Dracula

Dracula was published by Archibald Constable in London on 26 May 1897, in yellow cloth with red lettering, price six shillings. Its author, Bram Stoker, was forty-nine and had spent most of his working life as business manager of Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre; he had been reading and making notes toward a vampire novel since 1890, drawing on Emily Gerard’s articles on Transylvanian folklore, on Whitby, where he holidayed, and on a great deal of railway-timetable and Baedeker research that gives the book its peculiar documentary texture. It sold steadily rather than sensationally in his lifetime. Its afterlife began on the stage and the screen, and it is the films, not the book, that most people think they know.

The book is better, and odder. It is told entirely in documents — diaries, letters, phonograph cylinders, newspaper cuttings, a ship’s log — assembled, we are told at the end, by the survivors, so that the reader is placed among a group of modern, rational, note-taking people who cannot at first believe what their own records show. The Count is present in perhaps a tenth of the pages. The rest is waiting, inference and typewriting, and the effect, for a reader willing to go at the book’s own pace, is a dread that grows by accumulation. Stoker’s sources were popular, but his method — a horror story built out of paperwork — anticipates the detective novel and the modern thriller.

Read the first four chapters, Jonathan Harker’s journal in the castle, as a complete short novel in themselves; then notice how the book’s centre of gravity shifts to the women, to Lucy Westenra in Whitby and Mina Harker in London, and how much of the machinery of the plot is handed to Mina, who is the best stenographer, the best organiser and very nearly the best detective in the company.

This edition follows the Gutenberg transcription of the first edition, complete, with the author’s dedication to Hall Caine (“Hommy-Beg”) and his prefatory note on how the papers were arranged. Nothing has been cut; the long dialect passages in Whitby are as Stoker printed them.