CHAPTER SIX
BLOOD OUT
The American mania for policing seduction was never fully embraced in Europe. Though this was not due to a lack of interest in the subject. In Britain and continental Europe the same sexual fears that loomed large in the American psyche were nourished by many of the same anxieties. If in the historical imagination late-Victorian Europe slumbered in self-satisfied complacency, to its inhabitants it seethed with danger and novelty. The outward forms of industrial capitalism—filthy metropolises, mass migration, proletarian mobs, choking air and stinking rivers—were given a terrifying new significance by Darwinian theories that popularized the language of struggle, degeneration, and extinction. As natural selection begat racial theorizing, so did social transformation beget gender trouble. Like their American counterparts, European cities were home to a flourishing public sex trade. They were also incubators for a new generation of feminist activists intent on upending the dominant sexual order. For conservatives, the rebellion of the “New Women” of the 1880s and 1890s was directly connected to the new, racialized discourse that saw sexual permissiveness as the gateway to racial collapse. As in America, the panic over seduction was grounded in antagonistic and contradictory male attitudes toward race and gender. In Europe these fears found expression less in the law than in a complex of cultural tropes that dredged up tales of the supernatural to give form to the anxieties of modernity. “Witch-tales in this enlightened age!” marveled the London-based occult guru Madame Blavatsky in the 1880s. “You will have such witch-tales as the Middle Ages never dreamt of. Whole nations will drift insensibly into black magic.” Nowhere was this drift more in evidence than in the mind and milieu of one Londoner, operating out of a theatre in the city’s West End.1
The first thing people noticed about Bram Stoker was his height. At a time when the army had by force of necessity to reduce the minimum height for prospective recruits from five foot six to five foot, Stoker was an easy six foot two and muscularly built. Everything about him, from his tidy russet beard, his ruddy cheeks, and his legendary, booming voice spoke of good health and vitality. Stoker’s energy, good cheer, and unthinking courage impressed everyone he met. On at least one occasion it also made the national press when, at age thirty-five, he dived into the Thames from a steamboat after witnessing the attempted suicide of a fellow passenger. Without a second thought, the papers reported, “Mr. Stoker threw off his own coat, and pluckily jumped in after the drowning man, grappled with him, and succeeded in bringing him up from to the steamer, where he was laid on the deck in an unconscious condition.” When he could not revive the man himself he took him back to his home in Chelsea so his brother Thomas, a doctor, could have a go. The man died; Stoker seems to have survived his plunge in the rancid river unscathed. His wife, according to lore, was appalled when she came home to find a cadaver laid out on their dining room table.
Abraham Stoker was born in Clontarf, Ireland, in 1847, but spent almost his whole life to the age of the thirty in Dublin where his father, also Abraham, was a civil servant. His mother Charlotte was a respectable housewife who bore her husband seven children and involved herself in the charitable causes fashionable among middle-class women, which in her case meant an abiding interest in women’s education and the rescue of poor, vulnerable girls from the streets and workhouses of Victorian Ireland. The Stokers were Protestant, like much of the Irish elite, but their bourgeois status was hard-won. Abraham Senior was the son of an artisan and had raised his family’s place in society by grinding his way up through the ranks of the colonial bureaucracy. The result was that his sons got the best education that could be hoped for, which in Ireland meant attending Trinity College, Dublin. Bram, their third child and second son, had been a sickly boy and a mediocre student but was transformed from the moment he arrived at Trinity in 1864, at age sixteen.
Trinity was an intensely competitive social and intellectual environment which consciously selected and shaped the future Irish leadership. Stoker’s contemporaries were the sons of the elite and the fathers of Ireland’s revolutionary generation. In ambitious company, Stoker stood out as being a high-achiever with a hunger, easily worn, for success and recognition. There seemed no limit on the range of his interests and offices. He was President of the Philosophical Society and Auditor of the Historical Society (founded by Edmund Burke) where he composed, read, and discussed papers on everything from Shelley, Faust, Byron, and supernaturalism in literature, to science, politics, and racial theory. For his efforts in these fields he was awarded medals and certificates in history, oratory, and composition which sat alongside the dozen or so trophies he won for his athletic achievements in sports as varied as rugby, swimming, distance running, gymnastics, high jump, long jump, vaulting, slingshot, and rowing. Years later his classmates would remember their friend’s great strength, his flexibility, and his daring stunts on the rings and the trapeze. He was also a presence on the Trinity stage—performing in productions of Richard Sheridan’s School for Scandal and The Rivals—and a participant in student literary life as an avid if average short story writer. Alongside this packed schedule, Stoker also worked in the Dublin Civil Service for the final four years of his six-year stint at Trinity, a job he would apply himself to with mixed interest until 1878. Stoker formally left university in 1870 but remained intimately bound up in Trinity life which was only to be expected given the university’s dominant position in Dublin society. In 1871, already established as a local character and universally admired as an avatar of the Victorian values of thrift, industry, and muscular Christianity, Stoker joined the Dublin Evening Mail as a theatre critic. There he reported to the Mail’s proprietors Dr. Henry Maunsell and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, a descendent of the playwright and the author of the sapphic vampire thriller Carmilla (1872). He was soon ubiquitous in Dublin thespian circles where he mingled with actors, playwrights, critics, and managers, became a stalwart presence in the audience at the Theatre Royal, and grew easily into the role of assiduous networker—he started a correspondence (uninvited but happily received) with Walt Whitman, struck up intimate friendships with stage beauties like Genevieve Ward, and won the respect and attention of the dramatists who periodically came through town on tour.
One of the men who was drawn to Stoker would change his life. Henry Irving was one of the great Victorian freaks. Born in obscurity in the West Country, Irving had received little education—George Bernard Shaw liked to gossip that he was a virtual illiterate—but had acquired at a young age an obsession with the theatre. He began his dramatical career in the provinces, in Sunderland, and spent the better part of two decades perfecting his art and striving his way into London acting circles. A tall, stooping man, with habitually hunched shoulders, Irving had thick hair, an expansive, bald brow, and a very large, very curious head, the great bulk of which began beyond the jawline as though it always sought to tip him downward and that it took conscious effort on his part to keep himself upright. On the stage Irving was known for his harsh, stentorian voice, his hypnotic eyes, and his bizarre incorporation of an affected limp that left one foot dragging after the other whatever character he played. Irving was an enigmatic man, more comfortable in playing a fictional persona than inhabiting a real one, but he was acutely aware of his capacity to enchant his audience. Bram Stoker learned of this up close during his first meeting with Irving in Dublin in 1876 after an evening at Trinity. By this stage in his career, Irving was one of the most respected British actors and commanded audiences wherever he went. Wanting, perhaps, to bring this promising young man under his influence, he treated Stoker to a private recital of “The Dream of Eugene Aram,” a melodramatic narrative poem by Thomas Hood concerned with murder, guilt, and gothicism. The poem was a well-known part of Irving’s repertoire and one that Stoker knew. Nonetheless, when the famed actor launched into a rendition of these familiar lines after dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, something changed in Stoker forever. “There are great moments even to the great,” Stoker later wrote, but
That night Irving was inspired. Many times since then I saw and heard him—for such an effort eyes as well as ears are required—recite that poem and hold audiences, big or little, spellbound till the moment came for the thunderous outlet of their pent-up feelings; but that particular vein I never met again. Art can do much; but in all things even in art there is a summit somewhere. That night for a brief time, in which the rest of the world seemed to sit still, Irving’s genius floated in blazing triumph above the summit of art. There is something in the soul which lifts it above all that has its base in material things. If once only in a lifetime the soul of a man can take wings and sweep for an instant into mortal gaze, then that “once” for Irving was on that, to me, ever memorable night.
At the end of the performance Stoker collapsed to the floor in unmanly hysterics. It was the beginning of a great friendship.2
“Every Irishman who felt that his business in life was on the higher planes of the cultural professions,” George Bernard Shaw observed, “felt that he must have a metropolitan domicile and an International culture: that is, he felt that his first business was to get out of Ireland. I had the same feeling… . [the] English language was my weapon, there was nothing for it but London.” Bram Stoker felt much the same way. He and Irving stayed in close contact after the night of Eugene Aram and in 1877 Irving began to involve him in his plans to acquire a major London theatre, the Lyceum. When in November of that year Irving’s designs for Stoker swam into focus, the younger man recorded three triumphant words in his diary: “London in View!” It would take another year to get there but by December 1878 Stoker had resigned from the Dublin civil service, handed over his last review for the Mail, and was ready to sign on with Irving. The two met at Birmingham, where Irving was finishing a tour. Stoker visited Irving at his hotel in Edgbaston and later recalled that his new employer “was mightily surprised when he found that I had a wife with me.”
Oscar Wilde once described Florence Balcombe as an “exquisitely pretty girl … with the most perfectly beautiful face I have ever seen” and he was well-positioned to know, as were it not for Bram Stoker’s mysterious appearance in her life he would have likely married her. Almost nothing is known about how Stoker and Balcombe met, how he won her, and how they lived together for the four decades of outwardly calm married life that followed. Very little is known about Mrs. Stoker at all, except that she was exceptionally physically attractive, easily meeting the exacting standards of ethereal feminine beauty that the Victorians so coveted. Socially, she was a cipher. Biographers of her husband have had to survive on rumors and throwaway remarks to paint a picture of Florence Stoker as a frigid, vain, ambiguously cruel woman. In reality little is known of her except that she was sought after by painters and sculptors wanting to capture her likeness and that she won the sympathy of London society after surviving a major maritime disaster in 1882, when the steamer Victoria she and her son were aboard hit rocks near Dieppe in the Channel, resulting in the death of 20 of 120 passengers and crew and a public shaming of the traveling Italian men who jumped into lifeboats reserved for women and children.
One interesting absence in the sketchy surviving portrait of Florence Stoker is that total lack of love for her evinced by her only child, Irving Noel Thornley Stoker, born on New Year’s Eve 1879. Noel’s memories of childhood feature his enormous, bear of a father who existed as if visiting from a fairytale on the periphery of his life, always dressed up and about to leave for Theaterland, but there is nothing about his mother. There is, however, an unnerving public window into the Stoker household from an image of Bram, Florence, and Noel drawn by George Du Maurier that appeared in Punch magazine in September 1886. It is a scene of late-Victorian bliss: a garden party in the grounds of fine country house; in the foreground the hulk of a dark-hatted, heavily bearded Stoker leaning forward in his wicker chair, a tennis racket at his feet; sitting a good meter and a half apart from him is his wife, beautiful, glamorous, and distant, looking down, either lost in her knitting or ignoring both the attentions of her husband sitting morosely across from her and her only child standing in boater and knickerbockers behind her, seemingly bemused by her refusal to play with him. The caption beneath reads:
FILIAL REPROOF: Mamma to Noel, who is inclined to be talkative, ‘Hush, Noel! Haven’t I told you that little Boys should be Seen and not Heard?’ Noel’s reply “Yes, Mamma! But you don’t Look at ME!
It is an odd piece of Victorian sadism, inexplicable in its casual confusion of public and private.3
Within less than a year of their marriage in Dublin, the newly married couple found themselves plunged into the maelstrom of London life. Eventually the Stokers would make their home in and around Cheyne Walk, near the sleepy western end of the Thames Embankment, but in those first hectic years they lived only a few streets away from Stoker’s new place of employment at the Lyceum Theatre, at almost the exact center of London life. The Lyceum was and remains a large faux-Palladian structure situated at one of London’s great meeting places. Perched on Wellington Street, just off the eastern tip of the Strand, the theatre’s entrance was visible to the stream of Londoners and London traffic that traveled south to north across Waterloo Bridge each day and who could not have avoided the two huge illuminated signs that hung invitingly on the theatre’s facade. The theatre also connected the Eastern and Western hemispheres of the city. Aldwych, which the Lyceum looked over, was the meeting place of the Strand and Fleet Street. The former was the great London thoroughfare that led to Westminster and thence to the wealthy districts surrounding Piccadilly and Hyde Park before petering out in the bohemian villages of Kensington and Chelsea; the latter was the mainline to the old City of London whose course began as a tour of the great institutions of Victorian Britain—the Royal Courts of Justice, the Bank of England, St. Paul’s Cathedral—only to end in the scene of one the nation’s great shames: the teeming slums and rookeries of Whitechapel, Shadwell, and Stepney.
The larger paradoxes of Victorian London were played out in the Lyceum’s immediate environs. On the Strand, well-heeled shoppers rubbed shoulders with prostitutes, beggars, and pickpockets. Clerks and dukes alike came to Covent Garden for the playhouses—as they had done since the eighteenth century—but also for the seedier pleasures of neighboring Soho, a zone of gin shops, brothels, and flophouses wedged uneasily between the more desirable districts of Mayfair, St. James’s, and Bloomsbury. The contradictions that the Lyceum bore witness to were captured by Arthur Conan Doyle in The Sign of the Four (1890). When Holmes and Watson meet outside Irving’s theatre on a mysterious errand for a client they experience the strangeness of the West End where the thick crowds “of shirt-fronted men and beshawled, bediamonded women” spilling out of private carriages before the entrance to the Lyceum existed alongside a mass of undifferentiated humanity that “flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more.”
The gloom, smoke, and smog that typified late-Victorian London—and which was at its worst close to the river, where vapor from the Thames met with air-borne effluent that gathered naturally in the water basin—was something that the Stokers would have noticed as soon as they arrived from Dublin. The period they lived in the city coincided roughly with the heyday of the Pea-Soupers, the London Particular, the London Ivy—the infamous London fog that defined the visual and olfactory experience of London living in this era. The yellow-brown fog, that, depending on the light, atmospheric conditions, and the peculiar composition of local sources of air pollution, could also shade into purple, vermillion, pale green, and bog black, influenced and obstructed all life in this capital of global finance, industry, and science. In December and January it regularly killed several thousand Londoners a month from respiratory disease. The fogs also provided cover for crime and public disorder. The cast-iron London gaslights—those great symbols of rational civic planning—could not contend with the choking fumes and in the shallow half-light that the city consisted moody crowds and groups of petty thieves could and did run riot with scant fear of the police. In 1886 there was a spate of such disturbances in Trafalgar Square and Pall Mall, on the Lyceum’s doorstep. More generally the fog made mockery of Victorian pretensions to the conquest of nature and superstition by reason and investigation. A famous 1888 Punch cartoon depicted a hadean “King Fog” accompanied by his imps sweeping over the British capital while the figure of Science lies defeated in the ground. The “shores of Styx were bland matched with Fleet Street or the Strand,” Punch declared, where “a foul and foetid pall fell over each and all; its ingredients were mist, and much, and smoke.” The “ruthless reign of King Fog” had turned the citizens of London into ghosts—an image that artists, journalists, and writers would return to repeatedly in those decades. Indeed, the whole city became a specter existing as the hostage of an unreal, unfathomable, wholly capricious haze that had neither source nor purpose. Oscar Wilde, who had moved to London at the same time as the Stokers and lived nearby, on the Thames side of the Strand, recalled watching the yellow fog roll up the river each winter morning until it consumed the whole city leaving nothing in view apart from the dull white dome of St. Paul’s hanging like a chandelier above the mustard cloudline. Victorian London was a nightmare waiting to be populated.
The Lyceum’s role was to keep the nightmares out. Irving positioned it as a safe, conservative space that catered to the London elite and the aspirational middle classes. The selection of plays reflected this ethos. Irving rejected suspect new trends in theatre and playwriting in favor of lavish sets, high-end special effects, and a focus on the classics. Over a quarter of the plays performed in the Lyceum under Irving were Shakespeare; the rest were for the most part historical pageants or tried-and-true audience favorites. Irving steered clear of the Ibsen revolution, an insistence which won him the disdain of the avant-garde, especially Bernard Shaw who, though a regular presence in the stalls, considered the Lyceum little better than a high-end music hall.4 Irving did not care for such matters. A conservative by nature and by politics he was interested in form and craft, and had little time for Bernard Shaw’s socialist aesthetics which were, in any case, philistine in the extreme. Irving also needed to turn a profit. Before the curtain even lifted on the first performance under his management, he and Stoker had already spent some £12,000 renovating the building. This included a complete structural and decorative makeover of the two thousand capacity theatre; a retouching of the existing ornaments; the refurbishment of the grungy auditorium in more fetching shades of green and blue; and the commissioning of an entirely new act drop. The faithful green stage curtain was kept, and Irving’s son would later recall how when the lights went down
and only the lower part of it was softly illumined by footlights, this green curtain seemed to fade into infinity—veiling, as Charles Lamb, once said, a heaven of the imagination. It was the veil between the world of reality and of make-believe; when it rose the world before and behind the proscenium were blended; the illusory gained substance from the prosaic which in turn reflected something of the glittering image of the illusion.
Stoker’s specific role in the running of the Lyceum was that of acting manager. Irving and his stage manager, Harry Loveday, had complete control of the artistic direction of the theatres, of the conduct of the rehearsals, and of what was performed and who performed in it. Stoker had the arguably more complex role of mediating between the world of the stage, the world behind the stage, and the world outside the stage. Most actors only had to play a handful of roles each year; Stoker had to shape-shift between countless each day. Outside the Lyceum he represented Irving’s interests in court, in theatrical associations and cultural charities, on a few occasions in Parliament, and defended and promoted him and his work in the press. Stoker also had to handle the police and encourage them to combat the petty crime that always threatened to make the West End unappealing to middle-class theatregoers and to crack down on ticket forgeries—a problem that repeatedly took him to Bow Court to testify on the matter. In the front of house, Stoker was in charge of meeting the crowds who came to see Irving’s plays and ensuring that grandees, reviewers, and Irving’s mother were seen to their seats with all due care and courtesy. This was his most public function and the sight of this rugged, smiling Irishman deftly marshaling the audience into position before each performance became a familiar and welcome fixture in London life. Behind the scenes he managed all the money that passed through the theatres—over two million pounds over the course of his career—dealt with the salaries, gripes, and idiosyncrasies of the several hundred actors, engineers, and tradesmen in their employ, and otherwise ensured that the enormous operation that was the Lyceum Theatre ran smoothly and profitably.
From the outset Irving’s venture was a magnificent success. The opening night of his first Lyceum production—Hamlet, with Irving in the lead role—on December 30, 1878 was a major society event with an audience that numbered among them the Prince of Wales, former Prime Ministers and great rivals Gladstone and Disraeli, poets Swinburne, Tennyson, and Wilde, the musical duo Gilbert and Sullivan, and painters—and later Chelsea neighbours of Stoker—Whistler and Millais.5 Irving went on to secure the enduring patronage of the Prince of Wales and through him the favor of the British and Continental aristocracy. The Royal family would book boxes for the premiers of Irving’s plays; Horace Wyndham would later write that in the last decades of the Victorian era an opening night at the Lyceum drew “an audience that was representative of the best of the period in the realms of art, literature, and society. Admittance was a very jealously guarded privilege.”
As master of the box office, Stoker was the gatekeeper to each first night at the Lyceum and Wyndham wryly described how the proud Dubliner “looked upon the stalls, dress circle, and boxes as if they were annexes to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, and one almost had to be proposed and seconded before the coveted ticket would be issued.”6 Success in London gave Irving a license to print money in the provinces. Starting in 1881, the Lyceum troupe began to tour regularly in Northern England, Scotland, Canada, and the United States. To Stoker’s mammoth workload was now added the logistical horror of having to organize the travel arrangements of several hundred thespians and workmen along with their costumes, scenery, and lighting equipment. For the Lyceum’s first tour a separate train had to be booked just to transport the stage-sets and lighting paraphernalia. But the profits were enormous. That tour netted £24,000; the nine tours of North America that Stoker organized between 1883 and 1904 brought in lesser but still considerable amounts. It was on the road where Stoker earned his reputation for omnipotence and ubiquity. On an 1893 tour of America he managed to negotiate a stage electrician out of jail after his arrest for violating immigration laws. On tour the actors of the Irving troupe learned to fear and obey their acting manager. Stoker disciplined any dramatist who developed ideas out of sync with Irving’s aesthetic vision and personal preferences. An actor who tried to go on stage without wearing his makeup because he believed the foundation would run in the heat of the night was told “to forget his theories and to go and get made properly up like everyone else.” Stoker’s powers were almost uncanny. “That devil Bram Stoker,” actor William Terriss told a colleague, “he can see through a brick wall—God help you.” This was only a little short of the truth. Ever in a hurry, Stoker did travel through a plate glass divider while moving at speed through the lobby of the Chestnut Street Opera House in Philadelphia, though, invincible as ever, he emerged on the other side without a mark on him.
After their 1884–1885 tour of the United States, Irving and Stoker went home to the Lyceum. They returned to London that summer of 1885 to find the city in a tumult. Moral outrage led to disturbances in the street. Newspapers editorialized, ministers sermonized, and social reformers agitated for change with new vigor. Committees of bishops and elder statesmen were formed, as were new alliances among previously fractious groups of nonconformist ministers, trade unions, and bourgeois campaigners. Massive meetings in Hyde Park were discussed, organized, and attended. Rumors of conspiracy, cover-up, even revolution bounded around. Questions were asked in Parliament; dormant bills were revived and propelled through the two houses. By autumn English law and English democracy had been transformed. The subject of the outcry was the sexual rights of English women. The source of the intense public furor on the issue was a series of revelations in the London afternoon daily, The Pall Mall Gazette. At the center of it all was the Gazette’s editor, a professional acquaintance of Bram Stoker’s, William Thomas Stead.
With his dark, three-piece suits and pocket chain, his full brown beard, and piercing zealot’s eyes, W.T. Stead was emblematic of a new force ascendant in late-Victorian politics. Born in Northumberland in 1849 and raised in a Congregationalist household, Stead’s three declared passions were “Christianity, Cricket and Democracy” and his calling was as a campaigning journalist and editor. He had begun his career at the Northern Echo, England’s first morning halfpenny paper and the champion of its restless working class. Initially a Gladstonian liberal, Stead had been converted to a jingoistic socialism by the late 1870s and believed in “the duty of England as a civilising power among the weaker and more degraded nations of the earth” and was frank in his acknowledgment that the “Anglo-Saxon idea has gained possession of my brain.” At home in the provinces where he corresponded with the great and the good in splendid isolation from London, Stead professed no desire to move to the corrupt and dissolute British capital. He claimed that he had been to London once and had no desire to go again. “If the Lord wishes me to go,” he declared, “He will have to drive me thither with whips.” The Lord did wish for Stead to go to London. In 1880 he was offered a job with John Morley, editor of Pall Mall Gazette, an afternoon daily based out of offices on Strand, which he accepted. In 1883 Morley retired and he became editor himself. Under Stead’s authority the Gazette became an influential force in British life. Despite having a circulation of less than 40,000, the newspaper weighed in on the great issues of the day and not infrequently changed the course of events. Stead’s advocacy helped send General Gordon to his martyrdom in Khartoum; his patriotic affront at the retrograde state of the Navy resulted in a massive increase in the Admiralty’s budget; a campaign against slum conditions moved the ultra-conservative Tory administration of Lord Salisbury to action on the matter. Then, late in the spring of 1885, Stead had a conversation which would change his life.
In 1880, Benjamin Scott, a committed social reformer and the Lord Chamberlain of London, had been appalled by a new book. That year, Alfred Dyer published The European Slave Trade in English Girls in which he declared the existence of an underground economy selling English girls into sexual bondage in the brothels of France and Belgium. In a bid to combat this threat, the London Committee for Suppressing the Traffic in British Girls was established, with Scott as its Chairman. Its committee included many reformist luminaries such as Josephine Butler, the pioneering Victorian feminist and head of the Ladies National Association—a group that lobbied for improved sexual protections for women. Scott’s lobbying led to an investigation into white slavery by a House of Lord’s Select Committee which reported in 1881 that British laws were not sufficient to protect the bodies and morals of British women and girls. The trade in British girls was symptomatic of a larger failing. British law sought to regulate vice rather than promote virtue. British women were vulnerable to sexual exploitation and social ruin, all too often ending up on the streets as the sexual playthings of debauched aristocrats.7 “In other countries female chastity is more or less protected by law up to the age of 21,” the Lords observed. “No such protection is given in England to girls under the age of 13.” They recommended an increase of the age of consent from 13 to 16; the introduction of penalties for indecent assault; criminalizing the solicitation of women for employment in an overseas brothel, as well as tough new measures for those who aided and abetted the procurement and prostitution of minors. These formed the basis for a new Criminal Law Amendment Act which lingered in Parliament for several years without ever becoming law. After another setback in 1884, an infuriated Scott decided that only a major scandal would secure the bill’s passage and so he went to W.T. Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette with a horrific story.
Scott told Stead that English virgins were being bought and sold on the streets of London in enormous quantities. Outraged, Stead sought the opinion of a retired senior Scotland Yard detective who confirmed the story in no uncertain terms. A now thoroughly scandalized Stead concluded that a conspiracy of silence—whose confederates were the press, senior politicians, and the capitalist and landlord class—was keeping the ghastly truth from the electorate. He was now determined to expose the truth of the matter and in June he embarked on a journey into London’s underworld.
“I have been a night prowler for weeks,” Stead would later write of this voyage into the pit,
I have gone in different guises to most of the favourite rendezvous of harlots. I have strolled along Ratcliff-highway, and sauntered round and round the Quadrant at midnight. I have haunted St, James’s Park, and twice enjoyed the strange sweetness of summer night by the sides of the Serpentine. I have been at all hours in Leicester-square and the Strand, and have spent the midnight in Mile-end-road and the vicinity of the Tower. Sometimes I was alone; sometimes accompanied by a friend; and the deep and strong impression which I have brought back is one of respect and admiration for the extraordinarily good behaviour of the English girls who pursue this dreadful calling. In the whole of my wanderings I have not been accosted half-a-dozen times, and then I was more to blame than the woman. I was turned out of Hyde Park at midnight in company with a drunken prostitute, but she did not begin the conversation.
Stead’s elegy to the working girls of London spoke to his basic compassion toward women trapped in a life of prostitution. They were not to blame for their condition. On his travels through “the maze of London brotheldom” Stead met the real culprits: the madams who groomed the nurses and shop-girls promenading in Hyde Park on the weekend; the professional seducers who corrupted girls and delivered them to brothels; the drunken mothers who sold their daughters for gin money; the trafficker who spoke in brisk, commercial terms of the slave routes that took London girls to continental brothels via Dover and Ostend; the employment agencies and servants registries and bars and theatres whose business facade concealed a pernicious effort to corrupt and exploit working class women. At the heart of the labyrinth he met the men whose lust kept the market in existence, men taken almost exclusively from “the very wealthy and the immoral idlers of the ‘upper ten.’” These were aristocrats and capitalists, the sons and guardians of privilege. Somewhere along the way Stead also found the final proof of Scott’s initial claim. A thirteen-year-old girl from West London, her virginity proven by a medical examination, had been sold by her sodden mother for £5, chloroformed, and the delivered up to a wealthy gentleman in a Regent Street brothel.
Overwhelmed by moral revulsion, Stead struggled to find words to explain to the readers of the Pall Mall Gazette what he had witnessed in the capital of the British empire. He raided Dante, Homer, even the Koranic accounts of hell to find parallels. In the end he settled on myth of the Cretan Minotaur who took as tribute the flower of the Athenian youth. London was the new Crete, its wretched and exploited women the sacrificial offering. Stead’s series of exposes, including his ghastly account of the purchasing of a virgin, duly appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette over the course of the first ten days of July under the heading of the “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.”
In the first instalment of his exposé, Stead had emphatically denied that he was seeking a revolution in British sexual manners. “However strongly I may feel as to the imperative importance of morality and chastity,” he wrote, “I do not ask for any police interference with the liberty of vice. I ask only for the repression of crime.” Only three weeks later his tone had sharpened. In the intervening weeks his revelations had sent the country into a frenzy over women’s sexual rights and this public outpouring in turn inspired Stead to raise the stakes. Parliament had hastily scheduled a third reading of the Criminal Law Amendment Act on July 30. On July 28 the Pall Mall Gazette noted that the MPs were now faced with a “national uprising against the loathsome abnormities [sic] of sexual vice.” Parliamentary intervention was needed to forestall insurrection. “If ever there is a social revolution in this country,” the Gazette warned, “it will be over this very question.”8
What Stead and his allies knew was that Parliament could not discuss the issue of prostitution and the alleged “white slave trade” without also addressing the question of seduction: the two issues were inextricably linked in reformers’ minds. The condition of England’s prostitutes was understood as the dark reflection of the glistening ideal of the “Angel of the House.” Women either met a male standard of meek femininity and unquestioning submission to patriarchal authority or they were expendable outlets for unbridled male desire. It was no coincidence that one of Stead’s greatest supporters in the struggle to pass the Criminal Law Amendment Act was Josephine Butler, Victorian England’s lonely champion of women’s sexual rights. Butler and the Ladies National Association (LNA) had spent the previous fifteen years campaigning against the hated Contagious Diseases Act of 1867 that empowered police to detain any woman they suspected to be a prostitute and have them subjected to a forced inspection by a doctor to ensure that they were not carriers of venereal disease. Those who campaigned against the act loathed its partiality, its brutality, and its ineffectiveness, but above all they recognized that alleged prostitutes’ powerlessness before the combined specters of “medical despotism” and “police despotism” was a dramatization of every woman’s impotence before an all-encompassing male despotism.9
For championing the cause of one of Britain’s more despised and unsympathetic groups Butler attracted little praise and a great deal of mockery. One of her critics once attacked her as “an indecent maenad, a shrieking sister, frenzied, unsexed, and utterly without shame.” “Unsexed” was the key word. It was the same that had been used to describe Mary Wollstonecraft and it referred to a specific idea of womanhood. Butler was “unsexed” because she contravened the norms of her sex—understood quite literally as referring to her genitals. In Victorian medical literature women were portrayed as “the Sex,” hostage to their wombs (hence prone to hysteria), sent temporarily mad during menstruation, and finally ruined by menopause. Their biology determined the roles they could play in life: either as “an instrument to the convenience and lust of men” (through a life of prostitution) or as the mute, submissive bearer of children within marriage.10
Victorian feminists and their allies knew that the only way they could make progress on major issues—women’s education, employment, and voting rights, among others—was to escape a framework that viewed them purely as sex objects. But paradoxically they had to do that by talking about sex. Women had to sexualize politics in order to desexualize themselves. Butler perfected this sinuous rhetorical strategy. One of her most powerful devices was an attack on the double standard of sexual morality. Why was it, she famously asked, that while society mindlessly indulged male libertinism “we never hear it carelessly or complacently asserted of a young woman that ‘she is only sowing her wild oats’”? Men and women should be held to the same standard. This was an ostensibly banal assertion that contained a radical germ. Implicit in the argument was the assumption that women were already abiding by this superior standard and that only men had to change in order to meet it. Female purity was constantly juxtaposed with male dissolution. Butler and her fellow activists encouraged a view of women as essentially innocent and men as essentially rapacious. Male allies like Stead came to share in this opinion wholeheartedly. “Girls, and I say this emphatically, are not seducers,” he later wrote. “They have innate delicacy and refinement. I say honestly that I do not believe that one woman in 10,000 would cast herself at the feet of lust except under duress or under the force of circumstances.” Female perfection required radical male change to meet the same standard. Another one of Stead’s allies, Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, founded the Church of England Purity Society that later merged with Ellice Hopkins’s British White Cross Army (established in 1885) to form the White Cross League, an organization which encouraged single men to take public vows of chastity until marriage and to wear a white ribbon on their lapel to identify themselves as embodiments of the new morality. But individual change was not enough—the law had to protect the special needs of women in this area. Prostitutes had to be protected, but so too did girls, mothers, and wives—all women.11
The staid members of the British Parliament were wholly unprepared for the complexities of the reformers’ arguments and methods. Gathered together at the height of summer, many were perplexed by the fact that a law that was apparently meant to deal with the problem of underage prostitution actually aimed at the total reformation of sexual norms. Members were not unduly troubled by the request to raise the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen—albeit the few that grumbled about the risks of blackmail for teenage boys—though that measure did not meet the hopes of some feminists who had argued for an age of twenty-one. Similarly, proposed new measures to combat sexual assault and to tackle those who enabled juvenile prostitution were not seriously challenged in the chamber. What did cause consternation was the language used to describe procuring. The law defined procuration as
Any person who Procures or attempts to procure any girl or woman under twenty-one years of age, not being a common prostitute, or of known immoral character, to have unlawful carnal connexion, either within or without the Queen’s dominions.
Those found guilty with of procuration faced a two-year prison sentence. The problem was that this looked a lot like a seduction law. The description of “not being … of known immoral character” seemed to mimic American seduction statutes that spoke of “previously chaste character.” An “unlawful carnal connexion” was defined as “sexual intercourse is unlawful where no valid marriage exists” which seemed to be revive the old crime of fornication. Finally, the additional crimes of procuration “by false pretences or false representations” echoed the language of suasion commonly associated with seduction and courtship, not sexual enslavement. Confusion reigned as to whether the bill actually criminalized seduction or not. The attorney general, Sir Richard Webster, stated it did; Lord Bramwell—one of the most senior jurists in the land—declared that it did not. In between lay every shade of opinion. Many members observed the injustice that the new protections applied only to women and girls and put men and boys of the same age at legal disadvantage. Others stated that the door was now open to blackmail and extortion. Edward Lyulph Stanley, Liberal member for Oldham, called for a clarification of what “false pretences, false representations, or other fraudulent means” looked like in practice. He suggested that, like in American seduction statutes, a promise of marriage ought to be the benchmark for a false pretense that resulted in sex. In any event,
There ought to be some illustration given to show what kind of false pretences would be punishable. It would be too much for a woman to induce a man knowingly and willingly to go with her, and then to turn round and give him two years’ imprisonment on the charge that she had been influenced by the false representations made to her… . That would be carrying the Criminal Law to a dangerous length.
But no clarification was forthcoming in the final bill. Many parliamentarians clearly believed that the bill acted as a de facto seduction statute and that it was open abuse and exploitation by cynical women and “vicious girls.” Outside of Parliament there were those who agreed with them. “This Act of Parliament,” complained a columnist in the radical publication The Anarchist, “places the power of irreparably injuring the character and prospects of innocent men, into the hands … of rash and meddling philanthropists.” “The bill,” the anonymous writer continued, “opens a wide door for … fraud and intimidation.”12
But such concerns could not now prevent the passage of the Act. Public pressure and media scrutiny was too intense. The bill passed the Commons on August 7 and the Lords on August 10. As promised, Stead hosted an enormous public protest in support of the new measures in London at the end of August, shortly before the bill was signed into law by the Queen.13
Shortly after this triumph, Stead suffered what most would consider a painful personal setback. It transpired that the man whom he had described in his reporting as having paid £5 for a virgin was none other than Stead himself. Working through a network of former prostitutes and madams Stead had arranged for Eliza Armstrong’s delivery to that hotel in London’s West End. Keen to play the part of the pederast rake convincingly, Stead, who was a teetotaller, drank a bottle of champagne before making his way to the hotel where he paid his £5 and then burst into the room where the drugged and thoroughly terrified Armstrong lay in a stupor. Then, in order to prove the transnational trade in girls was a going concern, he had her transported to France where she was taken into the care of the Salvation Army. When the facts of Stead’s behavior emerged he was promptly put on trial and sentenced to serve three months in jail. A farcical end to a farcical enterprise, but in fact from Stead’s perspective it was a triumph. Not only had he succeeded in changing the law but his martyrdom was providential proof that he was fighting the good fight.14 Stead had also ruptured the complacent calm of high-Victorian England. His dispatches from Babylon had revealed another London—a filthy, fogbound world bubbling over with perversion and sexual danger. A world of monsters.
Stoker knew W.T. Stead. One of his duties was the management of the Lyceum’s relations with the press, and the Pall Mall Gazette regularly reviewed their productions. Stoker also knew the many politicians, journalists, and Establishment worthies who gathered after hours in the Lyceum’s Beefsteak Room to discuss the issues of the day with Henry Irving. That summer talk must have turned from time to time to the antics of W.T. Stead and those whom Irving’s circle knew dismissively as “the psalm-singing mob.”15 More prosaically, the wild scenes outside the Gazette’s Strand offices that July—the huge crowds, the ranks of policemen—would have obstructed Stoker’s morning commute to work and would have naturally drawn comment from the Lyceum’s employees. For the women of the Lyceum, Stead’s reports would have had a special resonance. In the public mind, actresses had long been interchangeable with prostitutes, an association that Stead reinforced again and again in his journalism that summer.16 All actresses had to live with this stigma. Ellen Terry, the Lyceum’s leading lady, was all too familiar with it. The daughter of strolling players, as a teenager Terry had been an artist’s model for George Watts, a painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelites.17 Despite a forty-year age difference, Watts and Terry had married in 1865. In their subsequent divorce papers, Watts had claimed that he had wed Terry “to remove an impulsive young girl from the dangers and temptations of the stage.”18 By 1885, Terry was twice divorced, had two children out of wedlock, and was among the highest salaried women in the country, earning a massive £200 per week as an actress. Although she largely toed Irving’s ideological line at the Lyceum, in her intellectual, creative, and financial independence Terry was something of a harbinger of the New Woman, and would later become a patroness of the suffragist movement. Even the staid confines of Irving’s theatre were not completely removed from the torrid sexual politics of late-Victorian London.
In the summer of 1888, when he and his company departed London for an extended tour of the provinces, Irving leased out the Lyceum to an American actor-manager named Richard Mansfield. It was to prove one of Irving’s few missteps and one that let the violence and despair of London’s dark places onto his hallowed stage, puncturing the veil of reality and make-believe once and for all. Mansfield’s production was a stage adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Published in 1886, Stevenson’s novel had been rapturously received and quickly became a bestseller. In a long, effusive review, The Times declared the story a tour d’espirit, Stevenson Edgar Allan Poe’s better and George Eliot’s equal, and the book a “a finished study in the art of fantastic literature.”19 But The Times did not regard Dr. Jekyll, as simply a work of fantasy. The reviewer understood its plot—the gradual uncovering of the schizoid split between the avuncular, Anglo-Saxon Dr. Jekyll and the malevolent, simian Mr. Hyde—as taking place on “strictly scientific grounds.” Stevenson’s work was of a piece with the latest biological and psychological research, specifically those unleashed in the wake of Charles Darwin’s two masterpieces: On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871).
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection initially took an optimistic view of biological development. “As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being,” he wrote in the famous closing passages of On the Origin of Species, “all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.” But in the 1880s this whiggish view of evolution was called into question. Ray Lankester’s Degeneration, A Chapter in Darwinism (1880) had argued that if the conditions of life softened then organisms would cease to elaborate in response to threat and instead undergo “a gradual change of the structure in which the organism becomes adapted to less varied and less complex conditions of life. Degeneration was the “stippression [sic] of form, corresponding to the cessation of work.” Parasites were the classic example. Once a parasite found a way of living off the life essence of another organism their genetic development eschewed all evolutionary “work” irrelevant to the improvement of their parasitic existence.20 Lankester’s two great scientific influences were the German biologists Anton Dohrn and Ernst Haeckel. Dohrn and Haeckel were both pioneers in the field of embryology. Haeckel had become known for his embryological theory of recapitulation, whereby a fetus in the womb passed through its species antecedent stages as it developed from a scattering of simple cells to, in the case of humans, a fully developed baby. Along the way, Haeckel postulated, the future organism climbed its own family tree. En route to personhood a future human was a group of cells, then a fish, then a primate, and then finally a human. “Ontogeny,” Haeckel and his acolytes endlessly explained, “Recapitulates Phylogeny.” As the embryonic organism underwent this process they developed and then shed the features of their species’ previous incarnations. Human fetuses at one point have a monkey-like tail but they have lost it by the time they are born. But, Haeckel argued, it was possible that these traits would not be lost—that vestigial traits, or atavisms, could persist in otherwise fully developed individuals. However it found expression—physiological, psychological, anatomical—an atavism was the equivalent of a human infant being born with a prehensile tail.
Cesare Lombroso observed atavistic humans everywhere or, to be more precise, everywhere he looked, which was in prisons and penal colonies. Lombroso was an Italian criminologist and an acolyte of the Darwinian theories expounded by Haeckel and others. In the 1860s, while examining the skull of the deceased Italian brigand Vilella, Lombroso had what he described as a revelation. Criminals were not like the rest of the population. The criminal was in fact, “an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.”
Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek-bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages, and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life from his victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.
As this (partial) list of traits and features demonstrates, for Lombroso physical and behavioral traits were comorbid in the biological criminal. Behavior and biology were intimately linked. In the process, causation became hopelessly confused. Lombroso readily embraced both hard theories of heredity and softer environmental explanations. “The aetiology of crime,” he wrote, “mingles with that of all kinds of degeneration: rickets, deafness, monstrosity, hairiness, and cretinism, of which crime is only a variation.” This was, of course, music to the ears of social conservatives and connoisseurs of decline throughout the West. Although his works were only translated into English in the very last years of the nineteenth century, his ideas soon gained currency outside of his native Italy. His breakthrough work, L’uomo Delinquente (Criminal Man), was published in 1876. By 1881 the Pall Mall Gazette—which published Stoker’s short fiction and reviewed the Lyceum’s plays—was discussing the Italian’s writings in its columns, concluding gravely from it that “savagery is always very close to our civilization, and that the criminal and indolent easily glide back into the manners of Australians and Red Indians.”21 A few years later, in 1887, the Gazette uncritically told its readers that “Lombroso asserts that no less than 40 per cent. of prisoners are born, or habitual, criminals, whom no house of detention, no penal servitude will change, and to whose existence the public had better accustomed themselves, adjusting their minds to the existence of this latest natural phenomenon.”22 In England, the novel notion that there existed a criminal genus mingled easily with a preexisting belief in the existence of sociologically defined “criminal class,” not to mention a general phobia of the poor and concomitant and lurid fascination with their moral, social, and domestic condition—as Mansfield’s adaption of Stevenson’s novel, and the appalling historical backdrop to its run at the Lyceum, would soon demonstrate.
Like Lombroso’s biological criminal, Mr. Hyde is both physically and behaviorally different from the upstanding Dr. Jekyll. Jekyll is tall and hale; Hyde is decrepit. Both Hyde’s appearance and actions are described in relation to monkeys—animals lower down the evolutionary scale. Jekyll, as a physician, a gentleman, and a man of culture, represents the apex of civilization. Hyde mocks his learning by scrawling obscene marginalia in Jekyll’s books. Stevenson used London’s geography to symbolize the distance between the two men. Jekyll lives in a large, clean, spacious home with a garden, previously owned by a well-known surgeon. When Utterson, the narrator, tracks Hyde through the “great chocolate-coloured pall” of the London fog, his pursuit leads him to Soho, “a district of some city in a nightmare”:
As the cab drew up before the address indicated, the fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women of many different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass; and the next moment the fog settled down again upon that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings.
Jekyll is home, hearth, and a well-stocked library; Hyde is gin, foreigners, and fog.
Mansfield’s great stunt was to play both Jekyll and Hyde at once. In the famous promotional photo advertising the play he is depicted both guises simultaneously, the wretched figure of Hyde double exposed over the dapper Jekyll, an image which visually recalled Darwin’s famous illustration in the Descent of Man of the monkey loping upward into homo sapiens. All these theatrics and all the knowing nods to contemporary science could not help Mansfield. The play opened on August 4, 1888. From the outset it underperformed both critically and commercially. The failure of an intensely psychological novel to translate onto to the stage might be no great surprise. But circumstance dictated that Mansfield’s misfortune be of a different order all together. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as The Times had insisted, was meant to be an entertaining fantasy but the city determined to turn it into something horrifically real.
In the early hours of August 31, Mary Ann Nichols was found dead in Buck’s Row, in Whitechapel. A week later the body of Annie Chapman was discovered in Hanbury Street in Spitalfields. Then there was a hiatus of three weeks before two women, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, were murdered in the same hour on the night of September 30, one in White Chapel the other on the eastern edge of the City of London. There was then another, longer break in the violence until November 9 when the appallingly mutilated body of Mary Kelly was found in her flat in Spitalfields. All the victims were allegedly prostitutes; all lived in London’s East End; all had been subjected to varying degrees of savagery and dismemberment by an unknown killer.
The Jack the Ripper killings, or the Whitechapel Mystery as it was known in the press at the time, gripped the nation at the exact same time as Richard Mansfield was staging Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Lyceum. The media descended on Whitechapel and its environs and their coverage of the crimes and their setting was inflected by the same social anxieties and Darwinian theorizing that ran through Stevenson’s novel. In a famous series of Punch cartoons on the murders, the denizens of London’s East End were portrayed as little more than animals—hunched, bestial, idiotic—living in an environment as degraded as its inhabitants. Echoing W.T. Stead, Punch compared the lattice of streets, alleys, and courtyards in the East End to the Minotaur’s lair; echoing Lankester, Lombroso, and the rest of the Darwinian declinists it asked: “Held Dante’s Circles such a dwelling-place? Did primal sludge e’er harbour such a race?” Whitechapel was the monster lurking within an otherwise civilized London; the Hyde to the capital’s Jekyll.
The connection between what was going on in the streets of the East End and what was being played out nightly on the Lyceum’s stage (only two miles from the sites of the murders) was not lost on the press, the public, or Richard Mansfield. On October 2, the Pall Mall Gazette offered its readers a summary of the various theories concerning the identity of the murderer, among them was “The Jekyll and Hyde Theory.—that the murderer lives two lives, and inhabits two houses or two sets of rooms.” On October 5, the City of London police received an anonymous letter alleging that Mansfield was himself the Ripper. The author had apparently seen the Lyceum production and though he had a “great likeing for acters” upon seeing Mansfield in the role “I felt at once that he was the Man Wanted & I have not been able to get this Feeling out of my Head.”23 This was not, presumably, the kind of audience response Mansfield had been hoping for. Touring in Scotland, Stoker and Irving looked on with some concern as negative publicity accrued to their theatre and ticket sales plummeted. Pressure mounted on Mansfield to cease performing his play and to switch to less controversial fare. Mansfield decided to do just that. In mid-October the Daily Telegraph approvingly reported that the production was being abandoned. “There is quite sufficient to make us shudder out of doors,” the paper noted, “few will regret Mr. Mansfield’s determination to show us, before he leaves England, a pleasant side of human nature in contrast to the monsters he has conjured up.” Hoping to win back public favor, and perhaps allay questions as to his personal culpability, Mansfield announced that he would give the receipts from an evening’s performance of the comedy Prince Karl to the Refuge Fund for the Poor of the East-end of London.24 Nothing, however, could save Mansfield now. The abject failure of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde left him in a disastrous financial position: the rent on the Lyceum went unpaid and he had to borrow money from Irving to get back to the United States. The fiasco served to confirm “Irving’s distaste and suspicion of contemporary authors.” The next Lyceum production would be a dramatical stalwart: Macbeth. Stoker, as the man in charge of the theatre’s finances would have been intimately familiar with the fiscal problems arising out of Mansfield’s woes.25 But Jekyll, Hyde, and Jack the Ripper also resonated with him artistically. The killings and the mysterious powers of their mysterious perpetrator would linger in his mind and reemerge in the novel he was just starting to plot.
While Punch was content to portray the Ripper killings as the work of an atavistic brute, other, more perceptive, observers noted that the reverse was likely the case, namely, that the culprit was charming, socially intelligent, and capable of winning over scared and suspicious women. The Spectator argued that judging by his “success in pacifying the women” the murderer must be “respectable, and even gentle in appearance” and manner.26 The notion that the killer was physically and socially attractive seems, judging by the weight of contemporary evidence and modern research, substantially true. In this way, the Whitechapel Mystery reaffirmed the Victorian narrative that connected seduction, prostitution, and male rapacity. It also added, or rather emphasized, a new dimension to the sexual dangers English women faced: Jewishness.
British anti-Semitism had always been an odd thing, defined by the absence of its object, not its presence. In 1290 Edward I had banished all English Jews from the country and it was not until the seventeenth century that they were permitted to return. By the middle of the nineteenth century there were only around 30,000 living in the country. For the vast majority, Jews were an exoticism—spoken of but never seen. Many Englishmen only saw a Jew in the flesh when they went overseas. In this period, Jewishness in the English imagination was normally associated with the Sephardic Jews that lived on the Mediterranean littoral, who tended to be part of a prospering mercantile caste rather than a segregated ethnocultural one. Henry Irving’s encounter was typical. He spent the summer of 1879 yachting around the Mediterranean with some wealthy friends. Boating from port to port he found his attention at every harbor drawn to the local Jewish population, many of whom conducted business at the quayside. These majestic rather romantic figures confounded the native stereotypes he had grown up with. The crystallizing moment came, according to his son, in a port on the Maghreb:
He had seen a Jew in Tunis, beside himself over some transaction, tear his hair and his clothes, fling himself upon the sand writhing in rage, and a few minutes later become self-possessed, fawning and full of genuine gratitude for a trifling gift of money. Picturesque in his fury, having regained his composure, the Jew had stalked away with kingly dignity behind his mule team.27
Irving now had his way into one of the most controversial and, to his mind, misunderstood figures in dramatical history: Shylock. Upon his return he revealed his plans for a radical reinterpretation of The Merchant of Venice to Loveday and Stoker and on November 1, 1879 the play opened at the Lyceum. Irving’s performance as the title character won him widespread acclaim and was considered a watershed moment in Anglophone depictions of “the Jew.”
Irving could not have known it, but his portrayal of Shylock came at a pivotal moment in the history of English Jewry. Between 1881 and 1905 approximately 100,000 Jews came to Britain, driven overseas by persecution in the Russian empire. Jewishness ceased to be a distant phenomenon and became a component of urban life in many of England’s great cities. Thousands went to Liverpool and Manchester, but the overwhelming majority gathered in relatively small parts of East London. 40,000 lived in Stepney, where they constituted a quarter of the population. Whitechapel and Spitalfields played host to much of the rest, but communities sprung up all over the East End, in Goodman’s Fields, Mile End, Shadwell, Cable Street, Dock Street, and elsewhere. The shock of mass Jewish immigration into these neighborhoods was compounded by their hitherto relative demographic stability—the populations of many East End neighborhoods were over seventy percent London born—and the inescapable fact of the newcomers’ difference. The complexion of English Jewry had previously been defined by the cosmopolitan, business-minded Sephardim but the Russian and Polish Jews were Ashkenazim. Their world was defined by shtetls, pogroms, yiddish, and, for the radical element among the émigrés, conflict with the Tsarist state. Their self-consciousness as a defined community and their concentration in specific neighborhoods created immediate tension. Jews were accused of undercutting wages, driving up rents, and generally adding to the squalor and misery of the East End. As anti-Semitic feeling began to take root the established English Jewish community took defensive actions. The Chief Rabbi criticized Jewish slum landlords in the press, adding for good measure “Thank God I live under a Christian landlord.” The Jewish Chronicle begged the newcomers to cease drawing attention “to their peculiarities of dress, of language and of manner” less all English Jews suffer from a recrudescence of “vulgar prejudices.” The Jewish Board of Governors went so far as to repatriate about 26,000 of their coreligionists and paid for the onward passage of another 13,000 to America and the Commonwealth.
By the end of the 1880s there was a sense of gathering crisis in the East End. The Ripper murders were the outlet for many of the anxieties that had been conjured up by the experience of mass immigration. From the outset, Jews were held guilty for the killings. The police detained and released several Jewish immigrants in relation to the killing and interviewed many more as witnesses. Leather Apron, the local boogieman believed to be behind the deaths, was universally believed to be “a Jew or of Jewish parentage, his face being marked of a Hebrew type.”28 The murderer’s skill with a knife and anatomical knowledge was connected to the preponderance of traditional Jewish butchers in the area. A Viennese correspondent to The Times suggested that the killings fitted into a pattern of ritual murder known to be sanctioned by the Talmud. The Pall Mall Gazette reprinted the allegation, writing that “among certain fanatical Jews there exists a superstition to the effect that if a Jew became intimate with a Christian woman he would atone for his offence by slaying and mutilating the object of his passion.” In the same article the Gazette also suggested that the killings might be revenge for the execution of Israel Lipski, a Jewish migrant hung for the murder of his Jewish landlady the year before.
The belief in Jewish culpability was bolstered by the profile of the Ripper’s victims. Prostitution was inextricably linked with Jewishness. One of the unifying features of white slave trade narratives from Moscow to San Francisco was that the Jews were somehow behind it all. This was of a piece with the generalized prejudice that viewed Jews as a corrupting force. Jews corrupted politics with socialism, economics with usury, and morality with prostitution.29 Lombroso had claimed that though Jews committed a lower percentage of crimes compared to other groups, their criminal activities were concentrated in “fraud, forgery, libel, and chief of all, traffic in prostitution.”30 Among rabid anti-Semites it was taken as writ that Jewish wickedness found gleeful expression in the immiseration of gentile girls. For many more it was simply a lazy conclusion drawn from the geographic coincidence of poverty, prostitution, and Jewish arrivals. Moral campaigners had often associated the rise of prostitution with the demise of traditional morality and the incursion of alien faiths. During his early forays into the field, W.T. Stead had characterized the haunts of sex workers as “colonies of heathens and savages.”31 Established English Jews responded vigorously to these allegations. In 1886 Jewish Ladies’ Association for Preventative and Rescue Work issued its first report into the matter and the association sent representatives down to the docks to help prevent newly arrived women from falling into the hands of “Men-sharks, and female harpies of all descriptions” set on entrapping them into sexual bondage. In 1888 the Jewish Chronicle described East End prostitution as “a blot upon our community at large” and the Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler voiced concern about alleged Jewish involvement in white slavery.32
The association would prove hard to shed, for the simple reason that it blurred so easily into the belief that Jews possessed the special ability to influence and seduce the gentile mind. “Intellectual superiority, Oriental subtlety, and the training of sorrow,” English anti-Semite Arnold White wrote in The Modern Jew (1899), “accredit the Jews with a complex and mysterious power denied to any other living race.” This had been a trope of English anti-Semitism since the Romantics and one that had gained widespread credence with the rise to power and preeminence of the uniquely suave and winning Benjamin Disraeli.33 The idea that Jews had ill-defined magical abilities was, of course, centuries-old but it fused perfectly with the late-Victorian mania for the occult.34 Hypnotism, mesmerism, and telepathy remained stock subjects for scientific debate and fictional embellishment. The notion that hypnotism could be used to seduce women persisted, albeit as a hotly contested subject among true believers in the practice.35 Its connection to the Jewish community was merely an extension of old prejudice to new circumstance which long survived the immediate crisis surrounding the Whitechapel Mystery.3637
In the 1890s the trinity of Jewishness, hypnotism, and seduction was consolidated in one of the first great modern literary phenomenon. For much of his life, George Du Maurier had been a draughtsman and cartoonist working for London magazines. Since the 1860s he had found regular employment at Punch—in 1886 he had contributed the strange Stoker family scene mentioned above—and other popular publications. But in the 1890s his sight started to fail him and he switched from drawing to writing. His first novel made little impression. Then, in 1894, he published Trilby.
Set in certain bohemian neighborhoods of 1850s Paris, Trilby tells the story of Trilby O’Ferrall, a beautiful if uncouth Irish laundress and artist’s model who falls under the influence of a musician and impresario known only as Svengali. Svengali is a Jew and is repeatedly described in the crudest terms. Svengali is a “filthy black Hebrew sweep,” “a big hungry spider,” with “bold, brilliant black eyes, with long, heavy lids, a thin, sallow face, and a beard of burnt-up black which grew almost from his under eyelids.” He bullies, cringes, borrows, hides, spits, performs, insults, and manipulates the whole novel long. Attracted by Trilby’s beauty he brings her under his sway through mesmerism, takes her as his mistress, and uses his hypnotic powers to turn her into the most sought after singer in Europe, making himself fantastically wealthy in the process. When he suddenly dies mid-performance, her musical abilities disappear and Trilby withers and dies, used, consumed, and discarded by her Jewish controller for whom she had been “a flexible flageolet of flesh and blood—a voice, and nothing more.”38
Trilby was a phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic. Du Maurier’s novel sold two million copies in the first two years. Trilby-mania resulted in innumerable commercial spin-outs (of which only the eponymous Trilby hat survives in common parlance). Stage adaptions proliferated. At one point twenty-four separate productions of Trilby were touring the United States, among them a burlesque of the novel performed at the Garrick Theatre, New York, by Richard Mansfield.39 When it was announced that Paul Potter’s acclaimed production was coming to England there were high hopes that it would be staged at the Lyceum. “It would be a pity if the Lyceum company did not secure the English rights,” one commentator opined, “for Mr. Irving would make an inimitable Svengali, and Ellen Terry would be Trilby without trying.”40 Irving and Stoker had good reason to be optimistic—after all, Trilby was directly compared to Ellen Terry in the text of the novel—but it was not to be.41 Potter’s Trilby went to the Haymarket Theatre in Piccadilly, ran by actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Trilby’s run at the Haymarket lasted three years and 260 performances making Tree so much money that he could afford to buy and rebuild a whole new venue, Her Majesty’s Theatre, across the road. The Lyceum management team’s chagrin can be readily guessed at.
By the mid-nineties Bram Stoker had arrived at a crossroads in his career. He had been at the Lyceum for the better part of two decades. He was a known and respected member of London society. In partnership with Irving he had traveled the world meeting statesmen, artists, and magnates along the way. Still, Stoker wanted more from life. Many of his friends and associates had already achieved recognition. Hall Caine was a millionaire novelist, as were George Du Maurier and Arthur Conan Doyle. Bernard Shaw’s career was rapidly picking up steam. Henry Irving’s long reign at the top of London’s theatrical world was crowned in 1895 when he was knighted at Windsor Castle by Queen Victoria, the first actor ever to attain the distinction. Some of his contemporaries had risen so far, so fast they had already experienced collapse and ruin. The same day that Irving’s knighthood was announced, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labor for gross indecency. The law he had violated was the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, section 11, that had criminalized homosexual sex.
Stoker’s restlessness had led him down a number of avenues. In 1886 he stunned his colleagues by announcing his interest in training to become a barrister, an endeavor which seemed scarcely possible given his enormous responsibilities at the Lyceum. Nonetheless, he quietly did the work and was duly called to the Bar at Inner Temple in 1890. In 1891 he invested alongside Arthur Waugh, Hall Caine, and others in an ambitious European publishing scheme. This went awry and a great deal of money was lost. He had continued to write, publishing several novels between 1890 and 1895. None of these made much of an impact in a crowded literary marketplace. Yet he persisted. In 1896 he borrowed some money from Hall Caine, took some time off from the Lyceum, and went to Cruden Bay to put some serious work into writing the novel that had bubbled away in his mind for five years. The commitment paid off. On Friday May 28, 1897, The Times announced in its Publications To-Day column, amid a list that included such timeless works as His Dead Past by C.J. Wills, An Exile From London by Colonel R. H. Savage, and A Frisky Matron by Percy Lysle, the release of “DRACULA. By Bram Stoker.”42
There was no single reason why Bram Stoker chose to write a vampire novel. He had some personal connections to the genre—his former employer Sheridan Le Fanu had written Carmilla, one of the major books in the vampiric canon, and his friend Hall Caine was very close to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Polidori’s nephew—but by the 1890s it was familiar territory for writers and dramatists.43 Stoker was writing for honest reasons: he needed the money. It seems probable that he identified the vampire narrative as a suitable vehicle for the kind of middlebrow mystery-thrillers so popular at the time. It was also a literary genre that leant itself to engagement with many of the themes and interests of the day. Reading Dracula in light of the larger trends and concerns of late-Victorian England, it is striking how many he involved in the plot. Mesmerism, immigration, urbanization, racial theory, imperialism, Jewishness, feminism—all are present in his book. But Dracula is more than just a gemischt of topical issues. It is clear from Stoker’s very earliest extant notes for the book that he intended it to be a book about sexual danger.
In its essentials Dracula is a seduction narrative. The Count is the seducer; he pursues friends Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker, seduces them by means of his hypnotic powers, uses and corrupts their bodies, and then abandons them. Lucy and Mina’s contrasting sexual personas mimic those of the conventional morality of the day which, as of 1885, had been embedded in law. Mina is the model woman: Christian, domesticated, almost pathologically disposed to supporting her husband. It takes all the count’s wiles to ensnare her and their encounter amounts to rape.44 Lucy is a pampered aristocrat, who speaks suggestively of her appetites, and is desirous of male attention. She craves her assignations with the count, sleepwalking from her bed each night in Whitby and making her way up to meet him at the abbey on the cliff. There she swoons on a bench overlooking the sea while Dracula feasts on her throat. When Mina notices Lucy’s somnambulism she locks her doors and windows only to observe her trying to escape through them at night to meet with her vampiric lover. Lucy’s corruption by the count results in her becoming a sexually predatory vampire herself though it is implied that this is not so much a perversion of her true self but a vindication of the old belief that “blood will out.” Lucy was primed for immorality and was lewd and vicious before the count he arrived—he simply revealed her. Mina, even after her assault, remains a redemptive figure and eventually helps bring about his destruction and her own rescue.
Nothing here departs from the basic literary model handed down from the eighteenth century. The modern spin Stoker puts on it—and Dracula is a very modern book—is that of race. The men arrayed against Dracula—Mina’s husband Jonathan Harker, Arthur Holmwood, the English peer and Lucy’s fiancé, the American adventurer Quincey Morris, the English doctor James Seward, and the Dutch vampire slayer Abraham Van Helsing—are all Anglo-Saxon. The count is from Transylvania, a place that loomed large in the Victorian imagination as a disconcerting goulash of tribes, creeds, and ethnicities.45 “Its population,” the Spectator declared in 1888, “is a singular mixture of nondescripts Wallachs, Aryan Teutons, Turanian Huns, Semitic stragglers, and Hindoo nomads, who have existed side by side for ten centuries without the least approach to fusion.”46 Whether Count Dracula is one of those Semitic stragglers is not wholly clear, though much in the text points toward that conclusion. Much emphasis is placed on the shape and size of his nose; in general the descriptions of his physiognomy align with those of workaday Jewish caricatures. He bears a striking resemblance to Svengali, still fresh in the public’s mind, and like him he mesmerizes his victims.47 Like Leather Apron, the count stalks London’s streets, scouring the capital for prey. Dracula’s portrayal contains other anti-Semitic tropes, not least his avariciousness. The count eats off a solid gold service and Harker finds piles of bullion and paper currency stacked in his bedroom.48 Later, in London, Harker slashes at Dracula with his kukri:
The blow was a powerful one; only the diabolical quickness of the Count’s leap back saved him. A second less and the trenchant blade had shorne through his heart. As it was, the point just cut the cloth of his coat, making a wide gap whence a bundle of bank-notes and a stream of gold fell out.49
It is surely not insignificant that the count cringes before the cross—both the symbol of Christianity and a reminder of the Jewish deicide. In the latter part of the book his flight from London back to Transylvania is enabled by one Immanuel Hildesheim “a Hebrew of rather the Adelphi Theatre type, with a nose like a sheep, and a fez.”50
Jewish or no, Dracula is explicitly linked to the racial theories of the day. “The Count is a criminal and of criminal type.” Van Helsing tells his posse of vampire hunters. “Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him, and qua criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind.”51 Van Helsing dwells at some length on the count’s “child-brain.”52 It is important to the ideological architecture of the book that the count is definitively the intellectual inferior of his Anglo-Saxon pursuers. The Count’s “child-brain” is one feature of his atavistic nature that manifests itself—as Lombroso had always claimed—both physiognomically and behaviorally. Dracula is associated with the primordial past, the Hobbesian world of the virgin forest, and his behavior is unimproved by contact with civilization. Holmwood, Harker, and the rest embody the virtues of that civilization and use its strengths to destroy the count. Rational planning, moral force, and, above all, the judicious use of cutting-edge technology, are their weapons. They represent the apex of Victorian civilization. The count’s powers, by contrast, are of a cruder order. As a bloodsucker, Dracula is literally a parasite. Like any parasite he has highly developed feeding faculties but his others functions have atrophied. Given that he feasts on women and uses mesmerism to access their bodies, his seductive powers are paradoxically a feature of his biological degeneration. The racialized seducer is not simply a parasite or even an ethnocultural other, but a destabilizing force that threatens progress—evolutionary, social, and moral—itself and does so by corrupting the Anglo-Saxon woman.
That the count uses hypnosis to seduce his targets is significant. The history of seduction is the history of the post-Enlightenment tension between reason and passion. To the racist mind it was impossible to accept that Anglo-Saxon women might actually rationally choose to partner with their racial inferior. Sexual panic and racial panic met in a discourse that imagined the racial “stock” of the West being overwhelmed or “swamped” by lesser races. Of course, such a discourse only made sense if Anglo-Saxon women were breeding with these racial outsiders and if they were—and were doing so consensually—then the very cornerstone of Victorian gender ideology, namely that women were meek, submissive, and faithful, was called into question. Hypnosis helped explain away this quandary. The mesmerized subject has their reasoning faculties suspended; some hypnotists argued that the mesmerized individual was in a state of hysteria, they were lost to their emotions. Either way, they could no longer be held responsible for their actions. The cultural trope that connected seduction, hypnotism, and race thus worked to salvage the myth of Victorian womanhood while reinforcing the belief that “undesirable aliens” were subversive inferiors possessed of atavistic sexual powers.53
The dark heart of Dracula is the unspoken fear that those precious women may actually desire the outsider, the alien, the count. This anxiety is connected in the novel to a trend at large in late-Victorian society—the specter of the New Woman. Between the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act and the publication of Dracula, the place of women in Victorian society had been transformed. A series of new laws had granted married women new rights. The movement for women’s suffrage was gaining momentum. Women’s access to and enrolment in higher education had boomed. A quarter of British women now participated in the workforce, and a number were beginning to make incursions into the hitherto exclusively male professions. These developments met with suspicion, and those suspicions found expression in the figure of the New Woman.54
In so far as she actually existed, the New Woman was a bridge between the fusty world of high-Victorian sexual role-playing and the more relaxed gender order of the 1920s and 1930s. She was looking ahead to a post-suffrage world and beginning to experiment with how women would be after basic civil rights had been won. The New Woman was engaged, passionate, and independent. To her detractors she was little less than a harbinger of social collapse.55 The reformulation of gender roles, male critics warned, would lead to chaos. These fears were explored on the stage. The 1880s and 1890s saw a deluge of New Woman theatre. In Sydney Grundy’s The New Woman (1894) the Colonel complains “Why can’t a woman be content to be a woman? What does she want to make a beastly man of herself for?” and suggests that the New Woman is “a sex of their own … They have invented a new gender.” The drive toward greater independence, often defined against the institution of marriage, was associated with a perversion of biological norms. “No, to be a woman trying not to be a woman,” the protagonist of Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895) declares, “that is to be mad.”56 These New Woman plays tended to share a common, and comforting, narrative arc. An allegedly emancipated woman toys with gender-bending behavior (smoking, flirting, intellectual activity, employment) then falls in love with a masculine man, realizes the errors of her ways, and is won back to the feminine “norm.”
Stoker would write a novel, The Man (1905), which conformed exactly to this model, and had as its protagonist the New Woman archetype Stephen Norman, a woman with a man’s name. Stoker’s domestic life reflected his gender politics. When Walter Osborne’s rococo portrait of Florence Stoker was exhibited as the Royal Academy in 1895, the press noted how pleasingly she conformed to classical femininity. “Mr Osborne has evidently taken pains to give a correct idea of the intellectual features of the lady,” The Era intoned,
we might say, with Hood, that everything about Mrs Bram Stoker is “pure womanly” according to the old-fashioned notions respecting the sex. One has no impression of the “new woman” in the fine intelligence, the lady-like dress, and refined manner, the artist has depicted. Mrs Bram Stoker appears in white, the folds of the gown being arranged with simplicity and artistic taste.57
If his home was safe from the New Woman, then by the 1890s Stoker’s workplace was not. In 1890, Ellen Terry’s daughter Edy Craig joined the Lyceum’s troupe of actors and actresses. She was the very embodiment of the New Woman, who had turned down Girton College, Cambridge to pursue a career on the London stage. If the Lyceum resisted dramatical modernism in all its forms, Edy Craig immersed herself in the new modes of theatre and acted in productions—then considered radical—of dramatic works by Ibsen and Bernard Shaw. A passionate feminist, she would later establish theatre troupes devoted to publicizing the suffragist cause.58 Edy worked alongside Stoker in London for seven years including a tour to America in 1895. Exactly what he made of her is not known, though if Dracula is anything to go by his views on the New Woman were dim indeed.
Central to the attempt to pathologize female independence was a boorish caricature of the emancipated woman as slatternly and sexually aggressive. Male on female courtship was the respectable norm; female on male seduction was an abomination.59 George Bernard Shaw explored this theme in his play Man and Superman (1903). In the preface, Shaw explained that the idea for the project arose out of a suggestion from a friend that he produce a play based on the legend of Don Juan. Shaw complied, after a fashion, but made it clear in the preface that “my Don Juan is the quarry instead of the huntsman.” The inversion of roles reflects what Shaw saw around him. Women, he wrote, were now
Aggressive, powerful: when women are wronged they do not group themselves pathetically … they grasp formidable legal and social weapons, and retaliate.
They asserted this new power in all areas of life, including sex. “As a result,” Shaw concluded, “Man is no longer, like Don Juan, victor in the duel of sex.” Independent women were sexually voracious and their lust could dominate men. The vampire was increasingly an image applied to women, not men, as a metaphor for the sinister new appetites women were supposedly exhibiting.60 The same year Dracula was published there was a major public contretemps over the exhibition of Edward Burne-Jones’s The Vampire at the Royal Academy. Burne-Jones was a friend of Stoker’s who had done design work for the Lyceum and had also sketched Florence Stoker. His painting is an inversion of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, and depicts a voluptuous, bare-armed women astride a slumbering, bare-chested man. In Dracula almost the exact same scene is portrayed in print. From the very beginning of the novel Lucy Westenra is linked to the New Woman.61 In a letter to Mina she boasts that three men (Holmwood, Morris, and Seward) had proposed to her on the same day. “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” she complains. This outrageous wish is realized later in the book. With her blood drained by the count, Holmwood, Morris, and Seward all volunteer their veins to provide urgent transfusions into Lucy’s own. “Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist,” Van Helsing thinks aloud. In death, Lucy becomes a vampire and stalks Hampstead Heath. When the men trace her to her den in Highgate Cemetery, she attempts to seduce her former fiancé:
She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said:—
“Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!”
Van Helsing intervenes in time and Lucy is driven back to her grave. There her sexual transgressions are punished in horrific fashion. Holmwood plunges a stake into her heart; Seward and Van Helsing saw off her head and stuff her mouth with garlic; her butchered corpse is then sealed in a lead coffin, like some kind of radioactive material. The savagery with which Lucy’s cadaver is treated might leave us to wonder who or what is being punished: a fictional vampire or a very real, independent, and sexually awakened young woman.62
The New Woman’s sexual aggression was chimerical, a useful fiction invented by her male critics.63 In reality, many fin de siècle feminists were themselves skeptical of sexual liberation. Sexual freedom was often countenanced in theory and recoiled from in practice. “We none of us know what exactly is the sexual code we believe in,” Beatrice Webb observed, “approving of many things on paper which we violently object to when they are practised by those we care about.”64 While there were feminists who staked-out a radical position premised on the merits of free love and sexual experimentation, they were always a minority and were frequently regarded as a harmful distraction from the serious work of securing reform.65 Most women simply wanted to experience freedom, to see “with our own eyes, and not, as the women of the past have done, with the eyes of men” as one pamphleteer eloquently put it.66 They wanted at least the prospect of a life lived without reference to men, even if only for a period before marriage. Many centrist feminists did not seek to destroy the institution of marriage or to live outside it in perpetual libertinage, they simply desired its reformation. Marriage ought to be made more accommodating of female independence. Part of this could be achieved by legal reform; part of this had to be brought about by voluntary changes in male behavior. In riposte to the patronizing image of the New Woman, they proposed instead a New Man, who would welcome and support female autonomy in education, the workplace, and the home. This partnership between New Man and New Woman would usher in a new sexual order that would “exemplify reciprocity and cooperation.”67 The more battle-hardened among them were, however, doubtful of the prospects for the New Man. They argued that sex was a trap laid by men and inherently degrading to women. It was better, they declared, to refuse to play the game. To live independently of men, sexlessly if necessary, was better than to flirt with subjugation. This vestal vision of committed feminism was encapsulated in Margaret McMillan’s motto “Marriage is bad and Free Love is worse.”68 Christabel Pankhurst went further, calling for a total rejection of heterosexual sex until feminist victory had been declared on all fronts. Her rallying cry was immortal: “Votes for Women and Chastity for Men.”69
These nuances are lost in Dracula, which should be no surprise as the Stoker’s novel is essentially one of male anxiety, not a condition tolerant of complexity. Stoker embodied Victorian values and Dracula manifests Victorian fears. The notion that Jews were hypnotizing gentile women was as absurd as the notion that marginally less oppressed women were now sexually harassing men. Nonetheless, change was afoot in English society. Immigration was changing the complexion of the country and, in the racial terms of the day, the make-up of the national stock. New gender norms were ascendant and a growing number of women were living increasingly independent lives. Feminism seemed to be subverting the gender order just as immigration was threatening the racial order. In the minds of the male establishment the two phenomena were closely connected: rebellious women shirked their reproductive duties leaving the nation open to “swamping” by racial inferiors.70 Foreign men, meanwhile, stood by to capitalize on their host’s weakness and the availability of English women. The quandary was that the impulse to protect women—measures like the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act—only seemed to embolden the women’s movement further. The apparently hopeless position of English men is captured in the dynamic at work in Dracula. Van Helsing and his team spend the first part of the novel keeping Lucy alive by elaborate means and the second part hunting her down and elaborately butchering her body—as good a metaphor as any for Victorian attitudes toward women.
Bram Stoker died in April 1912—the same week that his friend W. T. Stead perished aboard the Titanic—but his most famous creation lived on. Following his death Florence Stoker became his literary executor and the guardian of his royalties and copyrights. By the 1920s all her late husband’s works ceased to generate an income, with the exception of Dracula. In straitened circumstances following his passing, Florence was understandably proprietorial about Bram’s vampire tale and she was enraged when she learned in April 1922 that an unlicensed adaptation of Dracula had premiered at the Berlin Zoo the month before. Through lawyers in London and Germany Florence established that Prana-Film had commissioned director F.W. Murnau, who had recently produced a German language version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—Januskopf (1920)—to make a free adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula. Murnau’s film had a number of differences. Count Dracula became Count Orlok; the action was moved from London to Bremen; the dramatis personae was dramatically reduced. But these changes were not enough to save the Germans from Florence’s wrath. The plot of the film was clearly her husband’s and no permission had been obtained from his estate to use it. From her flat in Knightsbridge, Florence orchestrated a multiyear legal campaign to receive compensation from Prana-Film. When the film company went bankrupt she demanded in lieu of payment the destruction of all copies of the film. Her wish was finally achieved in July 1925 and Nosferatu, considered the apogee of German expressionist film-making, was consigned to oblivion.71
Murnau’s Count Orlok was not the only vampire to haunt the imagination of the Weimar Republic. German screens and German novels were filled with tales of the supernatural. Films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) and books like Hanns Heinz Ewers’s The Vampire (1921) and Arthur Dinter’s The Sin Against the Blood.72 All blended racial and sexual panic and featured Jewish or quasi-Jewish villains in prominent roles.73 The presence of esoteric themes in Weimar culture was a continuation of a pre-war fascination with the occult; their proliferation, however, was the consequence of the tectonic shocks that German society had experienced in 1918 and 1919.74 For thousands of völkisch mystics, far-right demagogues, and disillusioned veterans, defeat was not simply a national trauma but an eschatological event, a fissure in reality that had unleashed monsters on Germany.75 “Yesterday we experienced the collapse of everything which was familiar, dear and valuable to us.” Rudolf von Sebottendorf, founder of the mystic right-wing Thule Society told his followers on November 8, 1918. “In the place of our princes of Germanic blood rules our deadly enemy: Judah.”76 In 1919 members of the Thule Society formed the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP) which, upon the rise to prominence of one of its more compelling speakers, Adolf Hitler, became the National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) in 1920.
For the hard-right, the vampire was the perfect metaphor for the Jewish threat they saw all about them. In his monstrous person met the competing fears of sex, race (specifically, blood) and biological degeneracy. It was no surprise then, that when Hitler sat down in his cell in Landsberg Prison in 1924 to pen his personal and political testament, Mein Kampf, that the language and imagery of vampirism mixed readily in his prolix diatribes against the Jews. Hitler returned repeatedly to the vampire metaphor, referring to Jews as the “eternal blood-sucker,” as “parasites”77 always on the hunt “for a new feeding soil for his race,” lamenting the “blood-sucking tyranny” of “Jewish” financial interests and darkly predicting that the Jewish “vampire” will die soon after “the death of his victim.” Such epithets mixed freely with the familiar associations made between the perils of seduction and the menace of the racial other. Recalling the Vienna of his youth, Hitler writes that “in no other city of western Europe could the relationship between Jewry and prostitution, and even now the white slave traffic, be studied better.”78 The Jews were the “seducers of our people,” who had degraded modern ideas of health and beauty—through, of all things, their alleged control of the fashion industry—to allow “for the seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by bow-legged, disgusting Jewish bastards.” Such language was common among Nazi demagogues. Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer endlessly mixed demonic and vampiric imagery with frenzied allegations of Jewish sexual predation. In a 1926 edition of the paper, he claimed that Aryan girls subjected to street harassment by Jewish men could ward off their by pursuers by the prominent display of nationalist icons, like the Iron Cross, on their persons—just like a vampire could be scared off with garlic and crucifixes.79 In The Riddle Of The Jews’ Success (1927) Theodor Fritsch declared that the “Hebrew displays the features of the parasite” and did not “derive his means of existence directly from Nature … but only by means of an intermediary system of living, the essential members of which he sucks dry.”80 Fritsch married his disgust with the Jews physical condition with a perverse admiration for their seductive powers. “One is also inclined to assume the presence of some hypnotic power,” he noted, “when one observes how even old and ugly Jews render young females docile and submissive to their desires.”81
Upon their ascent to power in 1933, Nazi lawyers quickly went about laying the groundwork for a new set of racially inspired laws that would protect Germany from this imagined Jewish threat. In September 1933 a group of Nazi lawyers, including the future head of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler, issued a legal manifesto known as the Prussian Memorandum. The Memorandum laid out a vision of Nazi race law that would supplant the liberal laws of the Weimar republic. Just like the Americans of the Progressive era, Nazi racial thinkers in the 1930s were obsessed with racial mixing—what Hitler had called “race-poisoning”—and wanted to use the law as an instrument to protect the purity of the German race. To this end the authors of the Memorandum proposed the creation of a new crime: race treason. “Every form of sexual mixing between a German and a member of a foreign race,” they wrote:
Is to be punished as race treason, and indeed both parties are to be subject to punishment… . Particularly deserving of punishment is the case in which sexual intercourse or marriage is induced through malicious deception.
Their judicial model as to how to implement this new law was the United States, the home of inventive and expansive laws on race, sex, and seduction. “It is well known,” the Memorandum continued, “that the Southern states of North America maintain the most stringent separation between the white population and coloreds in both public and personal interactions.” Here was a system that the Nazis could emulate.
In 1934 Nazi lawyers, Freisler again among them, met once more, this time at the Commission on Criminal Law Reform, to discuss how to legislate into existence the Nazi racial utopia. At the forefront of their minds was sex, specifically how to introduce an “effective quarantine separating the racially foreign elements in Germany from the people of German descent.” First to speak was Fritz Grau, a member of the Academy of German Law, a future SS Colonel, and future Nuremberg Trial defendant. The American example, Grau said, was laudable but the Commission had to consider the difference in condition between the black American in the Jim Crow South and the Jew in Nazi Germany. It was all well and good to go down the “path of social segregation and separation” but the sexual threat posed by Jews could not be mitigated so long as the latter held economic power within the German state. “As long as they have the most beautiful automobiles,” Grau told his colleagues, “the most beautiful motorboats, as long as they play a prominent role in all pleasure spots and resorts” they would exist as a temptation to German women.82 The answer was in the first instance “positive statutory measures that forbid absolutely all sexual mixing of a Jew with a German, and impose severe criminal punishment” but also, Grau suggested, economic dispossession.8384
A year after this meeting the Nuremberg Laws were instituted. Echoing the exacting racial and sexual laws in place throughout the United States, the Nuremberg Laws forbade marital and extramarital relations between Jews and those “of German or related blood.” Furthermore, Jews were forbidden to employ as domestic helpers “female subjects of the state of German or related blood who are under 45 years old”—a preventative step against the mythical white slave trade, which German anti-Semites had long believed the Jews controlled.
Nor was Nuremberg the end of the Nazi campaign against the Jewish-Vampire-Seducer. As the 1930s wore on anti-semitic legislation intensified, with a whole host of exclusionary laws, injunctions, and regulations put in place to further deny German Jews a place in the society of their birth.85 In 1938, Fritz Grau’s dream of destroying the economic power of German Jews was realized when new statutes were introduced that forbade Jews from operating business and engaging in the trade of good and services of any kind and had to provide the state with details of their bank accounts and declare all wealth in excess of 5000 reichsmarks.86 No longer would Jewish-owned cars and speedboats tempt the racial honor of German women. A year later, as the Third Reich prepared for war, Nazi theorist and Himmler protégé Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch published Jew and Woman: The Theory and Practice of Jewish Vampirism. The book reinforced the connection between Jewishness, vampirism and racial pollution through sex just as the Nazis were about to become sovereign over the largest concentration of Jews in the world. The successes of the 1939 campaign against Poland and Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union would ultimately bring some 10 million Jews under Nazi control. This inevitably posed a distinct problem to the Nazi mind. If, after all, the Jews were a supernatural force, an “eternal blood-sucker,” a vampire forever thirsting for German blood, then the most radical solutions to the “Jewish Question” had to be entertained. At the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in 1942, fifteen men gathered round a table and planned the Final Solution. Among them was Roland Freisler, the lawyer who had spearheaded anti-Jewish racial and sexual legislation throughout the 1930s. That same week, also in Berlin, a Nazi screenwriter penned a memo about Weimar-era cinema for the Party Education Office entitled “Superstition in Film.” There was much decadence in the German cinema of the pre-Nazi period, Hans Fischer-Gerhold declared, but there were also some films from that time that contained political and racial messages that the Nazis could make use of. One such film was Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau’s unauthorized retelling of Dracula. Fischer-Gerhold praised Nosferatu as the story of a “vampire of Slavic origin” who preys on innocent Aryan blood. The message of the film was clear. Only one race could survive the confrontation: “either the German or the Jew.”87