Dracula

Jonathan Harker, a young solicitor from England, is traveling to Transylvania, diligently writing up his diary in shorthand as he goes. We catch up with him as he reaches Bistritz (Romanian: Bistrița, fig. 2) on 3 May 2023, having travelled via Munich, Vienna and Budapest.

Here’s a close-up of where Jonathan is at, and where he’s heading. The town is local river (from a Slavic root meaning “clear”). You’ll find the “Borgo” pass, where Dracula’s carriage awaits, on maps as Tihuța. Also labeled is Suceava County, which now contains part of Bukovina, the historical region towards which we’re going (the other part is in Ukraine).

(toot)

Jonathan has done some research on Transylvania, and informs us:

In the population of Transylvania there are four distinct nationalities: Saxons in the South, and mixed with them the Wallachs, who are the descendants of the Dacians; Magyars in the West, and Szekelys in the East and North. I am going among the latter, who claim to be descended from Attila and the Huns.

(Jonathan Harker’s diary, 3 May)

For those confused by Jonathan’s ethnic breakdown: Very roughly, and in today’s terms, the Wallachians would be Romanian-speakers, the Magyars and Szekelys would be Hungarian-speakers, and the Saxons German-speakers. Wallachian (a political/regional term) reflects the old word Vlach for Romance-speaking peoples in the Balkans generally, and thus also serves as an old name for the Romanians.

Today’s date presents us with a very minor mystery. Jonathan’s landlady is warning him not to brave the powers of darkness on this of all nights, the eve of St George’s Day. But as an Englishman might be expected to know, even as Protestant an Englishman as Jonathan (who thinks the crucifix a bit idolatrous), St George’s Day is April 23, not May 5! Jonathan, however, is unfazed, because he has done his homework, and he knows … what? See: Sacred time in Transylvania.

Thought experiment. Might a (non-vampirical) Transylvanian nobleman, fallen on hard times, concoct a get-rich-quick scam involving leases to land with alleged buried treasure? And what better way to spread the word to moneyed City types than letting a London solicitor see glimpses of alleged treasure-hunting activity on a memorable nighttime ride? (toot)

Today’s entries are full of great quotes:

• “Enter freely and of your own will.”

  Yeah, thanks but no thanks, you very normal person.

  (Some of us have been wondering if this tricks the visitor into some kind of magical forfeit. The editors of Stoker’s notes say this invitation is not found there, which suggests it’s not a piece of regional folklore that Stoker happened on in his research, so we’re free to interpret it as we like.)

• “Listen to them – the children of the night. What music they make!” 🐺🎶🐺

  Sometimes you can’t be sure if it’s Dracula or Lloyd Webber’s Phantom in that opera cape. Btw, speaking of Children of the Night, Dan Simmons’ modern Dracula novel by that title (1992) is a good, tense, atmospheric read if you like your vampires naturalistic and blended with real-world horrors like Ceaușescu‘s secret police and AIDS orphanages.

• “Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter.”

  A common stereotype about latte-sipping urbanites among rural folk everywhere. Will ultimately prove ironic.

(toot)

A note on the words Harker overhears:

Ordog

Satan [more properly ördög, a Hungarian word for devil, of unknown etymology].

Pokol

hell [also Hungarian, from a Slavic root]. The Hungarian terms can be traced through Stoker’s notes to Magyarland (London: Sampson Low, 1881), a book by an anonymous Fellow of the Carpathian Society, identified as Nina Elizabeth Mazuchelli (Stoker 2008, 201–3).

Stregoica

witch [presumably Romanian strigoaică]. The source for this, as for much of Stoker’s knowledge of Dracula’s home region, is An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (Wilkinson 1820), (London: Longmans, 1820), where it’s identified with the Italian strega. I think Romanian has independently inherited the word and its connotations from Latin, though (strix, owl; striga, night-hag in bird form). Romanian strigoi (pl.), including the strigoaică (fem.sg.), are basically vampires.

Vrolok, vlkoslak

werewolf/vampire [corruption of a Slavic expression, see below]. The source for vrolok/vlkoslak is Sabine Baring-Gould’s compendious Book of Were-Wolves (1865), but the words have been through a wringer. Vrolok is Stoker’s (further) corruption of vrkolak, said to be used by Slovaks and Bulgarians and connected with the Greek (βρυκόλακας, vrykolakas); vlkoslak is a misspelling of the Czech vlkodlak (Stoker says Serbian, but that would be vukodlak). All of these stem from a Slavic compound meaning (a man in) “wolf-skin”.

While we’re at it, @authorlevai has informed me that “God’s seat!” should be “Isten széke” in Hungarian, not “Isten szek.” Still, Jonathan clearly has an amazing ear for languages, and I really covet that polyglot dictionary of his.

(thread)

Carfax is very much a fixer-upper, but that’s probably just the ticket for the Count. He’s like all those American ladies who leave the rat race and their exes to renovate a dilapidated estate in Provence or Tuscany in blessed solitude, and then reluctantly get drawn into the charming and colorful life of the locals and into the romantic relationship they have sworn never to risk again. This is shaping up to be a cozy read!

Dracula has done his homework. He has studied English society, he has well-considered and realistic expectations as to the welcome a foreigner can expect, and he is keen to master the language. Clearly he also has ample means of support. In short, Dracula is a model immigrant, eager to become integrated. I’m starting to wonder where the conflict is even going to come from in this story.

At the same time, he’s extremely on brand as a Balkan strongman:

• Rants about his proud history fighting the “Turk”, skipping the bits that fit awkwardly in the narrative (his Ottoman-vassal dad leaving him an Ottoman hostage; he himself invading Wallachia with the aid of an Ottoman army, and fleeing back to the Ottomans; massacring civilians, including busloads of Christians)
• Plugs an utterly bonkers national origin myth (the Ugric peoples descending from the Iceland Norse?!)
• Ought to reflect more (Balkan strongmen don’t reflect much on their wrongheaded views; Dracula has no reflection in any surface).

Maybe it won’t be such a cozy read after all.

PS. Here I assumed that the Count is identical with that first Dracula he mentions, who must be Vlad III Ţepeş (“the Impaler”) aka Vlad Dracula (d. 1476/77), son of Vlad II Dracul. I’ll generally go on assuming that; it is the customary assumption, and a later discussion in the novel seems to confirm it. However, in another discussion later in the story (28 October), our heroes seize on the Count’s words about “that other of his race” who fought the Turks at a later date, and seem to identify that person with the Count. Hans Corneel de Roos, who has pointed this out, identifies the “other” as Michael the Brave (Mihai Viteazul, r. 1593–1601), who indeed retreated across the Danube but returned to attack the Turks again. Ultimately, he thinks Stoker used this ambiguity to “provide a convincing backdrop” while avoiding too precise details (de Roos 2017).

It’s nice to see a woman and her fiancé share a passion for stenography, which is starting to sound like a major plot point. I think they’re going to be very happy. (toot)

Lucy fancies that it is hard to read her thoughts, and there is a certain sense in which uncharitable readers might agree. (toot) (Also see: Mina vs Lucy).

We who are steeped in Dracula lore see this scene very differently from Jonathan:

Jonathan

Cape billowing out like great black wings, he climbed head first down the wall like a —

Reader

(mouths) Bat.

Jonathan

— lizard.

Reader

A lizard?! A lizard with wings?

Jonathan

(whips out a dog-eared copy of Fauna of Southeast Asia) Yes, one of the several flying lizard species of the genus … (pauses theatrically) … Draco.

(toot)

Jonathan is a captive in this scary castle, and the supernaturally terrifying owner has warned him not to fall asleep in any rooms not his own. So now he’s gone exploring a panoramic room clearly “occupied by the ladies in bygone days,” writing his diary by moonlight, and feeling “a soft quietude” come over him. You see where this is going. Things are about to get scarily sexy or sexily scary.

Meanwhile, I had some questions about femininity and modernity (thread): Jonathan is finding some comfort in the room. Why? Well, the Count’s not there. But beyond that, two things suggest themselves.

1. It’s a ladies’ room, a feminine sanctuary. You can see the attraction to Jonathan after weeks on his best subservient behavior with a hyperdominant male (albeit one who makes his food and bed). The irony in Jonathan’s seeking security in the feminine is about to bare its fangs, though. And I think this is a piece of a larger theme.

   So I wonder how much of Jonathan’s behavior, besides repairing to the ladies’ chamber, can be coded feminine/effeminate? Possibly nothing, in the 1890s context. In the 1890s the shift to what will become the female steno pool has begun, but men of affairs still practice their shorthand themselves, or have male secretaries. And journalling is even less of a gendered genre than later “Dear Diary” stereotypes would have it.

   

   Figure 5: Example of the neo-Gothic novel

   But consider the bigger picture: A newcomer to a gloomy old castle replete with dark secrets from which he must seek to escape, Jonathan faces the predicament of the Gothic-novel heroine, though it is perhaps clearer in our day after the wave of neo-Gothic paperback novels (fig. 5) than it was at the time of publication.

2. There’s a sense of modernity here, and its rationality is reassuring, although “the old centuries” have irrational powers which “‘mere modernity’ cannot kill.” Another theme that will recur.

   But what exactly is it that is “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance” in this scene?! The room is ancient, the moon outshines the lamp, the table is oak, and while Jonathan may feel a shorthand diary is very 1890s, it’s hardly new tech.

   I’m guessing part of the modernity lies in the large windows, unusual for an old castle. And also in the shorthand: Though stenographic systems go back centuries, fascination with shorthand peaked in the Victorian age (“Like Esperanto a generation later, shorthand spread through a counter-culture of early adopters” – Leah Price) and waned by the start of the 20th century when it become women’s work.

   But 19th-century Western social history really isn’t my field; I may be wrong.

(thread)

—pation.

Jonathan, a virtuous young Victorian solicitor, finds himself about to get his jugular cherry popped in a foursome with three steamy vampire “sisters.” There is wicked, burning desire, languorous ecstasy, licking of voluptuous lips. And for all his mortal fear and his brief pang of shame at the thought that his fiancée might find out, he’s here for it.

(As was I at his age, when this film came out. Hell, I’d have let Monica Bellucci rip my throat out any time she liked.)

There’s some intriguing characterization here: Dracula, looking at Harker’s face, whispers that he (Dracula), too, is able to love. Still, I think Frayling nails it when he calls the vampire relationship “haemosexual” rather than homosexual (Frayling 1991, 385–89).

The vamps have entered popular culture as the “brides” of Dracula, but their actual relationship to Dracula and each other is not clear, apart from the fact that they call each other “sister” and that Dracula provides for them. “Sister” may be a honorific, so it doesn’t tell us much.

And where does Jonathan know the blonde from? Possibly from the tomb of Countess Dolingen of Graz (d. 1801) in “Dracula’s Guest” (1914), a separate Stoker short story linked to his early ideas for the start of the novel, where Jonathan would have some harrowing experiences already in Munich. But this encounter cannot have taken place in the novel’s universe, or Harker would not be in such good shape when we find him traveling on.

Dracula wants Harker to write some letters home with future dates, indicating to Harker the span of his own life.

Pedantic nitpicking: Harker got from Bistritz to Dracula’s castle in a single memorable night between 4 and 5 May. Why would he need nine days for the return trip, as suggested by the dates Dracula demands on the letters?

Of course, Dracula wants to keep Harker’s associates in the dark and reassured for as long as possible. But above all, he must make it look like Harker has left the castle alive. So why risk an implausible time gap in Harker’s testimony?

I mean, Dracula knows all about England. He must know that this won’t be overlooked if Harker’s boss, or his fiancée, engages the services of a certain consulting detective in London who doesn’t even overlook a dog not barking.

(thread)

Lucy may be a bit bubbly, but here she shows good sense. Toying with a lancet while proposing marriage? That’s kind of a red flag, Dr Seward.

It’s also kind of an ironical foreshadowing. Lucy turning down a suitor with an unnerving penchant for bloodletting? Out of the frying-pan, etc.

Dr Seward, Lucy’s intellectual suitor, despondently throws himself into work on the patient Renfield, on whom more anon. He asks himself under what circumstances he would not avoid hell, quotes Sallust on corruption (omnia Romae venalia sunt, in Rome all are for sale) and hints that “Hell has its price” – before interrupting himself with a Latin “enough said” (verbum sapienti sat est, a word is enough to the wise). As if toying with the idea of some unspeakable deed. The unethical research method he was chiding himself for? Or something else?

Quincy Morris, the irrepressible Texan, suggests a boys’ night out. It turns out all three suitors are old buddies. Quincy and Arthur in particular are manly men who have bonded on hazardous globetrotting wilderness adventures.

Remember Dracula’s dismissive “you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter” to Harker (5 May)? He may have underestimated the opposition. The hunter still awakens in the urbane Victorian-era Anglo-Saxon sportsman.

(Yes, I seem to be getting into an argument about the manly virtues that our friends must find to repel the foreign threat to their women and their precious bodily fluids. We’ll see how it goes.)

(thread)

We now have an idea of most of the characters, but Lucy has been so coy about her new fiancé, Arthur Holmwood, the future Lord Godalming, that – if not for Quincey’s reminiscenses – one might almost fancy Arthur the vampire of the story, a Lord Ruthven under a new alias.

Fortunately, now that Quincey has written to him, Arthur will have to respond. Here one might expect a great outpouring of Arthur’s heart, brimming with characterization. Right? Wrong. As a character in an epistolary novel, Arthur really has one job, and he’s shirking it.

Anyway: three men walk into a bar.

A Texan with a Bowie knife, a doctor who fidgets with surgical tools when agitated, and the upper-class git who just snatched their dream girl.

Here one might expect a literal outpouring of the heart.

(thread)

One really gets the feeling that Dracula is enjoying his cat-and-mouse games with Harker. Entering into the spirit of the hunter, so to speak.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to Dracula’s “Szgany” minions. Of all the Carpatian “whirlpool” of foreign races, the Roma arguably get the worst explicit press in the book.

(thread)

Spare a thought for Harker’s fraying nerves now and then over the coming 16 days of terrifying quiet. He’s far from home, alone, pretending to be a guest, knowing himself the prisoner and prey of monsters, knowing he’ll soon be killed, rightly fearing that will only be the beginning. He has only his diary to confide in.

For the next 16 days, he doesn’t.

And someone just took away his comfort blanket.

He gives Renfield three days to get rid of his flies.

The slow, silent shredding of Harker’s sanity is interrupted by the arrival of some Slovaks with a delivery of empty boxes. Harker’s attempt to contact them is dashed by Dracula’s fiendishly clever and unexpected stratagem of, uh, locking his captive in.

(If Mina had been in his shoes, over the past few weeks she would have drawn up a dozen concisely phrased but carefully itemized escape plans and successfully executed the most plausible one. Just saying.)

A few glosses:

Slovaks

migrated in numbers to various parts of today’s Romania in the 18th and early 19th c, some seeking a freer climate to be Protestant in, others a fertile climate for farming in imperial borderlands depopulated by war.

Leiter-wagon

already glossed as “the ordinary peasants’ cart” by Harker on 5 May. From German Leiter, “ladder,” because the sides of the cart are shaped as ladders.

Hetman

here probably just headman or leader, in a loose usage which had spread beyond its original use for a Polish-Lithuanian commander or Cossack leader.

(thread)

It’s been two weeks since Dr Seward gave his mental patient Renfield three days to ditch his flies, and you know what? He hasn’t. Ok, he’s feeding them to spiders now, but also he’s getting more flies.

This doesn’t reflect well on Seward’s authority. Or perhaps on his ethics? Is he trying to to keep his patient “to the point of his madness,” as he chided himself for back on 25 May? Wanting to see where it goes? If it’ll end with spiders? (Narrator: It won’t.)

Dracula’s treatment of the woman looking for her child again confirms our picture of him: aristocratic but not too proud to do menial work or appear common, a solicitous host, a reliable provider, good with animals, and ready to dispense swift mercy to those in anguish. No, kidding. We get our most shocking confirmation yet that he is a heartless, evil monster.

Also some new Stokerian vampire lore: Though Dracula himself has so far appeared robustly physical (a few odd tricks of optics apart), vampires can also take on more ghostly, ethereal forms, coalescing from motes of dust in the moonbeams, and they can have a hypnotic effect.

Jonathan has finally found his courage and initiative, and has caught his dread enemy at his most vulnera NO JONATHAN NO WHERE ARE YOU GOING GET A STAKE NO DONT LIE DOWN TO THINK JONATHAN STAKE GET A STAKE DRIVE IT THROUGH HIS HEART YOU BLITHERING

Get this: Jonathan has learned that Dracula is helplessly inert in the daytime. He has found him in his lair and could have rid the world of the fiend forever. But he thought Dracula looked at him funny, and decided to have a lie down and a think instead. Four days of inaction pass until the next note.

Oh well, as someone who turned tail and fled the Norwegian National Library on his first visit because I thought the architecture of the entrance hall was looking at me judgmentally, I guess I can’t blame him. Spoiler: A bunch of people are entitled to blame him, though, including some lovely young ladies, a shipload of sailors, and several Hampstead families.

Now the children of the night are making music again. I love the image of Dracula controlling an orchestra of wolves like a conductor with his baton. When the inevitable happens and Dracula gets Disneyfied, this could be a great song number.

After a really half-assed attempt to kill Dracula – a glancing blow on the forehead with a spade is NOT HOW YOU KILL A VAMPIRE, Jonathan – and much procrastination, Jonathan is now trying to gain his freedom from the vampirettes by either succeeding in climbing the castle walls, or failing.

And what’s with the 50 boxes of Transylvanian soil Dracula is shipping? Some thoughts under Blood and soil.

Renfield is doing his impression of “There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.”

Dr Seward makes an unconvincing show of imposing some discipline on his patient, but really he is just raptly taking case notes with all the professional ethics of someone slowing down to gawk at a car crash, isn’t he?

The Demeter sets sail with an unreliable passenger manifest of zero, but loaded with a familiar cargo of boxes of earth, and, erm, victualed with a crew of nine.

Of all the imaginative subplots and iconic scenes in Stoker’s Dracula, I think none instills a growing sense of terror more effectively than the terse log entries from the voyage of the Demeter and her doomed crew. Poor souls.

Stoker took his inspiration for the ship from an event involving a Russian schooner, the Dimitry (see 8 August), but changed the name to the more classical-sounding Demeter, transforming a god-fearing Orthodox ship, presumably dedicated to St Demetrius, into the vessel of a pagan goddess.

Demeter, of course, is the Greek goddess of fertility and the harvest who grieves for her daughter Persephone (Kore). Persephone was abducted and raped by the prince of the underworld, and, having eaten some pomegrenade seeds, is doomed to spend half of all her days with him beneath the earth as queen of the dead: a rather vampire-like fate. (Though unlike a vampire, she walks the world of the living when the sun shines brightest, as Demeter’s joy at their reunion brings summer.)

Dr Seward’s mad doctoring intensifies.

I’m relieved that Dr Seward draws the line at kittens. Stand firm, doctor: Renfield may find the rejection hard to swallow, but then, he’s about to find out what hard to swallow really means.

• Renfield independently rediscovers why people tend to pluck birds before eating them.
• A newly discovered mental disorder, Seward’s zoophagous mania, has been proposed. (Spoiler: It hasn’t made it into the DSM-5. Yes, I checked.)
• But Dr Seward dreams of greater discoveries, and though he’s
  only monologueing at his diary for now, he’s really leaning into his mad doctor persona, isn’t he?

Narrator: [chokes on coffee]

To lose one seaman is unfortunate; to lose two seems like carelessness.

Mina has come to beautiful seaside Whitby, Yorkshire, to stay with her well-to-do airhead friend Lucy Westenra, soon to be Mrs Arthur Holmwood. It promises to be a fun and relaxing summer, with the atmospheric ruin of Whitney Abbey as a spooky backdrop, but with all the modern convenience of rooms at the [Royal] Crescent, built in the 1850s.

I went to Whitby at the end of July myself in 2024, nerding hard. Whitby Library saved its no doubt sorely tried librarians from me walking in and asking to see their copy of William Wilkinson’s Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820), in which Stoker first spotted the name “Dracula,” by the simple expedient of keeping closed all Wednesday.

Here’s a picture of spooky Whitby Abbey. Mina’s 14 August entry could serve as a caption: “The setting sun, low down in the sky, was just dropping behind Kettleness. The red light was thrown over on the East Cliff and the old abbey, and seemed to bathe everything in a beautiful rosy glow.”

(toot)

Oddly, few B&Bs by the Crescent (pictured) seem Dracula-branded, but the self-catering apartment Bram’s View at no. 6 claims to offer, well, Bram’s view from when he stayed.

Whitby does sport a Dracula Experience, a Dracula Festival, etc. etc. Whitby Abbey has recently been (groan) “revamped” by British Heritage, and in 2022 it set a record for the Largest Gathering of People Dressed as Vampires (1,369, but how do you actually tell?).

Over the next weeks, we will be treated to many a proud demonstration of Stoker’s keen ear for dialects, God grant us fortitude and understanding. Ageeanwards the end of better understanding the old man, Mr Swales, here’s a glossary (in order of appearance in the passage:

comers

visitors

creed

to believe

gang

to go — walk

ageeanwards

towards

crammle

to hobble as with corns

aboon

above [but used for “down” in Dracula – editors’ note]

grees

stairs

belly-timber

food

These glosses are verbatim from Stoker’s notes (Stoker 2008, 142–49). Stoker, in turn, cites F. K. Robinson, A Glossary of Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Whitby (London: Trubner, 1876).

Also, Mina’s talk with the old man is quite documentary. Stoker records a conversation with three old fishermen on 30/7/90 (Stoker 2008, 150–53). He heard some yarns about lost whalers, and also asked about the local legends Mina refers to; as far as the editors can make out, he notes: “These men said if legend of bells at sea & white lady in Abbey window. Then* things is all wore out” (153).

Mina is apprehensive about the odd one-line letter from Jonathan; as we know, she’s right to be. Trust your feelings, Mina.

Meanwhile, Lucy is sleepwalking. She’s done so before, and her father had the same affliction. Considering how things turn out, it seems she’s a congenital psychic sensitive, already responding to Dracula’s magnetic pull from out at sea.

Stoker’s notes (2008) include some quotes from an 1808 book about dream theory (F. C. & J. Rivington, The Theory of Dreams, 2 vols., London). He showed interest in ideas about dreams as visionary/oracular and sleep/dream as a state akin to death, and noted cases of people falling into a cataleptic state where they could easily be taken for dead. (Such disorders, of course, are among the many rationalist explanations for the belief in vampirism.) But nothing about somnambulism as such.

The female victim sleepwalking towards the vampire “under the strong influence of some eccentric dream” figures in the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire, which provided a number of vampire tropes used in Dracula (Frayling 1991, 40–41). Sir Francis Varney seems surprised at his powers, though, while one imagines Dracula using his fatal attraction deliberately.

Horror’s premier somnambulist remains Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), which also involves sleeping in a box, and an asylum.

“[Lucy] has lost that anæmic look which she had. I pray it will all last.”
Oh, Mina. 😥

(toot)

So, the British man in the street says that wafts and white ladies, boh-ghosts and bogles are just lies, or if they ever existed, now they’re “all wore out.” And indeed we meet no native apparitions. His skepticism extends to the memorials of the dead: they are not even buried in British soil. Contrast the vigor of the vampires in Transylvania, the holiness of its soil soaked with ancestral blood, and the powers of its “old centuries” against “mere modernity.”

More glosses of Whitby dialect from Stoker’s notes, in order of appearance in Mr Swales’ 1 August rant. (In a discussion, I described Mr Swales as “kind of a one-man-band Spoon River Anthology” of cynical remarks on his late townsmen.)

ban

curse

waft

ghost

boh-ghosts, barguests

terrifying apparitions [more specifically: barghests, monstrous black dogs of Yorkshire folklore; possibly an inspiration for an event to come shortly.]

bogle

[no gloss, presumably ghost]

anent

concerning

bairn

a child

dizzy

half-witted

air-bleb

bubble

grim

a ghost

illsome

evil disposed

scunner

to scare

hafflin’

a half wit

airt

quarter or direction

scowderment

confusion

yabblins

possibly!

poorish

few, small number

balm-bowl

a chamberpot

kirk-garth

churchyard

consate

to imagine

aboon

above [but used for “down” or “below” in Dracula]

lay-bed

a grave

toom

empty

aftest

hindmost

hap

to bury

antherums

doubts

gawm

to understand

lamiter

a deformed person

clegs

horseflies

dowp

carrion crow

addle

live

keckle

to chuckle

grees

stairs

gladsome

joyful

gang

to go — walk

References as before (Stoker 2008, 142–49 citing Robinson’s glossary); comments in square brackets are mine.

Today’s events inspired me to this dreadful doggerel; apologies to Eurythmics:

🎶 Nightmares are made of this
Who am I to disagree
I travel the Med and the British Channel
Everybody’s looking for something

Demeter’s mate looks for a stowaway
Mina still looks for a letter
Lucy sleeps, but tries to go away
Dracula’s coming to get her 🎶

The captain has seen Him – It! – for the first time.

At about this point in the 2023 #DraculaDaily cycle, The Last Voyage of the Demeter was about to hit cinemas (stoked toot). Not starring Viggo Mortensen after all, unfortunately, BUT directed by André Øverdal, of Trollhunter fame.

There’s something in that wind and in the hoast beyont that sounds, and looks, and tastes, and smells like death. It’s in the air; I feel it comin’.

— Mr Swales in Dracula

More Whitby dialect glosses from Stoker’s notes, in order of appearance in Mr Swales’ speech:

aud

old [repeatedly]

krok-hooal

a grave

caff

to chaff

chafts

jaws

dooal

grief, to lament

greet

weep

hoast

mist

I’m loving the Norse influences (“greet” for “cry, shed tears”).

Mina’s “brool” is “a low roar: a deep murmur or humming” (Merriam-Webster). I am officially in love with this word.

And Mina’s “men like trees walking” is from Mark 8:24 (how the blind man at Bethsaida started dimly seeing people before Jesus laid his hands on him a second time and restored his sight completely). Not to put too fine a point on it: it’s foggy in Whitby.

I have no idea how well Stoker did with the dialects (I have a tin ear myself), but between his notes from a dictionary and his chats with locals during a summer holiday, I’d imagine he’d get right the words and patterns he knew, but get on thin ice as soon as he ad libbed.

We’ll hear more of her [the Russian ship] before this time tomorrow.

— Mr Swales

Indeed they will; and the day after, so will we.

Say what you will about Dracula, the man knows how to make an entrance! Crashing ashore in a mystery ship steered by the storm and the hand of a dead man, then leaping out – presumably – as an immense dog.

And here’s a picture I took of Dracula’s landing site in rather fairer weather than he brought.

(toot)

This Wiki picture of the narrow opening in the pincer-like jaws of the East and West piers shows what a freak event it would be for the storm to blow the Demeter into the harbor by chance.

Some notes:

• I think this is our first intimation that Dracula can not only control wolves, he can take their shape. In Hollywood’s rigid werewolf/vampire dichotomy, that would make him both, but I think Stoker’s Dracula is more non-binary about it. For some background notes, see Vamps and wolves.
• Remember Mina deciding to learn the weather-signs? Stoker was equally determined, and the Dailygraph’s depiction of the brewing storm reflects his notes from Robert H. Scott’s Fishery Barometer Manual (London, 1887): the show of “mares-tails” in the northwest, the southwesterly wind, the “gaudy or unusual hues” (Stoker 2008, 132–37).
• On 24 October 1885, the Russian schooner Dimitry (hence Stoker’s Demeter) blew into Whitby harbor in a force-8 gale, somehow avoiding the rocks, and was wrecked on the beach. The crew was saved. Stoker noted the incident and kept an extract from the log book of the coast guard station (Stoker 2008, 138–41).
• The line “As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean” is from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, another tale of a cursed voyage where the crew all die, save for the one who lives to tell the tale.

Several detective mysteries here.

Poor Mr Swales’ death seems the least mysterious, whether he did fall and break his neck from fright when seeing Dracula, or Dracula snapped his neck.

The curious case of the dog in the day-time, though, is hard to explain. We know it’s the tombstone of a suicide; we know Mr Swales just died on this self-same seat; but is the dog just reacting to the psychic residue of these deaths and of the fleeting presence of Dracula? And what reduces it to trembling jelly on the tombstone? Is Dracula perhaps still around, right under their feet? Might he have taken temporary shelter in this tomb while waiting for his boxes to be delivered? I don’t think so – it conflicts with his character and his apparent dependence on his ancestral soil – but the dog’s behavior puzzles me. And so does Lucy’s.

The sensitive Lucy, who recoiled from a seat on a suicide’s tomb a few days ago, may be restless, but puts up no objection to sitting there now despite the fresh death of Swales at the same spot. (Mina too seems oddly unmoved.) Her helpless look at the helpless dog “in an agonised sort of way” perhaps suggest she recognizes its plight – another creature in thrall to the power of Dracula?

On a lighter note:

• “Severe tea” 😍 is, I suppose, nothing kinkier than tea with too much to eat.
• Fighting “the dusty miller,” I guess, means fighting back sleep; the miller’s flour dust, like the Sandman’s sand, gets in your eyes and makes them itch and close. Don’t know how common the expression was. But I almost feel I can trace Stoker’s train of thought from Robin Hood Bay to the dusty miller: one of the more memorable parts of Pyle’s Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883) was the tale of Midge, the miller’s son, and his tactic of throwing flour in his opponents’ faces.
• I’ve had discussions as to whether Mina is a New Woman, and since I wasn’t too sure about that, I should probably feel vindicated that she’s so concerned today to distance herself from that trend. But perhaps the lady doth protest too much. I certainly find it hard to picture that Mina would rest fulfilled as stenographic helpmeet to her husband for very long.

(thread)

We’ve been hearing a lot about Mina’s and Lucy’s favorite seat, and we’ll hear more anon. There are several benches in the churchyard today, all look too new, and I don’t know if any is in the right spot. (I did not get on my knees, whip out my magnifying glass and search for a stone inscribed to George Canon as night fell.) Feel free to imagine it’s this one!

(toot)

The clock was striking one as I was in the Crescent, and there was not a soul in sight.

– Mina’s diary

It’s an easy 20-minute walk for Lucy, and later Mina, but Lucy is sleepwalking, or something, and they’re barefoot in their nightgowns. They start from the Crescent:

(toot)

At the edge of the West Cliff above the pier I looked across the harbour to the East Cliff, in the hope or fear […] of seeing Lucy in our favourite seat. […T]here, on our favourite seat, the silver light of the moon struck a half-reclining figure, snowy white. […I]t seemed to me as though something dark stood behind the seat where the white figure shone, and bent over it.

– Mina’s diary

Mina has excellent eyesight: Here’s the daylight view.

I did not wait to catch another glance, but flew down the steep steps to the pier and along by the fish-market to the bridge, which was the only way to reach the East Cliff. The town seemed as dead, for not a soul did I see; I rejoiced that it was so, for I wanted no witness of poor Lucy’s condition.

– Mina’s diary

Through narrow streets of cobblestones, perhaps ‘neath the halo of a street lamp, like this, but presumably gaslit, if lit at all.

The time and distance seemed endless, and my knees trembled and my breath came laboured as I toiled up the endless steps to the abbey.

– Mina’s diary

(Not endless. There are 199 of them. A fairly easy climb.)

When I got almost to the top I could see the seat and the white figure, for I was now close enough to distinguish it even through the spells of shadow. There was undoubtedly something, long and black, bending over the half-reclining white figure. I called in fright, “Lucy! Lucy!” and something raised a head, and from where I was I could see a white face and red, gleaming eyes. Her lips were parted, and she was breathing — not softly as usual with her, but in long, heavy gasps.

– Mina’s diary

You’ll have to use your imagination a bit for this one.

(thread)

Or we can cut to Coppola’s movie adaptation, which made a whole steamy sex scene out of it, with hip thrusts suggestive of vaginal penetration in addition to the jugular kind. While the movie’s Lucy appears to be into it, we should not assume she’s in any state of consciousness to give meaningful consent to the serial predator she’s with. It’s rape. Yes, vampire stories and vampire movies are guilty pleasures.

Poor Mina. What a brave and devoted friend she is! But she hasn’t seen the movie, and doesn’t know what the pinpricks of blood on Lucy’s throat mean. Let’s not tell her.

Instead, here’s some suitably innocent, sweet music to soothe her nerves as she sneaks Lucy back on muddy feet:

🎶 As we walk through the streets there’s noone nowhere
And our nightgowns are trailing and our feet are bare 🎶

— Katie Melua singing “Moonshine” by Fran Healy https://youtu.be/oZCGeu6STwg

Lucy’s attitude to bedroom doors reminds me of my cat’s.

But Jonathan has turned up, and the good news are en route to Mina with a stern warning not to mention anything “of wolves and poison and blood; of ghosts and demons,” so clearly they’re being set up to withhold crucial information from each other until tragedy has well and truly struck. Not my favorite plot device.

Klausenburg = Cluj (Hun. Kolozsvár), capital of the former Principality of Transylvania.

Oh, and I love this bit: “Seeing from his violent demeanour that he was English, they gave him a ticket for the furthest station on the way thither” 🤣

(thread)

Today is the first mention of a bat in Dracula. After 3 months, 10 days. (Yes, we’ve seen how Dracula climbed down his castle wall in a very bat-like way, but as you will recall, Jonathan saw it differently.)

While South American “vampire bats” had been so called since the 1700s, it was only Stoker’s Dracula that established the pop-culture vampire as shifting between human form and bat.

Though antecedents can be found – here’s a great read:
Andy Boylan, “Stoker and the Bat”, Vamped.org, April 5, 2014.

🧛🏻‍♂️ “His red eyes again.” Just a trick of the light? Or is Dracula up and about early?

I commented on Mina’s good eyesight on 11 August when, from the West Cliff, she saw in the moonlight a reclining white figure on the seat on the East Cliff. But making out glowing red eyes at that distance, as both Lucy and Mina seem to do? Must be a trick of the light, as she says. Or a psychic phenomenon, perhaps.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Re: movie vampire eyes, I’m partial to the slit-pupil versions: They’re predators, after all.

🧛🏻‍♂️ What’s that up there with Lucy on the windowsill? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, Mina, it’s a bat.

(Probably. Can’t rule out Dracula taking owl shape, but he’s pretty consistent about being a bat here, and Lucy’s wounds are hardly from a beak.)

🧛🏻‍♂️ “Lucy was languid”: and if you like the word “languid” – not to mention beautiful young women spending a summer of mutual attraction and mysterious bite marks together – you should read Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) now if you haven’t already. Another great Irish vampire story and, I think, an important influence on Stoker.

(If you want a paper copy, do look for the 2019 Lanternfish Press edition for the added value of Carmen Maria Machado’s introduction and the learned references therein. It will astound you. No, I’m not going to tell you why.)

(Unexpected bonus: apparently, reading Carmilla can also harm the national interests of Belarus, where it is officially blacklisted by the Ministry of Information. 🤡)

🧛🏻‍♂️ Obviously Mrs Westenra’s heart condition is another device that keeps other characters from sharing crucial information, and Lord Godalming’s sickness keeps Arthur from noticing Lucy’s plight and coming to her aid.

But I wonder if there is any further significance to the theme of dying parents handing over to a new generation.

As the 50 boxes of Transylvanian soil near their destination at Carfax near Purfleet, perhaps it’s time to appreciate Dracula as a novel of fin-de-siecle globalization.

Dracula’s UK venture is sped by wagon, ship and rail, facilitated by a network of solicitors and shipping agents communicating by reliable international mail. Global trade is a mighty circulatory system, and Dracula, Bradshaw’s Railway Guide in hand, has his fangs on its pulse.

Though globalization thus does bring vampirical infestation with it, it’s hard to detect anti-globalist notes (or the anti-Semitic undertones they have in some quarters: the agents have names like Hawkins and Billington, not Rothschild).*

The novel rather celebrates a dawning age when, as J. M. Keynes wrote,

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.

— John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan, 1919)

Indeed, Keynes might almost** have been writing of Dracula:

He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a bank (…), and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, (…), bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.

– Ibid.

After all that’s happened, Mina and Lucy are STILL sitting on that seat.

Dracula is at his new home near Purfleet, and probably busy – Carfax sounded like a fixer-upper – so back in Whitby, the spell is lifted and Lucy’s doing better. For now. The “dream” she recalls is an out-of-body experience – suggesting she was near death, or in a state of sleep paralysis, or “traveling clairvoyance,” or seeing through his bat eyes?

Lucy’s dream of flying above the lighthouse somehow reminded me of Paul Simon’s hauntingly beautiful “American Tune,” so I started adapting it as a Dracula musical. 1st verse sung by Jonathan (“certainly misused … so far away from home”), 2nd by Mina (“I don’t know a soul that’s not been battered, I don’t have a friend who feels at ease”), bridge by Lucy (“And I dreamed I was dying”), and 3rd verse, slightly adapted, by Dracula (“I come on a ship they call the Demeter … and sing a Transylvanian tune”). However, better judgment kicked in, and I’ll spare you the full horror of my travesty.

But as noted elsewhere, there are so many Dracula musical numbers I’d love to see, and the actual Dracula: the Musical doesn’t sound silly enough.

While Lucy is temporarily free of Dracula’s sway, Renfield is filled with zeal by Dracula’s presence at Carfax, the neighboring estate to Dr Seward’s asylum. The bond between them is not clear; perhaps Renfield is a psychic sensitive, as Lucy seems to be. Renfield’s mania centers on prolonging his life by eating others, so it’s not odd that he wants to attach himself to Dracula, an expert in that field.

But it’s noteworthy that he “worships” Dracula, calls him “Master,” and apparently sees himself as a kind of disciple. And then there’s his curt dismissal of Dr Seward with a parable: “The bride-maidens rejoice the eyes that wait the coming of the bride; but when the bride draweth nigh, then the maidens shine not to the eyes that are filled.”

Renfield is saying that people like to look at the pretty bridesmaids until the bride herself appears, but then they have eyes only for the bride. On one level, this means he can no longer pay attention to his doctor (a mere bride-maiden) now that his Master (the bride) is at hand. What it might mean on a further level, depends on what Biblical allusion we pursue.

This is not a direct quote from the Bible; rather, it’s a kind of pastiche of Biblical wedding symbolism. Several references are suggested (Psalm 45:13–14; Matt 25:1–13, which we may already have seen Quincey mangle when proposing; John 3:29; various passages on the Bride of the Lamb in Rev 19 and 21).

John 3:29 is perhaps the most promising as a key to Renfield’s thinking. In context, John the Baptist speaks of Jesus as the bridegroom and himself as a mere friend of the groom. As John humbly explains to his followers, the bride (the Church) belongs to the groom (Jesus), not to John.

Along these lines, Renfield perhaps sees himself playing John the Baptist to Dracula’s (anti-)Christ; his role is to prepare the way for the Master. If so, this will not be the last scene suggesting Dracula as a grotesquely inverted Christ figure, but more on that later.

Another notable inversion here, though, is that of gender. In John 3:29 as in other wedding passages, the Jesus symbol and focus of the wedding is the groom: “The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice.”

Renfield switches groom to bride, and clearly the bride here signifies Dracula. Though Dracula has been clearly gendered male, and pretty toxic male at that. Perhaps Renfield’s parable is just a nod to modern wedding customs where the bride always shines the brightest; I certainly think that makes his point easier to understand for the reader. Or perhaps – just perhaps – Renfield’s queering Dracula a bit?

(Or maybe I’m just making up for my failure to get into the weeds of Dracula’s possible homosexual attraction to Jonathan. I think those weeds have been well trodden by others, though.)

Dr Seward’s diary today is disconcerting. He appears to think a week has gone by since the events of yesterday, and then another three days before he’s done recording for today.

Maybe someone just dated the recording wrong (Seward, Stoker, or, as we shall see, perhaps Mina). That seems to be the issue with the extra three days, at least - the date “23 August” should have come before the addition to today’s entry.

Or maybe we have an unreliable narrator.

As we’ve seen, Lucy’s “no” pushed Seward into depression tinged with decadence (as well it might – in Stoker’s original notes, he was to have been her fiancé). Maybe he’s been dipping too much into the chloral hydrate after all.

He’s also given off a mad-doctor vibe with his musings about unethical experiments on patients – and he’s set to launch another one tonight (or in three nights).

Also, he seems to be going through a bit of what psychotherapists call counter-transference – projecting his own issues onto his patients.

Yesterday and today, he’s been obsessing over his rank in Renfield’s estimation. When Renfield made no distinction between his doctor and his attendant, Seward, with his own riff on a Biblical parable, put the difference as that between an eagle and a sparrow. Ego much?

Today Seward’s feelings are soothed when he thinks Renfield distinguishes him from the others (but ironically, I don’t think it’s him Renfield is talking to).

Anyway, Dr Seward doesn’t seem entirely stable. In Sister Agatha’s judgment, Harker is about as stable as a pyramid of cards stood on its tip. And what are we to make of the captain’s wild ravings in the bottle? We have a bunch of potentially unreliable narrators here.

Or unreliable editors. Which opens up possibilities even darker than a naïve reading of Dracula. So I’ll return to them. 😬

(thread)

In which the author of The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879) brings the receipts, so to speak.

Such subjects as the advisability of uniform filing of papers or folding of returns, of using dots instead of 0’s in money columns, or of forwarding returns at the earliest instead of the latest date allowable, may seem too trivial to treat of; yet every Clerk would do well to remember […]

– from Stoker’s “Introduction” to The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879) 🙂

“… a big bat, which was flapping its silent and ghostly way to the west.”

West along the winding Thames from Purfleet lies teeming London, population: about 6 million pulsing jugular veins, with no natural immunity to Carpathian vampirism, ripe for an epidemic.

But perhaps the strain is not so virulent? After all, patient zero has already quite recovered, sleeping soundly through the night with roses back in her cheeks.

Oh, and she is back in … London.

A lot going on here.

🧛 Mina and Jonathan tied the knot! 🥂 Good for him, I guess.

🧛 “The idea of my being jealous about Jonathan!” Indeed, Mina, indeed.

🧛 Yesterday Dr Seward recorded a bat streaking west toward London. Today Lucy records feeling ill again, like she was in Whitby, but this time at the Westenra family home, Hillingham, which will turn out to probably lie somewhere in London’s Hampstead area. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc?

🧛 “Wilhelmina”: Jonathan hasn’t called Mina this since they got engaged. Good thinking, Jonathan, keep it up.

🧛 “…unless, indeed, some solemn duty should come upon me…”: Not so good thinking, Jonathan. We realize that you are dissociating after a severe mental trauma, but you did help unleash a monster on your home country and your loved ones. The solemn duty is upon you right now.

🧛 In addition to their marriage, Mina and Jonathan celebrate another sacrament, a sacrament of secrecy and oblivion. That Mina thinks of it as a sacrament is clear from her wording “an outward and visible sign,” echoing St Augustine’s definition of a sacrament as such a sign “of an inward and invisible grace.”

But keeping secrets from each other is rarely a good idea in a horror story.

Poor Lucy, all alone in her bedroom with the scratching and flapping at the window. Even though Arthur is visiting. I choose to read this as an indictment of Victorian sexual morality and how its strictures against even engaged couples cohabiting left young ladies unprotected against magical creatures of the night. Fortunately today we are more enlightened. 🙂

As @ivlia commented on this movie still, “that woman is neither sadly pale nor wan-looking, she’s just British 🙄.” If Lucy has the famous English peaches-and-cream complexion, though, by now it’s very easy on the peaches, and heavy on the cream.

Lucy’s reply to Mina raises two problems for the literal-minded nitpicker. First, “an appetite like a cormorant” suggests she eats a substantial fraction of her own weight in fish each day.

Second, it’s been 4–5 days since we last saw Lucy, and she was having a relapse of all her symptoms from Whitby. And – spoiler – Arthur is so worried for her that he’s about to call a doctor. Yet she tells Mina she’s sleeping well and full of life.

A plausible and charming explanation is that Lucy bravely covers up her health scare so as not to ruin her friend’s newlywed happiness.

Or perhaps the letter has been misdated and was in fact sent before 24 August, anticipating Mina’s letter of the same date.

That would be another dating glitch right after the week Seward seemingly passed in a day.

The dating, we’ve seen, is important because it establishes a chronology that fingers Dracula’s movements as the cause of both Renfield’s and Lucy’s symptoms.

But what if that isn’t true? What if someone has edited the dates to give that impression, and made a botched job of it? And why? Why would it be so important that we believe this foreigner is a vampire who has contaminated Lucy? Might someone have committed crimes they feel a need to justify? Hmm.

If this were a romantic novel, Lucy might be having second thoughts about Arthur, be secretly pining for Seward, or at least be ready to have her eyes opened when the doctor dashes in to save her life.

How convenient, then, yet how awkward given everybody’s sense of honor etc., for Arthur to be called away just as he has invited her other admirer to come, take her pulse and look deeply into her eyes.

Spoiler: This is a horror novel, and there will be sadly little bodice-ripping to show for this build-up, so I might as well spoil the anticlimax now. We’re a good month away from anyone even pulling open their shirt (but what a pulling open of the shirt it will be).

Ahem. Anyway. Back to analysis. Uh … I’m still wondering what the dying-parents theme is for, except conveniently keeping characters away and in the dark about what’s going on.

“I did not have full opportunity of examination such as I should wish.” 😉
I bet, Seward.

Also:

• What Dr Seward thought he wrote to Arthur: “Don’t worry, Lucy’s not physically ill, but just to be sure I’ve asked a colleague to take a peek, a really great guy btw.”
• What Arthur will read: “Dear Art, Lucy is so fatally ill I’ve got a top European authority to rush all the way from Amsterdam. He’ll clearly strike you as bonkers, but trust my slightly unhealthy adulation for the man, I’m a doctor.”

Van Helsing has now entered the chat. Get used to his charming continental speech patterns and sentimentalism.

Also, we learn that van Helsing owes Dr Seward because Dr Seward has sucked him. Uh, sucked gangrene from his wound, yuck. An oddly specific bond in a vampire story. Does this make Dr Seward vampire-ish? Is his devotion to Van Helsing akin to the mystic’s to the wounds of Christ (cf. Catherine of Siena)? And are we supposed to see some kind of homoerotic subtext here, cf. “The love that dares to speak its name”? Too many theories, not enough data.

Dr Seward gets told ‘Pouf!’ and is sent to smoke a cigarette in the garden while Van Helsing examines the lovely Lucy thoroughly. Alone in the garden, Dr Seward goes into a shy little dance routine and sings “Mr Cellophane,” ending the number by apologizing for taking up too much of the audience’s time. Okay, I made up that last bit, but it fits.

(toot)

Lucy’s doing better and, from the last change in Renfield’s behavior, we may infer it is because Dracula is back in residence at Carfax.

Renfield, after being abandoned for ten days, had just resigned himself to having to “do it for himself.” Do what? Apparently, appropriating the life force of other beings by consuming them alive. He has been looking to the master of this art, Dracula, to show him the way.

But failing that, Renfield’s DIY method is feeding other creatures to each other, bioaccumulating their life force up a makeshift food chain with himself at the top.

We may wonder why Renfield had an attack of frenzy at noon on 3 September. It must be to do with his link with Dracula. Is it sympathetic? Did Dracula throw a tantrum over van Helsing’s meddling with Lucy? Perhaps it is a withdrawal symptom because Dracula’s influence, as one might expect, is at its lowest ebb when the sun is high?

That seems unlikely, since Seward said it was at an unusual time, which argues against it being anything to do with Dracula’s regular biorhythm (necrorhythm?). But actually, we will learn by the end of the month that noon and sunset are significant times in Dracula’s biorhythm, for a specific reason of Stoker’s vampire lore that makes very little sense to me in terms what we now think of as the canonical lore.

(thread)

“Do not lose an hour.” So how many hours does Van Helsing need to get from Amsterdam to London, in this great age of late-1800s globalization, if he does not lose a single one? (original thread)

Let’s do like Dracula and study Bradshaw’s General Railway and Steam Navigation Guide (June 1896, no. 755, p. 694), where the Great Eastern Railway assures us the quickest route via Harwich and the Hook of Holland takes 11 hours.

Assuming the same schedule, if Van Helsing gets Seward’s telegram in the evening, he must catch the 9:05 pm to the Hook of Holland, where he’ll board a steamship that sails two hours later and brings him to Parkeston Quay in Harwich in seven hours or so. From there it is an hour and a half by rail to his 8 am arrival at Liverpool Street Station in London. Which, indeed, is where Dr Seward will meet him tomorrow.

(Today the EuroStar London–Amsterdam is 3h52m.)

It has now come down to a race between an ancient superstition and modern 19th-century medical science as to which one will kill Lucy first.

At this point human-to-human blood transfusions have been carried out in England for many decades (since Blundell’s success in 1818), but it’s still hit and miss. Karl Landsteiner’s crucial discovery of blood groups is yet to come (ca. 1901) and will take longer yet to inform medical practice.

Arthur’s “strong young manhood” is clearly important for ideas the story wishes to convey here. For Lucy’s sake, however, the manliness, brightness, and nobility of Arthur’s blood matters less than whether it is matched with her blood type or will trigger a dangerous immune reaction. But no-one knows this yet.

Unlike vampire bats, Victorians also have not yet figured out how to make an anticoagulant that won’t kill the patient. Blood clotting is a constant problem. To solve it, they sometimes resort to defibrination: take a pint of blood, add glass beads and stir vigorously to induce clots of fibrin to form, then extract them. (I imagine it like the skin on cocoa, but I probably imagine it wrong.) The remaining blood will be less prone to coagulation. However, the procedure involves increased risk of contaminating the blood.

I’m not a doctor, but I suspect the reason Van Helsing gives for dispensing with defibrination is nonsense. Despite all this, though, I’m also guessing that Van Helsing is making the right call, because the imminent risk of Lucy dying for want of blood outweighs all the other risks Van Helsing can do little about with the knowledge of his time.

And hey, at least it’s human blood, not goat, so it’s best practice, for 1890s values of best practice.

In other news:

• I am glad that Dr Seward understands Van Helsing’s parable of the corn, because that makes one of us.
• Van Helsing clearly already has a pretty good idea what made those wounds that Lucy has sexily covered up with a black velvet band. But he’s not about to let on to Dr Seward against what menace exactly he is to stand guard the whole night. Because that would be helpful.

Two kinds of people. Which one are you? The doctor or the damsel, the insomniac or the somnambulist?

Sleep is:

• [ ] The boon we all crave for
• [ ] A presage of horror

I asked the Mastodon community; respondents (N = 4) skewed heavily insomniac. (See the poll)

Lucy is feeling oddly close to Arthur, ironically unaware of how much of him she’s got pulsing right inside her veins. Dr Seward has been going for at least 36 hours without sleep.

They’re booth a bit woozy, and so is the dating of their diaries: by my count, Lucy and Seward are both writing about last night; Lucy’s should have been dated 8 Sep, but Seward falls asleep, so it makes sense that he writes today – except his waking up will be dated tomorrow. 🤔

—

In other news, Renfield would have been huge on TikTok.

(Or by my reckoning, still 9 Sep). Lucy’s lost blood again while Seward slept. In the absence of thoroughbred studmuffin Arthur, Van Helsing has to settle for transfusing Seward’s lower-quality commoner nerd blood. (Or maybe all that was just an excuse because he’s fond of his student; he doesn’t want to drain him today either.)

“No man knows, till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves.” Seward’s pride must be a mixed feeling; this is probably not quite how he imagined spending the night with his beloved and pumping his bodily fluids into her. And yes, I think we’re supposed to see a sexual metaphor in the transfusion. Van Helsing certainly expects Arthur to see it, which conveniently explains why Arthur must be kept in the dark again.

Meanwhile, Lucy’s teeth seem to have grown.

Shrinking gums create this impression in corpses. The skin around fingernails also retracts as it desiccates. The resulting false growth of teeth and nails in the grave has been suggested as one explanation for the folk belief in vampires.

Ironically, being a medical man, Seward is so aware of the natural explanation that he ignores the possibility of vampirism: that the reason why her teeth are so big is THE BETTER TO EAT HIM.

“Aha, my pretty miss, that bring the so nice nose all straight again. (…) No trifling with me! I never jest! There is grim purpose in all I do; and I warn you that you do not thwart me.“ It’s sometimes hard not to want Dracula to rip Van Helsing’s throat out.

Also, 1890s online shopping: wow. Van Helsing telegraphed only yesterday, and a cartload of garlic all the way from Harlem was delivered at the Westenras’ door today. Suck on that, Bezos.

Also, vampire lore: garlic has just entered the story as a general apotropaic. Van Helsing thus goes beyond Stoker’s notes on garlic, which only reference the more topical application in Emily Gerard’s Transylvanian Superstitions (cutting the vampire’s head off and putting it back in the grave with the mouth filled with garlic). Gerard does also mention the “Saxon” superstition that “Rubbing the body with garlic is a preservative against witchcraft and the pest.”

(toot)

“Virgin crants [and] maiden strewments”: For all her peaceful feelings and renewed cheer, Lucy is being morbid: She compares herself among the garlic flowers to the dead Ophelia being buried with garlands and strewn flowers in Hamlet, act 5, scene 1 (where it raises eyebrows because as a suspected suicide, Ophelia should not be so honored). Foreshadowing much?

(toot)

🧛 I have been urging our manly medical men to lose the DIY attitude and at least let the maids help keep watch. But today I guess we have all learned our lesson about how the most rational male devices can be undone by female foolishness, so I guess that’s off the table. What? No, we certainly haven’t learned that men should talk to women and tell them crucially important information. What a droll conceit!

🧛 Forgive me for harping on about dates, but did Lucy just have such a quiet night on 11/12 Sep that no-one bothered to record the progress in their diary, or has yet another day been mysteriously intercalated since Van Helsing left her wreathed in garlic? Both diarists are a bit woozy now, but still.

And on that note:

🧛 “I am beginning to wonder if my long habit of life amongst the insane is beginning to tell upon my own brain.” Aren’t we all, Dr Seward, aren’t we all.

(thread)

After a quiet spell, things are going down big time (thread).

🧛 “The blood is the life!” Renfield, having a normal one, is paraphrasing Genesis 9:4: “But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.” Jews read this to say that kosher slaughter (shechita) must be carried out so as to quickly drain the animal of blood. Renfield, a lateral thinker, prefers to read it as “never mind the flesh, lap up the blood.”

🧛 The exhausted Van Helsing is off to Amsterdam and telegraphs to Carfax for Dr Seward to take over Lucy-watching, but forgets to say which Carfax. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.

🧛 “A great, gaunt grey wolf.” Enter Bersicker the wolf. And what a jump-scare entrance!

🧛 Exit Mrs Westenra, pursued by a wolf. Her doctor wasn’t kidding. A sudden shock did kill her.

🧛 No, the wolf in Lucy’s window is not Dracula, it’s a genuine wolf from Norway, of all places, but you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s installment to learn what the heck it’s doing in Hampstead.

🧛 With the garlic arrangements disturbed and the room aired out a bit, Dracula is apparently free to come swirling in as a dust cloud. It seems odd that a supernatural horror like him needs to stoop to drugging the wine to deal with the maids, though.

🧛 At long last we hear from Mina again. Life is good to her and Jonathan, and she’s busy home-making. She seems to have forgotten that Lucy had already told her the wedding date, but Lucy’s [BROKEN LINK: 08-30] letter may never have reached her, and as you may recall, something was off about that letter anyway.

But at this rate, is there even going to be any bride to marry on 28 September? The letter to Lucy is “unopened by her,” which can’t be good.

🧛 Exeunt both Mrs Westenra, Lucy’s mother, and Peter Hawkins, Jonathan’s boss and benefactor. Our young people are adrift in the world, or about to be, and coming into fortunes.

🧛 The eyewitness record of Mrs Westenra’s last night has been conveniently torn into little pieces by the author. We are fortunate that Dr Seward has noted it for posterity, no doubt faithfully.

🧛 And how fortunate that manly, red-blooded Quincey happened to be lounging around on the sofa at the scene of the crime. What do we know about Quincey, really?

🧛 Certainly that he tells some tall tales about vampire bats in the New World. Hardly the first traveler to do so. But to be clear: Vampire bats are tiny and don’t drain whole horses. Unless this means he has encountered a supernatural vampire before. Which brings us back to the question: What do we know about him?

🧛 Finally, a note on Bersicker the wolf, for those of you who made it through the Pall Mall Gazette’s experiments with Cockney. He’s a natural wolf, but his name has a werewolf connection: Baring-Gould’s Book of the Were-Wolf, which Stoker studied, casts Norse sagas as a source of medieval werewolf tales. Berserkers would put on the skins of bears (“bear-sark”) or wolves and fight in fits of insane rage: howling, foaming at the mouth. Some were said to be actual skin-changers.

🧛 Farewell, Lucy. Or au revoir?

“Only resolution and habit can let me make an entry to-night”, wrote Dr Seward on 20 September. Yet in these turbulent moments, our literate doctor manages to quote two interesting snatches of poetry, both about those uncanny twilight moments when someone has just died but doesn’t look it.

We thought her dying whilst she slept,
And sleeping when she died.

This is from “The Death-Bed” by Thomas Hood (1799–1845), a prolific writer of mainly humorous verse for newspapers. It is believed to have been written upon the death of his mother, and I wish I didn’t know exactly what he meant.

“Decay’s effacing fingers”: this is from Lord Byron’s “The Giaour,” though I think the passage it comes from may also have been published standalone as “A Picture of Death”.

The poems speak to a phenomenon that is not unusual in human experience with death. But of course, the reason Lucy’s corpse is extraordinarily lifelike and beautiful is that she is not dead, but undead, and the joke is on poetry aficionado Seward for not realizing it.

Both authors also have vampire connections worth noting:

A long line of literary aristocratic vampires – the “Byronic” vampire (Frayling 1991) – starts with John Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” written by Byron’s long-suffering personal physician and assistant (during the same 1816 Geneva stay as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), originally misattributed to Byron and featuring the predatory Lord Ruthven, a name already used – for a character transparently modeled on Byron – in Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel “Glenarvon.”

As for Hood, he also wrote a dramatic poem, “The Lamia” (in his Miscellaneous Poems), following in the more famous footsteps of Keats, and based on Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana. The Lamia here appears as an enchantress who is really a snake and seduces a young man. In antiquity the term was also used for a night-fright that ate children. If we imagine that Stoker thought of the Lamia when quoting a different poem by Hood, there’s quite a bit of hinting and foreshadowing going on.

(thread)

🧛 Seward cites poetry, but his colleague Mr Hennessey is truly a man of letters:

MD

Medical Doctor

MRCS

Member Royal College of Surgeons

LKQCPI

Licentiate of the Kings and Queens College of Physicians of Ireland

h/t this Reddit post

🧛 Mina feels it very improper. For her husband to hold her. By the arm. While walking. On a scale of Victorian schoolmarmishness from 1 to 10, is Mina an 11?

🧛 Youthful Dracula spotted stalking London women.

🧛 Good thing Mina’s propriety won’t hold her back from reading her husband’s diary much longer.

🧛 We’ve all been thinking it, but Arthur and Van Helsing say the quiet part out loud: The blood transfusion truly makes her their bride; i.e. it’s a consummation of marriage, and hence, a metaphorical sex act. A “conjugular” relation, if you will.

🧛 This probably was not what Lucy had in mind back on 24 May, when she wondered “Why can’t a girl marry three men?” But she did foreshadow it, although the foreshadowing is messed up a bit by Van Helsing coming in as a fourth.

🧛 Btw, in some readings I’ve seen, Lucy’s 24 May “marry three men” is thought to characterize Lucy as a sexually voracious vamp, and Dracula is seen as a morality tale where sluttiness is punished (Lucy) and propriety rewarded in the end (Mina). Well, Lucy is obviously a desirable woman and has a woman’s desires for Art, who is clearly one hot young stud. But I’m not buying this reading, for two reasons:

1. A good-faith reading would credit Lucy’s express and very sweet reason for wishing to marry all three: that she might not have to hurt the feelings of any of them.
2. The slut-shaming reading disagrees with the structure of the book, where Lucy’s attempt to lure Art with her bedroom voice is the first time she’s described as “voluptuous”: a shocking transformation and turning point.

So no, this is not a morality tale; it’s a horror story, where bad things happen to good people, and evil perverts the innocent.

🧛 Also, btw, this settles a question in my mind as to whether vampirical contagion acts by the magical Law of Contact* or only by direct contact. From Lucy’s veins, Dracula has now drunk the blood of at least three** men, none of whom shows signs of being under his spell; for that, he would apparently have had to bite them directly.

(thread)

While we wait for Lucy to turn a new corner in her career, I’d like to recap certain events from last week that may have escaped your notice (because they’re about boring paperwork while we have all these juicy hints of supernatural horror to distract us), but which ought to excite the amateur detective in you. What if the bats and wolves are red herrings? Let’s keep an open mind, i.e., bandy about some vague suspicions and dark hints.

On the night her mother died, Lucy wrote a note claiming incredible events, including a wolf crashing its head through her window, and hid it in her breast. Van Helsing collected it, but returned it to her when she looked likely to survive, before she’d notice it was gone. We are told that Lucy started tearing it up, in a kind of trance, and continued to go through the motions of doing so even after it had been taken from her hands.

Dr Seward was awfully keen to avoid an inquest, ostensibly to keep the embarrassing note from being produced. To do so, he and Van Helsing immediately drew up a certificate of death, asserting that Mrs Westenra died of a disease of the heart, but leaving out minor details about broken windows, drugged maids and blood-drained daughters. And those are only the oddities we know about. What else might an inquest have found, one wonders?

By a curious coincidence, three rich people have died: Mrs Westenra, Peter Hawkins, and Lord Godalming. Cui bono? Well, our young protagonists stand to inherit considerable fortunes. Not least Arthur, who, in addition to his father’s estate and title, also inherits all of Mrs Westenra’s estate that isn’t entailed away. Mrs Westenra’s odd will suggests (a) she doesn’t trust Lucy with money (fair); (b) she’s not a fan of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882; or (c) something’s fishy.

That Arthur can dispose of the estate, including all papers, is also convenient to Van Helsing, who prevails on the distraught Arthur to let him take the papers away and examine them. This includes Lucy’s vague diary notes on her illness and her correspondence with Mina. (And who knows, maybe Mrs Westenra has taken some notes on Van Helsing’s strange interventions in her house?)

Meanwhile, Mina has read Jonathan’s diary, realizes the solemn duty from which she may not shrink, and takes immediate and resolute action, by – typing up a transcript. (My kind of person!)

Jonathan’s diary being in shorthand and his mind in tatters, Mina’s typescript is about to become the version of record.

The two people who control the record, Mina and Van Helsing, are about to meet.

(thread)

Children around Hampstead are going missing and turning up again with bite marks on their throat, and they say a “bloofer lady” is luring them. Well, she may be bloofer, but what is she wearing?

DeviantArt has some nice renderings of bloofer ladies that children might actually not either snigger at or run away from, screaming. Here’s one: https://www.deviantart.com/lilithrow/art/Bloofer-Lady-330835821

“Bloofer” = beautiful. Stoker’s inspiration for this childish mispronunciation may be Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, where Bella Wilfer is called a boofer lady – in a scene where she kisses a dying child, which is also what Lucy seems to be doing if you don’t look too closely.

(Do yourself a favor: do not Google the slang term “boof(er).” Everyone will find something to offend them: racial slurs, drug abuse, anal sex, flatulence, and Brett Kavanaugh.)

(thread)

🧛🏻‍♂️ Two men restarting their diaries today. It must be a sign that I should start a blog again.

🧛🏻‍♂️ And speaking of doing things against one’s better judgment: Seward is now an accomplice to trespassing, desecrating a tomb, and leaving an unconscious, abducted child by the wayside.

🧛🏻‍♂️ What a relief for Jonathan that he can stop gaslighting himself. He is a man reborn. And Van Helsing, by believing in him, has gained himself a believer.

🧛🏻‍♂️ The locked-room mystery of the empty tomb seems compelling, but if John Dickson Carr were writing this, there would be a natural explanation. And if (purely hypothetically) Lucy were back in the tomb tomorrow, Carr would have an explanation for that, too. (Do treat yourself to Carr’s The Burning Court if you haven’t already).

🧛🏻‍♂️ “And prove the very truth he most abhorred.” That’s almost* from Don Juan, but hardly appropriate. Maybe Seward should just stop the Byron quotes.

🧛🏻‍♂️ “ Holding his candle so that … the sperm dropped in white patches which congealed as they touched the metal …” Wait, what?!

No, this isn’t Seward’s/Stoker’s repressed sexuality surfacing as bawdy imagery in a Freudian slip. “Sperm” here is short for spermaceti, a waxy substance in the heads of sperm whales from which oil and, yes, candles were made. It was once wrongly thought to be sperma ceti, Lat. “sperm of the whale,” hence also “sperm whale” for the species.

(thread)

🧛 Confused about the trance bit. So being vamped while in a somnambulant trance means that Lucy is Un-Dead in a trance state as well, but when resting in her coffin in the daytime, she is in the non-trance state of the “common dead,” so she shows no signs of vampiric malignancy. Uh, except for her failure to decompose, which is uncommon for the dead at one week. But maybe her trance nights just slow the decay?

🧛🏻‍♂️ Talking about arrested decay, in our discussions it dawned (or dusked) on me that Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” might be an influence behind the “(un)dead in a trance” thing. In addition to the general Poe-ness of the beauty of a beautiful young dead girl, of course. (See conversation.)

🧛 So, does this trance business mean that the waveforms of Un-Dead Lucy and Dead Lucy are superimposed in the coffin until an observer opens it? Is she Schrödinger’s Bat?

🧛🏻‍♂️ On another tangent: I claimed the other day that there might be nothing Freudian about Van Helsing’s candle dripping “sperm,” but this “I shall drive a stake through her body” stuff, I dunno.

(thread)

“… it would be almost as great a marvel as the other to find that Van Helsing was mad”: The word “almost” is doing a lot of work here. But still the conclusion is inescapable, and Seward seems to draw it, once he’s out in daylight and away from Van Helsing’s sway. I wonder if he has read Hume on miracles (he has surely read the Enquiry, but it might be a bowdlerized edition without the blasphemous doubts).

Well, that was climactic. Bye, Lucy.

🧛🏻‍♂️ “In this matter dates are everything, and I think that if we get all our material ready, and have every item put in chronological order, we shall have done much.“ DraculaDaily shows how right Mina is about dates. And now she’s creating the canonical version.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Speaking of canon, we get a hands-on demonstration of remedies (stake, garlic, decapitation) and how killing a vampire frees its soul and its live victims.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Quantitative analysis: Remember I said Lucy was never called “voluptuous” before 20 Sep? Well, the word was used 4 times today, of which 3 times in just 4 paragraphs.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Van Helsing has brought a batch of the Host from Amsterdam, and got an indulgence to use it as so much sealant. This raises questions about the doctor’s relations with the Catholic Church already answered by the movie Van Helsing (2004), where he’s the Vatican’s 007 … but I’m not sure that’s canon.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Remember Jonathan’s Protestant reaction to a proffered crucifix? Van Helsing is faffing about with indulgences, as well as a Communion wafer used very ex opere operato, but his Church-of-England company doesn’t seem to give this popish magic much thought.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Nor do they ponder the relation between vampirism and the sacrament of the Eucharist, the doctrine of transsubstantiation, and drinking the blood (actual or symbolic) of Him who rose from the grave, as one would normally do.

… Wouldn’t one? What, you’re saying it’s just me?

🧛🏻‍♂️ Anyway, the Christian theme here is a little confused by Arthur hammering the stake home like the pagan god Thor.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Van Helsing’s manipulation of Arthur is textbook radicalization. In the initiation the new recruit has to prove in by getting blood on his hands, compromising himself and breaking with normie society. After weeks of just dropping cryptic hints, Van Helsing now has a band of vampire hunters who believe in driving stakes through people’s hearts to save their souls.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Speaking of indulgences: for what I am about to do, I must beg yours.

🎶 Picture yourself in the churchyard at Kingstead
Where moonbeams are gleaming through rents in the clouds.
Somebody calls you. You answer. The Thing’s dead
But wearing your fiancee’s shroud.
Four jilted lovers with hammers and stakes
Towering over her head
Look for the girl with hellfire in her eyes
And she’s gone
Lucy in the sky with angels
Lucy in the sky with angels
Lucy in the sky with angels 🎶

(thread)

Big day!

🧛🏻‍♂️ Our band of vampire hunters is complete and has joined hands in a solemn pledge.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Van Helsing has held his lecture on vampires: their powers and weaknesses. This will more or less form the popular-culture canon.

🧛🏻‍♂️ “She has a man’s brain […] and a woman’s heart.” Mina has done all the group’s clerical work, and now she’s doing all their emotional work. So the men shut her out of the action out of respect for the frailty of her sex.

🧛🏻‍♂️ So to avoid shocks to her delicate constitution, the men will go off, and Mina will be shut up in a lunatic asylum, next door to the monster’s home, alone. Is this a grievous mistake? Gentle Reader, would it even be a spoiler if I said yes?

🧛🏻‍♂️ With few spoilers left at this point in #DraculaDaily, I shared what I had read that led me to focus these threads on unreliable narrators, suspicious dating, Mina’s control of the written record and Van Helsing’s manipulative behavior: a paper by (Pordzik 2010). See Reading Dracula suspiciously.

(thread)

🧛🏻‍♂️ The men are, once again, firmly resolved not to clue the woman in at all. For her nerves’ sake. Because that worked out so well for the Westenras.

🧛🏻‍♂️ But would Mina even know a clue if it walked up and … bit her? She’s heard all about the mesmerizing mist, the red eyes, the white face; she sees them; wakes pale and unwell – nope, doesn’t ring a bell.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Dracula is living in London under the name of … de Ville. 🙄

(thread)

“… a big white church or somethink of the kind, not long built.” With a nearly audible between-the-lines snigger at the ignorant prole, Harker recognizes the “church or somethink” as the Junior Constitutional Club, 101–104 Piccadilly, built in 1890: “Apparently the first building in London to be entirely faced in marble,” according to Buildington. This was the Junior Constitutional, not the one P.G. Wodehouse liked, but likely just as full of posh twits.

To paraphrase Eliot’s “Bustopher Jones”: His visits are executional / to the Junior Constitutional …

Which makes me wonder: How clubbable is Dracula? He’s a wealthy nobleman, “a man of sense and education, and who has lived in the world,” so hardly “ill qualified to recommend himself to strangers.” But also a hook-nosed foreign chap from an unfashionable backwater, so who knows.

(And while I’m pinching Pride and Prejudice quotes: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” In Dracula’s case: Jonathan’s.)

The Junior Constitutional Club’s requirement that members pledge support to the Conservative party would be a low bar, I think, except that Dracula probably thinks the Tories should pledge fealty to him. Which would explain a great deal, come to think of it.

Anyway. It’s now been obvious for some time what Dracula wanted all those boxes of earth for: to set up a network of safe houses in and around London. The Count’s meticulous contingency planning takes us from opera cape to cloak and dagger, from supernatural horror to spy thriller: Dracula as secret agent, foreign infiltrator and subversive.*

Ten years from now, you could imagine our Vlad III as a mysterious Mr Vladimir** running an agent provocateur in a Soho anarchist group …

[Missing emoji: annoyingly smug grin about working Eliot, Wodehouse, Austen, and Conrad into this commentary. And two words pinched from Douglas Adams. Spot them?]

(thread)

🧛🏻‍♂️ [stertorous breathing intensifies] Exit Renfield, loyal to Mina at the last, but guilty of inviting Dracula in to satisfy his sick obsession, so save your tears.

🧛🏻‍♂️ I promised a ripped shirt: here it is. Plus a ripped breast, nonconsensual bloodsucking, domination, and cuckolding. Kinky as it gets in this book.

🧛🏻‍♂️ The Communion wafer wards off Dracula, but not before he has subjected Mina to his own unholy communion to hold her in telepathic thrall.

Dracula’s act may be seen as a perversion of three sacraments: the Eucharist, baptism (here one of blood), and marriage. His “flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood” paraphrases Adam’s words to Eve in Gen 2:23–24, a common reading at weddings, and “helper and companion” references Gen 2:18. (The “bountiful winepress” more vaguely recalls Biblical imagery of God’s wrath; Jer 48:33 and Lam 1:15 seem particularly apposite. But of course Dracula will also squeeze and drink her blood like juice from grapes.)

🧛🏻‍♂️ Virtuous Mina, supposed to be washed white in the blood of the Lamb (Rev 7:14), has been stained unclean in the blood of the Bat, as demonstrated when a true Communion wafer pressed against her forehead leaves the mark of Cain (Gen 4:15). Yet she is the one who remembers charity, even to Dracula.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Mina must now stay alive until Dracula is truly dead, or she will become a vampire.

🧛🏻‍♂️ But Jonathan is resolved to become a bloodsucking demon of the night if she does. Isn’t that sweet?

🧛🏻‍♂️ As noted above, if Dracula’s violation of Mina is a (para)sexual act, his doing it right in front of Jonathan must surely count as a “cuckolding.” But Jonathan has not been emasculated by the experience; on the contrary, he shows the surest sign of virility Stoker knows. [Nostril quivering intensifies.]

🧛🏻‍♂️ I find Van Helsing’s theory about Dracula’s child-brain – that not all his wits survived physical death, that he is growing into his faculties, learning like a child – oddly poignant and disturbing in the same breath as the good doctor talks of stamping him out of existence.

🧛🏻‍♂️ When did Jonathan start carrying a kukri (a knife used by Ghurkas)? It’s certainly understandable that he’s armed himself; it just looks a little awkward that this element appears here, well ahead of the exposition introducing it on 25 Oct. There’s something vaguely suggestive of an imperialist theme about how Quincey and Jonathan both carry large, lethal knives – the Bowie and the kukri – from the far ends of Anglo world dominion.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Returning to our alternative reading and the theme of the redacting and fixing of Dracula as canonical scripture: After Dracula burned what he could find, there exists only a single copy. At least some of the original sources (the phonograph cylinders) are also gone. Here it is presented as enemy action. But comparable intentional canon-fixing events may be sought in religious history, e.g. the Muslim narrative that caliph ʿUthmān had a master copy of the Qurʾān made and had all the variants burned.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Depressed fracture of the skull: Stoker got notes and even a diagram on this from his brother Sir William, a doctor; but according to his editors, this medical understanding hasn’t aged well. Sir William uses the word “stertorous,” and Stoker really takes it and runs with it.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Professor Arminius Vámbéry of Budapest: was an actual Orientalist and traveler (and sometime British spy) whom Bram Stoker met, and who has been mentioned as a possible partial model for Van Helsing himself.

(thread)

Good thinking, Mina! She’s realized that the link between them that allows Dracula to invade her mind, works both ways, or at least leaks back information on the movements of the enemy.

I wonder: Is this the first occurrence of the trope? And how many could we find?

I can only think of Voldemort and Harry Potter; I’m not sure if the link between Sauron and the Ring-Bearer / palantir users is quite the same thing.

(toot)

🧛🏻‍♂️ I wonder, not for the first time, about our diarists’ predilection for transcribing Van Helsing’s linguistic errors and oddities. I was particularly wondering about Mina, who takes shorthand notes, but @iulia may be right that shorthand is exactly the reason why it’s verbatim. In any case, Mina did say she wanted to train herself to reconstruct a conversation exactly.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Of Blood and Bloom: Van Helsing must be having us on, it can’t be that he doesn’t get the words “bloody” and “bloomin’”. But what a great title! I regret to inform you it’s taken: Santana Saunders’ Blood and Bloom duology, according to the blurb, is “an enemies to lovers romance” in “a Greek-inspired world of warriors, vampires, and fae” and promises “explicit content” not intended for minors. Also, @camilla_hoel has beat me to claiming Van Helsing’s astonishing phrase “polyglot with blood and bloom” as the title of her autobiography.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Mina is to be kept in the dark again, but for a good reason, for once. I wanted to say a rational reason, but we passed out of that realm some time ago.

🧛🏻‍♂️ And so: “Our toil must be in silence, and our efforts all in secret; for in this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be his greatest strength.” A clandestine conspiracy cult, then.

🧛🏻‍♂️ “metaphor be more dishonour to science than wolves be of danger to man”: uh, what?

“She is calling to me”: This would be a beautiful line to end a book on: a promise of lovers reunited, yet pregnant with precarious possibility.

It’s not the end.

Instead, here we are, on 6 October – mark the date! – putting our affairs in order before starting out for Varna in the morning, and waiting with bated breath for what Mina will have to say at sunset, in just a moment now.

I have peeked at what’s ahead, and guess what?

It’s astounding! Time is fleeting!

Eh, what? It was just a jump to the to the left and a step to the right, but five whole calendar days slipped by?! If that wasn’t some eldritch cosmic horror going non-Euclidian on space-time, I don’t know what it was. (toot)

Apart from the time glitch, what have we got? (thread)

🧛🏻‍♂️ Mina puts her traveling companions on hair-trigger alert to kill her suddenly and without hesitation at some point when her deteriorating condition and their growing paranoia convinces them she’s about to rip their throats out. This will be a fun trip!

🧛🏻‍♂️ To drive the point home, Mina wants the burial service read for her now. (You can follow along if you like; I assume we are using the Order for the Burial of the Dead in the Book of Common Prayer.) But isn’t that weird?

🧛🏻‍♂️ A mock burial is obviously part of an initiation rite in which the initiand ritually “dies” from her present status, entering a liminal state and being taken out of society for a period of instruction.

If I were an adherent to the Cambridge “myth and ritual school,” I’d immediately read Dracula as the mythic echo of an ancient mystery cult. But it also sort of fits our alternative plot line of a modern anti-vamp cult.

Makes you wonder about Lucy’s death, eh?

Oh for the time when Europe was a real civilization and connected by rail, where you could snuggle in your wagon-lit from the Gare de l’Est to the Golden Horn, or hop off in Varna to catch a vampire.

I don’t understand why Dracula got on a boat again, letting his enemies pursue him at their leisure, when he could have been enjoying the sumptious fare (pun intended) on the Orient Express. (Maybe he didn’t have time to grab enough gold for the ticket?)

At this point there was a request for an Agatha Christie crossover, so here is one, in the form of a brief picture novel of the kind women’s magazines used to have.

Ah, monsieur Dracula, monsieur Van Helsing. This story of the passengers becoming zombies, it intrigues me. I must interview each of you separately after breakfast.

When will you be done with breakfast, exactly, monsieur Poirot? There’s a bit of a line forming in the dining car.

Order and method, gentlemen, order and method. First I must carefully examine these two, qu’est-ce que l’on dit, hard-boiled characters.

(toot)

Apart from Kenneth Branagh in Murder on the Orient Express, this silly little tribute includes a picture of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in Horror Express (1972). Cushing used to play Van Helsing to Lee’s Dracula.

16 October: We’re in Varna, Bulgaria, to meet Dracula’s ship. It hasn’t arrived yet. We’re in for a wait. Have some doggerel.

Oh, what a bore. But modern war,
they say, is months of tedium
punctuated by moments of terror.
No news in the wire sent to our squire;
no more than from Mina, our medium.
Might we have made some fateful error?

(toot)

Our heroes have been in Varna for a week, and with the Czarina Catherine sighted in the Dardanelles, it will be several more days to go.

So what’s to do in and around Varna cirka 1897 while you’re waiting for the ship to come in? Lots! See my guidebook, Things to do in Varna while you’re waiting.

“Euthanasia” is an excellent and a comforting word! – Dr Seward’s diary

—

In other news, the medical men are unhappy about Mina’s peaceful noontime nap. Spoiler: Rightly so.

(toot)

Still waiting for … When The Ship Comes In (Bob Dylan)

(toot)

🧛 Dracula has, unsurprisingly, fooled his hunters. Dipping into Mina’s mind, he knew they were waiting for him in Varna, and somehow made the Czarina Catherine just sail past and on to Galatz (Rom.: Galați), an important Romanian port town on the Danube. The Danube enters the Black Sea here through three main branches; I’m guessing he went up the Sulina Channel, which was heavily developed after the Crimean War. Here’s a doodle of the route on a modern map.

🧛 Mina is the train fiend! Honestly, at this point I don’t know why anybody is surprised. Of course Mina memorizes train schedules.

🧛 Also, although she claims not to have studied criminology, she seems conversant enough not only with Lombroso but with Max Nordau. Pity that this is all pseudo-scientific, borderline racist rubbish about the hereditary “degeneration” of criminals – and, as Nordau set out to demonstrate in his 1,000-page rant Degeneration (1898), also of all modern, fin-de-siècle artists. (Here’s a fun contemporary review.)

Stoker was into this physiognomy woo. But among the “degenerates” Nordau attacked was Walt Whitman, which you’d think would be a problem, since Stoker was infatuated with Whitman, and once wrote him a super-cringe fan letter. (This, I speculate wildly, may also have led Stoker to take an interest in the Transcendentalist movement, which may help account for Seward’s odd “beacon to the angels” musing.) But then, Nordau also spent ~100 pp on Ibsen’s degeneracy, so [shrug].

Anyway, the upshot is that Dracula’s child-brain (which, uh, has just run rings around all their man-brains) is a creature of habit and will retrench to Castle Dracula, so they know where to look for him if they don’t catch him in Galatz. Wasn’t his destination kinda obvious even without the phrenology?

Also, they figure Dracula (being selfish) has released his grip on Mina’s mind to avoid leaks, but that they (being good Christians) can still eavesdrop on that channel.

(thread)

Returning to our “conspiracy cult” reading, the group is coping with a minor disconfirmation or failed prophecy (in Leo Festinger’s classic formulation): Dracula has not appeared where he was supposed to.

Van Helsing has provided a rationalization, explaining that Mina’s sleep at noon a few days earlier meant that Dracula was reading her mind and knew to avoid them. As usual, Van Helsing just looked knowingly worried at the time and came up with the explanation later.

Meanwhile the group’s medium/prophetess, Mina, has seamlessly shifted to giving vague readings fitting the new expectancy.

No big deal. It’s not as if they’ve come across hard proof that vampires don’t exist. But even at this minor hitch, we see how Van Helsing and Mina swing into action to manage the group’s expectations and come up with new narratives to maintain their belief and motivation. 🙂

(thread)

🧛 Just missed Dracula in Galatz.

🧛 Ethnic stereotype #1: The American speaks no foreign language.

🧛 I hate being that guy saying “that doesn’t seem realistic” about anything in a book about a 500-year old undead count who transforms into a bat, but Dracula causing wind and fog to drive the boat all the way up to Sulina and then west through the channel to Galatz just doesn’t seem realistic to me.

🧛 Ethnic stereotype #2: The “Hebrew” is stereotyped as orientalized, big-nosed, and greedy, and all this is, of course, deplorable. But given that some people see Dracula as metaphor for an imagined Jewish threat to England, I still think it a relief that the only actual Jew appearing is of “the Adelphi Theatre type,” i.e., a coarsely humorous caricature rather than a sinister menace. Also, not notably greedier or easier to bribe than Jonathan has already found the thirsty English lower classes to be. (Not that my use of classism to relativize racism here makes anything any better, I guess.)

🧛 Ethnic stereotype #3. Slovaks: vagrant, mercenary, automatic cutthroat suspects. Not sure how Stoker formed this impression.

🧛 It must be irksome to Dr Seward, as faithful Watson to Van Helsing’s Sherlock, that Mina is the one with the deductions.

🧛 Train fiend Mina is also the itemized-outline queen.

Not to mention her map-reading skills. Possibly her task is made easier by the mapmakers of her day taking more care to point out navigable waterways. It’s certainly taken me a while to check on electronic maps.

🧛 This also taxes my meagre map-making skills, especially since the river database I tried didn’t name the Bistrița, but I made this:

Both the Siret (Sereth) and Prut (Pruth) indeed run north from Galați (Galatz). The Prut is hard to see here because it also forms the border with Moldova and Ukraine. (I have omitted all waterways not relevant to the plot.)

The Siret indeed links up with the Bistrița (Bistritz) at Bacau (no idea what Mina’s “Fundu” refers to), and the Bistrița then runs past the Tihuța (Borgo) Pass some way to the east.

The Bistrița river in question is not the shorter Bistrița that runs through the eponymous town (Bistritz) where Jonathan started, on the other side of the Carpathians (see map).

🧛 Dracula’s castle should be somewhere a carriage ride from the Borgo Pass.

🧛 Van Helsing is certainly showering Mina with compliments and old-world charm. Deep down Jonathan must be a little relieved he’s always around to keep an eye on what the professor gets up to with his wife.

🧛 Oops.

🧛 In case you hadn’t noticed that this is a horror story, we just got to the “Let’s split up!” part.

🧛 “The wonderful power of money”

🧛 “that awful den of hellish infamy — with the very moonlight alive with grisly shapes, and every speck of dust that whirls in the wind a devouring monster in embryo” sounds like a fun place.

(thread)

🧛 To Art’s and Jonathan’s other crimes, you may now add impersonating a Romanian government official, which is surely frowned upon. And how do they maintain the pretense without speaking Romanian?

🧛 Mina cannot abide garlic – and here I finally grasp the full tragedy of her situation and the vampire’s curse. Of course, she may mean that she’s never liked garlic (poor thing). But her memory and dislikes may not be entirely her own now in any case.

(toot)

🧛🏻‍♂️ Arthur and Jonathan discover that steam boats are not great at going uphill.

(Annoyed with Jonathan for skipping all the detail on the rope solution.)

🧛🏻‍♂️ Van Helsing has taken up journaling.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Mina has started to sleep all day, skip dinner, and watch Van Helsing thirstily in the night. Van Helsing has started to nod off at unsafe moments, like driving, or being watched thirstily in the night by Mina.

(toot)

🧛🏻‍♂️ Mina and Van Helsing arrive at the foot of Castle Dracula.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Wherever that is. Hans C. de Roos, who has probably done as much to find out as any sane person could, thinks the evidence points to the peak Izvorul Călimanului in the Kelemen/Călimani mountains some distance southeast of the Borgo Pass (de Roos 2017).

🧛🏻‍♂️ Van Helsing has been on the road for a while: “[…i]t seemed as though the snow-flurries and the wreaths of mist took shape as of women with trailing garments […] I knew the swaying round forms, the bright hard eyes, the white teeth, the ruddy colour, the voluptuous lips.”

🧛🏻‍♂️ Dutch tourist breaks into cultural heritage site, kills three women in their sleep, cuts off heads. “They were so voluptuous, I almost didn’t,” professor protests his innocence.

🧛🏻‍♂️ But the horses had died earlier – presumably from the vampiresses’ bites. Yet nothing suggests Van Helsing cut their heads off or drove a stake through their hearts. He just left them. Abe, do you want vampire horses? Because THAT’S HOW YOU GET VAMPIRE HORSES

🧛🏻‍♂️ Mina, eyes glowing with fervor: “Let us go to meet my husband who is, I know, coming towards us.” She seems to be able to psychically sense his movements at a distance. It is Jonathan she’s talking about, right? … Right?

🧛🏻‍♂️ Will Van Helsing know peace after his knife has destroyed the vampire women? Baudelaire’s knife thought not:

Imbécile! — de son empire
Si nos efforts te délivraient,
Tes baisers ressusciteraient
Le cadavre de ton vampire!

– Baudelaire, “Le Vampire”

(thread)

🧛🏻‍♂️ The cavalry arrives in the nick of time!

🧛🏻‍♂️ The hunted have truly become the hunters and vice versa. The once-urbane Jonathan is now a savage intent only on his prey. You wouldn’t want to come between the knife in his soft solicitor’s hand and his kill. This gives the lie to Dracula’s sneer (6 May) that “you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter.”

🧛🏻‍♂️ It also says the sun won’t set on Anglo-American civilization as long as its manly men stand ready to do violence against the sinister forces of the East. Jonathan’s character arc from the lady’s parlor (15 May) to kukri-wielding warrior is the very model of the modern masculinity needed to beat down subaltern subversives and the powers of “the old centuries”.

🧛🏻‍♂️ Mina, the feminine symbol of what they’re fighting for, also aids the fight, but with her man’s brain.

But like everything these people say about brains, that’s nonsense. Stoker’s Mina is a strong female character who rises above their sexist society’s confines to forge the narrative of her warrior band and take charge of their operational planning. ✊ Also, she looks damn good with a gun. 😍

🧛🏻‍♂️ Preparing violence against the sinister forces of the East is of course a theme that will remain salient over the following long century.

🧛🏻‍♂️ As will the theme of gallant Americans embracing foreign entanglements and giving their lives in some bleak foreign field to save Europeans from each other’s monstrous appetites for carnage, which brings us to:

🧛🏻‍♂️ RIP Quincey P. Morris. Quincey, an unlikely Christ figure, is wounded in the side and gives his life to save a soul.

While Quincey’s death may not be a surprise, we hardly saw it coming as the emotional climax of the ending. The novel hasn’t done much to build up to it. Great guy, but we barely knew him, and he doesn’t have a character arc to speak of.

🧛🏻‍♂️ RIP Dracula, his features at peace at last as he crumbles into dust.

THE END

(thread)

… THE END?!

Not as long as Hollywood keeps lighting fools the way to dusty death by sending them to disturb the tomb of Dracula!

🧛🏻‍♂️ Spare a thought for poor little Jonathan Quincey John Abraham “Quincey” Harker, whose “bundle of names links all our little band of men together.”

This remained the record unhappiest naming in a happy “where are they now” afterword until poor little Albus Severus Potter left for Hogwarts.

If it’s any consolation, it actually could have been worse: Stoker originally toyed with calling the Texan “Brutus M. Marix.”

🧛🏻‍♂️ “…there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting…” And hardly one reliable narrator among the lot of them, either.

Best keep it to themselves, or they may find themselves assisting the authorities in several countries with their investigations.

But they seem to be indoctrinating the next generation. Is there still a secret cult of vampire-conspiracy theorists that foreigners of nocturnal habits need to beware of? Asking for a friend.

(thread)

Jonathan, having done his homework, is not surprised to find he has arrived on the eve of St George’s day although it is already 4 May. He would know that many of the people he meets will be Eastern Orthodox or Greek Catholic, and that their church year follows the Julian calendar. Today, the Julian calendar lags the Gregorian one by 13 days, and Julian 23 April falls on 6 May. In the 19th century, the lag was only 12 days, so St George’s Day would indeed fall on 5 May.

Note what I’m not saying here, though: I’m not saying that in Transylvania, they’re Orthodox and use the Julian calendar. That would be wrong, for two reasons. First, the Transylvania Harker is traveling to is hugely multi-religious. There are Eastern Orthodox, Greek Catholics (who acknowledge the Pope but keep the Byzantine rite), Roman Catholics, at least three flavors of Protestants, Jews, probably some Muslims. Second, Transylvania is now in the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, which runs on Gregorian time. In fact, if Harker had Wikipedia he’d know that the historical Principality of Transylvania itself went Gregorian as early as 1590, though the rest of Romania only did so in 1919. So it’s a bit unlike how Czarist Russia, officially Julian, confused everyone by having an October Revolution in November. Harker might expect official, secular time to be aligned with his own.

Sacred time, on the other hand, depends on what Church you’re in, and in Harker’s time, the Orthodox are all sticking to the Julian calendar. Only after 1923 did many Orthodox Churches adopt a Revised Julian calendar, closely aligned with the Gregorian one except for Easter. Others, like the Serbian Orthodox Church, still use the old calendar, and celebrate St George’s Day (Đurđevdan), an important feast, on Gregorian May 6, while their Catholic Croat neighbors do so on April 23.

Of all the Carpatian “whirlpool” of foreign races,the Szgany, that is, the Roma or “Gipsies,” arguably get the worst explicit press in the book (though the Slovaks give them a run for their money).

The unpronounceable “Szgany” is Stoker’s own unique spelling. (In his notes from Crosse, Stoker used the old Hungarian spelling “czigany”, now “cigány”.) Of uncertain origin, this is a cognate of German Zigeuner, Norwegian sigøyner, etc., appearing in English and French as tzigane. It carries the load of centuries of accumulated prejudice, and is considered derogatory.

Harker, like Stoker, has clearly read A.F. Crosse’s 1878 account of his treks “Round the Carpatians” (armed with a bowie knife, like Quincey) (excerpted in Frayling 1991, 331–35; cf. Stoker’s notes in Stoker 2008, 213). This is how he knows that “they attach themselves as a rule to some great noble or boyar, and call themselves by his name.”

None of our authors bothers to explain this “attachment”: Roma were legally enslaved until 1856 in Wallachia and Moldavia; in Transylvania the Habsburgs abolished slavery a bit earlier. Until recently, then, part of the Roma had been “attached” to the boyars as household slaves. (Orthodox monasteries also owned Roma slaves.) The institution of Roma slavery was unique to this region, but other inhuman anti-Roma policies were instituted in much of post-Reformation Europe.

Stoker would have known this, e.g. from W. Wilkinson’s Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, which he also read. But we should perhaps be grateful that he did not source his Szgany info from this racist rant. Wilkinson led with how “keeping them in a state of regular slavery” was to “make a more profitable use of them than other countries do” – and he went downhill from there (Wilkinson 1820, 168ff at 169).

Despite all the Szgany we meet being villainous minions, I wonder how much to make of this when it comes to the general xenophobic subtext of Dracula-as-invasion-of-Eastern-peoples. In support, Harker’s diary note that they are “allied to the ordinary gipsies all the world over” (28 May) perhaps even suggests an international conspiracy, but the novel does not go there: the only Roma we meet are in the Count’s homeland. Perhaps “allied with” should here be read as “related to.”

But the novel’s Roma stay put in Transylvania; they are enablers and defenders, not invaders. The “gipsies” already in England aren’t mentioned. In any case, as noted by Abby Bardi (2016), quite a bit of English literature had taken a romantic liking to them, from Wordsworth to George Eliot. This point, then, goes against the racial-invasion interpretation that I think Bardi otherwise pushes a bit farther than warranted (notably, one argument hinges on placing a Jewish character, incorrectly, in London rather than Galatz.)

For a different Stoker take on Travellers, see his short story “A Gipsy Prophecy” (1885).

(much of this is from my 28 May thread)