract of a letter by Jules Verne to his father. ‘La Correspondance
Familiale de Jules Verne’, Lettre 159 de Jules Verne à son père, le ‘lundi
[novembre (?)] 1870’, in Jules Verne (Lyons: La Manufacture, 1988),
p.454 is reproduced by permission of Olivier Dumas.
An extract from John Polidori’s letter to Lord Byron, 11 January 1817
by permission of John Murray Archive.
An extract from John Polidori’s letter to Gaetano Polidori, Dec 1813
(Angeli-Dennis collection, box 31, folder 5) by permission of University
of British Columbia Library, Rare Books and Special Collections.
Extracts from letters by Anthony Hope Hawkins to Bram Stoker
(13June 1897; 27 Jan 1898; 28 May 1901) by permission of A.P. Watt Ltd
on behalf of John Hope Hawkins.
Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if
any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased
to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.
vii
Note on Translations
All translations from French and Italian are by the author. The attempt
has been in most cases to prioritise exactitude over stylistic felicity. In
nearly all cases (except where it would prove too cumbersome or obvi-
ous) I have provided notes reproducing the original text or have placed
the original French beneath the English text.
viii
Introduction
In his amusing travel book of 1875, the mysteriously initialled R.H.R
describes how he decided to relax after what he considered to have been
one of the best meals of his life at the Russian consulate in Cattaro,
Dalmatia: ‘I got another chair, and stretched my legs on it; the natives
stared – no Oriental ever thinks of stretching his legs – the acme of com-
fort for him is to tuck them under him.’1 This distinction between an
‘Oriental’ and a Western custom is designed to show the exotic nature of
his location – what can be more exotic than a difference of custom in a
function which for most of us seems natural, not cultural? – but also to
define the area in which the traveller finds himself: it is a part of the
Orient, and he is amongst Orientals. Few people today would define the
Dalmatian coast (now southern Croatia and Montenegro) as ‘Oriental’,
although they would not hesitate, I should think, to describe it as
‘Balkan’, and a part of ‘Eastern Europe’.
However, the idea of the South Eastern European countries of the
Balkans as being not merely Eastern (in the sense of a Slavic Eastern
Europe to which, as Larry Wolff has shown,2 they have also variously
been perceived as belonging since Venetian times) but ‘Oriental’ (i.e.,
part of the East that not does include North Eastern Europe and Russia,
and is mainly non-Christian) is a common one throughout the nineteenth
century and up until the first Balkan war. In Eothen (1835), Alexander
Kinglake declared that having left Austro-Hungarian Semlin for Turkish-
occupied Belgrade ‘I had come, as it were, to the end of this wheel-going
Europe, and now my eyes would see the splendour and Havoc of the
East.’3 Europe ends at Belgrade for Kinglake, although in his travels to
Constantinople he is almost oblivious of the Christian Slavs and interested
only in the Turks, even though he would have travelled through Southern
Serbia, an area by then independent of Ottoman rule. H. Charles Woods,
1
