Appendix: Christie’s Description of the Dracula Manuscript (Auction of April 15, 2002)
| Sale Title |
Bram Stoker's Dracula: The Original Typed Manuscript |
|
Location |
New York, Rockefeller Plaza |
| Sale Date | Apr 17, 2002 |
| Lot Number | 1 |
|
Sale Number |
1166 |
|
Estimate |
1,000,000 - 1,500,000 U.S. dollars |
| Lot Description |
STOKER, Abraham ("Bram") (1847-1912). Typescript of The Un-Dead, published as Dracula (London, 1897), WITH AUTOGRAPH ADDITIONS, CORRECTIONS AND DELETIONS IN INK BY THE AUTHOR, signed or initialed by Stoker in some 26 places, and with his name and address ("Bram Stoker, 17 St. Leonard's Terrace, Chelsea, London") on versos of some chapter endings, preceded by a hand-lettered title-page by Stoker (using the title The Un-Dead), dated 1897. Carbon and ribbon typescript (largely carbon, with some words, usually names of places or characters, typed directly into blank spaces), comprising Stoker's revised typescript used as the printer's setting copy, with the printer's occasional blue pencil markings. Probably typed by Stoker in London and perhaps in Cruden Bay, Scotland, 1890-97.
530 sheets (comprising unnumbered title and pp. 1-541, with irregularities), lacking 8 pp. (175, 233, 297, 521, 525, 532, 534, 537), pp. 177 and 295 skipped in pagination but text continuous. Typed on the rectos of sheets of wove paper of varying size (ranging from 8.5 to 14.5 inches in height). Stoker (like his contemporary, Arthur Conan Doyle) cut and reassembled some pages of his manuscript as part of the editorial process, often adding necessary connecting text in ink (see below under "Pagination"). Several marginal notes in the text are perhaps in the hand of William Thornley Stoker, the author's brother, some pencilled punctuation possibly added by an editor. A few marginal tears, not affecting text and without loss to paper, occasional minor soiling, otherwise IN AN EXCELLENT STATE OF PRESERVATION THROUGHOUT. Each leaf in protective mylar envelope, enclosed in four large half black morocco slipcases. COUNT DRACULA'S DEBUT: THE UNIQUE, LONG-LOST ORIGINAL TYPESCRIPT OF BRAM STOKER'S MASTERPIECE OF SUPERNATURAL HORROR, WITH NUMEROUS REVISIONS BY THE AUTHOR, INCLUDING A DELETED SCENE OF THE FINAL DESTRUCTION OF CASTLE DRACULA THE ONLY SURVIVING FULL-LENGTH MANUSCRIPT OF STOKER'S "DRACULA." It is highly unusual for the manuscript of a major work of fiction to be entirely lost from sight for almost a century, but in the case of the original typescript of Dracula--the very existence of which was not suspected until its discovery in 1984--such a sudden re-emergence seems appropriate, as if to mirror the mysterious disappearances and reappearances of Count Dracula in Stoker's classic horror novel. Today, just over a hundred years since it was first published, Stoker's Dracula continues to assert a profound hold on the popular imagination. As a character, Count Dracula remains an archetype of exceptionally enduring power. His nocturnal savageries are both deeply repellent and yet strangely compelling. Rationally, we find his grand plan to seduce thousands of urban victims into an eternity of vampirism abhorrent and nightmarish, but we also feel, perhaps to our surprise, pity for the Count, and more than a twinge of admiration for the sheer audaciousness of his sanguinary iniquity. Like Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, the character of Count Dracula is unforgettably vivid, heroically glamorous, shrouded in an aura of venerable aristocratic grandeur. In the end, Count Dracula exercises an unalterable, subtle hold over us, one that strikingly parallels Dracula's crucial telepathic link with his last victim, the brilliant Wilhelmina Harker, a connection only severed when he meets ultimate extinction at the hands of Mina's blade-wielding husband and friends. Stoker's Dracula has attained the stature of a classic of its genre. It has never been out of print, and remains one of the most widely read of all late-nineteenth century novels, while dramatic and film adaptations continue to proliferate. As a literary character, it is abundantly clear that Dracula has already attained a level of immortality. Just as Count Dracula conceals himself in the darkened gardens and brambly underbrush of English estates, so Dracula the archetype lurks, watchful but unseen, on the dark-shrouded margins of the modern psyche. From the pages of Stoker's Dracula "there rise images so dreamlike and yet so imperative that we experience them as ancient allegories. Everywhere one looks, there flicker the shadows of primordial struggles: the perpetual tension between the dark and the light; the wrestling match between Christ and Satan; and, finally, the complex allegories of sex; sex in all its unimaginable innocence, or sex reeking with the full perfume of the swamp" (Leonard Wolf, The Annotated Dracula, N.Y., 1975, p.ix). The murky psycho-sexual aspects of Stoker's Dracula seem to us so palpably apparent and so thinly veiled that we find it hard to conceive that the author and his contemporaries were not immediately struck by them. Seen through the prism of our post-Freudian lens, the Count is "an apparition of what we repress, particularly eros," profoundly evoking "the fear of death and the fear of the dead and the dream of immortality; the psychological and sexual dialectic within us of mastery and submission, of sadism and masochism, of the desire to hurt those we love and to be hurt by them; the conflict within us between knowledge turned into civilizing power and the power of unknowable and uncivil urges; the alternating control over us of the moonlit energies of the night, when fantasies rise from our sleeping heads to enact our darkest desires, and the waking renunciations of the day, domain of the reality principle; the struggle to achieve, maintain and define manhood and womanhood" (George Stade, Introduction to Dracula, New York: Bantam Books, 1981, p.xiv). As Jonathan Harker powerfully warns his companions as they prepare to enter Dracula's castle, "Do you know what the place is? Have you seen 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? Have you felt the Vampire's lips upon your throat?" Dracula's Progeny Since its publication in 1897, Stoker's novel has "managed to interject into the culture of the West the image of a creature of such symbolic force that he has become something like a culture hero whom our first duty is to hate even while we have for him a certain weird admiration" (Wolf, Annotated Dracula, p. ix). Its unforgettable title character has spawned--directly or indirectly--a legion of literary and cinematic offspring, including such modern interpretations as Stephen King's Salem's Lot (1975), in which vampires infest a contemporary New England village, and Anne Rice's best-selling Vampire Chronicles, (begun in 1976 with Interview With the Vampire), which sympathetically relate the convoluted lives and relationships of multiple vampires through different historical eras. While Count Dracula's visage cannot be reflected in any mirror, he has been captured on film many times and has achieved a form of virtual immortality on celluloid, videotape and DVD. Stoker's life-long involvement with the theater undoubtedly influenced his construction of the novel in distinct scenes, much like a screenplay. In a device that anticipates techniques widely used in the modern novel, Stoker presents multiple versions of the same events through the accounts of different characters (reminiscent of the multiple viewpoints explored in Akira Kurasawa's classic Rashomon). F.W. Murnau's pirated silent film, Nosferatu (1922) was the first of a long series of cinematic adaptations of Stoker's novel, many of indifferent quality. "The film industry," Wolf observes, "long ago realized that there was as much gold as there was blood in 'the Dracula matter' and ground out one profitable horror movie after another...[T]he image of the count stalking victims through scenes in which blood lust and lust are commingled has been so powerfully emblematic that even the worst of the films contributes something to our understanding of the film lore of the vampire, and to the fascination it holds for the contemporary imagination..." (Annotated Dracula, p.352.) It is reported that Count Dracula is the most widely filmed of all literary characters, with the possible exception of his inimitable contemporary, Sherlock Holmes. Dracula, indeed, lives on. Ancient Evil vs. Modern Technology Stoker's novel brilliantly knits together many disparate threads of obscure European folklore, occult themes and little-known regional history, and builds on the efforts of other, less successful, literary predecessors (see Dracula's Antecedents, below). Dracula is provided, in the learned commentary of the scientist Van Helsing in Chapter 18, with a venerable past and a heroic role in the merciless warfare that raged in his Transylvanian homeland during the fifteenth century. But Count Dracula, the terrifying archetype--the embodiment and symbol of ancient ferocity and evil--is especially fearsome and threatening because he has left his remote ancestral castle in the nightmarish, "land beyond the forest," lit by flickering fires and resonant with the calls of feral wolves, to walk the streets of modern, gas-lit, technologically advanced London. By extension, Dracula and his ancient iniquity is reincarnated in the midst of our own highly advanced civilization and perhaps not-so-advanced psyche. "In its contrast between the modern and the pre-modern, Dracula seems to question the idea that societies are constantly developing towards ever more rational structures" (Pericles Lewis, "Dracula and the Epistemology of the Victorian Gothic Novel," in E. Miller, ed., Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow. A Critical Anthology, p.74). In their campaign against the Count's evil plans, the characters in Stoker's Dracula employ the traditional weapons of garlic, silver crucifixes and stakes, long recommended by folklore, but are comfortable with and make extensive use of such new technologies as the typewriter, telegraphy, phonographic cylinder recording, hypnotism and blood transfusion. When Dr. Abraham Van Helsing--a detective-like figure--organizes the campaign with Jonathan and Mina Harker, Dr. Seward and Quincy Morris to bring the vampire to extinction, one commentator contends that we are witness to nothing less than a paradigm of modern information theory at work, since "the typewriter and the phonograph are the technologies that make information retrieval possible and allow information to be shared between group members." These technological weapons, "used against the ancient gothic powers of confusion and misinformation," "partly replace the techniques of holy water and crucifix with secular methods" (Marion Muirhead, "Corruption Becomes Itself Corrupt: Entropy in Dracula," in Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow, p.243). In Chapter 14, Mina confides to her journal that "I am so glad I have type-written out my own journal," so that Jonathan can read it; later, in Chapter 26, reflecting on the revealing records of Dracula that she has transcribed and collated, she expresses her gratitude "to the man who invented the 'Traveller's' typewriter," for "I should have felt quite astray doing the work if I had to write like a pen." At many points in Stoker's narrative, the telegraph is critical to the story. In Chapter 10, realizing that Lucy is the victim of a vampire, Dr. Van Helsing uses the telegraph to procure a medieval protection from vampires: garlic. He orders a quantity, in flower, "all the way from Haarlem," raised by his friend Vanderpool in his green-house, commenting proudly "I had to telegraph yesterday, or they would not have been here." In Chapter 23, when Van Helsing, Harker and Morris close their net around Dracula by locating and destroying the crates of consecrated earth he has laboriously trans-shipped from his castle, they are notified by telegraph that the Count is probably on his way to his last sanctuary, the Fenchurch Street house where they hope to trap him. It is in Chapter 16 that Mina is first shown Dr. Seward's phonograph: "on the table opposite him was what I knew at once from the descriptions to be a phonograph. I had never seen one, and was much interested." Count Dracula himself, as a living relic of an ancient order, disdains the modern tools that contribute to his ultimate downfall: he sneers contemptuously at the use of shorthand and burns Dr. Seward's phonograph cartridges in hopes of effacing his trail. And, as Van Helsing seems to acknowledge through his use of garlic, crucifix and wild rose, while modern science may aid in the battle against this ancient evil, in the end it is Jonathan Harker's "great knife" and Quincy Morris's "bowie knife" which finally still his ancient heart and sever his head, to ensure his final extinction. The Manuscript "The Un-dead" Becomes "Dracula" In Stoker's preliminary notes at the Rosenbach Library and Museum is an undated memorandum containing several possible titles, including "The Un-Dead" and "The Dead Un-Dead" (illustrated in Bram Stoker's Dracula: A Centennial Exhibition, 1997, p.32). From the careful hand-lettered title-page Stoker prepared in 1897 for this typescript, it would appear that the title he intended for his novel was The Un-Dead. When a prepublication theatrical reading to secure dramatic copyright took place at the Lyceum Theatre on May 18, 1897, the printed program advertised the work as "Dracula, or the Un-Dead." Stoker's contract with Constable & Co., signed just two days later, specified that the title was "The Un-Dead," but when the book appeared in bookstores on May 26, the title had been simplified to the memorable, emphatic three-syllable name of its main character. Whether the change originated with Stoker himself, or with an editor, is unknown, but "the decision was fortuitous--the one-word title itself, the three sinister syllables that crack and undulate on the tongue, ambiguous, foreign, and somehow alluring, was certainly a component of the book's initial and continued mystique" (David Skal, Hollywood Gothic, p.22). Pagination The existing pagination suggests much about Stoker's compositional method, providing concrete evidence of the complex re-arrangements of text that the book underwent when Stoker, after seven years' work, prepared his finished typescript for the printer. Most of the typescript's pages bear at least three distinct sets of pagination: one typed and two in ink in Stoker's hand, which may suggest the existence of previous typescripts, or, at least, drastic rearrangement. The typed set of numerals and one of the handwritten sets are crossed out. The final numbered sequence commences with page 3 (preceded by Stoker's prefatory note and the first unnumbered page of text), and continues (with irregularities) to the last page (Stoker's "Note," an epilogue), which is numbered 541. Because of the cut-and-paste method Stoker used to assemble the manuscript, the numbering is irregular at times, and some pages in fact bear two consecutive numbers. The earlier numbering sequences strongly suggest that Stoker altered both the order of the chapters and the order of pages within chapters in the final stages of composition. Some chapters (19, 23-27) were originally separately numbered, the first page of each bearing the number 1. In keeping with contemporary typographical practice, the pages which begin Chapters (in Roman numerals) and sub-chapters (in Arabic numerals) are un-paginated by Stoker. The printer has numbered Chapters and sub-chapters in bold blue crayon; the same crayon has been used to mark the text at the end of each section. Stoker's cut-and-paste manipulation of his typescript is evident in many places: some text pages consist of several strips pasted together, sometimes with additional handwritten connecting text added by Stoker to link them seamlessly. Further detailed analysis, it is likely, will permit at least a partial reconstruction of the pre-existing order of Stoker's text. The Discarded Beginning and "Dracula's Guest" From the typescript and Stoker's preliminary notes it is apparent that Jonathan Harker's journey to Transylvania was not the novel's original beginning. Originally, Stoker's first chapter was to consist of the correspondence between Mr. Hawkins (Harker's employer) and Count Dracula concerning the purchase of residential property in London. In the second chapter, Harker was to have told of stopping in Munich to attend a performance of Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman (Der Fliegende Hollander), an appropriate choice, given its strong supernatural elements. In the present typescript, the chapter number of the first text page has been altered by Stoker from II to I. In addition, the first hand-numbered page bears the earlier typewritten number 103. It is clear that in the late stages of editing, Stoker deleted 102 pages of the earlier portion of the manuscript. The typescript and the published book now begin with Harker's diary entry dated May 3. The discarded second chapter was posthumously published by Stoker's widow, probably from Stoker's retained typescript, under the title "Dracula's Guest" in a collection of the same title, issued in 1914 (the story was the source for the film Dracula's Daughter). Some have argued, though, that "Dracula's Guest" may have been part of a very early draft of the novel, or even an independent short-story dating from about 1890 which Stoker later expanded into a full-length novel (see Clyde Leatherdale, "Stoker's Banana Skins," in Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow, pp.138-153). Unfortunately, we cannot know whether the decision to excise 102 pages of his typescript originated with Stoker or his publisher, Archibald Constable. The Typescript and Stoker's Emendations No handwritten manuscript of Stoker's Dracula, if one ever existed, is extant today. While we know little of Stoker's actual working methods as a novelist, we are fortunate that an extensive archive of Stoker's preliminary notes, plot outlines, character lists and sketches for Dracula survives in the Rosenbach Library and Museum in Philadelphia (the notes are the subject of an excellent catalogue: Bram Stoker's Dracula: A Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1997, hereafter referred to as Rosenbach Exhibition). In preparing his novel for the printer, Stoker chose to use the newly invented manual typewriter. While the early typewriters were often cumbersome and difficult to maintain, the design was rapidly perfected and their use spread rapidly from 1880, as did the use of the carbon paper that made possible "manifold" or multiple carbon copies. Mina, in Chapter 14, expresses gratitude that she is able to use the "Traveller's typewriter," possibly a reference to the Columbia portable typewriter, weighing only six pounds, that came on the market in 1885. It is more than likely that Stoker himself typed the entire novel on such a machine. Alternatively, although there is no direct evidence to suggest it, he may possibly have employed one of the numerous typing agencies to transcribe a handwritten manuscript. (Oscar Wilde, Stoker's Dublin acquaintance and Trinity classmate, used the services of such agencies to prepare the successive typescripts of all his successful plays at about the same date.) A careful study of the typescript, particularly in connection with Stoker's early notes, will certainly reveal a great deal about the genesis of the novel and Stoker's methods. Virtually every page of Stoker's typescript exhibits some revision by its author. In the case of pages that have been pasted together from fragments of other pages of typescript, Stoker has in some cases added a sentence or two in his small, spidery hand to link the previously unconnected narrative (see, for example, the illustration on the facing page). The quotation from Burger's popular ballad, Lenore, "Denn die Todten reiten schnell" ("for the dead travel fast"), whispered by one of Harker's fellow coach passengers in Chapter 1, is here supplied in Stoker's hand. In several places in the narrative where blood transfusions are administered to Lucy in hopes of saving her, Stoker's brother, the distinguished physician Sir William Thornley Stoker, has added a factual note in the margin, suggesting that Stoker showed the typescript to his brother, who resided in Dublin but frequently visited London, to be certain that his technical description of the unusual transfusion process was accurate. Interestingly, there are occasional typewritten emendations typed directly onto the pages of carbon typescript; these are readily distinguished by their darker appearance and appear to have been typed over erasures or into blank places deliberately left in the typescript. The name of the zoophagous patient, Renfield, is left blank in some early appearances, in other places he is simply termed "Flyman," and his name is later filled in by hand, as are some place names and names of minor characters, such as Carfax (the abbey Dracula rents in England), Lord Godalming, Arthur Holmwood, Swales, and others, as well as the dates in the ship's log of the unfortunate Demeter (the vessel which brings the Count to Whitby). These blanks strongly suggest that Stoker remained undecided about the names of certain of the novel's minor characters and needed to fill these in at a relatively late stage. Handwritten punctuation changes are quite frequent throughout the typescript; some are probably by Stoker, but many appear to be in a different, larger hand, perhaps that of an editor at the publishers, Archibald Constable & Co. From a close examination of several segments of Stoker's typescript and the published novel, it is apparent that a number of minor changes, including punctuation, paragraphing and occasional word substitutions were made subsequently to this typescript, probably at page proof or galley stage. No galleys or page proofs for the novel are extant, unfortunately. The Destruction of Dracula's Castle: Stoker's Dropped Ending The typescript contains a very remarkable passage deleted from the published book, here neatly lined out in ink and quite readable. In Stoker's typescript, after Harker and Morris kill the Count, Dracula's castle is destroyed in a sudden volcanic cataclysm. The whole passage is as follows (only the first sentence appears in the published book): INdent these two paragraphs] The castle of Dracula now stood out against the red sun and every stone of its broken battlements was articulated against the light. As we looked there came a terrible convulsion of the earth so that we seemed to rock to and fro and fell to our knees. At the same moment with a roar which seemed to shake the very heavens the whole castle and the rock and even the hill on which it stood seemed to rise into the air and scatter in fragments while a mighty cloud of black and yellow smoke volume on volume in rolling grandeur was shot upwards with inconceivable rapidity. Then there was a stillness in nature as the echoes of that thunderous report seemed to come as with the hollow boom of a thunder clap - the long, reverberating roll which seems as though the floors of heaven shook. Then down in a might ruin falling whence they rose came the fragments that had been tossed skywards in the cataclysm. From where we stood it seemed as though the one fierce volcano burst had satisfied the need of nature and that the castle and the structure of the hill had sunk again into the void. We were so appalled with the suddenness and the grandeur that we forgot to think of ourselves. Stoker's motives for this significant deletion from the climax of the narrative may never be known to us, but it has been plausibly suggested that he may have considered the possibility of a sequel to Dracula in which the "Un-Dead" Count Dracula somehow returns again from the grave to stalk new victims. Veiling the Storyteller: Stoker's "Documentary" Form As a recent biographer observes, just as Stoker chose to mask the erotic with the supernatural, the narrative structure of Dracula served to obscure the author's own voice, distancing Stoker himself "from the unspeakable" (Belford, p.xiii). Stoker chose to narrate Dracula through a technique drawn from the epistolary novel, in which the plot is developed and resolved in a series of letters between characters. The form originated in the eighteenth-century. The technique, which provided the reader with direct insight into the experiences and viewpoints of the characters, was successfully employed in novels such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747), Rousseau's La nouvelle Heloise (1761), Fanny Burney's Evelina (1778) and Choderlos de Laclos's Les liaisons dangereuses (1782). Nearly a century later, Wilkie Collins, in The Woman in White (1860)--widely credited with being the first modern mystery novel--returned to the epistolary form, using it skillfully as a means to heighten and intensify the tension of his dark story of murder and revenge. Stoker, though, carried the epistolary technique to a still more complex level, constructing the narrative from an overlapping series of journal entries, memoranda, personal letters, business letters from solicitors, newspaper reports (such as those that recount the eerie landing of the Count's freighter, the Demeter, at Whitby, manned by a crew of dead seamen), and even wax cylinder phonographic recordings made by Dr. Seward in the privacy of his study. In his prefatory note (page 1 of the present manuscript), Stoker explains, rather enigmatically, that "There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the knowledge of those who made them." Stoker's novel "does not provide us with a single omniscient narrator...As in the classic works of modernism by authors like Henry James, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, we are given access only to the information contained in the minds of each of the characters" (P. Lewis, in E. Miller, ed., Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow, p.77). The reader of Dracula, then, peruses the private letters and diaries of others, acquiring an omniscience not permitted the characters. It is by the adroit layering of these various diary entries, letters and documents that Stoker creates a narrative seemingly rooted in reality that inexorably reveals the ghastly horror at the heart of the story, both to his characters and to his readers. It is only when Mina Harker has carefully collated and transcribed her own and the diaries of Jonathan and Lucy, plus Doctor Seward's medical records, that she and her circle of friends are finally able to perceive the full extent of Dracula's grand plan to infiltrate and prey upon millions of Londoners, and to clearly see their own duty to thwart his scheme. The Hidden Life of the Creator of Dracula Bram Stoker, the creator of the single most enduring figure in nineteenth-century fiction, has left only the relatively modest records of his own life, and little of an autobiographical nature. While Dracula's creator is likely to have written, during the course of his career as acting manager of the Lyceum theatre, literally thousands of letters in an official capacity, Stoker wrote relatively few personal letters, and, as far as we know, kept no diary or journal. It was not until 1996 that a biography, Barbara Belford's Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Man Who Wrote Dracula, made extensive use of what archival material and limited family papers are still extant. A great deal of what is known of Stoker's life is therefore drawn from contemporary press notices; additional, though still scanty, information was provided by Stoker himself in his adulatory two-volume biography of Henry Irving, the noted actor to whose career Stoker was closely linked for nearly three decades. Abraham Stoker was born in Dublin in 1847 into a respectable middle-class Protestant family. As a boy, he suffered from a crippling affliction--though the precise medical nature of the condition is still not known--and apparently did not walk until age seven. During these early years as an invalid, the future author of Dracula was entertained by his mother, Charlotte Stoker, who had a deep knowledge of Ireland's exceptionally rich store of myths and folk tales, many of which feature supernatural elements: giants, banshees, ghosts, human-animal transformations, magic spells and the risen dead. This powerful imagery re-occurs in much of Stoker's fiction, which ultimately totaled eighteen books and dozens of short stories. When Stoker had shaken off his early illness, he attended a private school, then enrolled at Trinity College, Dublin, where he distinguished himself in athletics and mathematics, and was chosen President of the Philosophical Society. Accepted into the best Dublin society, he was an occasional guest at the literary soirees held at the Merrion Square home of Sir William and Lady Wilde, parents of Oscar Wilde. He accepted a modest civil service post, and published a widely used procedural manual for law clerks of the court of sessions in Ireland. His evenings, though, were devoted to a passionate interest in the theater, an enthusiasm shared with his father and with another ambitious young Dubliner, George Bernard Shaw. In 1871, Stoker became the unpaid drama critic for the Dublin Evening Mail and the next year published his first short story, "The Crystal Cup," a dream fantasy, in London Society. Other early stories of Stoker relied strongly on supernatural or fantasy elements and at least one, "The Chain of Destiny," serialized in The Shamrock in 1875, "was pure horror, mixed in with romance, nightmares and curses," and featured a character called "the 'phantom of the fiend'" (Leatherdale, p.59). In 1872, J. Sheridan Le Fanu's serialized his story Carmilla in the Dublin University Magazine. Carmilla was a powerful vampire story with strong overtones of lesbianism, featuring a beautiful Styrian countess who is revealed as a vampire. The story evidently exerted a considerable influence on Stoker (at the very least, it appears to have influenced Stoker's choice of Styria as the location of Dracula's castle, though this was later changed to Transylvania). Along with John Polidori's The Vampyre and James Malcolm Rhymer's Varney the Vampire, Le Fanu's Carmilla probably furnished Stoker with many of the attributes and mannerisms that he later synthesized into the fictional Count Dracula. In December 1876 Stoker attended and reviewed a performance by the rising young actor Henry Irving (1838-1905), then appearing at Dublin's Theatre Royal in the role of Hamlet. It was a fateful meeting. Max Beerbohm praised Irving's powerful stage presence for its "sardonic, grotesque, fantastic humour." To Beerbohm, Irving "had an incomparable power for eeriness--for stirring a dim sense of mystery; and not less masterly was he in evoking a sharp sense of horror." Irving's Hamlet powerfully moved Stoker, and, after his review appeared, he was invited to dine with the actor and a deep, almost spiritual bond was formed. The two talked until sunrise, and the next night, Irving offered a powerful private reading of Thomas Hood's dramatic poem "The Dream of Eugene Aram," a performance which Stoker later described in rapturous, almost mystical terms: "If once only in a lifetime the soul of man can take wings and sweep for an instant into mortal gaze, then that 'once' for Irving was on that, to me, ever memorable occasion...." That night, Stoker relates, "began the close friendship between us which only terminated with his life--if indeed friendship, like any other form of love, can ever terminate." For the next two years, Stoker was frequently part of the inner circle of the charismatic Irving, both in London and in Dublin. In March 1878, Irving telegraphed Stoker to report that he had taken a long-term lease on the Lyceum Theatre in London and asked Stoker to accept the post of acting manager. Stoker accepted the offer with alacrity. At about the same time, Stoker courted and married Florence Balcombe, a beautiful Dublin girl whom Stoker's classmate at Trinity, Oscar Wilde, had also courted. The couple moved to London after their marriage in late 1877 and Stoker flung himself into the complex management of Henry Irving's large and eventually highly successful theatrical company. A brilliant theatrical innovator and magnetic stage presence, Irving was also extremely egotistical and often autocratic. Many critics disapproved of what they saw as Irving's exaggerated mannerisms and overly grand productions (George Bernard Shaw once referred to "the perpetual struggle between Henry Irving and Shakespeare"), but Irving's vivid portrayals of extreme psychological states (his most celebrated stage roles included Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth and Richard III), coupled with his company's advanced stagecraft and sophisticated theatrical lighting proved extremely popular with late Victorian theater-goers. Some authorities believe that traits of Stoker's character, Dracula, may well derive from Irving's arresting and compelling portrayals. Stoker's responsibilities for nearly three decades were critical to Irving and the Lyceum: he managed all the account books, planned the budget, disbursed funds, took care of the hiring of staff and actors, booked advertisements, scheduled and planned the company's frequent provincial and overseas tours and maintained most of the correspondence, thereby allowing Irving to concentrate particularly on the creative aspects of whatever production his company was staging. In spite of Irving's and the Lyceum's demands on his time, Stoker continued to nurse aspirations as an author, and completed a good deal of short fiction and several novels, beginning with The Snake's Pass (1891), his first full-length book. The Writing of Dracula It was in 1890 that Stoker seems to have settled upon a theme and a character destined to become a classic. According to his son Noel Stoker, the genesis of Dracula was a terrifying dream of his father's about a vampire king rising from his tomb. Stoker's extensive preliminary notes for the novel, reveal a great deal about the extensive background research and readings its creator undertook in the writing of the work. Stoker's earliest notes for the book are dated March 1890, a full seven years before its publication. In contrast to Stoker's general journalistic haste, which enabled him to spin out a short story during a free hour or a novel over the course of a month's vacation, his work on Dracula appears to have been from the beginning meticulous, careful and almost obsessive in its attention to the most minute details. He strove "for accuracy and authenticity at every turn, taking careful notes, planning every plot twist in advance, and revising the story line numerous times. Unlike his other novels, Dracula was a long-term project" (Rosenbach Exhibition, pp.17-18). Stoker's earliest surviving notes for his novel (illustrated, ibid., p.19) are dated March 1890. These show that he originally conceived the work in four Books, which he labeled "Styria to London (later he crossed out Styria and substituted "Transylvania"), "Tragedy," "Discovery," and "Punishment," each consisting of seven Chapters. Even at this very early stage, the action in each chapter was mapped out in surprising detail: in Book 1, Chapter 3 is described as "The journey-- wolves--blue flame"; Chapter 4 is simply "Arrival the Castle." Even more striking, Stoker's skeletal armature shows that one of the novel's critical early scenes, and an especially memorable line of the Count had already been visualized by Stoker. His outline for Chapter 5 reads, "Loneliness--the Kiss--'this man belongs to me.'" Also preserved in Stoker's early notes is an undated list of "Historiae Personae" (see illustration, p.22), featuring "Doctor of Mad house Seward," "Girl engaged to him Lucy Westenra Schoolfellow of Mina Murray," "A Detective," "A Psychical Research Agent," "A Painter" and "A Texan." The novel's principal character is there listed as "The Count--Count Wampyr." Later, though, Stoker has crossed out "Wampyr" and written "Dracula." At the top of the sheet, in the corner, he writes it again, underlined, and then inscribes "Dracula" twice again on either side of the "Historiae Personae" title, perhaps indicative of his sense of satisfaction at hitting upon the name. In several other memoranda (illustrated, ibid., p.21) Stoker has compiled, partly from his research into vampire lore and legend, detailed lists of the special traits possessed by vampires, including: "never eat nor drink," "influence over rats," "money always old gold-traced to Salzburg banking house," and "no looking glasses in Castle house--never can see him reflected." Stoker, his wife and his son spent the summer of 1890--while he was probably engaged in planning the novel--in the popular seaside resort of Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast. This picturesque town, with the imposing ruins of a thirteenth-century abbey perched on a seaside promontory, made a powerful impression on Stoker and the striking locality was incorporated into several chapters of Dracula. In Stoker's book, Whitby becomes the site of the Westenra family's vacation home. Later, when Count Dracula is brought to England as a secret passenger on a Russian merchantman, the Demeter, the unmanned vessel drives itself ashore at Whitby in a storm. The incident was based on an actual shipwreck of a Russian vessel that Stoker had heard about from local residents. And finally, after Dracula has disembarked in the form of a large dog, it is on a bench at the top of the cliff, near the cemetery, that Lucy Westenra has her first, fateful encounter with the vampire. Stoker is known to have consulted books on Transylvania, Moldavia, and the Carpathians at the local library at Whitby and, later, after his return to London, in the British Museum reading room. Some of his early research notes are typewritten, almost certainly by Stoker himself (see, for example, ibid., p.26). Stoker's almost obsessive plotting of his novel is demonstrated by a page from a pocket calendar, now at the Rosenbach, whose days and dates correspond to the year 1893. There, Stoker has plotted with meticulous care the daily events of the early portions of his novel. The calendar leaf (illustrated in Belford, p.263, in the Rosenbach Exhibition, rear flap) commences on May 1 with the deleted portion of the text later published as "Dracula's Guest." Then, on 5 May, the calendar reads "J.H. [Jonathan Harker] drove to Castle." On the 9th, Stoker's entry notes "Castle prison" and on the 10th, he writes "Castle, letters home." On the line opposite Thursday, May 11, Stoker has first noted the important scene with Jonathan and the three seductive vampires: "Castle, women kissing." This entry is lined out by Stoker, then the scene is relocated to the line for Monday the 15th of May. (In the published book, this pivotal incident transpires on May 15.) At some point in his research on Transylvania and its turbulent history, Stoker evidently came across accounts of a fierce 15th-century Wallachian warlord who earned the sobriquet Dracul, or "Devil" in his prolonged battles against the invading Turks. His son Vlad IV (1431-1476), or Vlad Tepes, employed the name Dracula (the terminal "a" denoting "son of"). The son was famed for his prodigious cruelties both to enemies and his own subjects, and exhibited a particular penchant for executing his victims by impalement, while alive, on stout wooden stakes. The historical accounts of the depredations of this obscure Hungarian tyrant make quite disturbing reading, and may have been exaggerated by his many enemies and rivals. But the extent of Stoker's knowledge of the historical figure whose name he appropriated is likely to have been very slight. In Chapter 18 of Stoker's novel, the character Abraham Van Helsing remarks that the Count "must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land." As a result of this rather scant reference, Vlad Tepes and his bloody career have remained of great interest to readers of Stoker's Dracula. But Stoker's character was at best "a composite picture--admittedly sketchy--of an authentic historical character who bore at least some of the characteristics of the historical Dracula" (Florescu and McNally, Dracula: Prince of Many Faces, p.9). Some scholars consider Vlad the Impaler essentially irrelevant to any consideration of Dracula, since most of the historical accounts were almost certainly unknown to Stoker (see E. Miller, "Filing for Divorce: Count Dracula vs Vlad Tepes," in Dracula: The Shadow and the Shade, pp.165-179). Dracula's Antecedents If an obscure figure furnished Stoker the name of his main character, what literary models provided him with a general knowledge of vampirism? We know tantalizingly little of what specific sources Stoker may have drawn upon. The mythological vampires--living dead that prey upon the flesh or blood of the living--are a part of the folk belief of nearly every culture. At its most primitive level, vampirism is a form of ritual cannibalism, linked to the ancient belief that the strength, wisdom, or bravery of the victim is symbolically or actually transferred from the victim to the cannibal. The vampire myth is also connected to the widespread belief that men, while asleep, may be visited in nightmares by demons able to drain them of life and vitality, and to the belief in the nocturnal succubus and incubus, male and female demons who engaged in sexual acts with innocent men and women in their sleep. During the eighteenth century there was much debate about the reality of the vampire, and a Benedictine abbot, Augustin Calmet (1672-1757) compiled a dossier of first-hand reports, mostly from Eastern Europe, in his Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohème, de Moravie et de Silésie (Paris, 1746). Calmet summarized the main tenets of vampirism: "dead men return from their tombs, are heard to speak, walk about prey upon both men and animals, whose blood they drain rendering them sick and finally causing death." Calmet also reported that the only way to kill such creatures was to "dig the corpses up and drive a sharpened stake through these bodies, cut off the heads, cut out the hearts, or else to burn the bodies to ashes." (Calmet, though, remained skeptical of the horrific narratives he gathered, especially since none where supported by solid, objective proof; he believed that most of the cases represented tragic cases of premature burial.) Reports by Calmet and others of vampires coincided with the development of the gothic novel, launched by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764). It and its successors, of which there were many in the latter part of the century, often featured medieval settings with stock elements: a castle, ruined abbey or abandoned mansion equipped with darkened passages, high towers and grim dungeons. Frequently, in these stories, a virtuous young woman is pursued by a powerfully attractive but threatening man, and often, in a climactic scene, is rescued from his evil designs--which, it is implied, are sexual--by the courageous actions of a virtuous young man seeking only honorable matrimony. Much gothic fiction involved supernatural elements: ghosts, apparitions, strange visitations, premonitions and madness, and often dealt, in symbolically veiled fashion, with such inflammatory realities as fornication, incest, adultery, homoeroticism, sadism and masochism. Extreme emotional states and shocking revelations often culminated in outright violence. These settings and narrative components were carefully exploited to evoke in the reader strong sympathetic emotions of tension, fear, terror and horror. The vampire entered English literature in the early decades of the nineteenth century, making its debut simultaneously with that of another powerful archetype, the man-made monster, Frankenstein. In the summer of 1816, George Gordon, Lord Byron, his personal physician, Dr. John Polidori, the poet Percy Shelley and the young Mary Godwin Shelley, were living near each other at Lake Geneva. During one of their frequent house-parties at Byron's Villa Diodati, they fell to reading a collection of ghost stories in French. Byron suggested that each of them should a ghost story. Both Shelley and Byron (who was still occupied with the writing of his epic Childe Harold: A Pilgrimage) soon abandoned the project, but nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley completed a tale published in 1818 as Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Dr. Polidori, who had not written fiction before, expanding upon a plot kernel suggested by Byron and produced the first modern vampire tale, The Vampyre, which he published in 1821. Polidori's vampire, Lord Ruthven (whom the author may have modeled after Lord Byron himself) has much in common with Stoker's later Count Dracula: both are suave, self-centered and powerfully attractive to women. Although Polidori's tale was clumsily plotted and amateurishly written, it was often mistakenly attributed to Byron himself (to the poet's intense displeasure) and served as the basis for many successful theatrical adaptations and reworkings in both French and English. These included such stage works as Charles Nodier's and Cyprien Berard's Lord Ruthven et les vampires (1820), Nodier's Le vampire (1820), James Robinson Planche's The Vampire, or the Bride of the Isles (1820), Le Vampire, drama fantastique (1851) by Alexandre Dumas pére, and Dion Boucicault's The Vampire (1852, successfully staged by Charles Kean). These popular melodramas, widely performed for several decades, made the character of Lord Ruthven and the sanguinary aspects of vampirism familiar to a very wide segment of the Victorian literary public, probably including Stoker. In the meantime, another English author had taken the vampire theme to a new height--or length, at least--in his 800-page novel entitled Varney the Vampire or The Feast of Blood (1847), published anonymously but now reliably attributed to James Malcolm Rhymer (1814-1881), a prolific writer of horror and adventure fiction. But a more serious predecessor of Stoker was the Irish author, J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), whose 1872 Carmilla focused with great insight on the psychology and shifting emotions of his characters, and used familiar settings as well as the devices of gothic fiction. Stoker, who reviewed drama for the Le Fanu's Dublin Evening Mail, is quite likely to have encountered Carmilla. A scholar who has written extensively on Dracula and related horror fiction places Le Fanu in a pivotal position in the evolution of a whole genre: "Le Fanu's interest in the processes of the mind opened the way for the scary psychological fiction that came after him: Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Stoker's Dracula (1897), and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898)" (Leonard Wolf, Dracula: The Connoisseurs' Guide, New York, 1997, p.111). Final Words Dracula was published in June 1897, in a first printing of 3,000 copies, and received rather mixed reviews. Stoker's friend and fellow author Arthur Conan Doyle was impressed, calling it "the best story of diablerie which I have read for many years. It is really wonderful how with so much exciting interest over so long a book there is never an anticlimax." Others were much less enthusiastic. One reviewer in the Athenaeum criticized its lack of "constructive art in the higher literary sense," and stated that it seemed "at times like a mere series of grotesquely incredible events." But at least one early reader, Charlotte Stoker, Bram's mother, clearly recognized the power and originality of Dracula. In an enthusiastic letter to her son, she wrote, "it is splendid, a thousand miles beyond anything you have written before, and I feel will place you very high in the writers of the day--the story and style being deeply sensational, exciting and interesting...No book since Mrs. Shelley's 'Frankenstein' or indeed any other has come near yours in originality or terror." Mrs. Stoker, it would seem, was quite correct. The enduring fascination of this unique late Victorian novel, a century after its first publication, testifies to the richness of the psychological themes Stoker tapped--consciously or unconsciously--and to the vitality of the characters--particularly Count Dracula--whom he summoned from his imagination in its creation. Provenance: Discovered about 1980; A California collector; The present owner, in 1984. |