Bram Stoker 
Dracula
Why does the Count come to England?
Our obsession with vampires supports a commercial empire which mass-produces books, films, cartoons, television dramas, comics, and novelties (such as plastic vampire teeth and Bela Lugosi capes). Like the great Transylvanian monster himself, it would seem that the vampire industry cannot die. Just when you think it is finally exhausted, along come a couple of big-budget, millions-at-the-box-office-earning movies like Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1993) and the Anne Rice-originated, Neil Jordan-directed, Tom Cruise-starring Interview with the Vampire (1995).
The essential book on the vampire cultus is Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burials and Death.1 Barber’s survey is massively debunking and wholly convincing, drawing as it does on the resources of folklore scholarship, anthropology, mythography, and forensic pathology (particularly the evidence of postmortem medical investigators and autopsies). Barber shows how superstitions about vampires – which are found in cultures as remote from Transylvania as China – originate not in the epic misdeeds of Vlad the Impaler, but in the behaviour of the human corpse after death. The dead body is not inert, but a veritable hothouse of chemical and physiological activities. It moves, makes noises, and excretes fluids. This post-mortem activity, Barber suggests, is rationalized by primitive peoples into the vampire (or ‘undead’) myth.
Dracula, as A.N. Wilson pointed out in his Oxford World’s Classics introduction, is a mishmash of elements picked up from the author’s experience in the popular theatre (exactly at that moment when it was about to transmute into the cinema industry) and from Gothic predecessors such as John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), J.M. Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1847), and Sheridan Le Fanu’s superior novella, Carmilla (1872). On to this Stoker pasted some new-fangled psychiatric theory, derived from the French alienist Charcot, one of Freud’s main precursors (see Chapter 14, where Van Helsing indicates he is a disciple). Overlaying the whole work is the kind of paranoid anxiety induced by the ‘invasion fantasies’ which (following Colonel George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking in 1871) were a popular fictional genre at the end of the century.2 Like Wells’s Martians (which also sent shivers down English spines in 1897), Stoker’s monstrous vampire is a deadly and alien invader, bent on destroying England’s green and pleasant land (both the Martians and Dracula support themselves on a diet of English blood, interestingly enough).
As its title proclaims, Francis Ford Coppola’s sumptuously produced Bram Stoker’s Dracula prides itself on being more authentic than its predecessors. Coppola strips away the superstructural mythologies which originate in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film, Nosferatu; principally the convention (which is not found in Stoker) that Dracula is destroyed by sunlight. Coppola observes Stoker’s less florid conception, which is that Dracula can only exercise his superhuman powers fully at night. During the day he is obliged to take a mundane, human form, and his wings are correspondingly clipped. But he is quite capable of moving around by daylight with the freedom of any other gentleman. Traditionally, film-makers have loved the Murnau final twist of Dracula surprised by sunlight and turning first to gorgonzola and then to bones and sawdust. It makes wonderful cinema. When the first (of six) Hammer versions of Dracula came out in 1958, the last sequence, in which Christopher Lee deliquesced in a shaft of morning sunshine, was thought so horrible that the British censor demanded it be cut.
None the less, Coppola’s Dracula deviates from Stoker’s original text in two important ways. First, by inventing a wildly romantic reason for Dracula’s coming to England (he sees in Mina the reincarnation of the wife whom he loved and lost while still human: it is this undying love that brings him to England). Secondly, Coppola throws the film back into a ‘Gothic’ nineteenth-century England, lush as a Leighton oilpainting, but essentially as ahistorical as Ruritania.
The key to reading Dracula and recovering Stoker’s artistic intention is, I would suggest, close attention to the large number of spikily contemporary references in the text to recent gadgetry, communications technology, and scientific innovation. It is significant, for example, that Jonathan Harker records his journal in shorthand (Chapter 1). Later, he refers in passing to his ‘Kodak’, with which he has photographed the English estate in which Dracula is interested (Ch. 2). Mina, we are told, is learning to ‘stenograph’, so that when she marries Jonathan she can be his ‘typewriter girl’ (Ch. 5). There are numerous references to the New Woman vogue, something that peaked in 1894 (Mina, although an advanced member of her sex, draws the line at aligning herself with New Women, what with their outrageous ‘open sexual unions’). Lucy Westenra’s life is prolonged, but not saved, by a blood transfusion (this is one of many references to up-to-the-minute medical advances – Stoker, for example, includes references to brain surgery). Lucy’s phonograph cylinders are used by Dr Seward to make memoranda. Van Helsing even develops an early version of radar employing Mina’s powers as a mesmeric medium to locate the fleeing monster.
On his part, Dracula hates modernity – or, at least, he is nervous of it. He cannot read shorthand and throws Harker’s encrypted writings on the fire in disgust. He chooses to come to England by sail, not steamboat. He studiously avoids the railway for the transport of his earth-filled boxes, choosing instead gipsy carts. What this means is that in the struggle between Van Helsing and Dracula, we have a contest between the ‘pagan world of old’ and ‘modernity’. A demon from the Dark Ages pitted against men of the 1890s armed with Winchester rifles, telegrams, phonographs, modern medicine and science. Stoker’s Transylvania is certainly Gothic and ahistorical. But his England is as up-to-date as that week’s edition of Tit-bits.
Why, it may be asked, does Dracula want to come to England? It would seem he has something more than tourism in mind. When we first encounter him, through Harker, he is practising his English to make it flawless, and is studying
books … of the most varied kind – history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law – all relating to England and English life and customs and manners. There were even such books of reference as the London Directory, the ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ books, Whitaker’s Almanac, the Army and Navy Lists, and – it somehow gladdened my heart to see it – the Law List. (Ch. 2)
One apprehends from this that Dracula does not want to visit England – he wants to invade it, conquer it, make it his own infernal kingdom. It is notable that his activities in England are very different from those in Transylvania where, apparently, his depredations on the local populace are random, infrequent and rather circumspect (the only local victim we learn of is one baby). In Transylvania Dracula is apparently careful about propagating his kind, keeping his retinue of undead companions to a handful. But in England his promiscuity triggers off a potential infectious epidemic. Lucy becomes one of the undead, and as the ‘Bloofer Lady’ promptly embarks on infecting any number of children who in their turn will infect others. In a year or so, we can calculate, England will be a pest-hole.
There are huge risks in Dracula moving from his castle fastness in Transylvania. The business of the fifty boxes makes him very vulnerable. The journey itself involves what would seem to be unacceptable risks – his ship is almost wrecked off Whitby (and death by drowning is, together with a stake through the heart, one of the sure ways in which Dracula can be exterminated). Why do it, and if he must do it, why not choose Germany, which at least would shorten the distance back to his lair and would not entail passing over the dangerous element of water?
The reason for Dracula’s coming to England is divulged late in the narrative by Van Helsing. ‘Do you not see’, he asks Harker, ‘how, of late, this monster has been creeping into knowledge experimentally?’ (Ch. 23). Dracula, in other words, is learning how to think scientifically. The point is elaborated by the perspicacious professor a little later:
With the child-brain that was to him he have long since conceive the idea of coming to a great city. What does he do? He find out the place of all the world most of promise for him. Then he deliberately set himself down to prepare for the task. He find in patience just how is his strength, and what are his powers. He study new tongues. He learn new social life; new environment of old ways, the politic, the law, the finance, the science, the habit of a new land and a new people who have come to be since he was. His glimpse that he have had whet his appetite only and enkeen his desire. Nay, it help him to grow as to his brain; for it all prove to him how right he was at the first in his surmises. He have done all this alone; all alone! from a ruin tomb in a forgotten land. What more may he not do when the greater world of thought is open to him? (Ch. 24)
Dracula, we apprehend, has chosen England because it is the most modern country in the world – the most modern that is, in its social organization, its industry, its education, its science. Put in its most banal form, he has come to England to learn how to use the Kodak, how to write shorthand, and how to operate the recording phonograph in order that he may make himself a thoroughly modern vampire for the imminent twentieth century.