The Many Lives of Count Dracula

While the picturesque Yorkshire fishing port of Whitby is catnip to day-trippers, literary tourists and (when in season) surprising numbers of Goths, the tourist industry that lines up its attractions for these profitable visitors also tactfully mentions that one anticipated sight is defin­itely missing. However diligently you search for it, you won’t find Dracula’s grave (though one confectionery shop does a nifty line in super-sweet little “Dracula’s Coffins” – chocolate, filled with fruity red gunk). There’s Dracula rock (black), the Dracula Experience Waxworks, assorted postcards, ornam­ents and even a celebratory Dracula tea towel, but he simply isn’t buried there. He’s not hidden in the stately ruins of Whitby Abbey, though nothing could be more suitably Gothic, and he doesn’t lurk among the weather-worn gravestones surrounding St Mary’s, where the cliff-top churchyard crumbles slowly into the sea. There are two good reasons for the lamentable absence of his bones. In Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, the vampire count does indeed begin his brief reign of terror in England by entering Whitby harbour on board the doomed Russian freighter Demeter, going on to flit around St Mary’s churchyard and the up-market terraced streets on the opposite cliff, and despatching at least one local. However, before his nefarious doings have been fully investigated by Abraham Van Helsing and his team of fearless amateur vampire-hunters, he has moved down to London, avid for the richer pickings of a teeming modern metropolis. And even then, he doesn’t meet his comeuppance in England but is tracked eastwards across Europe to his original home in Transylvania. In the chapel belonging to Castle Dracula, Van Helsing finds the Count’s lordly tomb, but Dracula is notably not at home. He is eventually encountered lying corpse-like in one of his travelling coffins, conveniently lined with native grave-earth and transported by loyal gypsies. Just as the setting sun threatens to restore the vampire’s power, Jonathan Harker shears through his throat with a great Kukri knife while the dying Quincey Morris plunges his Bowie knife (Morris is American, you’ll have guessed) into his heart. Pausing only to adopt an expression of deep peace, Dracula’s corpse immediately crumbles to dust. So the only tomb is in Transylvania and anyway is empty, and not even the Yorkshire Tourist Board can claim that Dracula’s bones ever found rest in Whitby. 

The other reason why you won’t find his grave there (and I really can’t stress this one sufficiently strongly) is that Count Dracula the vampireis a fictional character. He’s not buried anywhere except in the pages of the book that gave him existence – and given how often the novel is read, studied, adapted and borrowed from, he must be enjoying a much richer afterlife than most literary inventions. And there’s the rub – though Stoker did indeed invent Dracula, he used such potent source materials that his creation looms larger than the novel in which he is embedded. Arguably not the most fully realised character in supernatural fiction, still he has been woven out of such glittering threads that the slightest tug unravels a wealth of references and possibilities. Far from featuring in every page-turning paragraph of the eponymous novel, the vampire actually takes up considerably less wordage than good-guy characters such as Mina Harker or Van Helsing, but he has long since flown the nest in so many dramatisations, sequels and variations on a theme that he has come to stand alone, a flourishing pop cultural trope for audiences who would never dream of picking up a Victorian novel running to 161,774 words. Indeed, his name has almost become synonymous with the concept of the vampire: mention Dracula and you call up a dark-haired, hypnotic-eyed aristocrat who flits into your bedroom, shifting from his bat-shape as flickering wings become black cloak. However many visually unremarkable vampire types may pass for human in True Blood, Being Human or Buffy, anyone choosing to play the vampire come Hallowe’en is going to dress up as Dracula – or at least as the elegant caped bloodsucker who represents our most familiar interpretation of the character. You only have to look at Count von Count from Sesame Street to see how pervasive is the look, the outfit, the accent and the aristocratic status. Dracula is practically a trademark. He also belongs to that select band of created characters who have broken the bounds of fiction: while they may imply differ­ent things by it, it’s amazing how many people will calmly insist that “There really was a Count Dracula.”