FROM VILLAGER TO VAMPIRE

Even while working and on occasion touring with the Lyceum Company, Stoker found time to write. Dracula was his fifth novel and by so far the best that it has been suggested he had a helping editorial hand from the (then) immensely popular Manx novelist Hall Caine, to whom it is dedicated. A less speculative reason for its quality is that Stoker’s notebooks show him maturing his complex plot from 1890, recording his changing ideas along with a list of the sources he consulted. These help explain the unique hold the book exercises over its readers – it is a construct that deliberately touches on verifiable realities, a novel of many voices, a strict timetable of journeys and dates and layer upon layer of researched references. 

From the notes, we know that Stoker read up on Romanian folklore in Emily Gerard’s 1885 article Transylvanian Superstitions (he never visited the country). Belief in vampirism was never an official doctrine subject to written dogma, so Stoker was effectively reading about oral traditions written down in the name of folklore but quite probably, in their native environment, subject to local variations and changes over time. Ironically, by putting so much of this material into the mouth of his “vampire expert” Van Helsing, Stoker himself helps create the immutable “rules” of vampirism endlessly cited thereafter. 

At its most basic, the belief discussed the buried dead who wouldn’t stay down. Usually familiar, local individuals who had recently expired (as opposed to age-old warlords attempting to take over the world), vampires were not glamorous, didn’t have fangs or evening cloaks and were not always associated with blood-drinking. They were just wrong, aberrations from the natural order, and in their wake death followed, usually of their family and neighbours. The idea seems concerned with contagion (linked perhaps to anxiet­ies about the protocol of death), and the vampire of folklore may be an anonymous unfortunate – ‘a man in our village…’. Stoker takes the convincing background details of the belief but translates the grave-soiled revenant of a mundane vill­ager into a superstar, flashing (not too often) onto the stage of his novel as a fiendish mastermind whose turbulent history has matured during centuries of undead brooding until he is ready to erupt onto the modern stage. Instead of a contagious corpse, he delivers a mediæval warlord striding like a colossus across a 19th-century world of petty clerks, a great black dog that certainly doesn’t need the help of the Whitby RSPCA. Ruthless and horrible, Dracula is attractive because he calls on the forces of nature while defying its laws, and harks back to cliff-edge castles and mighty forests while casually using the modern urban environment as his blood-bank. Beside him, Stoker’s band of heroes are small, neat people defined by professional and social roles. 

The aristocratic, larger than un-life vampire figure isn’t, however, entirely original to Stoker. Once again, he made a perceptive choice from within an existing literary range. The first major depiction of the vampire in English fiction is the pale, seductively attractive Lord Ruthven in John Polidori’s 1819 novella The Vampyre. In what looks like an unscrupulously brill­iant piece of promotion, authorship was attributed to the notorious Lord Byron – in fact Polidori had (briefly) travelled with the poet as personal physician and Ruthven is an unflattering portrait of his former employer, whose travels to Greece had been instrumental in introducing the idea of the vampire into English-speaking literary culture. Mid-century penny-dreadful Varney the Vampire or The Feast of Blood (whose authorship is variously attributed to Prest and Rymer) also has an energetic, titled vampire with historic connections. Varney, in the illustrations a theatrically dashing if hideous creature, has fangs, leaves puncture wounds on the necks of his victims (young ladies preferred) and can move about during the day, all features that Dracula will inherit. Stoker didn’t haveto create his undead hero in this mould – by the 1890s, the vampire was a familiar type in supernatural fiction, and variations on the theme had included Le Fanu’s sentimental chestnut-haired seduct­ress Carmilla and a beautiful revenant from Ancient Rome in Anne Crawford’s A Mystery of the Campagna. Dracula, however, is as much about a compelling, ruthless, exotic masculine presence as it is about vampirism, and the choice to expand on the Ruthven/Varney prototype chimed well with what has become the most controversial element in the book’s construction – the role of the real-life Dracula.