Dracula

What It's About

Told entirely through journal entries, letters, telegrams, newspaper clippings and phonograph recordings, the novel opens with young English solicitor Jonathan Harker travelling to Transylvania to finalise a property sale with the mysterious Count Dracula. Harker soon realises he is a prisoner in a castle with a monstrous host. When the Count relocates to England, a series of strange events follows: a wrecked ship at Whitby, the wasting illness of Harker's friend Lucy Westenra, and the increasingly disturbing behaviour of asylum patient Renfield. The Dutch professor Abraham Van Helsing leads a group of allies, including Dr John Seward, Arthur Holmwood, the American Quincey Morris and Harker's fiancée Mina Murray, in a race to understand and destroy the creature among them.

Key Concepts

The novel draws on Victorian anxieties about foreign influence, with the Count often read as a threat of "reverse colonisation" from the East. Its treatment of sexuality and gender has long attracted scholarly attention, particularly the contrast between the "New Woman" and the ideal of Victorian womanhood. Science and superstition clash throughout, as modern tools such as typewriters, shorthand, blood transfusion and the phonograph are used against ancient evil. Critics have also pointed to the xenophobic undertones in its portrayal of Eastern Europeans, and some find the pacing uneven in the middle chapters. Its influence on vampire fiction and popular culture has nonetheless been immense.

About the Author

Bram Stoker was an Irish writer born in Clontarf, Dublin, who spent much of his childhood bedridden before recovering and graduating from Trinity College Dublin. After a spell as a civil servant and theatre critic, he moved to London, where he spent nearly three decades as business manager of the Lyceum Theatre for the celebrated actor Henry Irving.