Something in the Blood

Frontispiece of Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves (1865). (John Moore Library)

Where witches, ghosts and wolves appear.

Into the woods and through the fear,

You have to take the journey.

— Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, Into the Woods

There are many stories about how Bram Stoker came to write Dracula, but only some of them are true.

According to his son, Stoker always claimed the inspiration for the book came from a nightmare induced by “a too-generous helping of dressed crab at supper”—a dab of blarney the writer enjoyed dishing out when asked, but no one took seriously (it may sound too much like Ebenezer Scrooge, famously dismissing Marley’s ghost as “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese”) But that hasn’t stopped the midnight snack of dressed crab from being served up as a matter of fact by countless people on countless occasions. While the nightmare aspect may well have some validity—Stoker’s notes at least suggest that the story might have had its genesis in a disturbing vision or reverie—it exemplifies the way truth, falsehood, and speculation have always conspired to distort Dracula scholarship. An unusually evocative piece of storytelling, Dracula has always excited more storytelling—both in its endlessly embellished dramatizations and in the similarly ornamented accounts of its own birth process.

Some Dracula creation myths are easier to believe because they contain partial truths, although they quickly begin to enable improbabilities and impossibilities. For example, it is an undisputed fact that Stoker spent at least seven years working on Dracula, from conception to publication, but this leads to a number of unsupported assumptions. First, that it was his masterwork largely because he spent seven years on it, and that the book is deservedly renowned for the endless care Stoker took in its crafting. Second, that a work span of seven years indicates, ipso facto, unusually painstaking and authoritative research, which uncovered, among other things, the grisly true story of a bloodthirsty fifteenth-century Wallachian warlord, Vlad Tepes˛, “the Impaler,” who was also known as Dracula. The name was not well known outside Romania, but Stoker would make it world-famous as the historical source and embodiment of the vampire mythos. In reality, Vlad’s connection to Stoker’s character was more fortuitous than inspirational, and the author’s research was surprisingly thin, but over time, and especially with the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s misleadingly titled film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Vlad’s story is now universally misunderstood as Stoker’s central source and impetus, and the novel itself as an overheated romance about Dracula’s quest over the centuries for the reincarnation of his long-lost love. The motif appears nowhere in Stoker’s book or his foundational notes.

Like the unending parade of dramatists and filmmakers who have not been able to resist tinkering and altering and “improving” his story, Stoker initially had trouble recognizing the essential elements that would make his tale click. The reason Dracula took seven years to write was that Stoker had great difficulty writing it, especially cutting through the overload of his own imaginative clutter. The process was twisted, arduous, and constantly interrupted. He stopped to write other books. He questioned himself. He censored himself. He had second, even third thoughts about almost everything.

In the end, he wondered if the book would even be remembered.

Apart from his long-standing interest in the occult, the best reason we can deduce for Stoker’s apparently sudden interest in writing an out-and-out supernatural novel at the end of the 1880s was his working association with Hall Caine. Since they had many discussions about legends of living death, demonic love, and life unnaturally prolonged as possible stage vehicles for Henry Irving, it is not surprising that Stoker began mulling over a similar theme. Caine may even have suggested a modern-day vampire adventure as something with a good chance for commercial success. Traditional Gothic novels were always set in the past, or at least stripped of the trappings of modernity. But what if the present was pitted against the past? No one had attempted such a thing, and there was a good chance it might catch the public’s fancy. The literary vampire canon then extant was fairly small, comprising familiar works like Polidori’s tale “The Vampyre,” wherein a vampire sets up shop in London society; Varney the Vampyre, the rambling penny dreadful serial in which key scenes in Dracula have obvious antecedents; Carmilla, of course; and the sometimes overlooked but nonetheless strong inspiration of the German short story “The Mysterious Stranger” (1844) by Karl von Wachsmann, best known from its anonymous English translation of 1854.

While we have no letters from Stoker to Caine asking for editorial advice on any of his books, since Caine was already highly successful and would soon be the best-selling British novelist of his time, Stoker would have taken any recommendation seriously. So perhaps their discussions of wandering Jews and demon lovers did stray into vampire country. We do know, at least, that the beginning of his professional relationship with Caine coincided with his own renewed determination to become a successful novelist. Around the time he began making notes for the yet-untitled vampire story, Stoker had finished and was in the process of publishing The Snake’s Pass, a straightforward romantic melodrama, well paced and still entertainingly readable. The villain is Black Murdock, a “gombeen man,” or shady moneylender, who wants to foreclose on a certain property because he knows something its cash-strapped owner does not: the land (situated on the pass to the sea through which St. Patrick drove out Ireland’s snakes) contains a hidden treasure. The property is also surrounded by a dangerous, all-engulfing peat bog, which catches up with Murdock when he ignores its perils in his greedy quest for gold.

Then the convulsion of the bog grew greater; it almost seemed as if some monstrous living thing was deep under the surface and writhing to escape. By this time Murdock’s house had sunk almost level with the bog. He had climbed on the thatched roof, and stood there looking towards us, and stretching forth his hands as though in supplication for help. For a while the superior size and buoyancy of the roof sustained it, but then it, too, began slowly to sink. Murdock knelt and clasped his hands in a frenzy of prayer. And then came a mighty roar and a gathering rush. The side of the hill below us seemed to burst. Murdock threw up his arms—we heard his wild cry as the roof of the house, and he with it, was in an instant sucked below the surface of the heaving mass.

The cataclysm strongly recalls the climax of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which Stoker admired and always thought might be an excellent basis for an opera. The image of a domicile being engulfed in geological turmoil was one he would revisit more than once in his writing.

Although work for Irving and Caine was already threatening to swallow Stoker himself up, in London, on Saturday, March 8, 1890, he found time to write the first of only two dated notes for the new novel’s plot.* A certain “Count——” in Styria, who wishes to buy property in England, has written the president of the Incorporated Law Society, who refers the matter to the solicitor Abraham Aaronson, who in turn selects an unnamed but “trustworthy” young lawyer who

is told to visit Castle—Munich Dead House—people on train knowing address dissuade him—met at station storm arrive old castle—left in courtyard driver disappears Count appears—describe old dead man made alive waxen colour dead dark eyes—what fire in them—not human—hell fire—Stay in castle. No one but old man but no pretence of being alone—old man in waking trance—Young man goes out sees girls one tries to kiss him not on lips but throat Old Count interferes—rage & fury diabolical—This man belongs to me I want him. A prisoner for a time . . .

The notes contain three separate references to the Old Count’s intention to possess his male visitor; in addition to the March 8 “This man belongs to me I want him,” a March 14 notation reads “Loneliness” followed by “the Kiss—‘This man belongs to me.’ ” When he begins to formally outline his chapters, he identifies Dracula’s brides as “the visitors,” followed by “is it a dream—woman stoops to kiss him—terror of death—suddenly Count turns her away—‘This man belongs to me.’ ” The importance of the line to Stoker is also evidenced in the novel’s final typescript, where the typist has mistakenly entered something other than the word “man” and Stoker has emphatically restored it—the largest, boldest single-word hand emendation in the final typesetter’s manuscript.

In the published book, Dracula additionally says to his wives, “Back, back to your own place ! Your time is not yet come. Wait. Have patience. To-morrow night, to-morrow night is yours!” In the 1899 American edition, Stoker changed the last sentence, rather significantly, to “To-night is mine. To-morrow night is yours!” There can be no doubt that the Count intends to make a very personal claim on Harker. On the way to his room, Harker notes that “the last I saw of Count Dracula was his kissing his hand to me; with a red light of triumph in his eyes.” The Count has already told his wives that “when I am done with him you can kiss him at your will.” Dracula’s parting gesture—his own gloating kiss blown to the young man—makes his intentions fairly explicit. Christopher Craft, in his frequently cited essay “Kiss Me with Those Red Lips: Gender and Inversion in Dracula,” suggests that the whole novel “derives from Dracula’s hovering interest in Jonathan Harker; the sexual threat that this novel first evokes, manipulates, sustains but never finally represents is that Dracula will seduce, penetrate, drain another male.”

In the end Dracula never touches Harker—it is Harker who, searching for a key, touches the Count’s body, which is tumescent and blood-gorged, like a postmortem erection. Harker might as well be looking for the key to his own sexual ambivalence; his repulsion for the act is matched only by his compulsion to carry it out. “I shuddered as I bent over to touch him, and every sense in me revolted at the contact,” Harker writes in his journal, “but I had to search, or I was lost. The coming night might see my own body a banquet in a similar way to those horrid three.” Has he already forgotten the exquisite sexual thrill, the “languorous ecstasy,” he experienced during the vampire woman’s oral ministrations? Harker continues: “I felt all over the body, but no sign could I find of the key. Then I stopped and looked at the Count. There was a mocking smile on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad.”

If the homoerotic dimensions of Dracula are largely subliminal, a matter of Stoker’s “unconscious cerebration” (the pre-Freudian term for involuntary thought processes operating beneath the level of awareness), several earlier works consciously presented vampires frankly attracted to the same sex. The lesbian intrigue of Le Fanu’s Carmilla is front and center, at least to modern readers, and almost certainly to Stoker. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s short story “Manor,” published in Germany in 1885, concerns the love of a dead sailor (the title character, turned into a vampire at the age of nineteen) for a younger boy who equally adores him. There is nothing at all malignant about Manor—Ulrichs was a pioneering crusader for homosexual rights—and the real villains are the townspeople who dig up the beach to locate his resting place and destroy him and his relationship. Ulrichs’s story was not translated into English during Stoker’s life, and he was unlikely to have even heard of it. Far more accessible to Stoker was Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock’s “A True Tale of a Vampire,” included in his 1894 collection Studies in Death, which frankly equated vampirism with pederasty. The story opens with a clear reference to the setting of Carmilla: “Vampire stories are generally located in Styria; mine is also.” Stenbock was a well-known figure to literary London, if only because he pursued the grotesque with an almost religious fervor. Arthur Symons recalled him as “one of those extraordinary Slav creatures, who, after coming to settle down in London after half a lifetime spent in traveling, live in a bizarre, fantastic, feverish, eccentric, morbid and perverse fashion. . . . He was one of the most inhuman beings I have ever encountered; inhuman and abnormal; a degenerate, who had I know not how many vices.” In life, Stenbock seems to have preferred adult men over boys, but the monstrous Count Vardalek of “A True Tale” would have been perfectly at ease dragging children home in bags to satisfy his appetites.

Since Stoker’s time, vampires have reliably aligned themselves with changing fashions in sexual and social transgression. In folklore, simply existing outside the tribe in any discernable or annoying way could be enough to stoke suspicions of vampirism or witchcraft. The village idiot, the village drunk, the village whore—all were excellent candidates for supernatural scrutiny and scapegoating, especially when the crop failed, or mysterious illnesses transpired. Stoker told an interviewer that he had always been interested in the vampire legend, because “it touches both on mystery and fact.” He went on to explain how prescientific peoples might conjure vampires to explain poorly understood natural phenomena. “A person may have fallen into a death-like trance and been buried before the time. Afterwards the body may have been dug up and found alive, and from this a horror seized upon the people, and in their ignorance they imagined that a vampire was about.” Those prone to hysteria, “through excess of fear, might themselves fall into trances in the same way; and so the story grew that one vampire might enslave many others and make them like himself.”

Almost every culture has some variation of the myth of the hungry dead, and the rules by which these creatures are created and killed are so varied and diverse that no work of fiction could utilize them all and remain coherent or plausible, even taking into account a heavy dose of suspended disbelief. Stoker wisely steered clear of some of the more ludicrous beliefs (for instance, that vampires, seemingly driven by obsessive-compulsive disorder as much as by bloodlust, could be stopped by strewing poppy seeds in their path, which they would be compelled to individually count—a laborious process sure to last until dawn). In order to create at least a degree of believability, Stoker judiciously adapted the basics of vampirism as set forth in the accounts of eastern European vampire panics by the French biblical scholar Dom Augustin Calmet in Dissertations sur les apparitions des esprits et sur les vampires (1746, translated as The Phantom World in 1850). Here he found the time-honored methods of vampire disposal, actually used on suspicious corpses: a sharp stake through the heart, decapitation, and cremation. Variant methods included the removal of the heart rather than its staking. These were all physical measures taken against a physical threat. For the most part Stoker intended his vampires to be reanimated corpses, not (as some traditions held) the body’s astral projection of its ghostly double, which in its nocturnal wanderings collected blood that was somehow dematerialized and physically reconstituted in the grave-bound corpse. The 1888 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica presented this view, but Stoker went his own way; he retained the vampire’s power of dematerialization but never raised the conundrum of blood transport. He gave Dracula the ability to shapeshift into a bat (or batlike bird), a trait not found in folktales, and the additional ability to assume the form of a wolf, something he found in Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves (1865). Baring-Gould described the Serbian vlkoslak, a vampire-werewolf hybrid, and related the Greek belief that werewolves became vampires after death. Stoker was sufficiently impressed by some of Baring-Gould’s descriptions of werewolf traits that he incorporated them almost verbatim into his description of Dracula. (Baring-Gould, for instance, says the werewolf’s “hands are broad, and his fingers short, and there are always some hairs in the hollow of his hand”; Dracula’s hands “are rather coarse—broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm.”) Baring-Gould also gave Stoker his descriptions of werewolf eyebrows meeting above the nose and sharp white teeth protruding over the lips. A blurred boundary between human and animal forms was especially resonant for late Victorian readers, still reeling from Darwin’s unsettling theories.

Since so many film adaptations of Dracula have depicted the vampire being incinerated by sunlight, readers are often surprised that in Stoker’s novel the Count walks the streets of London by day, unscathed, although his powers are diminished in the light. In folklore, the vampire, like other evil spirits, retreats into hiding by day but is never destroyed by the sun. This particular vulnerability made its first appearance in F. W. Murnau’s unauthorized Dracula adaptation, the German Expressionist classic Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror) in 1922. Stoker discovered the curious word nosferatu in Emily Gerard’s 1885 essay “Transylvanian Superstitions,” which first appeared in the journal The Nineteenth Century and was later included in her book The Land beyond the Forest (the title refers to Transylvania’s literal meaning, “across the forest”). Although she claimed the word as the Romanian term for vampire, nosferatu appears in no Romanian dictionary, or any dictionary in any language. To date, it has been found in only two other published sources, a German account of Transylvanian traditions published in 1865 by Wilhelm Schmidt, and an 1896 article by the Hungarian-Romanian folklorist Heinrich von Wlislocki, in which it appears in the variant, capitalized form Nosferat, describing an illegitimate child of illegitimate parents, who becomes a bloodsucking spirit. The word’s elusive etymology has prompted numerous origin theories, none completely convincing.†

Folklorist Emily Gerard.

At roughly the same time Stoker made his earliest notes, Oscar Wilde delivered a handwritten manuscript of his own horror story to Miss Dickens’s Type Writing Office, just a block away from the Lyceum on Wellington Street. Ethel Dickens (granddaughter of Charles) would produce the typescript for the first version of Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which appeared in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Magazine, an American periodical distributed simultaneously in England.

The title character is a privileged young man “of extraordinary personal beauty.” His portrait has been painted by a society artist, Basil Hallward, whose admiration of his model borders on obsession. The portrait’s subject, however, has an unexpected reaction to the canvas. “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young,” Dorian pouts. “If only it were the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” There is a convenient stand-in for Mephistopheles at hand, Lord Henry Wotton, who doesn’t directly broker the deal but tacitly approves Dorian’s descent into darkness with an engulfing tsunami of cynical epigrams. (“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick.”) Wilde saw himself in all three characters: “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian is what I would like to be.” There is also more than a hint of Frank Miles in the doomed, fictional Hallward; both painters are killed, in their own ways, in the pursuit of masculine beauty.

The Picture of Dorian Gray caused a furor when it first appeared in the July 1890 edition of Lippincott’s Magazine.

As Dorian retains his youth, the painting begins to show signs of both age and moral corruption, until at last it resembles a hideous, ancient satyr and has to be shut away in an attic room. Meanwhile, Dorian callously drives an actress who loves him to suicide, but mostly he ruins the lives and reputations of other males. “Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?” Basil demands, after he has aged eighteen years and Dorian none at all. “There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable. What about Adrian Singleton, and his dreadful end?” The list goes on and on. Like a vampire, Dorian feeds on the lives of others to maintain his unnatural existence. When Basil Hallward finally discovers the secret of the painting, its original beauty eaten away by “the leprosies of sin,” he begs Dorian to pray with him for mutual forgiveness. “The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful” as the cursed, corrupted painting he had created. Instead Dorian stabs the artist to death and arranges for his corpse to be destroyed by acid.

In the end he has covered all his crimes. The painting is the only witness. In a final frenzy, he stabs the canvas, somehow imagining the act will set him free. It does, but not in the way he hoped. The painting returns to its unblemished state, and Dorian lies dead before it with the knife in his own heart, “withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage.”

The critical reaction to Dorian Gray was swift and savage. The London Daily Chronicle’s notice amounted to a neat distillation of the general outrage that descended on the book. “It is a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Décadents—a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction—a gloating study of the mental and physical corruption of a fresh, fair and golden youth, which might be horrible and fascinating but for its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophisings, and the contaminating trail of garish vulgarity.”

The New York Times Sunday correspondent reported how Dorian Gray “had monopolized the attention of Londoners who talk about books. It must have excited vastly more interest here than in America simply because [of] last year’s exposure of what were euphemistically styled the West End scandals.” Also called the Cleveland Street affair, the scandals were a series of trials involving sensational charges against high government officials for covering up a male brothel in Cleveland Street, which procured telegraph boys for wealthy and aristocratic clients. As the Times correspondent explained, “Englishmen have been abnormally sensitive to the faintest suggestion of pruriency in the direction of friendships. Very likely this bestial suspicion did not cross the mind of one American reader out of ten thousand, but the whole town here leaped at it with avidity.”

(top and bottom) The artist Majeska illustrated Horace Liveright’s 1932 deluxe edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

For most of August 1890, Bram, Florence, and Noel vacationed in the picturesque fishing village of Whitby, North Yorkshire. Vacation may not be the best word to ever describe Bram’s time away from the Lyceum, for as usual he was still preoccupied with work—his writing—and he spent uncounted hours taking notes from books at the local museum and subscription library. It is not inconceivable that Whitby was chosen for the holiday because Bram had already decided it might make an ideal location in his novel, the English port of entry for his still unnamed vampire menace; he had first chosen Dover, then wisely reconsidered. Whitby provided a more surreptitious route, and considerably more atmosphere. Stoker came alone to Whitby for the first week, and it was therefore likely that he did the bulk of his research and note taking then. Not far from the guesthouse was the storefront studio of a local photographer, Frank Sutcliffe, who sold prints and postcards of Whitby and environs. His sepia-toned views of the abbey and the adjacent church and cemetery overlooking the sea were especially striking, but the Sutcliffe photo that commanded Stoker’s attention depicted the dramatically beached wreck of the Russian schooner Dmitry, run ashore in Whitby on October 24, 1885. (Henry Irving was in rehearsals for Faust at the time.) His curiosity piqued, Stoker sought out and had a conversation with a Coast Guard boatman, William Petherick, who gave him details on various wrecks, including the Dmitry, and seems to have transcribed a complete account of the incident from official records and given it to Stoker. If the idea of Count Dracula arriving via a deliberate shipwreck, instead of merely by sea, had never occurred to him before, it did now. He only slightly disguised the name of his fictional vessel, the Demeter.

The ruins of Whitby Abbey, photographed by Frank Sutcliffe in the 1880s.

Whitby’s harbor is situated at the mouth of the River Esk, which divides the town into two promontories, east and west. The Stokers stayed at an ideally located guest house at 6 West Crescent owned by a Mrs. Veazy, with an excellent view of both the harbor and the east cliff dominated by the imposing ruins of Whitby Abbey, founded in 1078 on the site of an original monastery dating to the year 657 and destroyed by Viking invaders in the late ninth century. The ghost of its medieval abbess, Saint Hilda, was believed to haunt its empty windows and is mentioned in passing by Mina Harker in Dracula.

Stoker was fascinated with the wreck of the Russian schooner Dimitri near Whitby in 1885. His name for the vampire-haunted ship in Dracula was the Demeter.

Max Schreck, the first screen Dracula, takes to the sea in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922).

In addition to a location, Whitby afforded Stoker some of his most profitable research. It was his only known visit to the town, and he made the most of it. At the Whitby Museum, he found a glossary of Whitby localisms, a good number of which found their way into his finished book. The museum building also held the Whitby Subscription Library, where he requested an 1820 volume by William Wilkinson, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia: with Various Political Observations Related to Them. In this book Stoker momentously encountered the name “Dracula,” the sobriquet given to the Wallachian warlord Vlad Tepes˛ (1431–76), legendary for protecting the region from Turkish invasion, and a folk hero in Romania to this day. Stoker paraphrased Wilkinson in his notes and added emphatic capitalization: “DRACULA in Wallachian language means DEVIL. Wallachians were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous by courage, cruel action, or cunning.”

Wilkinson erred slightly. “Dracula” in Romanian means “Son of the Devil” or “Son of the Dragon”; Vlad’s father was called “Dracul,” which means both “devil” and “dragon.” There is no evidence Stoker was aware of the warlord’s reputation as Vlad the Impaler, so-called for his favorite and extraordinarily sadistic method of dispatching enemies. On one particularly atrocious occasion, twenty thousand Turkish captives were exterminated in this manner and displayed in a mile-long semicircle outside the capital city of Târgovs˛te. It is nothing but a gruesome coincidence that stakes are also used to kill vampires. And there is no documentation that Stoker ever came across a German pamphlet describing Dracula dining beneath his writhing victims and dipping his bread in their blood. But, since wooden stakes and blood were highly suggestive of vampires, enthusiastic modern scholars have repeatedly asserted that Stoker was far more knowledgeable about Vlad than he actually was, even maintaining that the historical Dracula was the primary inspiration for the fictional one. This is patently untrue; Stoker’s notes show that the book had taken considerable shape in his mind before he struck out his first idea for his monstrous villain’s name—the all-too-obvious “Count Wampyr”—and replaced it with the three crackling, undulating syllables that would forever define the idea of vampirism in the public mind. Professor Van Helsing, enumerating historical documents, notes that “in one manuscript this very Dracula is spoken of as ‘wampyr,’ which we all understand too well.” This is Stoker’s invention; there has been found no manuscript or historical book in any language using the German word for “vampire” in connection with Vlad.

top and bottom Bram Stoker discovered the name “Dracula” in this book, which he found at the Whitby Susbcription Library while on holiday. (John Moore Library)

If Stoker hadn’t taken Lippincott’s Magazine with him to Whitby, he certainly carried the imprint of Dorian Gray in his mind. The firestorm of moral outrage at the book already threatened to make Stoker’s concept of Dracula as an archetypal Gothic novel villain problematic at best. Dorian Gray’s sins, never explicitly identified, paled before the lurid transgressions described in meticulous detail in Gothic novels like The Monk and The Italian. These villains, whose hawklike profiles and blazing eyes made them perfect physical templates for Dracula, were also unashamed sexual predators, their overt, libidinous behavior exceeding anything even hinted at by Wilde. Stoker’s notes indicated Dracula’s power to implant “immoral thoughts” in his victims, and this idea of moral pollution was precisely what critics objected to in Dorian Gray.

Stoker’s first instinct may have been to increase his cast of characters, the better to distract the reader from thinking about matters that were increasingly unspeakable. And so an early page of notes headed “Dramatis Personae” contains a painter, Francis A. Aytown; a “Deaf Mute Woman” and “Silent Man,” both servants to the Count; an unnamed “Texas inventor;” a detective named Cotford; a “Psychical Research Agent” named Alfred Singleton; and a “German Professor,” Max Windshoeffel. These last three seem to have been merged later into one character, the vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing. It is interesting indeed that Stoker named a discarded preliminary character “Adrian Singleton,” more than slightly similar to Wilde’s “Alfred Singleton.” In Dorian Gray he is one of the title character’s victims, a degraded denizen of a vice den. It is exactly the kind of place Hall Caine described disapprovingly in Drink and claimed to have personally visited—purely in the interest of research, of course. Perhaps Stoker accompanied him.

People have long sought a specific real-world model for Dracula, a part most frequently assigned to Henry Irving, but other candidates have been nominated, some of them less than convincingly. The elderly Franz Liszt visited the Lyceum, and he was a dramatic-looking old man who had composed “The Mephisto Waltz.” (To paraphrase Tennessee Williams, sometimes there was Dracula—so quickly!) Slightly better nominees for Stoker’s prototype have included the Greek-born French actor Jacques Damala, Sarah Bernhardt’s husband at the time she was in London as Irving’s guest in 1882. According to Stoker, the twenty-seven-year-old morphine addict “looked like a dead man. I sat next to him at supper and the idea that he was dead came strong on me. I think he had taken some mighty dose of opium, for he moved and spoke like a man in a dream. His eyes, staring out of his white waxen face, seemed hardly the eyes of the living.”

In seven more years Damala would indeed be dead, from the effects of morphine mixed with cocaine. But that night in 1882 during which she entranced Stoker, the Divine Sarah herself might have been actively auditioning for the role of Lucy Westenra, or at least one of Dracula’s Transylvanian brides. In Paris, she had just posed for a series of photographic souvenir postcards showing her sleeping in a coffin. The public had come to expect her dying onstage—her signature roles were tragic heroines, often suicides, including the likes of Phèdre, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, and Tosca. The coffin photograph was an inspired publicity ploy, trading on the popularity of Victorian postmortem photography, but also serving another ritual function. At thirty-eight she was precariously close to the dreaded “certain age” of forty. The coffin photo was Bernhardt’s Dorian Gray portrait in reverse, allowing her to freeze her beauty, stage-manage her “funeral,” and have her own last laugh on mortality .

The spectre of aging haunted Victorians almost as much as death. In Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain, the historian Kay Heath notes, “The fin-de-siècle preoccupation with degeneration in individuals and the general population also increased age anxiety. Age itself could be considered definitive evidence of degeneration as the human body began to dissolve before one’s eyes, a miniature version of the regression of the populace which was becoming feared.” Bernhardt had been consumptive, or was thought to have been, in her teens. While she mysteriously outgrew her bloody cough, an aura of deathliness still clung to her, and she consciously cultivated it for public attention. A talented sculptress, Benrhardt modeled a bronze inkwell incorporating her own sphinxlike head flanked by bat wings. She was also said to have worn a stuffed bat as a fashion accessory.

While Bernhardt’s eccentricities were morbid enough, her ghoulishness never prompted public objection, perhaps because the unhealthy sexual overtones weren’t sufficiently pronounced. But on March 13, 1891, almost exactly a year after Stoker made his first notes for Dracula, London experienced its worst eruption of censorship hysteria since Dorian Gray when the first English performance of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, denied a public license by the Lord Chamberlain, was given a legal but private performance at the Royalty Theatre, Soho. The critic William Archer, recounting the event for the Fortnightly Review, recorded “a few of the choice epithets” the press had hurled at the Norwegian play: “Abominable, disgusting, bestial, fetid, loathsome, putrid, crapulous, offensive, scandalous, repulsive, revolting, blasphemous, abhorrent, degrading, unwholesome, sordid, foul, filthy, malodorous, noisome. Several of the critics shouted for the police.”

Sarah Bernhardt, in one of her celebrated coffin portraits, sold as souvenir postcards to morbid admirers. Since so many of Bernhardt’s most famous roles were tragic, audiences expected to see her die onstage.

The story recounted the horrible choice faced by the long-suffering Mrs. Aveling, whose husband has finally died from his endless dissipations, when her grown son, Osvald, returns with the news that he has been diagnosed with a hereditary “softening of the brain”—that is, advanced syphilis. He pleads with his mother to take the life she has given by mercifully administering an overdose of morphine. The play ends with the mother’s horrible choice hanging unresolved, forcing the audience to make a decision of its own. In Dracula, the mercy-killing theme is raised when Mina secures the promise from her protectors to take all appropriate steps if vampirism engulfs her.

The Sporting and Dramatic News claimed that “ninety-seven percent of the people who go to see Ghosts are nasty-minded people who find the discussion of nasty subjects to their taste, in exact proportion to their nastiness.” The Daily Telegraph called Ghosts an “open drain,” a “sore unbandaged,” and “a dirty act done publicly.” The periodical Truth decried the private audience as a pack of “muck-ferreting dogs” and seemed to have Oscar Wilde and other transgressive company in mind when they decried the (assumed) appeal of Ghosts to “effeminate men and male women,” the “socialistic and the sexless,” and, heaping on some gratuitous misogyny, “unwomanly women, the unsexed females, the whole army of unprepossessing cranks in petticoats. All of them—men and women alike—know that they are doing not only a nasty but an illegal thing.”

Stoker needn’t have seen the performance; just reading the reviews and letters to the editor may have prompted him to ask himself if it was really the right time to resurrect an archetypal Gothic villain, his moral outrages made all the worse by way of vampirism, and drop him down into a modern London, especially this modern London, where a reactionary moral crusade was taking hold. Apropos of Ghosts, The Picture of Dorian Gray reads today as an almost transparent syphilis parable, an interpretation first put forth by Wilde’s preeminent biographer, Richard Ellman. Stoker may have dialed back a full elaboration of his vampire’s sins, but Dracula would also contain a discernible allegory of syphilis as its characters, terrified of a blood-borne contagion, obsessively examine the skin for telltale lesions, with pseudoscientific cures like garlic wreaths and wolfbane sprigs in lieu of mercury treatments and “blood purifiers.”

As depicted in the 1945 MGM film version, Dorian’s portrait was a perfect picture of syphilitic corruption.

The first of two documented social encounters between the creators of Dorian Gray and Dracula, at least during the developmental stages of Stoker’s book, took place in 1889. Wilde had written a note to Stoker: “My dear Bram—my wife is not very well and has gone to Brighton for ten days rest, but I will be very happy to come to supper on the 26th myself. Sincerely yours, Oscar Wilde.” He had been accepting many social invitations on his own, and his wife’s illness may have been, in part, a reaction to the stress of their leading increasingly separate lives. Since the birth of their sons, Constance Wilde had had to cope with an increasing parade of attractive young men at Tite Street, apparently blind to the extent of Oscar’s involvement with them. One, Robbie Ross, is thought to have been his first extramarital male lover. (The idea, put forth in earlier biographies, that he was Oscar’s first male lover, period, today seems rather quaint.) Robbie remained a close family friend to the very end. But Constance’s denial was so deep she confided to a friend that she was struggling with feelings of jealousy for a woman she suspected might be her husband’s mistress. And she doesn’t seem to have suspected anything about another frequent visitor, Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of John Sholto Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry. Pale, blond, and strikingly beautiful, Alfred—more familiarly known by his childhood nickname, “Bosie”—was a twenty-one -year-old Oxonian and a budding poet of some talent.

The supper to which Wilde had been invited by Stoker would have been held in the Lyceum’s Beefsteak Room, one of its paneled walls then dominated by John Singer Sargent’s life-sized canvas of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. Some of Frank Miles’s landscapes also hung there, even as the artist was dying in an asylum, very much in the same wretched manner described by Ibsen in Ghosts. Miles would finally succumb to brain syphilis in July 1891.

With the Banquo-like presence of the doomed artist hovering in the air, what literary matters might have been discussed that night? The year of 1889 would culminate in Wilde’s outpouring of Dorian Gray, and Stoker, no doubt, was at least beginning to mull over the possibilities of literary vampires. Irving had not yet given up the idea of resurrecting the living-dead Vanderdecken. If the conversation turned to such matters, Wilde’s thoughts about vampirism would have been fascinating to know. He would have been quick to notice the inherent paradoxes of being simultaneously dead and alive, and could anyone have better encapsulated the transgressive erotics? The subject lends itself easily to an imagined, wickedly Wildean epigram: “The vampire’s mouth—such an ambiguous orifice! So soft and sensual, yet so hard and penetrating . . .”

Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas.

Stoker may well have been reading Wilde’s poetry as well as Dorian Gray in preparation for Dracula. In his opening chapter, upon glimpsing the sharp-toothed coachman who meets Jonathan Harker at the Borgo Pass, a fellow traveler nervously whispers, “Denn die Todten reiten schnell,” a slight misquote of a line from Gottfried Bürger’s death-and-the-maiden ballad “Lenore” (1774), famously and accurately translated as “For the dead ride fast” by the American romantic poet James Russell Lowell in 1846. Though “Denn” does not appear in Bürger, Stoker translates the line as “For the dead travel fast,” as if taking a cue from Wilde’s poem “Fabien dei Franchi,” dedicated in 1882 “To my friend Henry Irving” and named after one of the actor’s dual roles in The Corsican Brothers: “The dead that travel fast, the opening door / The murdered brother rising through the floor.” Stoker certainly knew Wilde’s poem—it was too cloyingly flattering to Irving for anyone to forget. Because of the fame of Dracula, the line from Bürger’s ballad is now almost always quoted in English the way Wilde and Stoker, and not James Russell Lowell, chose to present it.

The next time we can place Wilde and Stoker in the same room is three years later, at the West End debut of Oscar’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, his first theatrical success. The play is a sparking comedy of manners about a young wife confronting the possibility that her husband has been leading a double life. The presumed dalliance is ultimately revealed to be harmless, but the theme reflected Constance Wilde’s anxieties about the state of her marriage that could not be explained away. Her husband would spend more and more time with Bosie, often in hotels, and later with lower-class rent boys, for whom Bosie had a special appreciation.

According to Wilde biographer Neil McKenna, “The audience on that memorable night of Lady Windermere’s Fan constituted an emotional and sexual autobiography for Oscar. There were lovers past, present and even future seated in the auditorium.” Bosie, along with Bram and Florence Stoker, and a host of celebrities, attended the premiere. Oscar had ordered a dozen or so carnations dyed a bright green and distributed them among selected friends. The actor Ben Webster, playing an epigram-spouting, Wilde-like bachelor named Cecil Graham, also sported a green flower in his lapel when he delivered such quips as “We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” In Paris, green carnations had replaced green cravats as signals between members of the homosexual demimonde, and Wilde had learned of the trend. He knew Londoners would talk, and they did, even if they didn’t really know what they were talking about.

Following the curtain call, Wilde strolled languidly onstage, a cigarette dangling between what one critic described as his “daintily gloved” fingers, and the green carnation affixed to his lapel. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I have enjoyed this evening immensely. The actors have given us a charming rendering of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself.” Some were amused, but many others were revolted by what they regarded as an arrogant breach of decorum—especially smoking in front of the ladies. And that was the least of Wilde’s gender transgressions that night, and in general. Everyone understood that those green flowers meant something . . . something that mocked and subverted traditional notions of masculinity.

We don’t know what words Wilde exchanged with the Stokers that night, but we can assume he always thought of Stoker as something of a prig—the priggishness covering a submerged self Wilde could imagine all too well. It would have been so very easy, at the interval, while complimenting Florence on what a newspaper described as her “marvelous evening wrap of striped brocade,” to discreetly slip a carnation into Bram’s pocket to be discovered later. When he undressed.

It is difficult to understand how Stoker ever found time to write Dracula. In addition to Irving’s London seasons and provincial tours, and a command performance of Becket for Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle, there were two more Lyceum tours to America, one in 1893–94 and another in 1895–96. Beyond theatre commitments was his continued involvement in Hall Caine’s literary affairs, including preparing for publication and writing introductions for reprints of Caine’s books. These were part of an ambitious enterprise headed by the publisher William Heinemann called the English Library, which invited established writers in England and America to distribute their work in continental Europe. Stoker was a partner in the imprint, along with publisher Wolcott Balestier and journalist W. L. Courtney. English Library authors included Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, J. M. Barrie, and, at Stoker’s personal invitation, Mark Twain, who later became a friend when he lived with his family in London.

A letter written by H. P. Lovecraft in 1932, and first noted by Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu in 1979, claimed that “Stoker was a very inept writer when not helped out by revisers. . . . I know an old lady who almost had the job of revising ‘Dracula’ back in the early 1890s—she saw the original ms. & says it was a fearful mess. Finally someone else (Stoker thought her price for the work was too high) whipped it into such shape as it now possesses.” The explosive implications were not well received by Stoker aficionados, and the letter has routinely been dismissed as one of Lovecraft’s strange imaginings; the writer’s eccentricities have been exhaustively documented. However, Lovecraft told variants of the same story on at least three other occasions. As early as 1923, in a letter to writer Frank Belknap Long, he named the would-be book doctor as Edith Miniter. “Mrs. Miniter saw Dracula in manuscript about thirty years ago. It was incredibly slovenly. She considered the job of revision, but charged too much for Stoker.” A letter to Donald Wandrei in 1927 offered more information, and gave another decidedly negative appraisal of Stoker as a writer:

Have you read anything of Stoker’s aside from Dracula? . . . Stoker was absolutely devoid of a sense of form, and could not write a coherent tale to save his life. Everything of his went through the hands of a re-writer and it is curious to note that one of our circle of amateur journalists, an old lady named Mrs. Miniter, had a chance to revise the Dracula manuscript (which was a fiendish mess!) before its publication, but turned it down because Stoker refused to pay her the price which the difficulty of the work impelled her to charge. Stoker had a brilliant fantastic mind, but was unable to shape the images he created.

Finally, in a lengthy and heartfelt appreciation of Miniter written following her death in 1934, but not published until 1938, Lovecraft offered a different reason for her rejecting Stoker’s offer. “Notwithstanding her saturation with the spectral lore of the countryside, Mrs. Miniter did not care for stories of a macabre or supernatural cast; regarding them as hopelessly extravagant and unrepresentative of life,” Lovecraft wrote. “Perhaps that is one reason why, in the early Boston days, she had declined a chance to revise a manuscript of this sort which later met with much fame—the vampire novel Dracula, whose author was then touring America as manager for Sir Henry Irving.”

Edith Dowe Miniter (1867–1934) was a New England journalist and amateur fiction writer who published one commercial novel, Our Natupski Neighbors (1916). The amateur press movement to which Miniter belonged emerged after the Civil War as a serious hobby for people interested in writing, editing, and letterpress printing. Its small-circulation newspapers and journals served as social hubs, often extending to regional and national conventions. H. P. Lovecraft became active in the movement in 1920, the year he met Miniter, and the spirit of amateur journalism went on to significantly drive the growth of fantasy and science fiction fandom throughout the twentieth century.

Boston journalist Edith Miniter, who refused Stoker’s offer to edit and revise Dracula.

If Stoker offered Mrs. Miniter the job of revising Dracula, how and when did he meet her? When Henry Irving’s 1893–94 American tour reached Boston in January, Miniter had just joined the editorial staff of the Boston Home Journal, a lively arts and literary weekly. “Its Editorials are pungent and straightforward,” a typical advertisement for advertisers enthused. “Its Society News tells your doings and those of your friends. Its Fiction is of the highest order. Its Dramatic Criticisms are scholarly and its Musical Melange is sparkling. It is as full of interest as an egg is of meat. There is no doubt of the value of an ‘ad’ in the Boston Home Journal.”

The paper obviously had a good opinion of itself, and the promised editorial pungency came out in its reviews. The Lyceum was traveling with nine productions that season: The Merchant of Venice, Olivia, Nance Oldfield, The Bells, Becket, Louis XI, Charles I, The Lyons Mail, and Henry VIII. Early during the three-week engagement, the Journal showed it knew how to damn with faint praise. On the topic of Ellen Terry, an anonymous writer opined, “She is not a great actress in the sense of the word as usually applied to actresses of broad intellectual power and vivid passion—the Medeas and Lady Macbeths of the stage; she does not belong to their rank and fails to suggest even vaguely the scope and splendor of their geniuses. But with those who have seen her, she remains in the memory a dream of youth, beauty and sweetness.” Like Philadelphia, Boston was known for tough, skeptical critics; this may be a reason Broadway producers chose both cities as the most useful out-of-town venues in advance of New York.‡

Stoker was the company’s press contact, and he also bought the advertising. One can imagine he had some diplomatic words to share with the Journal editors, especially after the paper’s appraisal of The Merchant of Venice near the end of the Boston stay. Of Irving’s portrayal of Shylock, the reviewer did not mince words, calling the performance a “grotesque caricature.”

In representing, or attempting to represent, the racial characteristics of Shylock, Mr. Irving goes too far in a line that most actors do not go far enough in. Mr. Irving’s Shylock is the kind of a Jew that in our day we would expect to see upon the streets with a tray hung about his neck whereon would be displayed suspenders, buttons, combs, and other small articles, to say nothing of shoe strings. He is the kind of Jew that one would find in the lowest dives of the North End, by no means the Jew who could bring forth a daughter who could win the sympathy that Jessica demands.

The last comment was presumably a crumb thrown to Terry, who played Shylock’s daughter. But the attack on Irving continued with relish: “He is a dirty Jew, withal, one who deserves the contempt that is heaped upon him, not for his religion or belief, but for his own repulsiveness. . . . It is easy to see how Mr. Irving’s Shylock would be spurned as a rodent, as an unclean thing.” The reviewer also complained that Irving delivered the “Hath not a Jew” speech like “a second-hand clothing dealer disposing of a suit of clothes.”

Although Stoker might well have objected to the review as an affront to Irving—according to almost all other accounts, Irving played the always-problematic role with great restraint and dignity—the degree to which he was offended by the reviewer’s attitude toward Jews is a matter for debate. The great Gothic character then taking shape in Stoker’s mind has, in recent years, been criticized as an anti-Semitic stereotype, and perhaps deservedly. The simple idea of a hook-nosed foreigner who steals babies for their blood, of course, comes straight out of the time-dishonored playbook of the blood libel, not to mention the recoiling from Christian symbols. Stoker drops some casual anti-Jewish sentiment into Jonathan Harker’s journal entry of October 30, when it is discovered that a cargo receiver facilitating Dracula’s escape back to Transylvania in his earth-box is one Immanuel Hildesheim, “a Hebrew of rather the Adelphi Theatre type, with a nose like a sheep, and a fez. His arguments were pointed with specie [money in coin]—we doing the punctuation—and with a little bargaining he told us what he knew.”

Antisemitic Victorian architypes. George du Maurier’s “Filthy black Hebrew,” Svengali.

Henry Irving as Shylock.

Shylock was part villain but mostly victim. If Stoker needed a model for a thoroughly evil Jew, he needn’t have looked any further than a book he would have known well since childhood. Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) introduced the repellent character Fagin, who preys on children by turning them into thieves, with nowhere to go outside of his protection. He doesn’t abduct them in bags, but they are held hostage nonetheless, with the threat of a blood sacrifice hovering; when Oliver wakes after the first night in the thief’s house, a suspicious Fagin almost immediately threatens him with a knife. That it is described by Dickens as a bread-knife only intensifies a subliminal connection to the ancient calumny about the blood of Christian children being used to prepare Passover bread.

But the question remains: was Stoker himself anti-Semitic or racist? Probably not beyond the norm for Victorian England, where a basic distrust of foreigners and ideas about racial purity and the great hovering bugaboo of “degeneration” were so fully ingrained into daily life that they were deployed almost unconsciously. His 1886 pamphlet A Glimpse of America makes no mention of slavery or the Civil War, the unresolved social issues of Reconstruction, or the impact of race on American culture and character. He mentions blacks only in the context of being well represented as domestic servants, with the men being subject to immediate lynching if they commit an outrage upon a white woman. The lynched men are grouped by Stoker with a category of “tramps, and other excretions of civilization.” Near the end of his life, Stoker would turn again to the “American Tramp Question” and recommend the establishment of remote labor camps, as well as branding (or, as he put it, “marking the ear”). His final novel, The Lair of the White Worm (1911), would feature a frightening, subhuman manservant, Oolanga, whose fondness for wearing dress coats only underscores his apelike animality. The casual, recurrent use of the word “nigger” throughout the narrative is still a bit startling. Until the end of his life, Stoker’s library contained a history of the Ku Klux Klan’s first incarnation in the 1860s and 1870s.

It may have been in Boston, following the volley of undeserved critical abuse hurled at Irving, that he decided to write an essay on “Dramatic Criticism” and publish it in the North American Review while the American tour was still ongoing. He succeeded only in prompting the New York Times to spend more time in a Sunday column attacking Stoker than it did covering the appearance of Irving and Terry. The piece is remarkably vicious and personal.

Who said anything about dramatic criticism? Who asked Bram Stoker to write anything about it? Of course, everybody knows Bram Stoker’s name, for it has been in print before, and it is a name one never forgets, like Dodge Orlick or Quentin Durward. But few persons in this country have ever associated the name with a clearly-defined personality. If any of the John Smiths or William Browns of the American public, who read the North American Review to learn what public characters do not know about the questions of the hour, have thought of Bram Stoker at all, they have merely thought it was odd that any contemporary human being should be so named, and, being so named, should not ask legislative permission to change his name.

The Times conceded that “he is a gentlemen amply qualified to inform the world on some important subjects, such as the difficulty of keeping one’s temper when selling theatre tickets through a peephole to ungrateful and inquisitive people, and the quickest way to stick up a four-sheet poster on a windy day.” The writer predicted that “sometime in the twentieth century—I trust well along in that century—Mr. Bram Stoker will be of much interest to the biographers of Henry Irving. They will go to him for facts about the distinguished gentleman who employed him, as to his clothes and his food and his dependence on the advice of Bram Stoker.” As to Stoker’s perceived general grievance against drama critics on both sides of the Atlantic, the Times speculated that “perhaps they have too frequently neglected to mention in their notices that during the performance the money at the box office was counted, with his accustomed skill, by Mr. Bram Stoker, who also, after the play, and with great delicacy of touch, filled his hand-wash basin and laid out the towels for Mr. Irving to remove his ‘make-up.’ ”

In his essay, Stoker had quoted an anonymous British critic who wondered if actors should be considered parasites, since they lived off plays, playwrights, and producers. The Times jumped at the chance for a delicious, gratuitous coup de grace: “We can imagine what such a critic, who holds an actor to be a parasite, would call an actor’s business agent. He might even be rude.”

The anonymous Times writer wanted to land a punch, and succeeded. The column was both a merciless caricature of Stoker as Irving’s fawning factotum and a direct attack on his abilities as a writer. He had, of course, seen Irving endlessly assailed and ridiculed, but he was not at all accustomed to being on the receiving end himself. It’s hard to imagine Stoker having knowingly snubbed or otherwise displeased anyone at New York’s leading newspaper, but someone in the employ of the Gray Lady had obviously been offended somehow, and expressed his umbrage in the most humiliating way possible. The attack was so personal that it pricks curiosity about the nature of Stoker’s friendships (and possible intimacies) in America, which almost by necessity would have overlapped with his theatrical responsibilities, and perhaps compromised or complicated them.

For Stoker, the winter of 1894 was not a happy season. Aside from a personal but very public slap in the face from the New York Times, the vampire novel was tied in knots he would have to untangle himself, and his summer holiday would be devoted to yet another book, The Watter’s Mou’, set in Cruden Bay, Scotland, which he had visited for the first time the previous year. As a fallback, he dusted off a short historical novel, Seven Golden Buttons, which he had finished in 1891 but never submitted for editorial consideration. After returning to London he offered it to the Bristol publishing house J. W. Arrowsmith, but it was rejected.

As for the vampire book, it is not known whether Edith Miniter gave him any kind of detailed critique, but from his notes we can surmise the manuscript was likely a now-lost first draft titled either The Dead Un-dead or The Un-Dead. “Undead” was an existing word, derived from the Middle English undedlic but having no supernatural connotation; it was merely a roundabout locution for being alive, that is, “not dead.” Stoker’s hyphenated coinage was the first known use of the term in its now-familiar revenant sense. He must have had the work-in-progress already transcribed by a typing service, in manifold (a precursor to the carbon paper process), since it is inconceivable he would leave the only copy of a handwritten draft in America, even if Miniter had accepted the book-doctoring assignment. And it’s a fair assumption the “fearful mess” of the manuscript resulted from what is apparent in Stoker’s notes: far too many characters with overlapping identities and functions, and a surfeit of subplots. It was the most complicated and ambitious piece of fiction he had ever attempted, but his ambition simply outpaced his technical ability to manage and channel his own imagination.

In order to conceptualize (or at least roughly imagine) what the manuscript that ultimately became Dracula might have looked like in early 1894, it is useful to flash forward six years to Reykjavik, Iceland, when a novel called Makt Myrkranna (or Powers of Darkness) was published under Stoker’s name as a magazine serial in 1900 and as a book in 1901, an apparent translation of Dracula. The translator was Valdimar Ásmundsson, a well-regarded Icelandic journalist and author, but with no other known connection to supernatural fiction. Since the rest of the book was far shorter than the 1897 Archibald Constable edition, it had until recently been assumed that the novel had been abridged. A previously unknown introduction to the book, signed by Stoker, caused stirs in Dracula circles when it was retranslated into English in 1986, largely because it made a tangential reference to the Jack the Ripper murders, sparking overheated speculation about a substantial, inspirational link to the Whitechapel crimes and perhaps even clues to the killer’s identity.

In 2014, the Munich-based Stoker scholar Hans C. de Roos revealed that Makt Myrkranna was in fact a radically different telling of Dracula, 80 percent of its action taking place during Harker’s visit to Transylvania. Dracula is “the leader and financier of an international elitist conspiracy,” according to Roos, who, at the time of this writing, is preparing a full English version of the Icelandic text. Ásmundsson, whose other writings covered both socialism and anarchism, “puts the fiend in the corner of reactionary social-Darwinist forces as the arch-enemy of egalitarianism, at the same time linking him to vile murder, sexual libertinage, incestuous degeneration and satanic cult: at Castle Dracula, Harker sees the Count leading a kind of black mass.” Once Dracula is in England, his home is not a ruin but a splendidly appointed showplace where the Count (under the adopted name of Baron Székély) entertains a band of glamorous and aristocratic co-conspirators who have enabled his relocation from Transylvania.

Could such a strange, truncated and bastardized version of Dracula have actually been approved by Stoker? Roos seems to think so, but there are other factors and possibilities that need consideration. To begin with, why was this text created in Iceland? Stoker had no known contacts or correspondents there. But Hall Caine did. He knew the country extremely well and had friends there, and it provided a major setting for his novel The Bondman (1890). As Stoker wrote in his 1895 introduction to the book’s reissue as part of Caine’s collected works, “Iceland and the Isle of Man are so closely linked by far-back associations, that one cannot deeply study the history of one without being somewhat fascinated by the other.” In The Essential Dracula, Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu first floated the possibility that Caine himself might have been the “someone else” whom H. P. Lovecraft mentioned as having “whipped [Dracula] into such shape as it now possesses.” Given the extent of Caine’s own publishing commitments between 1894 and 1897, this is highly unlikely. But Caine could have given Stoker advice, or recommended another writer to help revise the book. A writer, perhaps, who lived in Iceland.

While no correspondence between Caine and Ásmundsson has yet surfaced, a surprisingly large percentage of Caine’s papers has yet to be sorted or cataloged, and may yet yield surprises about the Icelandic connection to Dracula. Nonetheless, we can be confident that Ásmundsson somehow had access to an early version of the manuscript. The evidence is contained in Stoker’s preliminary notes. The Icelandic book contains a character named Barrington, who does not appear in the finished novel, but does appear in the notes. Likewise, a deaf-mute housekeeper, and a dinner party at which Dracula is the final guest to arrive. None of these elements were available to Ásmundsson via the published version of Stoker’s novel. The retranslated version of the Icelandic introduction reads suspiciously like Stoker’s bloated, overstrained first draft of the terse prefatory note that effectively opens the book as we know it today.§

Is it possible that Ásmundsson, on Caine’s recommendation, took on the formidable job of revising The Un-Dead? And that Makt Myrkranna was the bizarre, off-the-rails, and ultimately rejected result? Even without Stoker’s early draft for comparison, this makes far more sense than the idea that Stoker actually approved the Icelandic adaptation—which, at least according to Roos’s synopsis, reads like a piece of unauthorized fan fiction, with scant regard to the original author’s vision. But no regard or respect was needed. Iceland had not yet joined the Berne Copyright Convention. Neither Ásmundsson nor his publishers needed to seek permission from Stoker or any other foreign national for publication. Their works could be pirated with impunity. Indeed, the initial installment of the serialization in the January 13, 1900, weekly magazine Fjallkonan contains no notice of copyright, describing the work only as “Novel. After Bram Stoker.”

Without the literary equivalent of a major international archaeological dig—funded, exactly, by whom?—the truth may never be known. But there can be no doubt that Ásmundsson had access to some of the earliest notes or drafts of Stoker’s book, upon which he constructed a uniquely curious fantasia. The fact that Makt Myrkranna gives so much play to the Transylvania chapters may indicate that Harker’s visit to Transylvania was the most coherent section of the lost draft, and that Stoker may have had as much trouble getting out of Castle Dracula as a writer as Jonathan Harker did as a character.

Victorian writers were bedeviled by literary piracy, which they rightly considered parasitism—a charged word with many other associations apart from intellectual property theft. In the hierarchy of social Darwinism, the poor, foreigners, the weak, and the infirm were all perceived as sapping power and money from the middle and upper classes. For nervous men, women’s growing independence was experienced as a kind of sexual energy siphon. Arthur Conan Doyle’s novella The Parasite (1894) presented a psychic female vampire: a self-employed, self-possessed, and sexually self-directed occultist who used her powers to seduce and destroy.

Parasitism was also a concern of degeneration theory. In Dracula, Stoker drops the names of two leading degenerationists, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), author of Criminal Man (1876), and the German cultural critic Max Nordau (1849–1923), author of Degeneration (1892–93; English translation 1895). Lombroso would have interested Stoker because of his own long-standing interest in phrenology and physiognomy, but Lombroso’s direct influence on Dracula has been consistently exaggerated. Criminal Man put forth Lombroso’s taxonomy of the physical characteristics of people he claimed were “born criminals,” and these characteristics, or so it is said, formed the basis of Stoker’s description of Dracula. In fact, Stoker’s vampire bears little resemblance to any of Lombroso’s examples, save for his claim that murderers tended to have hawklike noses, a trait already supplied for Dracula’s villainous precursors in fiction, and that the eyebrows above such noses grew together (as did those of the evil Ambrosio in Lewis’s The Monk and the werewolf as described by Baring-Gould). Lombroso also mentions, almost in passing, that a small protuberance atop the criminal ear is the vestige of an animal’s pointed ear. Dracula, of course, has fully pointed ears—something Stoker had seen on imaginary beings since childhood, when he first beheld the costumes for beloved pantomime characters like the Wolf, Puss in Boots, and Dick Whittington’s Cat. The goat god Pan and the satyr in general were common subjects of nineteenth-century academic painting, reflecting a general cultural delirium about reverse evolution and animal tendencies in humans. Lombroso’s criminal types lacked mythic resonance; they had jug ears, asymmetrical features, prognathous jaws, and receding brows with small craniums—quite unlike Dracula’s “lofty domed forehead,” clearly intended by Stoker to signify superior intelligence and cunning. We can safely conclude that Stoker invoked Lombroso merely as a contemporary, authoritative reference to bolster verisimilitude, however pseudoscientific. Stoker’s description of Dracula’s face ultimately owed much more to Baring-Gould and to his own imagination than to Lombroso.

Nordau’s Degeneration, though formally dedicated to Lombroso, was more concerned with finding evidence of mental and moral decay in cultural productions, not in somatotypes. There was almost nothing in fin-de-siècle arts and letters that met with Nordau’s approval. Pre-Raphaelitism, aestheticism, symbolism, realism, naturalism, mysticism, and everything from the philosophy of Nietzsche to the theatre of Ibsen—for Nordau, all were clear signs of creeping hysteria and insanity, both in their creators and in the public that accepted them. Nordau actually believed that both visual art and the written word had the power to reverse human evolution. “When under any kind of noxious influences an organism becomes debilitated,” he wrote, “its successors will not resemble the healthy, normal type of the species, with capacities for development, but will form a new sub-species.” Degeneration was a contagious disease, even if Nordau could identify no particular agent of contagion. His book was basically a scream against the miasma of modernism in all its forms. In literature, among many other things, Nordau objected to exactly the kind of “rationalized” horror fiction Stoker was writing. According to Nordau, “Ghost stories are very popular, but they must come on in scientific disguise, as hypnotism, telepathy, somnambulism.” Stoker was using precisely these elements, widely accepted as scientific in the 1890s, to give his novel-in-progress credibility.

It should not be surprising that Nordau also had a specific distaste for Oscar Wilde.

“Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get these wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?” Wilde had written. “The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to this particular school of Art.” Nordau was appalled, and completely insensate to Wilde’s humor. “He asserts that painters have changed the climate,” he sputtered. Nordau felt that Wilde’s degeneracy rose from “a malevolent mania for contradiction” and a “purely anti-socialistic, ego-maniacal recklessness and hysterical longing to make a sensation.”

Wilde, of course, reveled in public attention, all the more so with the increasing success of his drawing-room comedies: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893), A Woman of No Importance (1894), and An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest (both 1895.) But his private life was increasingly disordered and indiscreet. He was seen everywhere dining extravagantly with Bosie, while privately he endured torrents of Douglas’s rage and emotional abuse—which he always forgave, like a clueless battered spouse.¶ Other companions lacked Bosie’s pedigree, comprising a shifting entourage of scruffy young men whose most valuable assets, no doubt, included the endless supply of engraved silver cigarette cases Oscar had given them.

Unlike Stoker, Wilde had never been a college athlete, but from his early years there remain descriptions of a powerful, imposing physique. However, by the early nineties, after more than a decade of gastronomic indulgence and dissipation, he had morphed into a corpulent caricature of himself, subject to the kind of merciless lampooning his mother had endured in Dublin. There can be no doubt that his physical presence caused many people to shudder. The American novelist Gertrude Atherton, in London during the early nineties, turned down the chance to meet him solely on the basis of her visceral reaction to a photographic portrait—the very daguerreotype of Dorian Gray, at least in Atherton’s description. “His mouth covered half his face,” she recalled, “the most lascivious coarse repulsive mouth I have ever seen. I might stand it in a large drawing room, but not in a parlor eight-by-eight lit by three tallow candles. I should feel as if I were under the sea pursued by some bloated sea monster of the deep, and have nightmares for a week thereafter.”

A Washington Post caricature of Wilde as the Missing Link.

For all his intellectual brilliance, Wilde set off atavistic, Darwinian anxieties in his detractors, as well as in his partisans. Again and again he was described as pale and bloodless, a kind of fleshy, engulfing amoeba. Even his admirer Richard Le Gallienne admitted to a “queer feeling of distaste, as my hand seemed literally to sink into his, which was soft and plushy.” “The face was clean-shaven, and almost leaden-coloured,” recalled Horace Wyndham in The Nineteen Hundreds, “with heavy pouches under the eyes, and thick blubbery lips. Indeed he rather resembled a fat white slug, and even to my untutored eye, there was something curiously repulsive and unhealthy in his whole appearance.” Alice Kipling, Rudyard’s sister, quickly detected signs of invertebrate life: “He is like a very bad copy of a bust of a very decadent Roman Emperor, roughly modeled in suet pudding. I sat opposite him and could not make out what his lips reminded me of—they are exactly like the big brown slugs we used to hate so in the garden.” Whistler once caricatured Wilde as a pig. As early as his 1882 American tour, the Washington Post had depicted him outright as an evolutionary throwback, “the Wilde Man of Borneo,” foreshadowing ridicule to come. And capitalizing on the Wildean fondness for the sunflower as an aesthetic prop, many graphic satirists chose to go even further, casting Wilde lower than the animal realm as a human sunflower—a droopy, half-vegetable monstrosity.

As Irishmen in London, Stoker and Wilde were keenly aware of the pernicious and deeply ingrained stereotype of the Irish as brutish, drunken, and subhuman. The shiftless stage Irishman was already a sturdy convention of comedy. It was a caricature often deepened and darkened elsewhere, as in the pages of Punch by artists like Sir John Tenniel (“the Irish Frankenstein,” looking more like a simian Mr. Hyde). The magazine once featured a “satirical” piece called “The Missing Link,” informing readers that “a creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro is to be met in some of the lowest districts of London.” The Hibernian ape stereotype originated before Darwin but quickly drew additional noxious energy from evolutionary theory. Following a visit to Ireland in 1860, the Cambridge historian Charles Kingsley wrote to his wife, “I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along the hundred miles of horrible country.” The Famine years had stoked intolerance as well; if the Irish seemed animalized by hunger, it was because they were animals to begin with.

In the face of British power and intolerance, Wilde’s mother had always asserted her Irish identity. Oscar, by contrast, ingratiated himself with the enemy, shedding his Irish accent at Magdalen College and arriving in London with a comprehensive plan for social climbing. Lady Wilde’s surrogate son Bram Stoker made no such move toward assimilation and retained his rich and musical brogue for life. Unlike his own parents, he supported home rule. Perhaps part of the reason for the New York Times’s personal attack on him was unvarnished antipathy for his nationality. Like their counterparts in London, many New Yorkers in the 1890s reacted to Irish immigrants with a visceral revulsion.

Stoker, of course, never sought the spotlight like Lady Wilde’s real son. Through Henry Irving and his rabid detractors, he became well acquainted with the dark and vicious flip side of public acclaim. Even as Wilde’s sparkling plays earned plaudits and applause, the public sensed his shadow side the way sharks smell blood. Wilde was a constant topic of increasingly nasty gossip, fueled in no small part by a scandalous roman à clef by Robert Hichens, The Green Carnation, published anonymously in 1894. Hichens had slyly penetrated Wilde’s circle the year before and observed Oscar and Bosie at close quarters; in the book he gave them the fictional names of Esmé Amarinth and Lord Reginald (Reggie) Hastings. In a scene parodying the dyed-boutonniere opening night of Lady Windermere’s Fan, a young lady, recently arrived in London, notices the green flowers and comments that “all the men who wore them looked the same. They had the same walk, or rather waggle, the same coyly conscious expression, the same wavy motion of the head. . . . Is it a badge of some club or society, and is Mr. Amarinth their high priest?” The Saturday Review was not so naïve as the naïf and duly made note of the novel’s “allusions, thinly veiled, to various disgusting sins.”

Lord Alfred Douglas’s father had introduced the Queensberry rules of boxing, but the marquess had a personality sufficiently pugnacious to ignore any rules of engagement he didn’t care for. Especially when he felt certain his opponents were guilty of disgusting sins. To the marquess, paranoia came easily; the Douglas clan had a history of psychological instability. By the early 1890s Queensberry was thought by some—perhaps especially those who were scandalized by Ghosts—to be yet another sad victim of long-simmering syphilis. It was not an outlandish idea. He was obsessed to the point of derangement with the idea that the soon-to-be prime minister (Archibald Primrose, the 5th Earl of Rosebery) was having an affair with his eldest son, Francis, who served as Rosebery’s personal secretary. Francis Douglas died in an 1894 “hunting accident” that many suspected was a suicide but has never been proven as such. Queensberry threatened to thrash Rosebery in public and even carried a riding crop to be on the ready.

It’s quite possible that Queensberry’s animus toward Rosebery was deflected by the Crown’s willingness to offer up an alternate, sacrificial scapegoat. Bosie’s father abruptly shifted his fixation from Rosebery to Wilde. He would later claim that Wilde fell into the “booby trap” intentionally set for him. The first step involved goading Wilde into a foolish move. On February 18, 1895, at the Albemarle Club, where both he and Wilde were members, Queensberry left his card scrawled with the now-infamous if barely legible and badly spelled missive, “For Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite.” Wilde rashly responded by charging Queensberry with criminal libel, a move he was advised against by everybody except Bosie and his family, who absolutely loathed their patriarch. They intimated they would even pay for Wilde’s court costs, which (of course) they never did. Bosie hated his father and invoked vampiric metaphor when he called Queensberry “an incubus” who had abused and tormented him all his life. Despite their prestigious educations at Oxford, neither Bosie nor Oscar comprehended the nature or possible ramifications of the legal action. Bosie was excited that all his father’s defects of character would be exposed, humiliating him before the world. Oscar somehow never considered that Queensberry was fully entitled to a defense of justification and already had a team of investigators tracking down, coercing, and even bribing witnesses who could testify that Queensberry’s calling card had been no libel. “Blindly I staggered,” he later wrote, “as an ox into the shambles.”

To the degree he did think through his testimony, Wilde expected to charm the courtroom with witty ripostes and the natural superiority of an acclaimed apostle of art over an uncouth if wealthy Philistine. But from the start, it was clear that the plaintiff was doomed to be the defendant. The tables turned abruptly and alarmingly on the first day of the trial, catching Wilde off guard. He had never anticipated being forced to answer questions, as pointed as they were endless, about a long string of relationships with questionable young men, and certainly didn’t plan to commit perjury, as he did repeatedly in a futile attempt to portray his compulsive sexual slumming as platonic mentoring. And he could hardly be the only literary man in London taken aback when The Picture of Dorian Gray was hauled into court and used against the author. Never before or since has a work of fiction—supernatural or not—been presented as evidence in a nonliterary criminal proceeding. There was a ghostly surreality to the notion that imaginary characters, having no substance beyond the words and ink with which they were constructed, might be called to testify about events in the real world. The idea itself was the stuff of a weird tale.

Queensberry’s defense, and soon to be Wilde’s archnemesis, was Edward Carson, a Dublin contemporary of both Wilde and Stoker active in the Trinity College debating societies. Carson called Dorian Gray an “immoral and obscene work” that was “designed and intended by Mr. Wilde, and was understood by the readers thereof, to describe the relations, intimacies and passions of certain persons of sodomitical and unnatural habits, tastes and practices.” There was, of course, nothing explicitly sexual in the story. “Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray,” Wilde had written to a newspaper. “What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them.” But in front of a jury, the argument fell short. Wilde denied that the book was in any way obscene; he contended that it was, in fact, a morality tale. This was true. But it was also true that the author had pressed a multitude of invisible green carnations between its pages, and had described a particular demimonde with great precision.

Queensberry’s plea of justification ultimately prevailed, and the jury found for the defense. And now the Crown had amassed all the evidence it needed to prosecute Wilde criminally. Among the few people who urged Wilde not to immediately flee England was his own mother. Lady Wilde’s nationalist pride overtook her common sense; somehow this was all about the Crown attacking Ireland, and she was Speranza again, rejuvenated like the painting in her son’s book, or at least in her own mind. She was now in her seventies and barely subsisting on a civil list pension. Willie’s marriage to the wealthy American heiress Mrs. Frank Leslie had collapsed under the weight of his drinking, adultery, and indolence, and with the divorce came the end of desperately needed income. Mother and son and his new wife, Lily, now lived together in a small rented house in Oakley Street, a few blocks from Oscar, who paid many of her bills but never arranged for an allowance, despite his spending lavishly on Bosie—something he estimated at £5,000 over the course of their relationship, including the payment of his gambling debts. Bosie was rich and didn’t need Oscar’s money. He expected it anyway. “I see little of him,” Speranza sadly told a visitor of her son not long before the Queensberry affair. “He is so very busy. He is always working, and the world will not let him alone. No one in London is so sought after as Oscar.” She had no idea at the time of how frightfully he was about to be pursued.

Lady Wilde’s grandson Vyvyan remembered her as “a terrifying and severe old lady seated bolt upright in semi-darkness,” even as the sun beamed brightly outside. “She was dressed like a tragedy queen, her bodice covered with brooches and cameos. The curtains all through the house remained permanently drawn, and the drawing-room was lit by guttering candles arranged in the corners of the room, as far away from my grandmother as possible, so that the heavy make-up with which she tried to conceal her age could not be detected. I protested strongly every time I was taken to pay her a duty visit.”

The last known photograph of Lady Wilde—a “terrifying old lady,” according to her grandson.

In her memoir Adventures of a Novelist, Gertrude Atherton recalled her own visit to Lady Wilde’s cramped and crepuscular house, where the gas evidently had been turned off. “The room was close and stuffy, the furniture as antiquated as herself; the springs could not have been mended for forty years,” Atherton wrote. Speranza’s person fared no better. “In her day she must have been a beautiful and stately woman; she was still stately, heaven knew, but her old face was gaunt and gray, and seamed with a million criss-crossed lines, etched by care, sorrow, and, no doubt, hunger.” She was dressed in “a relic of the sixties, gray satin trimmed with ragged black fringe over a large hoop-skirt. As her hair was black it was presumably a wig, and it was dressed very high, held in place by a Spanish comb, from which depended a black lace mantilla.” When the candlelit apparition extended “a claw-like hand” in Atherton’s direction, she “wondered if I were expected to kiss it,” but in the end “gave myself the benefit of the doubt.”

To her present circumstances she made no allusion, and the walls seemed to expand until the dingy parlor became a great salon crowded with courtiers, and the rotting fabric of her rag-bag covering turned by a fairy’s wand into cloth of gold, shimmering in the light of a thousand wax candles. But the dream faded. Once more she was a laboriously built up terribly old woman who subsisted mainly on indigestible cake contributed by the few friends who remembered her existence.

There is no record of any contact between Lady Wilde and the Stokers after 1884, when she wrote to a friend in Dublin, “Bram is always very attentive and kind when I meet him at the theatre,” but Florence Stoker never visited her. In late life Lady Wilde does not seem to have socialized much outside of her rooms. The only hint we have of Stoker’s possible behavior vis-à-vis his onetime mentor in the immediate aftermath of the libel trial is the curious fact that a watercolor portrait of Lady Wilde—her favorite likeness, painted in 1864 by Bernard Mulrenin and exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy—came into Bram and Florence’s possession. No matter how fond Speranza had been of Stoker in Dublin, it is inconceivable that such a cherished heirloom was ever gifted to him. But might it have been acquired in the frenzied bankruptcy auction of all Wilde’s personal property at Tite Street? The drastic action was forced immediately by Queensberry to recover court costs for the libel trial as his vindication shifted into triumphal vindictiveness. The public sale was held on Friday, May 24, and liquidated Wilde’s furniture, books, manuscripts, artwork, and other property, including his children’s toys. Was Stoker there that fateful Friday? On his own volition? At Florence’s suggestion or request? The Mulrenin portrait of Lady Wilde was still in the possession of Stoker’s granddaughter as late as 1997.#

Blind to the enormity of Oscar’s loss, Bosie told Wilde he thought bankruptcy was a “splendid score,” a clever way of writing off a debt to his detested father and thereby having the last laugh. Bosie didn’t understand the implications of bankruptcy, just as he didn’t comprehend the magnitude of the situation his friend and benefactor now faced. Despite being at the center of the whole disaster, Bosie was never called to testify, and never charged with a crime that by definition could only have been committed mutually. Queensberry, however, had the prosecution in his pocket from the outset—or under his heel, given all the allegations against Rosebery and other liberals of high position he was willing to make public.

Queensberry was one of those paranoid personalities who sometimes choose to obsess over plots and conspiracies that actually have merit. Freud explained paranoia as rising from latent homosexual desires; if this theory is applied to Queensberry, the Wilde imbroglio becomes a true psychosexual rabbit hole. That Queensberry himself had complicated sexual issues is bolstered by his first wife’s divorcing him for whoring and his second wife’s obtaining an annulment on the basis of nonconsummation due to a never-explained “malformation of the parts of generation” and impotence. The atmosphere of near-hysteria surrounding the Wilde prosecution was bound up in a more general crisis of masculinity, including but hardly limited to the visibility of men who loved men. Male power and privilege appeared to be under relentless assault by economic and cultural forces. A depression that had lasted more than a decade had reduced England’s per capita output to a fraction of France’s, Germany’s, or America’s. Empire was waning. The influx of foreigners, experienced almost viscerally as an invasion, was an especially unwelcome kind of penetration—a reverse colonization. The increased visibility and assertiveness of women was a direct challenge to men’s virility and to their sexual prerogatives. Wilde’s public persona was mocking, flabby, and effeminate—in short, a classic scapegoat for a threatened patriarchy.

Following Queensberry’s exoneration, Wilde had only one night of freedom before being arrested the next day and officially charged with acts of gross indecency—not sodomy, which under British law described anal penetration exclusively (to all accounts, Wilde’s sexual tastes were predominantly oral) and was punishable by life imprisonment. He was arraigned at the Bow Street police station in Covent Garden and remanded without bail.

There followed not one but two sensational trials. The first ended in a hung jury, after which Wilde briefly obtained bail. He quickly found that no hotel in London would admit him. Like a character created by Bram Stoker, he encountered the equivalent of garlic or wolfsbane at every door. Finally, he sought refuge in Oakley Street’s cramped confines. “Willie, give me shelter or I shall die in the streets,” he implored his brother. Willie acceded, but nonetheless passed a drunken judgment: at least his own vices were “decent.” As J. B. Yeats recalled it, “His successful brother who had scorned him for a drunken ne’er-do-well was now at his mercy.” It was still possible for him to escape to France. Bosie was already there. Constance had taken the children to Switzerland, where they would all change their names. He would never see his sons again. Friends had arranged for a private yacht to cross the Channel, and offered him money, even ordered the champagne for the trip, and yet he refused. In Yeats’s recollection, his mother had given him a simple choice—or no choice. “If you stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son,” she said. “It will make no difference to my affection. But if you go, I will never speak to you again.” According to Frank Harris, however, Willie used more than emotional blackmail. Oscar was convinced his jealous, vindictive brother would personally tip off the police if he made the slightest move to jump bail. He was already a prisoner. Many notes of sympathy and encouragement arrived, but Willie screened anything that urged Oscar to flee. Among the missives was an unsigned note of support from Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, delivered with a spray of violets by a veiled woman said to be Terry herself. But after a few days, Wilde did flee—for the kinder sanctuary offered by a friend, Ada Leverson.

From the beginning of the second trial, which commenced on May 20, the writing was already on the wall. In truth, the conclusion had been determined from the moment the libel suit was lost. The same witnesses were paraded out—mostly blackmailers and rent boys who seemed, to many observers, far more deserving of prosecution than Wilde. In the end, Wilde and codefendant Alfred Taylor were found guilty. Taylor was the procurer whose male brothel was the scene of numerous alleged assignations (and who frequently goes unmentioned in condensed accounts of the trials). The judge called it “the worst case I have ever tried” and declared Wilde to “have been at the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men.”

The sentence was imprisonment at hard labor for two years, the maximum punishment allowed under law. Wilde struggled to respond. “And I? May I say nothing, my lord?” The judge dismissed the convicted man with a disgusted wave of his hand.

Bram and Florence had followed every moment of the trial—who in London hadn’t?—but seem to have kept their thoughts and feelings to themselves. Before An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde’s name was removed from their playbills and programs. Anyone connected to Wilde became suspect. One of the casualties was the artist Aubrey Beardsley; he was never accused of any personal impropriety, but his illustrations for Wilde’s controversial play Salome (1894) associated him too closely in the public mind with a newly minted social pariah. At the height of his career, he became suddenly unemployable. In his novel The Confessions of Aubrey Beardsley, Donald S. Olson evocatively imagines the artist’s recollections: “It is quite impossible to convey the atmosphere of London during that time,” he tells the priest who hears his testament.

One half-expected to see witches flying past the chimneypots and people being burned at the stake in Trafalgar Square. People became beasts. Everything that had been progressive and modern in the world of art and literature was suddenly suspect. . . . Panic spread amongst the inverts of London. Today it was Oscar, but who would it be tomorrow? If evidence had been obtained by threats, bribes, blackmail and stolen address-books, who was safe? What other names would come out in cross-examination? Incriminating letters were burned, certain books and journals disposed of, bachelor households dissolved, and hasty marriages arranged. Those who could afford to fled the city. The boat-trains to Calais and Dieppe were filled with nervous gentlemen whose blood turned to ice every time they saw a grim-faced official.

Stoker needn’t have feared unwelcome attention himself. After all, he was married to one of the most beautiful women in London, even if they saw little of each other during waking hours. Much of the time they did share was public—Lyceum openings and Florence’s Sunday at-homes. To a certain degree, even to an essential degree, the Stokers had a marriage for show. And why not? They were an extraordinarily handsome couple. Bram was strikingly good-looking—burly, bearded, with piercingly blue eyes and retaining the imposing build of the athlete he once was. Almost coinciding with the Wilde trials, a stunning, just-commissioned portrait of Florence adorned a wall at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition. It was painted by the well-known Dublin artist Walter Frederick Osborne, a master of plein air, or natural lighting effects.** Even though the word “heterosexual” had yet to be coined, Mr. and Mrs. Bram Stoker presented a seemingly unassailable picture of an idealized Victorian union. For Florence, there still may have been a hidden Wildean connection. It is said she vowed never to be photographed or painted after she turned forty, and in 1895 she was only a few years away from the point of no return. Walter Osborne may not have been a Basil Hallward, but his portraiture managed, in its own nonsupernatural way, to effectively suspend the aging process of a woman who might have married the creator of Dorian Gray but chose the author of Dracula instead.

Irish painter Walter Frederick Osborne’s ravishing oil portrait of Florence Stoker, exhibited in 1895 at the time of the Wilde trials.

There was no reason for Stoker to make any comment on Wilde’s tragedy, and he didn’t. Other writers, like Hall Caine, were openly unnerved. “It haunts men,” Caine said, “like some foul and horrible stain on our craft and on us all, which nothing can wash out. It is the most awful tragedy in the whole of literature.” At the time of the trial H. G. Wells was revising The Island of Dr. Moreau, published the following year. Like Dracula, it featured shapeshifting animals—beasts who became people—and responded to the era’s preoccupation with evolution and its fearful double, degeneration. In a later reference to Wilde’s ordeal and the writing of Moreau, Wells remembered “the graceless and pitiful downfall of a man of genius” and said the “story was the response of an imaginative mind to the reminder that humanity is but animal rough-hewn to a reasonable shape and in perpetual instinct between instinct and injunction.”

Philip Burne-Jones, son of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones, was an artist himself and creator of a scandalous 1897 canvas called The Vampire, the exhibition of which practically coincided with the publication of Dracula. The painting was accompanied by a poem by the artist’s cousin Rudyard Kipling, also entitled “The Vampire,” that began with the famous line “A fool there was . . .” In the painting the lovestruck fool is represented by an unconscious male figure straddled in bed by a gloating woman in a nightgown who has left an ominous wound over his heart. The painting was deemed scandalous because of gossip that Burne-Jones based the female figure on the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who had badly used him. Whatever the truth, both artist and involuntary subject greatly enjoyed the flood of public attention that ensued. The reviewer of Dracula in the Weekly Sun related that “it was not until I had read Mr. Stoker’s book that I grasped the full meaning and weirdness of that painting.” We will never know Stoker’s reaction to either the painting or the poem, and whether he identified in any conscious way with Kipling’s lines:

The fool was stripped to his foolish hide

(Even as you and I!)

Which she might have seen when she threw him aside—

(But it isn’t on record the lady tried)

So some of him lived but the most of him died—

(Even as you and I!)

If Philip Burne-Jones had seen fit to paint an emotionally honest canvas of Florence and Bram—he masochistically drained, devitalized by work and wife—the result might have been a compelling Dorian Gray portrait of the Stoker marriage itself.

“A fool there was . . .” Philip Burne-Jones’s scandalous painting The Vampire (1897).

Stoker knew Burne-Jones personally and sent him a copy of Dracula, which the artist gratefully acknowledged: “Your most kind promise of the other evening was most pleasantly fulfilled to-day, when your book arrived.” The artist had earlier been quite the acolyte of Oscar Wilde, inviting him to the rambling family homestead, the Grange, and hanging on his every word. At dinner, his cousin Alice Kipling was not so impressed with “Phil’s latest adoration”—it was she who likened Wilde’s lips to garden slugs. After Oscar’s downfall, Burne-Jones switched his allegiance to the traumatized Constance Wilde, offering her what assistance he could.

On July 16, nearly eight weeks after his brother’s incarceration, Willie Wilde wrote to Stoker. “Bram, my friend, poor Oscar was not as bad as people thought him. He was led astray by his Vanity—& conceit, & he was so ‘got at’ that he was weak enough to be guilty—of indiscretions and follies—that is all. . . . I believe this thing will help to purify him body & soul. Am sure you and Florence must have felt the disgrace of one who cared for you both sincerely.” Stoker’s response, if he had one, has never surfaced. But in all likelihood he never wrote back to Willie, and Oscar’s conviction likely marked a complete and final break with the Wildes. More than a decade later, when Stoker wrote his biography of Henry Irving, he would omit the names of both Oscar and his mother from the extensive list of distinguished guests at the Lyceum. Wilde’s omission was rather more understandable than the slighting of Lady Wilde, to whom Stoker was genuinely close in Dublin.

But 1895 was a rather busy year for Stoker, and it is possible that many letters went unanswered. On the very day of Wilde’s conviction, announcement was made of Henry Irving’s impending knighthood—the first for an English actor. Irving had been considered for the honor a decade earlier, but, contrary to Stoker’s later account, the prime minister had qualms about Irving’s adulterous relationship with Ellen Terry. In Stoker’s telling, Irving refused the offer as being extravagant and premature. In any event, the new prime minister, Lord Rosebery—the very bane of Queensberry—hardly regarded the Irving and Terry liaison as a controversy, perhaps because of the far weightier sex scandals that never stopped swirling around him personally. Bram’s brother Thornley Stoker, by then the president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, was also knighted in 1895, for his distinguished contributions to medicine. Stoker acknowledged the honor in the dedication of The Shoulder of Shasta. Throughout the summer, preparations were being completed for another North American tour, with Faust’s Montreal opening in September.

And still, there was the damned unfinished book.

While Stoker may have worried about having his novel linked to Wilde in any way, there were commercial considerations as well as personal ones. Whatever else his motivations were as a writer, he wrote for money, and the public downfall of Wilde might as well have been market research. As it stood, by the summer of 1895, anything that was left of the art world subplot, and paintings of Dracula that looked like other people despite the artist’s best efforts—all the remaining vestiges of Dorian Gray simply had to go. The spectacle of Queensberry’s defense going savagely after the content of Wilde’s book as if words were forensic facts was alarming to any writer paying attention. And we can assume that this was also the point at which Dracula’s London social calendar was completely scrubbed, his dinner party invitations torn up, and the character began to take a snarling step back into the shadows. Just as Wilde was silenced at the end of his trial, Stoker muted Dracula before he ended his book.

And yet Wilde’s ghostly imprint still lingers in the pages of Dracula. Jonathan Harker’s visceral disgust at the Count’s swollen, blood-bloated body (“he lay like a filthy leech”) echoes countless descriptions of Wilde, and Harker’s fear that Dracula will spread “an ever-widening circle of semi-demons” finds a parallel in the sentencing judge’s characterization of Wilde as “the center of a hideous circle of corruption.” During the trial, a Savoy Hotel chambermaid had testified to the excrement-streaked sheets removed from Oscar’s rooms while he and Bosie were in residence; just as the vampire rested on a bed of his native earth, Wilde, too, seemed to sleep in proprietary dirt.†† Both Dracula and Wilde maintained multiple residences around London to avoid detection of their activities. Both depended on the bodies of the young and the vital to procure the fluids that satisfied their unconventional appetites. Both had made a sea voyage from their land of origin, relocating in London—only to be destroyed. The true story of Wilde and the fictional story of Dracula both emphasize the importance and primacy of bonding between males. As Nina Auerbach, author of Our Vampires, Ourselves, explains it, Dracula “abounds in overwrought protestations of friendship among the men, who testify breathlessly to each other’s manhood. In fact, Van Helsing should thank the vampire for introducing him to such loveable companions. Borrowing the idiom of Oscar Wilde’s letters to Lord Alfred Douglas, he declares himself to Lucy’s former fiancé, ‘I have grown to love you—yes, my dear boy, to love you.’ ”

In the Norton Critical Edition of Dracula, Auerbach notes that the Wilde trials gave Victorian England “a new monster of its own clinical making” in a medicalized paradigm for homosexuality that “stigmatized not acts, but essence; like the vampire this creature was tainted in its desires, not its deeds. This pariah, more dangerous than the New Woman because more insidiously pervasive, cast a shadow not only over the theatrical community but over all men.” Stoker, meanwhile, also medicalized and technologized his monster, containing and controlling and repelling the arch-pariah Dracula with up-to-date blood transfusions, phonograph diaries, and the typewriter. The legal thresholds that defined Wilde’s transgressions were as pseudoscientific as the superstitious thresholds that defined vampirism.

Wilde’s residual spectre would not be commented upon at the time of the book’s publication, or for almost a century afterward. As the novelist Fay Weldon notes in her introduction to Bram Stoker’s Dracula Omnibus, in the 1890s “who’d ever heard of a sub-text?” Witness Edward Carson’s mind-numbingly literal reading of Dorian Gray.

Stoker’s book was ending up quite unlike the lurid sensation novel he had first envisioned. In making his final revisions, he fell back instinctively, if perhaps unconsciously, on the sturdy substructure of the literary form that had sustained him since childhood: the fairy tale. The plot took on an archetypal simplicity, drawing on the folktale motif of abused and abandoned children. An orphan (Jonathan Harker, bereft of parentage like most of the main characters) ventures into the woods and is confronted with a terrifying demon king, who chases him home, but the young hero must return to the dreaded place to destroy the monster and restore moral order. Among the many classic tales evoked are “Bluebeard” (the castle with locked rooms and bloody secrets), “Jack the Giant Killer” (the ogre who chases the protagonist to his homeland and is slain), and “Little Red Riding Hood” (explicitly cited in Stoker’s text and mimicked when a wolf crashes through a bedroom window to menace Lucy and her mother). In short, for Dracula to be saved as a publishable tale, it had to be shrunken, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedtime story of childhood abandonment and rescue.

As argued by Jarlath Killeen, “The novel is deeply involved in the metaphysical orphanage that nineteenth-cetury Britain had become, due to the crisis of faith and the apparent withdrawal of God,” who is replaced by a threatening ogre straight out of a pantomime. Indeed, the characters “all appear to have arrested development, and lack the ability to grow up,” a point well illustrated by the numerous occasions when the grown men of Dracula simply break down and cry.

Instead of stabilizing Stoker’s finances, the vampire book had only complicated things by sapping Stoker’s time over seven long years without any return. In fairy tale terms, seven years was a magical span. In terms of Dracula, the magic took on the dimensions of a curse. On June 3, 1896, he wrote Caine on the letterhead of the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool:

My dear Hommy Beg,

There is a matter which I want to ask you about and I

write instead of speaking as I wish you to be quite free

in the matter. Though I would like to make it a matter

of business it is a matter entirely between friends also,

and I would rather if I might, ask you than anyone I

know. I have to borrow some money—£600—as I have

to pay an old debt which I intended paying some time

ago and which in any case I would have cleared off in

the immediate future had not the call come rather

sooner than I expected and I want to know if you

would care to lend me the amount. The Heinemann

& Balestier enterprise took so much more than I

intended investing—£800 in all—it left me rather

short, and a year ago I bought the lease on my house

leaving me with a rental of only £10 a year for the

next eleven years. This cost me £600 which I got from

Coutts giving them a security some £800 worth of

stocks all good paying things which it would not be

wise to sell. . . . I am glad to hear Heinemann and

Balestier is getting all right but at present the money

is laid up & is not available.

Now my dear old fellow if you would rather not do

this do say so freely for I would not for all the world

have you let anything to do with money (of all things)

come in any way between us. I only mention this

matter to you at all because you are closer to me than

any man I know, and I prefer to ask my own kind who

are workers like myself rather than rich men who do

not understand. Any time within a month (or even

longer) would do me to have the money but I’d like to

be in time in such matters and if the matter is settled

it will be a certain ease to me in the mist of much

work and after a long and trying year. Of course if the

new book comes out well at all the first money I get

will go to pay the debt. . . .

This is a long letter but I want you to quite

understand and honestly hope that if you do not care

to go into the matter you will treat me as a friend and

say so frankly—as frankly as all things have been—

and please God ever shall be between you and me. In

any case you must not let the matter worry you by a

hair’s breadth.

Yours always,

BRAM STOKER

The mail between Liverpool and the Isle of Man was quick, and without a moment’s hesitation Caine posted Stoker a check, which he received at the Adelphi on June 6. “My Dear Hommy Beg,” he responded. “Your letter is like yourself and that is saying all. I won’t say much about it as I know you do not like it[.] I feel truly grateful all the same—and I am rejoiced that I was right in thinking or rather knowing that I might speak to you frankly. . . . And believe me my dear old fellow I shall not forget your brotherly gesture.” But as warm as his emotions were, and despite the familiar greeting, he nevertheless signed the letter with his usual, inexplicably stiff formality: “Yours Always, Bram Stoker.”

He would ultimately repay Caine not with vampire money but with a cashed insurance policy, the same move made by Abraham Stoker to fund his sons’ educations. The loan released the debt pressure and presumably allowed him to devote a concentrated amount of time to finishing the book in the summer of 1896. The previous year had been the Lyceum’s last American tour until 1899, so he was free of that particular pressure. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t anxious to finish the project. He had published two books in 1895, but none in 1896, despite mounting financial concerns. Noel recalled him being “very testy” during the completion of the novel, withdrawing from Florence and himself, and told biographer Harry Ludlam that Stoker always “used to seek complete isolation” while writing. Cruden Bay had become the family’s regular summer holiday destination—if “holiday” is ever the accurate word for an unreformed workaholic’s leave-taking. Noel remembered his father “striding out on long walks” and “stabbing at the sand with his strong walking stick, and at other times sitting for hours perched on the rocks off shore like some giant seabird, his notebook on his knee,” and being “inclined to be short-tempered if interrupted.” But, according to Florence, once he came out of his writing trance, Stoker “used to read his stories over to me as they were written, and ‘Dracula’ was by no means least among those which revealed to me the supernormal imagination of the author.”

Stoker’s begging letter to Hall Caine, asking for money to complete Dracula. (Courtesy of Manx National Heritage)

Unlike some of his later manuscripts, which had entries meticulously dated, with Dracula it is impossible to determine exactly when any particular passage was composed or revised. The final typescript has numerous cut-and-paste revisions, and the pagination indicates that whole chapters were shuffled around like cards. But whenever they occurred, many of the revisions are quite fascinating. For example, at some point before typesetting, Stoker struck out a dramatic description of Castle Dracula’s seeming self-destruction, immediately following its owner’s dusty demise. From Mina Harker’s final journal entry: “As we looked there came a terrible convulsion of the earth so that we seemed to rock to and fro and fell to our knees. At the same moment, with a roar that seemed to shake the very heavens, the whole castle and the rock and even the hill on which it stood seemed to rise in the air and scatter skywards in fragments while a mighty cloud of black and yellow smoke volume on volume of rolling grandeur was shot upwards with inconceivable rapidity.” The return of the debris to earth is rendered in tortured syntax that might have warranted deletion on that basis alone: “Then down in a mighty ruin falling whence they rose came the fragments that had been tossed skyward in the cataclysm.”‡‡ Then, Mina writes, “it seemed as if the one fierce volcano burst had satisfied the need of nature and the castle and the structure of the hill had sunk again into the void.”^§§ Again? When had the hill or castle previously been in “the void”?

In any event, the demolition order on Castle Dracula was likely rescinded not because words failed Stoker but on account of a last-minute idea that the story might not be finished after all, or at least might rise again. The American writer and former Massachusetts state senator and assistant attorney general Roger Sherman Hoar claimed that “Stoker told me that he planned to bring Dracula over to America in a new story.”¶¶ This might also explain why Dracula’s bloodless “death”—a crumbling into dust, when we already know the Count has the ability to transform himself into dust motes—is so different from those of the four other vampires killed in the book. Lucy and Dracula’s brides all die gruesomely; Van Helsing describes the dispatching of the latter three women as “butcher work” with a “horrid screeching as the stake drove home.” Ancient like Dracula, they, too, crumble into their native dust—but only after they scream through “lips of bloody foam” and put on a show. Another reason to suspect Stoker considered a sequel is a press clipping, included with his notes, titled “Vampires in New England” and dated 1896—too late to be of use in Dracula, but of great potential utility in a follow-up book set in America.

There was no advance announcement of the book, save Stoker’s cryptic comment to an Atlanta journalist, who told readers in January 1896 that Stoker’s “next book is going to have ghosts in it.” Sometime later that year Stoker delivered a final, professionally typed and hand-emended manuscript called The Un-dead to Archibald Constable & Company. That the penultimate title was a last-minute decision is indicated by Stoker’s hand-scrawled title page, added to the typescript. For seven years of work, he received no advance, only a guaranteed first print run of at least three thousand copies and a payment of one shilling for each copy sold. No one knows when the title was changed to Dracula, or at whose inspired suggestion. The final title was assigned by the end of the previous summer at the very latest, far earlier than is usually assumed. A bookseller’s advertisement for “New Books” in the September 11, 1896, issue of the Cape of Good Hope’s Cape Illustrated Magazine includes “Dracula by Bram Stoker.” This can only be an advance announcement of the Hutchinson Colonial Library edition of the book (very likely delayed; the magazine didn’t publish its review until September 1897), licensed by Constable and printed in London from the original typesetter’s plates. A strangely after-the-fact contract between Stoker and Constable, prepared and signed in May 1897, retains his original title, The Un-Dead, which raises a question never asked before: Did Stoker possibly object to the new title, rather than propose it himself? His seemingly obstinate clinging to the first title tends to bolster the idea that the change might have been Constable’s and not Stoker’s.

In any event, typesetting of Dracula could not have been complete before March 1897. Stoker must have been making final galley corrections when he wrote to Hall Caine on March 2.

Page from the typescript of Dracula, describing the Count’s first appearance.

I was thinking, if you would not object, to dedicate

the book to you—may I? If so how would it do to put it

To my dear friend

Hommy-beg?

or would it be better to note the name more

formally—if the book is ever worth remembering it

will be well understood what is meant.

I saw Mrs. Caine at the theatre. . . . Florence is in

Ireland has been almost a month and I am all alone at

home. When do you come in?

Yours ever
BRAM STOKER

On May 18, 1897, the week before Dracula appeared in bookstalls, Stoker held a staged reading of the book for dramatic copyright purposes at the Lyceum. Theatrical piracy was a thorn in the side of many nineteenth-century writers, most famously Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, and although there is no evidence that copyright readings actually prevented unauthorized stage adaptations, they were nonetheless a common practice. Programs were printed, placards posted, and a token admission was charged to make the event an official, commercial endeavor (the Stokers’ cook, Maria Mitchell, was the only known paying customer). Fifteen actors from the supporting ranks of the Lyceum company participated in the reading, and Ellen Terry’s daughter, Edith Craig, took the role of Mina. Dracula was played by a now-obscure actor named T. Arthur Jones. The ritual lasted over four hours, and because it would have been impossible for Stoker to have created multiple copies of the complicated cut-and-paste script (which utilized galley proofs of the novel and connective material handwritten by the author), the performers must have been seated on the stage behind a lectern to which they rose to read from a single script.

Although Stoker really did believe Dracula had theatrical possibilities, his adaptation was perfunctory and his dramaturgy not quite ready for prime time. The breathless exposition he puts in the mouth of Jonathan Harker to avoid the difficulties of putting a carriage ride through the Carpathian Mountains on a proscenium stage is a prime example. “Well, this is a pretty nice state of things,” Jonathan exclaims after being dropped off on Dracula’s doorstep. “After a drive through solid darkness with an unknown man whose face I have not seen and who has in his hand the strength of twenty men and who can drive a pack of wolves by holding up his hand; who visits mysterious blue flames and wouldn’t speak a word that he could help, to be left here in the dark before a—a ruin. Upon my life I’m beginning my professional experience in a romantic way!” The theatrical shortcomings of the piece were clear enough to Henry Irving. Asked by Stoker what he thought of the effort, Irving reportedly had a one-word reply: “Dreadful!”

Program for the copyright reading of Dracula, performed on the Lyceum’s stage to protect the book’s theatrical rights.

No doubt, Stoker knew this wasn’t real theatre. Any kind of representation of the book would do. Because the reading required an official license from the censor’s office, Stoker was cautious in the treatment of certain elements. For instance, he self-censored Lucy’s death scene, or any description of it, from the cobbled manuscript submitted to the Lord Chamberlain. A gap appears instead of the following:

The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together until the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor, his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart spurted up around it.

Stoker also eliminated most of the bloody ménage à trois involving Dracula, Mina, and Jonathan, luridly played out in the Harkers’ bed:

With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.

All that remains of this scene in the play script is the stage direction “See Dracula holding Mrs. Harker’s face to his breast.” It is a bloodless pantomime; once more Stoker avoids staging any action or image the Lord Chamberlain might find objectionable. Mina does recount the details of the blood communion with her rescuers, but it is only a description, if still a gruesome one: “He pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his and held them tight and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the—Oh my God! My God! What have I done?”

“What have I done?” could have been a question in Stoker’s own mind as he waited for reactions to the book. He could not have been unhappy with the first reviews, though he might have been surprised, given the doubt expressed to Hall Caine that he had written anything memorable. Although a great number of sources have described the overall critical response to Dracula as “mixed,” outright pans of the book were exceedingly rare, and the overwhelming majority of notices were enthusiastically supportive. However, since a great number of the positive reviews also adopted a tongue-in-cheek tone, it is understandable that these appraisals might be perceived as ambivalent.

For the staged reading, Lyceum actors read from Stoker’s cut-and-paste script, assembled from Dracula’s printer’s proofs. (The British Library)

The Daily Mail set a high bar in its baseline literary comparisons: “In seeking a parallel to this weird, powerful, and horrible story, our minds revert to such tales as ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho,’ ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘Wuthering Heights,’ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ and ‘Marjery [sic] of Quelher.’ But ‘Dracula’ is even more appalling in its gloomy fascination than any of these!” The Bookman was similarly admiring:

Since Wilkie Collins left us we have had no tale of mystery so liberal in manner and so closely woven. But with the intricate plot, and the methods of the narrative, the resemblance to stories of the author of “The Woman in White” ceases; for the audacity and the horror of “Dracula” are Mr. Stoker’s own. A summary of the book would shock and disgust; but we must own that, though here and there in the course of the tale we hurried over things with repulsion, we read the whole with rapt attention. It is something of a triumph for the writer that neither the improbability, nor the unnecessary number of hideous incidents recounted of the man-vampire, are long foremost in the reader’s mind, but that the interest of the danger, of the complications, of the pursuit of the villain, of human skill and courage pitted against inhuman wrong and superhuman strength, rises always to the top.

The Athanaeum was the only British periodical to discern a creeping zeitgeist quality in Dracula. “Stories and novels appear just now in plenty stamped with a more or less genuine air of belief in the visibility of supernatural agency. The strengthening of a bygone faith in the fantastic and magical view of things in lieu of the purely material is a feature of the hour, a reaction—artificial, perhaps, rather than natural—against late tendencies in thought. . . . Mr. Stoker has got together a number of ‘horrid details,’ and his object, assuming it is ghastliness, is fairly well fulfilled.” One through-line in all the contemporary reviews was praise to Stoker for his cleverness in juxtaposing medieval legend with up-to-date modernity. We have become so accustomed to thinking of Dracula as a “period” novel that it is easy to forget that in its time, the book was set in an immediately recognizable present day.

Noel Stoker, then studying at Winchester College, sent his father a note of congratulations. In one of the few recorded instances of a warm or humorous communication between father and son, Bram replied, “Dear Sir—let me thank you for your most kind appreciation of my last book. May I ask, as you have perused my previous books, if you enjoyed reading my first book, ‘The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland.’ If you have not already read it let me advise you to do so, as you will find it interesting and amusing and that the continuous nature of the narrative is instructive—Believe me, yours faithfully, Bram Stoker.”

Bram, Florence, and Noel vacationed again in Scotland in the summer of 1897, and this visit concluded with a three-day stay at Slains Castle as the guests of the French artist Henri Rivière and his wife, who were in turn the guests of the Earl of Erroll, whose family had owned the castle for three hundred years. Today it resembles a medieval ruin (leading some to mistakenly think it provided some measure of inspiration for Castle Dracula), but in the late nineteenth century it was sumptuously appointed, and the earl entertained many celebrities. The Rivières and their daughter had been Irving’s guests at the Lyceum, and Stoker obviously made a good impression. Rivière was well known for his cleanly drafted landscapes of the coast of Brittany, but also for the unique shadow puppet theatre he devised for the legendary Parisian cabaret Le Chat Noir. The silhouetted figures and shapes were placed at various distances behind the screen, creating a gradated tonality of shadows and a remarkable illusion of depth. Rivière’s dramatic compositions and penumbral mise-en-scène could easily have qualified him to illustrate Dracula. Could it be possible Stoker’s just-published book was not a topic of conversation that weekend?

Stoker’s fears of piracy were almost immediately validated when an unauthorized Hungarian translation appeared in Budapest in 1898 as Drakula (subtitled Angol Regény, or “English Novel.”) Like Iceland, Hungary was not yet a member of the Berne Convention, and British books provided ridiculously easy targets. There is no evidence, however, that Stoker knew of the theft. The American publisher Doubleday & McClure brought out the first authorized foreign edition of Dracula as a holiday book in 1899, but not without delay and frustration. According to the New York trade publication The Bookman, Dracula “had some curious vicissitudes in the United States. At first no American publisher would take it and Bram Stoker went to considerable expense in copyrighting it in this country. Time went on, and it looked as if this money—hard-earned, as was all Stoker’s money—would be utterly wasted. Then suddenly a publisher took the book and from the very first its sales were enormous, not only in the States, but Canada also.”

The American copyright formalities were handled not by the publisher as such but by the firm’s partner S. S. McClure personally. McClure was considered a brilliant publisher—he would become a major player in muckraking journalism—but an erratic businessman, and his joint venture with Frank Nelson Doubleday was coming to an end in 1899, after only three years. His more enduring enterprises included McClure’s Magazine and the McClure Newspaper Syndicate, which maintained an office in London and had introduced a number of British writers, including Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle, to American readers through popular newspaper serializations of their books. Like Stoker, McClure had been born in Ireland.

The copyright registration made by McClure in Stoker’s name on March 10, 1899, was not for the Doubleday & McClure book but rather for a newspaper serialization, deposit copies of which were received “in parts” between March 10 and April 10—exactly twenty-seven publication days (excluding Sundays), corresponding precisely to the twenty-seven chapters of the novel. These deposit copies no longer exist at the Library of Congress, and no correspondence regarding the matter was officially preserved. To date, an extensive search of newspaper microfilm and digital databases, conducted by the present author and others over a period of many years, has not revealed the identity of the periodical in which Dracula first appeared in America in the spring of 1899. But a confirmed weekly serialization in the Charlotte Daily Observer (titled Dracula: A Strong Story of the Vampire) followed from July 16 to December 10, and a subsequent 1900 serial in the Buffalo Courier included the first known illustration for the book, depicting Harker at the Transylvanian inn, receiving a letter from the Count. With an increasing array of digitized historical papers becoming available each year, the number of discovered serializations may well grow; it would, in fact, be quite surprising if they didn’t.

But what about Stoker’s “considerable expense” in securing an American copyright? It seems that McClure arranged for book publication only after Dracula had proved its viability in regional papers, and Stoker was expected to assume a portion of the financial risk for typesetting. Syndication was profitable because a book only needed to be set in hard type once. Daily newspapers that accepted syndicated material utilized columns of a standard width and were accustomed to receiving lightweight, easily shipped papier-mâché molds known as stereotypes,## into which they poured their own hot metal to produce printing plates. Stoker must have truly run out of publisher options when he accepted McClure’s deal. From the very beginning, he had warned Hall Caine of the financial disadvantages of accepting syndication offers tied to book publication, but now he found himself in the position of signing exactly such a contract or not being published in the United States at all.

(top and bottom) Irregularities abounded in Stoker’s registration of Dracula with the U.S. Copyright Office. Had anyone challenged the matter, the American copyright claim could never have been enforced. (Photographs courtesy of Elias Savada)

Stoker personally covered typesetting costs for an American newspaper serialization of Dracula, which appeared in the Charlotte Observer and other papers. (Courtesy of Paul S. McAlduff)

The first known illustration for Dracula, depicting Jonathan Harker and the Transylvanian innkeeper, appeared in the Buffalo Evening Courier in 1900. (Courtesy of Paul S. McAlduff)

The Count himself was first visualized on the cover of Constable’s abridged paperback in 1901.

Stoker entrusted the copyright paperwork for the published American book to William Carey, a friend and fellow Walt Whitmanite based in New York. Whitman supplemented his income by selling autographed portraits of himself and had designated Carey as sales agent for engravings based on the 1887 “Laughing Philosopher” photograph taken by George Collins Cox. Except for their mutual interest in Whitman, and the fact that they both worked in publishing, little else is known about Carey and Stoker’s relationship. Carey worked for the Century Magazine, America’s most widely circulated monthly, with offices overlooking Union Square. Carey’s name and his business address are penciled under the formal entry in the Copyright Office ledger: “Library of Congress, to wit: be it remembered, That on the 19th day of March, 1897, Bram Stoker of London, Eng., has deposited in this office the title of a Book the title or description of which is in the following words: Dracula By Bram Stoker.”

It is not clear that this registration carried legal weight. No deposit copy of the Constable edition was provided to the library—the line for that information is blank—but even that wouldn’t have satisfied the standing requirement that a copyrighted work by a foreign national needed to be manufactured in America. Further, the registration of a title is not the same thing as the copyright in a published work, and titles alone have never been eligible for copyright. Stoker probably made the registration only to meet Constable’s contractual requirement that he copyright the work in the United States as a prior condition of British publication, even though this was technically impossible.

McClure broke with Doubleday near the time the American Dracula arrived in bookstores, and he never sent the Copyright Office the two printed copies required upon publication. Someone—possibly Stoker, Carey, or the new firm of Doubleday, Page & Company—deposited two cloth copies on September 28, 1901, almost two years after any reasonable definition of timely compliance. The Copyright Office is a registry only, and any challenge to the validity of a copyright certificate is a matter for the courts, not the Library of Congress. There were enough irregularities in Stoker’s two registrations to invalidate his claim on Dracula. Fortunately, no one ever did.

Why Stoker wasn’t more vigilant on copyright matters we may never know. Dracula, in the end, may simply have exhausted him. He staged one more “copyright reading” at the Lyceum, for his novel Miss Betty in 1898, and obtained a Lord Chamberlain’s license for a staged reading of Mystery of the Sea in 1902, but never followed through with the performance.

Stoker would not live long enough to see Dracula achieve media superstardom in America, but the initial critical response to the book was mostly positive, and sometimes more insightful than the original British notices. A long and perceptive review in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle sensed the author’s affinity for fairy tales, mixed with a revulsion at the dehumanizing effects of a purely scientific worldview. “Upon an age of materialism, the book flashes a light of faith. On a time of fads and fakirs, it pours the results of an imagination that is as facile and familiar with marvels as children are made from nurses’ lips.” The reviewer found the novel’s “persuasive audacity” to be “a rare fact and find.” The worst condemnation on either side of the Atlantic ran in the San Francisco Wave, which titled its notice “The Insanity of the Horrible.” “When an Englishman, or, for that matter, anyone of Anglo-Saxon blood, goes into degenerate literature of his own sort, he reveals a horrible kind of degeneracy. The works of the French degenerates possess a verve, a Gaelic attractiveness, indefinable but definite. . . . The difference is that between Whitechapel and the Moulin Rouge.” But even this hatchet job ended with a left-handed compliment. “If you have the bad taste, after this warning, to attempt the book, you will read on to the finish, as I did—and go to bed, as I did, feeling furtively of your throat.”

An engraved portrait of Bram Stoker published in 1897, the year of Dracula’s debut.

Henry C. Dickens (1882–1966), Charles’s grandson, was one of the longest-living persons with a clear memory of Stoker at the time he wrote Dracula. In response to a 1959 London Observer piece by Maurice Richardson, drawing from his essay “The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories,” in which he likened reading the book to “entering a twilight borderland, a sort of homicidal lunatic’s brothel in a crypt, where religious and psychopathological motives intermingle,” all culminating in “a kind of incestuous, necrophilous, oral-anal-sadistic wrestling match.” Dickens wrote to the Observer editor and told him Stoker would have laughed at the assessment. “He wrote his book as an unashamed horror story (which it undoubtedly was) and hoping it to become a best-seller (which it did) and he wrote it in any case as a joke.” According to the drama critic Frederick Donaghey, “He knew he had written, in ‘Dracula,’ a shilling shocker, however successful a one, and was frank about it.” And no less an authority than Hall Caine wrote that Stoker “took no vain view of his efforts as an author. . . . He wrote his books to sell. . . . He had no higher aim.”

In the final analysis, the most frightening thing about Dracula is the strong probability that it meant far less to Bram Stoker than it has come to mean to us.

* Stoker’s working notes for Dracula, long available to scholars at the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, have also been published in an indispensable volume annotated and transcribed by Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller, Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2008).

^† Wilhelm Schmidt, “Das Jahr und seine Tage in Meinung und Brauch der Rumänen Siebenbürgens,” Österreichische Revue 3, no. 1 (1865): 211–26, trans. Andrea Kirchhartz. Heinrich von Wlislocki, “Torturing Spirits in Romanian Folk Belief,” Am Ur-Quell 6 (1896): 108–9. This author has found only one Romanian word, the adjective nesuferit (meaning “annoying” or “insufferable”) that has any possible relevance.

^‡ The critic for the Boston Evening Transcript, in an otherwise positive assessment of Irving, seemed constitutionally incapable of resisting some lacerating digs: “Mr. Irving . . . held you fast from beginning to end; there was an indescribable element for greatness in his performance. Indescribable is the right word for it. Here is this wonderful man, chock full of mannerisms, and pretty ungainly mannerisms at that; at times hardly speaking what can rightly be called English; with scarcely any power of climax, reading his lines in a way that seems most cunningly devised to conceal their meaning; and yet, with and in spite of all this, producing an impression of force, dignity, and beauty such as one hardly imagined surpassed.”

^§ Following is the full author’s preface to Makt Myrkranna, retranslated into English, as it first appeared in A Bram Stoker Omnibus, edited by Richard Dalby (London: Foulsham, 1986):

The reader of this story will very soon understand how the events outlined in these pages have been gradually drawn together to make a logical whole. Apart from excising minor details which I considered unnecessary, I have let the people involved relate their experiences in their own way; but, for obvious reasons, I have changed the names of the people and places concerned. In all other respects I leave the manuscript unaltered, in deference to the wishes of those who have considered it their duty to present it before the eyes of the public.

I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the events here transcribed really took place, however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight. And I am further convinced that they must always remain to some extent incomprehensible, although continuing research in psychology and natural sciences may, in years to come, give logical explanations of such strange happenings, which, at present, neither scientists nor the secret police can understand. I state again that this mysterious tragedy which is here described is completely true in all its external respects, though naturally I have reached a different conclusion on certain points than those involved in the story. But the events are incontrovertible, and so many people know of them that they cannot be denied. This series of crimes has not yet passed from the memory—a series of crimes which appear to have originated from the same source, and which at the same time created as much repugnance in people everywhere as the notorious murders of Jack the Ripper, which came into the story a little later. Various people’s minds will go back to the remarkable group of foreigners who for many seasons together played a dazzling part in the life of the aristocracy here in London; and some will remember that one of them disappeared suddenly without apparent reason, leaving no trace. All the people who have willingly—or unwillingly—played a part in this remarkable story are generally known and well respected. Both Jonathan Harker and his wife (who is a woman of character) and Dr. Seward are my friends and have been so for many years, and I have never doubted that they were telling the truth; and the highly respected scientist, who appears here under a pseudonym, who will also be too famous all over the educated world for his real name, which I have not desired to specify, to be hidden from people—least of all those who have from experience learnt to value and respect his genius and accomplishments, though they adhere to his views on life no more than I. But in our times it ought to be clear to all serious-thinking men that

“there are more things in heaven and earth

than are dreamt of in your philosophy”

London,——Street,

August 1898

B.S.

By contrast, Stoker’s opening note in Dracula is a model of simplicity, a matter-of-fact statement that accomplishes much more than the Icelandic preface, simply by doing less: “How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of latter-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.”

^¶ John George Littlechild, the Scotland Yard chief inspector who strongly suspected that Francis Tumblety was Jack the Ripper, made the following unrelated but intriguing statement about Wilde’s masochistic streak: “It is very strange how those given to ‘Contrary sexual instinct’ and ‘degeneration’ are given to cruelty, even Wilde liked to be punched about.”

^# The painting appears as a color illustration in Merlin Holland’s The Wilde Album (1997), with credit given to Stoker’s granddaughter Ann Dobbs.

^** Osborne also painted Bram’s father (from a photograph) and his mother (from life), though judging from an apologetic letter from the artist, Charlotte Stoker was not completely pleased with her likeness.

^†† Although this evidence would seem to suggest sodomy under the British legal definition, the prosecution didn’t press the matter, possibly because it knew the sheets in question were used by Bosie and another party, and it was understood that the son of Queensberry was not to be prosecuted for any reason.

^‡‡ If “ruin” is taken as the typist’s mistaken transcription of Stoker’s handwritten “rain,” the sentence suddenly makes sense.

^§§ Here Stoker may be taking a cue from a similarly cataclysmic, and much better written, climax by Poe: “My brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher.’ ”

^¶¶ Hoar reportedly met Stoker as a seventeen-year-old Harvard freshman working as a local stage extra for Irving’s December 1903 engagement at the Tremont Theatre in Boston. Could Stoker have already been thinking of a sequel, even while struggling with the original manuscript? Before his political career, Hoar wrote pulp fiction under the pseudonym Ralph Milne Farley. His two-part serial “Another Dracula?” appeared in Weird Tales for September–October 1930. It was a Stoker-like tale set in the United States, and lifted Stoker’s description of the Count verbatim to describe a character who ultimately was revealed to be not a vampire, but rather the unfortunate victim of a sun-sensitivity disease.

## Printing stereotypes were first used in the early nineteenth century, and by the mid-1800s the word “stereotype” began to accrue its modern, metaphorical meaning from the predictability and standardization inherent in mass production. Similarly, cliché was originally a French printer’s term for the frame that held the stéréotype in place on the press.