DRACULA THE RIPPER

Fact and more than one fictional creation would find an uneasy alliance in a most unexpected revelation. Dracula was published in 1897, though it’s now generally accepted that Stoker’s reliance on a firm calendar structure places its events in the year 1893. Could they have been inspired by events still earlier – the Jack the Ripper murders that became such a cause célèbre in the London of 1888? The murder of (at least) five prostitutes loomed so large and the killer remained so elusive that the all-too-real case took on an almost supernatural dimens­ion – aided no doubt by the calculating work of journalists who effectively created the persona of Jack the Ripper and may even have inadvertently spurred on the actual killer. An interaction with fiction began at once. Robert Louis Stevenson’s immensely popular novellaThe Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde had been published in 1886, was dramatised the following year and in 1888 became a starr­ing vehicle for actor Richard Mansfield, appearing at the Lyceum Theatre by invitation of Henry Irving. The escalation of anxiety over the Ripper murders brought an unexpected new focus of attention to this study of evil unleashed. The hideous propensities of Mr Hyde, unchecked by any moral impulse, were altogether too close to what was happening in Whitechapel. Indeed, might Mansfield himself actually be the Ripper, as one theatregoer suggested to the police? 

Stoker must have been on-hand during these events, and perhaps took a hint from the way in which real murders were strengthening the sense of fear promoted by a literary fable – and vice versa. While there are no obvious Ripper references in the text of Dracula, in 1901 Stoker wrote a new preface for an Icelandic translation and took the opportunity to indulge in a little sleight of hand, declaring of his novel that: “The strange and eerie tragedy which is portrayed here is completely true, as far as all external circumstances are concerned…” 

Playing this game, he then pretended that Dracula’s activities might already be known to his readers – they would recall them as murders reported some years before and would perhaps have made a connection to an earlier, even more notorious, spate of killings in London: “Many people remember the strange series of crimes that comes into the story a little later – crimes which, at the time, appeared to be supernatural and seemed to originate from the same source and cause as much revulsion as the infamous murders of Jack the Ripper!” 

The hint is ambiguous – is Stoker saying that the motivat­ion (“source”) of the Ripper and Dracula was the same, that both of them appeared to be supernatural (but possibly weren’t), that both sets of killings were vampiric or that the same person was responsible for everything? 

This mischievous piece of plot-stirring is clearly too tempting to leave unexploited, and the Dracula/Ripper relationship has recently been explored in Dacre Stoker’s 2009 novel Dracula The Un-Dead. Jack the Ripper had already crossed over into the world of a major fictional character, having been investigated by Sherlock Holmes in the films A Study in Terror (1965) and Murder by Decree (1979). And in David Stuart Davies’s novel The Tangled Skein (1995), Holmes has also met Dracula (whose first appearance in print he pre-dated by just 10 years.) Despite the reality of the Whitechapel murders, the Ripper, Dracula and Holmes (and perhaps Mr Hyde too) have come to inhabit a shared construct, the semi-mytho­logised, fog-bound late-Victor­ian London where characters loom larger than life. Their paths are undoubtedly fated to cross again… 





RECOMMENDED READING 
David J Skal: Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen, 1992. 
Elizabeth Miller and Robert Eighteen-Bisang (eds): Bram Stoker’s Notes for ‘Dracula’, 2008. 
Christopher Frayling (ed): Vampyres, Faber 1991.