Dracula Invades England: The Text, the Context, and the Readers

By Cristina Artenie

This study is an inquiry into the circumstances that led to the publication of Dracula, Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, and into the far-reaching consequences of that publication. It is, in other words, a study of what made Dracula possible and of what was made possible by Dracula.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Universitas Press
• Release date: Aug 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781988963457

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NOTE ON QUOTATIONS

Several scholarly editions of Dracula have been used in this book, but all quotations from Stoker’s novel come from Glennis Byron’s edition (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1998). Whenever an explanatory note from such an edition is quoted, the editors are identified between brackets. This is also true of the Notes for Dracula, quoted as Bram Stoker’s Notes when the source is Stoker, but identified with the names of the editors (Eighteen-Bisang/ Miller) when the quotation reproduces a commentary on Stoker’s text.

INTRODUCTION

The following is an inquiry into the circumstances that led to the publication of Dracula, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, and into the far-reaching consequences of that publication. It is, in other words, a study of what made Dracula possible and of what Dracula made possible. It is also part of a much larger body of research and the first in a series of works dedicated to Stoker’s novel, its sources and its readership. To understand the factors involved in the construction and distribution of meaning that constitute the object of study in this book, it helps if we see them as a series of concentric circles. At the heart of it all lies the political, social, cultural, and economic context that precedes Dracula: the British colonial involvement, sometimes as a real presence, sometimes as wishful thinking, in a remote area of Europe where their faithful ally, the Turks, had battled a fierce warrior whose descendants were getting dangerously close to the throne of England. It is a tale rarely told, of colonial adventurers, struggling to tame and control a mighty river and a backward populace in the heart of old Europe; of soldiers, scholars, and mere travellers set to discover fame, fortune, or just the curious superstitions of others; of medieval crusaders and of royal weddings. Some of this is discursive – what people said and wrote is just as much part of history as what they did. Some of it happened or was said in the fifteenth century; some took place during the reign of Queen Victoria. What Stoker knew or thought he knew became part of the stories he told.

The second circle is biographical. Stoker was born in Ireland, where he spent the first three decades of his life. He graduated from Trinity College in Dublin and worked as a government clerk for 12 years, rising to a middle-management position and writing a textbook on the duties of such clerks. Of his four brothers, three (William Thornley, knighted by Queen Victoria, Richard and George) were physicians; another (Thomas) joined the Indian Civil Service. George, the youngest of the Stoker brothers, was a surgeon in the Turkish army, then in the Red Crescent, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. In 1878, Bram Stoker married Florence Balcombe, daughter of a veteran of the Crimean War. While in government employ, Bram started writing theatre reviews for Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dublin Evening Mail. After expressing boundless admiration for the actor Henry Irving, the latter invited him to become the manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. For the next quarter of a century, thanks to his friendship with the most important actor in Late Victorian England, Stoker moved in the high circles of London society, which included the Royal family. In his writings, Stoker liked to make references to relatives and acquaintances and to include the experiences of the people he knew.

Next is the text of the novel itself. Published in 1897, Dracula probably began its life no later than the spring of 1890, when Stoker took down the earliest surviving notes about a young barrister hired by a mysterious Count from Styria. Soon afterwards, Transylvania replaced Styria, and the Count got a name. New characters were introduced, others were dropped, but the author kept the initial structure of twenty-seven chapters. One full third of the novel was originally set in Transylvania, but in the printed version more room was made for Whitby and London scenes. (An Icelandic version of Dracula, published in 1901, which Stoker may or may not have known, includes a larger cast of characters and many more Transylvanian incidents.) Stoker’s working notes for the novel, published in facsimile in 2008, show him curious about lands that he had never visited. He summarised information found in five books and one long essay about Transylvania and Romania; this he turned into his narrators’ descriptions of landscapes and people and into the portrait of his main character, Count Dracula, although he mostly kept this information verbatim.

The fourth circle of meaning is produced by the novel’s afterlife on stage and especially on screen: Dracula’s extratextual myth. It is virtually impossible today to approach Stoker’s novel without a pre-existing representation of the plot, the main character, or the nature of vampires that comes not from the original Late-Victorian work of fiction, but from the more than two hundred film adaptations featuring Count Dracula as the villain, or from the plethora of literary and cinematic depictions of vampires; from cartoons; from games; from Halloween pageants; or even from a box of breakfast cereals. The same kind of pre-existing representation affects Count Dracula’s birthplace, alternately identified as either Transylvania or Romania, about which both Stoker’s novel and its multimedia afterlife have generated a mythological dimension as a backward place populated by vicious monsters and superstitious villagers.

The fifth circle of meaning is produced by the novel’s many commentators. Overlooked for more than half a century, Dracula was reborn as a subject of literary study in the mid- to late 1950s, when two competing readings of the novel emerged, one historicist and the other psychoanalytical, which were to remain the leading interpretative approaches for the following half a century. The historicist view on Dracula began with the identification of Stoker’s character with a Romanian medieval ruler better known as Vlad the Impaler. This was also supported by the first biography of Bram Stoker, published in 1962 by Harry Ludlam and based on interviews with the author’s only son Noel, who also suggested that the novelist had found out about Vlad from a Hungarian acquaintance named Arminius Vambéry. Very little, however, was written on Stoker and his novel until 1972, the year of Dracula’s second rebirth. Several books on Dracula and his Romanian origins appeared in the early 1970s (including a new biography by Stoker’s great-nephew and the first critical edition of the novel, provided by Leonard Wolf), none as important as the 1972 bestselling In Search of Dracula by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu. In the following years, McNally and Florescu published more books and were invited on TV shows, including Johnny Carson’s, as experts on both Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, who now came to be automatically associated with Stoker’s vampire Count.

Although much has been written about Dracula in the last four decades in academic and less academic venues, the original interpretative dichotomy persisted until recently, when a third approach, just as old but for a long time surprisingly marginal, took over from the psychoanalytical reading. In this perspective, Dracula is now placed and analysed especially in the long tradition of the British Gothic novel (Killeen 26). One cannot end this brief discussion of the ways in which the "meaning of Dracula is to be understood today without mentioning the large body of Dracula enthusiasts, originally part of the fifth circle mentioned above, but who are positioned nowadays outside it and act as guardians of the one, true, meaning of the novel. More exactly, the Dracula enthusiasts are defenders of the facts and, as a consequence, are reluctant to accept (and tend not to provide) interpretations. The facts" of the novel are their expertise and their belief in the quasi-veracity of Dracula makes them reject any direct relation between the text of the novel and its possible historical and biographical sources, since these are extratextual. Veritable apologists of Stoker’s novel, they defend the Dracula canon against what they perceive as the intrusion of the apocrypha.

The Dracula enthusiasts always expect proof, and their vehemence is never understated when hard facts cannot be provided. The true champion of the enthusiasts’ camp is Elizabeth Miller, through her decades-long effort to produce and implement a unitary, canonical view of the novel, its author, his sources, the model for the eponymous character, and the Transylvania that is part of the story. In her words, There are things that happened; there are things that might have happened; there are things that did not happen. . . . It would be foolhardy to claim that Stoker’s sources are limited to what he mentions in the papers. But it is just as absurd to claim that he ‘must have’ read this or that, when there is no supporting evidence (Miller, Sense and Nonsense 12; 18). Yet, despite her warning, literary and cultural studies as a rule walk a fine line between must have and might have, and do not usually prove anything; at best, they make a strong case. In the end, the very reduced view of Dracula based exclusively on hard facts is an invitation precisely to the kind of speculation that the enthusiasts claim to reject. For example, Stoker’s sources are often accepted as sources of truth for the simple fact that they represent written evidence. Hence, the Dracula enthusiast is not interested in questioning a text about the Romanians’ alleged belief in vampires, since the proof is already there.

There is, broadly speaking, a conspicuous unwillingness to consider some of the greatest mysteries of the novel, which are constantly glossed over or explained away. For instance, why did Stoker choose that particular Romanian medieval ruler? Why did he choose a real historical character (unlike in other Gothic stories)? Why did he choose a Romanian (who, despite the remoteness of his country of origin, risked not being mysterious enough or scary enough)? Why did he subsequently make him a Szekler? Why not a German, or a Romanian (Wallach) or a Slav or simply a Transylvanian? While it is true that there is not enough data to support definitive answers to these questions, there are a few things that we do know. We know that Stoker made a deliberate choice when he named his character Dracula. We know that he did not play around with other names (except for the casual Count Wampyr, which was not, in any case, the name of a historical character). We know that he wanted to make sure that Count Dracula was, as Van Helsing insists, indeed that Voivode. We know that he was interested in identifying his fictional character with that of the Romanian medieval ruler and not with his deeds. It is true that we do not know if Stoker had any real information about Vlad Ţepeş’s methods of execution. However, Stoker knew at least that the name of Dracula had diabolical connotations, and yet he was not interested in using them in the novel. From Wilkinson’s account he took the battles, but not the meaning of the name.

We also know that there are too many coincidences (the fact that a descendant of the historical Dracula was about to marry into the Royal Family when Stoker began working on the novel is perhaps the greatest of all) that one should take into account, despite the lack of hard evidence proving that the novelist was inspired by the recent betrothal. To use Wayne C. Booth’s terms, there is always a danger that one might overstand rather than understand a text. On the other hand, one might also understand too little. Speaking of historical knowledge, A.J.P. Taylor remarked that it is nothing but gradations of guessing:

Consider a general conducting a battle. If we know from his later dispatch or from what others recorded at the time, we say: "He saw the enemy advancing. If we can deduce what he saw from studying the map or ourselves reconnoitring the battlefield, we say: He must have seen the enemy advancing. If we can only deduce what he saw from his subsequent actions, then we say: Probably he saw the enemy advancing." (Taylor 12; my emphases)

Even when we know something, we are still guessing. The general’s dispatch and the witnesses’ records may include exaggerations. In Dracula’s case, finding out about the descendants of the Romanian ruler ready to invade England is similar to discovering that Taylor’s general, hitherto believed to have acted independently, may have been following the orders of a famous superior, known precisely for the kind of tactical manoeuvre that we have been analyzing, and whose presence on the battlefield had been ignored all this time. Of course, he may have been only visiting, inspecting, or may have even been there incognito. However, his presence now seems too important to ignore.

PART I

DRACULA, ROMANIA AND THE WEST TODAY

Bram Stoker’s working notes for Dracula can offer many of the answers, no matter how partial, to the mysteries of the novel. However, if the avant-texte can provide an explanation of the text, one should also look before and beyond the avant-texte for an explanation of the notes themselves. Several commentators of the novel, including some of the editors, have already done this, but never from a postcolonial perspective. As a rule, they have looked for encoded messages that might prove that Transylvania and Romania are stand-ins for other countries, especially Ireland. In what follows, I will assume, on the contrary, that the events and situations described in Dracula (including some that have only survived in the notes) reflect facts that Stoker witnessed and knew about in London society and in European areas controlled by the British Empire.

Stoker was never at the centre of the English literary field. Even in theatre circles, he had a subaltern position. But he knew important people and was interested in domestic and foreign policy. He was, in fact, familiar with Romanian issues long before he decided to place his vampire in Transylvania. A major source of information would have been his brother, George, who was on the Turkish side against Russian and Romanian troops in the war that brought the independence of the Romanian Kingdom. Stoker’s biographers agree that Bram helped his brother write his memoirs, which he then published under the title With the Unspeakables; or, Two Years’ Campaigning in the European and Asiatic Turkey (1878). At the time of the Russian-(Romanian)-Turkish war, in 1877, Great Britain was heavily involved in the region, controlling the navigation on the Danube as well as much of Romania’s economic policy. In fact, the British Empire had a colonial enclave on the lower Danube, which makes it difficult to accept the premise of balkanist scholars, who concede that the countries in East Central Europe have never been colonised by Britain, France or some other Western Empire.

Stoker had, nevertheless, another possible reason for associating his vampire to Romania and to Dracula: the marriage of the future king of England to one of Dracula’s descendents, Princess Mary of Teck. The novelist was in a position that would have allowed him to know details of both the marriage and the bride’s ascendancy. Some of the commentators of the novel, including its editors, justify Stoker’s choice of a Romanian medieval ruler as a model (or partial model) for the vampire Count by making reference to Vlad the Impaler’s renowned cruelty, thus perpetuating a demonising discourse begun in the fifteenth century. Others prefer to think that Stoker chose almost randomly, being simply drawn to the name, since the cruelty is never mentioned in the novel: Are we to believe that [Stoker] knew about Vlad’s bloodthirsty activities but decided to discard such a history for his villainous Count in favour of the meager pickings gleaned from Wilkinson? (Miller, Filing for Divorce 175). Yet, the opposite seems equally odd and even disturbing: that all Stoker knew about the historical Dracula was what he had read in Wilkinson (that he battled the Turks and had a nickname that could mean brave, cruel or cunning) and still made him a vampire. In reality, Stoker also never used the association between the name of Dracula and