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Dracula is an 1897 Gothic fiction horror fiction novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. The narrative is Epistolary novel, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist and opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Harker flees after learning that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. A small group, led by Abraham Van Helsing, hunts and kills him.
The novel was mostly written in the 1890s, and Stoker produced over a hundred pages of notes, drawing extensively from folklore and history. Scholars have suggested various figures as the inspiration for Dracula, including the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler and the Countess Elizabeth Báthory, but recent scholarship suggests otherwise. He probably found the name Dracula in Whitby's public library while on holiday, selecting it because he thought it meant 'devil' in Romanian.
Following the novel's publication in May 1897, some reviewers praised its terrifying atmosphere while others thought Stoker included too much horror. Many noted a structural similarity with Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1859) and a resemblance to the work of Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe. In the 20th century, Dracula became regarded by critics as a seminal work of Gothic fiction. Scholars explore the novel within the historical context of the Victorian era and regularly discuss its portrayal of race, religion, gender and sexuality.
Dracula is one of the most famous works of English literature and has been called the centrepiece of vampire fiction. In the mid-20th century, publishers and film-makers realised Stoker incorrectly filed the novel's copyright in the United States, making its story and characters public domain there. Consequently, the novel has been adapted many times. Count Dracula has deeply influenced the popular conception of vampires; with over 700 appearances across virtually all forms of media, the Guinness Book of World Records named Dracula the most portrayed literary character.
Lucy Westenra's letter to her best friend, Harker's fiancée Mina Harker, describes her marriage proposals from John Seward, Quincey Morris, and Arthur Holmwood. Lucy accepts Holmwood's, but all remain friends. Mina joins Lucy on holiday in Whitby. Lucy begins to sleepwalking. After Dracula's ship lands in Whitby, he begins to stalk Lucy. Mina receives a letter about her missing fiancé's illness and goes to Budapest to nurse him. Lucy becomes very ill; Seward's old teacher—Professor Abraham Van Helsing—determines the nature of her condition, but he refuses to disclose it, instead diagnosing it as acute Hypovolemia. Van Helsing places garlic flowers around her room and makes her a necklace of them. Lucy's mother removes the garlic flowers, not knowing they repel vampires. While Seward and Van Helsing are absent, Lucy and her mother are terrified by a wolf and Mrs. Westenra dies of a heart attack; Lucy dies shortly thereafter. After her burial, newspapers report children being stalked in the night by a "bloofer lady" (beautiful lady), and Van Helsing deduces it is Lucy. Seward, Morris, Arthur and Van Helsing go to her tomb and see that she is a vampire. They stake her heart, Decapitation her, and fill her mouth with garlic. Jonathan Harker and his new bride Mina return and join the campaign against Dracula.
Everyone stays at Seward's asylum as the men begin to hunt Dracula. Van Helsing finally reveals that vampires can only rest on earth from their homeland. Dracula communicates with Seward's patient, Renfield, an insane man who eats vermin to absorb their life force. After Dracula learns of the group's plot against him, he uses Renfield to enter the asylum. He secretly attacks Mina three times, drinking her blood each time and forcing Mina to drink his blood on the final visit, cursing her to become a vampire after her death unless Dracula is killed. The men discover that Dracula has distributed his boxes of earth around various properties in London. After sterilizing most of the distributed boxes, the group fails to trap the Count in his Piccadilly house and learns that Dracula is fleeing to his castle in Transylvania with his last box. Using hypnosis, Van Helsing exploits Mina's faint psychic connection to Dracula to track his movements and they pursue, guided by Mina.
In Galatz, Romania, the hunters split up. Van Helsing and Mina go to Dracula's castle, where the professor destroys the vampire women. Harker and Holmwood pursue Dracula's boat on the river, while Morris and Seward follow them on land. Dracula's box is loaded onto a wagon by Romani people men; the hunters attack and rout the Romani. Harker Decapitation Dracula as Quincey stabs him in the heart. Dracula crumbles to dust, freeing Mina from her vampiric curse. Quincey is mortally wounded in the fight against the Romani. He dies, at peace knowing that Mina is saved. A note by Jonathan Harker seven years later states that the Harkers have a son, named Quincey.
He supplemented his theatre income by writing Romance novel and , but was more closely identified during his lifetime with the theatre than he was with the literary world. By the time of his death in 1912, Stoker had published 18 books. Dracula was Stoker's seventh published book, following The Shoulder of Shasta (1895) and preceding Miss Betty (1898). Stoker's grand-nephew, Daniel Farson, wrote that Stoker may have died from syphilis, but this is widely disputed by scholars. Novelist and playwright Hall Caine, a close friend of Stoker's, wrote in Stoker's obituary in The Daily Telegraph that—besides his biography on Irving—Stoker wrote only "to sell" and "had no higher aims".
Count Dracula has literary progenitors. John William Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819) includes an aristocratic vampire with powers of seduction. The lesbian vampire of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) can transform into a cat, as Dracula can transform into a dog. Dracula resembles earlier Gothic villains in appearance, with Miller comparing him to the villains of Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1796) and Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk (1796).
There is almost unanimous consensus that Dracula was inspired, in part, by Henry Irving. Scholars note the Count's tall and lean physique and aquiline nose, with Dracula scholar William Hughes specifically citing the influence of Irving's performance as Shylock in a Lyceum Theatre production of The Merchant of Venice. Stoker's contemporaries remarked upon the similarity. Stoker had praised a performance of Irving as "a wonderful impression of a dead man fictitiously alive with cinders of glowing red from out the marble face". Louis S. Warren writes that Dracula was founded on "the fear and animosity his employer inspired in him". Miller contests this, describing Stoker's attitude towards him as "adulation".
Historical figures have been suggested as inspirations for Count Dracula but there is no consensus. In a 1972 book, Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu popularised the idea that Ármin Vámbéry supplied Stoker with information about Vlad Dracula, commonly known as Vlad the Impaler. Their investigation, however, found nothing about "Vlad, Dracula, or vampires" within Vámbéry's published papers, nor in Stoker's notes about their meeting. Miller calls the link to Vlad III "tenuous", indicating that Stoker incorporated a large amount of "insignificant detail" from his research, and rhetorically asking why he would omit Vlad III's infamous cruelty. McNally additionally suggested in 1983 that the crimes of Elizabeth Báthory inspired Stoker. A book used by Stoker for research, The Book of Were-Wolves, does contain some information on Báthory, but Stoker never took notes from the short section devoted to her. Miller and her co-author Robert Eighteen-Bisang concur that there is no evidence Báthory inspired Stoker.
Stoker's notes reveal other scrapped concepts. Bierman says that Stoker always intended to write an epistolary novel but originally set it in Styria instead of Transylvania. Other concepts from the notes include a German professor called Max Windshoeffel confronting a "Count Wampyr" and one of the vampire hunters would have been slain by a werewolf. Stoker biographer Barbara Belford notes evidence that Stoker intended to write a detective story, with a detective called Cotford and a psychical investigator called Singleton.
Stoker took the name Dracula from William Wilkinson's history of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820), which he probably found in Whitby's public library while holidaying there in 1890. Stoker copied the following footnote from the book: "Dracula means devil. Wallachians were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous by courage, cruel actions or cunning".
Stoker stated that it took him about three years to write the novel, and it is likely that he wrote most of the manuscript during his summer holidays in Cruden Bay, Scotland from 1893 to 1896. Stoker generally wrote in spare time from his duties as Irving's business manager, and the long gestation of the novel is indicative of the importance he placed on it.
Bound in yellow cloth and titled in red letters, Dracula was published in May 1897 by Archibald Constable and Company. It cost 6 . Uncertainty exists around the exact date of publication, but it was probably published on 26 May 1897. Stoker wrote to William Gladstone that the novel would be released on the 26th. Paul McAlduff writes that it was published "on or about May 26". Eighteen-Bisang states it could have been published anywhere from late May to June 1897.
Stoker's mother, Charlotte Stoker, enthused about the novel and predicted it would bring her son immense financial success. She was wrong: the novel, although reviewed well, failed to earn Stoker much money and did not establish his critical reputation until after his death. For the first thousand sales of Dracula, Stoker earned no royalties. Following serialisation by American newspapers, Doubleday & McClure published an American edition in 1899 with some textual changes. A cheaper paperback version was published by Constable in 1901, but few copies have survived. The text is around 15% shorter than the original but it is not known if Stoker made the amendments. Since its publication, Dracula has never been out of print.
An edition of the novel edited by McNally and Florescu in 1979 was the first to include Dracula
David Seed argues that the structure only provides a narrative voice to Dracula's opponents, while Miller writes that the "collaborative narration" reinforces the idea that Dracula must be defeated by a combined effort. Allison Case says Seed views that Dracula's absence generates tension by offering only "tantalizing glimpses" of his activities, while literary critic Franco Moretti writes that it highlights the power struggle between the vampire and his hunters. Similarly, Allison Case views the structure as representing a power struggle between Mina and the male protagonists for "narrative mastery". Seed notes that the narrative's style distances the reader from its plot. Dracula's journey on the Demeter is captured by the captain on the logbook, then "translated by the Russian consul, transcribed by a local journalist, and finally pasted by Mina into her journal".
Contemporary reviewers frequently compared the novel to other Gothic writers. Comparisons to novelist Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White (1859) were especially common, owing to similarities in structure and style. A review appearing in The Bookseller notes that the novel could almost have been written by Collins, and an anonymous review in Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art wrote that Dracula improved upon the style of Gothic pioneer Ann Radcliffe; Radcliffe was also referenced by The Daily Mail, which also highlighted The Mysteries of Udolpho, Frankenstein (1818), and The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). Another anonymous writer described Stoker as "the Edgar Allan Poe of the nineties". Other favourable comparisons to other Gothic novelists included the Brontë sisters and Mary Shelley.: "Dracula's writing was seen by early reviewers and responders to parallel, if not supersede the Gothic horror works of such canonical writers as Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, and Edgar Allan Poe." Arthur Conan Doyle sent a letter to Stoker after reading Dracula, writing: "The old Professor is most excellent and so are the two girls. I congratulate you with all my heart for having written so fine a book."
Many of these early reviews were charmed by Stoker's treatment of the vampire myth. The Daily Telegraph called it the best vampire story ever written. The Daily Telegraph reviewer noted that while earlier Gothic works, like The Castle of Otranto, had kept the supernatural far away from the novelists' home countries, Dracula horrors occurred in foreign lands and at home in Whitby and Hampstead Heath. An Australian paper, The Advertiser, regarded the novel as simultaneously Sensation novel and domestic. One reviewer praised the "considerable power" of Stoker's prose and described it as impressionistic. They were less fond of the parts set in England, finding the vampire suited better to tales set far away from home. The British magazine Vanity Fair found Dracula's disdain for garlic unintentionally funny.
Dracula was considered frightening. A review appearing in The Guardian in 1897 praised its capacity to entertain, but concluded that Stoker erred in including so much horror. Likewise, Vanity Fair opined that the novel was "praiseworthy" and absorbing, but could not recommend it to those who were not "strong". Stoker's prose was commended as effective in sustaining the novel's horror by many publications. A reviewer for the San Francisco Wave called the novel a "literary failure"; they elaborated that coupling vampires with frightening imagery, such as insane asylums and "unnatural appetites", made the horror too overt, and that other works in the genre, such as Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), had more restraint.
Transgressive or abnormal sexuality within Dracula is a broad topic. Some psychosexual critics explore the novel's disruption of Victorian ; within the Victorian context, Christopher Craft writes males had "the right and responsibility of vigorous appetite" while women were required to "suffer and be still". Critics highlight the many places in which the novel disrupts these social mores: Jonathan Harker's excitement over the prospect of being penetrated; Dracula's resulting anger and jealousy; and Lucy's transformation into a sexually aggressive predator who drains "vital fluid". Some critics, including professor Carol Senf, argue that the novel reflects anxiety about female sexual awakening as a threat to established norms.
Dracula contains no overt homosexual acts, but homosexuality and homoeroticism are elements discussed by critics. Christopher Craft argues that the primary threat Dracula poses is that he will "seduce, penetrate, and drain another male", and reads Harker's excitement to submit as a proxy for "an implicitly homoerotic desire". Victorian readers would have identified Dracula with sexual threat. Some critics note that changes made to the 1899 American version of the text reinforce this subtext, wherein Dracula states he will feed on Harker. Critics have variously linked these themes to homoerotic letters Stoker wrote to Walt Whitman, his friendship with Oscar Wilde, his intensely emotional relationship with Irving, and contemporary rumours of Stoker's almost sexless marriage. David J. Skal acknowledged the letters' subtext but cautioned against applying Anachronism modern sexual labels to Stoker.
Many critics have suggested that the novel reveals a "reactionary response" to the New Woman phenomenon. This is a late-Victorian term used to describe an emerging class of women with increased social and economic control over their lives. Several critics describe the battle against Dracula as a fight for control over women's bodies. Senf suggests that Stoker was ambivalent about the New Woman phenomenon, while Signorroti argues that the novel's discomfort with female sexual autonomy reflects Stoker's dislike for the movement. Both Lucy and Mina have characteristics associated with the New Woman; Mina, who plays an important role in Dracula's defeat, repeatedly expresses contempt for the concept. Senf notes that Lucy is punished for expressing dissatisfaction with her social position as a woman. After her transformation into a vampire, her defeat by the vampire hunters symbolises the re-establishment of "male supremacy".
Critics frequently identify Antisemitism themes and imagery in the novel. Between 1891 and 1900, the number of Jews living in England increased sixfold, mainly due to antisemitic legislation and in eastern Europe. Examples cited by Jack Halberstam of antisemitic connections include Dracula's appearance, wealth, parasitic bloodlust, and "lack of allegiance" to one country. Dracula's appearance resembles some other cultural depictions of Jews, such as Fagin in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838), and Svengali of George du Maurier's Trilby (1895). Jewish people were frequently described as parasites in Victorian literature; Halberstam highlights fears that Jews would spread diseases of the blood, and one journalist's description of Jews as "Yiddish bloodsuckers". Daniel Renshaw writes that any antisemitism in the text is "semi-subliminal"; he writes that Dracula is not Jewish but does reflect the 19th-century conception of Jewish people. Renshaw frames the novel more broadly as a general suspicion of all foreigners.
The novel's depiction of Slovaks and Romani people has attracted limited scholarly attention. In the novel, Harker describes the Slovaks as "barbarians" and their boats as "primitive", reflecting his imperialistic condescension towards other cultures. Peter Arnds writes that the Count's control over the Romani and his abduction of young children evoke folk superstitions about Romani people stealing children, and that his ability to transform into a wolf is related to xenophobic beliefs about the Romani as animalistic. Croley argues that Dracula's association with the Romani made him suspect in the eyes of Victorian England, where they were stigmatised owing to beliefs that they ate "unclean meat" and lived among animals.
The vampire hunters use many weapons—including Christian practices and symbols (prayer, crucifixes and consecrated hosts), folkloric practices (garlic, staking and decapitation) and contemporary technology (typewriters, , telegrams, blood transfusions and )—in their battle against Dracula. Sanders argues that Stoker presents Christianity as a religion that can be instrumentalised and incorporated into scientific knowledge. Herbert describes Van Helsing's "Christian purification" of Lucy as punitively addressing her promiscuity, and the resulting framing of Christianity as a means towards the "eradication of deviancy".
Raphaël Ingelbien notes that "recognizably nationalist" critics like Terry Eagleton and Seamus Deane favoured readings of Dracula as "a bloodthirsty caricature of the aristocratic landlord" where the vampire represents the death of feudalism. Bruce Stewart changes the focus to the lower classes, suggesting Dracula and his Romani followers more likely represented violence by Irish National Land League activists. Michael Valdez Moses compares Dracula to the disgraced Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Home Rule movement from 1880 to 1882. Robert Smart argues that Stoker's experience during the Great Famine (1845–1852) influenced the novel, with Stewart also noting this as historical context.
Some critics discuss Count Dracula's Count. Literary critic Franco Moretti writes that he is an aristocrat "only in a manner of speaking", citing his lack of servants, simple clothing, and lack of aristocratic hobbies. Moretti suggests that Dracula's blood thirst represents capital's desire to accumulate more capital. More generally, Moretti argues the novel evinces cultural anxiety about foreign Monopoly functioning as a return of feudalism. Chris Baldick maintains this line of analysis, describing Dracula as an undead symbol of feudalism but concluding that the novel is more concerned with "sexual and religious terrors". Mark Neocleous writes that Dracula symbolises the victory of the bourgeoisie over feudalism. In Das Kapital, Karl Marx compared the bourgeoisie's exploitation of Working class to a vampire draining blood. He uses vampires as a metaphor three times in Das Kapital, but these predate the writing of Dracula.
Adaptations were produced during Stoker's lifetime. Stoker's first theatrical adaptation ( Dracula, or The Undead); was read once at the Lyceum Theatre. While the manuscript was believed lost, the British Library have extracts of the novel's galley proof with Stoker's handwritten stage directions and dialogue attribution. A Swedish newspaper serialised an adaptation from June 1899 to February 1900 as Mörkrets Makter ("Powers of Darkness"). This version is almost twice as long as Stoker's novel, containing elements included in Stoker's notes but not in the published novel. The adaptation contains an author's preface signed "B. S", which Eighteen-Bisang and Miller conclude was not written by Stoker. Although believed lost, the Swedish adaptation was rediscovered and published in 2017. In 1901, Valdimar Ásmundsson translated a heavily abridged version of the Swedish adaptation into Icelandic under the title Makt Myrkranna ("Powers of Darkness"). The adaptation included an abridged author's preface, purportedly by Stoker. Scholars knew the Icelandic version had existed since the 1980s because of the preface attributed to Stoker. When the Swedish translation was rediscovered, scholars learned that the Icelandic version had been translated from it rather than Stoker's Dracula.
The first film to feature Count Dracula was a Hungarian silent film—Károly Lajthay's Drakula halála (). The film allegedly premiered in 1921 but this release date has been questioned by some scholars. Very little of the film survives, and David J. Skal notes that the cover artist for the 1926 Hungarian edition of the novel was more influenced by the second adaptation of Dracula, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922). Critic Wayne E. Hensley writes that the narrative of Nosferatu differs significantly from the novel, but that characters have clear counterparts. Bram Stoker's widow, Florence Stoker, initiated legal action against Prana, the studio behind Nosferatu. The legal case lasted two or three years, with Prana agreeing to destroy all copies in May 1924.
Visual representations of the Count have changed significantly over time. Early treatments of Dracula's appearance were established by theatrical productions in London and New York. Later prominent portrayals of the character by Béla Lugosi (in a 1931 adaptation) and Christopher Lee (firstly in the 1958 film and later its sequels) built upon earlier versions. Chiefly, Dracula's early visual style involved a black-red colour scheme and slicked back hair. Lee's portrayal was overtly sexual, and also popularised fangs on screen. Gary Oldman's portrayal in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), directed by Francis Ford Coppola and costumed by Eiko Ishioka, established a new default look for the character—a Romanian accent and long hair. The assortment of adaptations feature many different dispositions and characteristics of the Count.
It profoundly shaped the popular understanding of how vampires function, including their strengths, weaknesses, and other characteristics. Bats had been associated with vampires before Dracula as a result of the vampire bat's existence—for example, Varney the Vampire (1847) included an image of a bat on its cover illustration—but Stoker deepened the association by making Dracula able to transform into one. That was, in turn, quickly taken up by film studios looking for opportunities to use . Novelist Patrick McGrath notes that many of the Count's characteristics have been adopted by artists succeeding Stoker in depicting vampires, turning those fixtures into clichés. Aside from the Count's ability to transform, McGrath specifically highlights his hatred of garlic and crucifixes. William Hughes writes critically of the Count's cultural omnipresence, noting that the character of Dracula has "seriously inhibited" discussions of the undead in Gothic fiction.
In the 1930s, Universal Studios initiated development on a Dracula film and learned Stoker failed to comply with United States copyright law. This prematurely placed the novel into the public domain in the United States. It was not until the 1960s that publishers recognised the novel's copyright status. Coinciding with the Paperback's rising popularity, publishers began to produce their own versions. Stoker's mistake prevented his descendants from collecting royalties but provided ideal conditions for the novel to endure because writers and producers did not need to pay a licence fee to use the character of Count Dracula.
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