In that case, the Count might feel that nothing Harker has written is of any threat to him. Or it might not matter, since he plans to kill Harker before the journal ever reaches anyone. Or he’s making secret edits. Or or or OR EVEN Dracula LIKED Harker’s observations, liked how they addressed his creepy behavior without ever realizing or articulating too many specifics (every long-term bad-ass probably likes a nice legend, right?), and maybe Harker was meant to escape all along, to spread the crazy word. And then, “He’s mine!” would be nothing more than a mis-direct for the Brides, something to keep them away until Harker escapes.

am I writing fanfic yet, maybe.

Oh, that’s perfect. He really is. Is he in a dressing-gown?

I alluded to this a little in my response above–what exactly is being *omitted* from the journals/letters/&c., and why? Curious and curiouser, no?

BUT I will say that the recounting of the dialogue is one of the things that bugs me the most about this first-person journal/epistolary format. We are meant to accept the accuracy of the reportage of other characters’ speech, as remembered by the narrator of the moment. Rather than impressionistic, which is certainly the most I could ever manage, we’re given multi-paragraph speeches that are ostensibly verbatim. This was driven further home for me when I read Mina’s account of her ‘old friend’. He speaks in a dialect she can, by her own admission, not fully understand, and yet she transcribes it in shorthand which can then be transliterated for our consumption. Despite her reference to her attempts at developing memory or whatever, I struggle with this.

Anyway, just to say that I thought about this when I was thinking about Dracula’s apparent command of English. It’s unclear to me (at least as yet) whether Jonathan is generally tidying up Dracula’s speech in his journal (which is also ‘kept in shorthand’ for that matter) or Mina is more faithful to phonetics.