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Bram Stoker's 1897 novel sends the young English solicitor Jonathan Harker to Count Dracula's castle in Transylvania to close a property sale, where he finds…
Bram Stoker's 1897 novel sends the young English solicitor Jonathan Harker to Count Dracula's castle in Transylvania to close a property sale, where he finds that his host is a vampire about to move to London. Told entirely in letters, diaries, a ship's log and newspaper cuttings, the story lets readers live the horror with the characters day by day: a ship runs aground at Whitby with its crew gone, Harker's fiancée Mina watches her friend Lucy waste away, and the Dutch professor Van Helsing leads a small band of friends against the count, from the cemeteries of London back to the mountains of Transylvania.
Context and significance
Stoker, the manager of a London theatre, did not invent the vampire, but he fixed its modern image, the aristocrat who casts no reflection and shrinks from garlic and the crucifix, and his count has haunted literature and film ever since. The name came from a medieval prince of Wallachia. A chapter Stoker cut from the novel was published as Dracula's Guest.
About the author
Bram Stoker (1847–1912) was born in Dublin, a sickly child confined to bed until he was seven, who grew into a university athlete. He worked as a civil servant and an unpaid theatre critic, until his admiration for the actor Henry Irving led him to London, where for twenty-seven years he managed Irving's Lyceum Theatre.
In his spare time he wrote novels and stories, and after years of research into folklore and Eastern Europe published Dracula in 1897. It was only moderately successful in his lifetime, but it gave the modern world its image of the vampire. His widow published Dracula's Guest after his death.