It is fitting that Bram Stoker is more celebrated in death than life. This week marks the centenary of his death. Numerous events have been held in his honour. It’s a typical jamboree.
Horror writer Stewart King has explained how Stoker’s legacy is being sustained by a new wave of vampire fiction, which, for those who’ve been locked in an eerie for the past decade, has proved wildly popular. Vampires also remain popular in academic circles. The Times Higher Education reports that numerous professors convened for a Stoker centenary conference, where they lamented the modern assault on the gothic tradition. They condemned the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis on vampire stories, and castigated the ‘Americanisation’ of gothic literature, which has replaced the violent, brooding aristocrat with the insipid form of the tortured adolescent. In other words, ditch Stephanie Meyer and revive Stoker.
Dracula was published in May 1897. What did Victorian readers make of it? Here is the Spectator’s review, published on 31 July 1897:
Mr Bram Stoker gives us the impression — we may be doing him an injustice —of having deliberately laid himself out in Dracula to eclipse all previous efforts in the domain of the horrible — to ‘go one better’ than Wilkie Collins (whose method of narration he has closely followed), Sheridan Le Fanu, and all the other professors of the flesh-creeping school. Count Dracula, who gives his name to the book, is a Transylvanian noble who purchases an estate in England, and in connection with the transfer of the property Jonathan Harker, a young solicitor, visits him in his ancestral castle. Jonathan Harker has a terrible time of it, for the Count — who is a vampire of immense age, cunning and experience — keeps him as a prisoner for several weeks, and when the poor young man escapes from the gruesome charnel-house of his host, he nearly dies of brain-fever in a hospital at Budapest.
The scene then shifts to England, where the Count arrives by sea in the shape of a dog-fiend, after destroying the entire crew, and resumes operations in various uncanny manifestations, selecting as his chief victim Miss Lucy Westenra, the fiancée of the Honourable Artur Holmwood, heir presumptive to Lord Godalming. The story then resolves itself into the history of the battle between Lucy’s protectors, including two rejected suitors — an American and a ‘mad’ doctor —and a wonderfully clever specialist from Amsterdam, against her unearthly persecutor. The clue is furnished by Jonathan Harker, whose betrothed, Mina Murray, is a bosom friend of Lucy’s, and the fight is long and protracted.
Lucy succumbs, and, worse still, is temporarily converted into a vampire. How she is released from this unpleasant position and restored to a peaceful post-mortem existence, how Mina is next assailed by the Count, how he is driven from England, and finally exterminated by the efforts of the league — for all these and a great many more thrilling details, we must refer our readers to the pages of Mr Stoker’s clever but cadaverous romance. Its strength lies in the invention of incident, for the sentimental element is decidedly mawkish. Mr Stoker has shown considerable ability in the use that he has made of all the available traditions of vampirology, but we think his story would have been all the more effective if he had chosen an earlier period. The up-to-dateness of the book — the phonograph diaries, typewriters and so on — hardly fits in with the mediaeval methods which ultimately secure the victory for Count Dracula’s foes.
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