At least a rudimentary understanding of Victorian history is necessary to appreciate the contemporary readership for Dracula. By the beginning of Victoria’s reign in 1837, Britain was in the process of not only creating the Industrial Revolution but becoming the greatest industrialized nation in Europe. Spurred on by the acquisition of overseas territories, England witnessed an exponential burst of industrial growth. New, surprisingly complex forms of commerce arose, much of it as a response to the masses who suddenly swelled cities like Manchester, Birmingham, and London, creating sprawling urban centres where crime and poverty abounded.

By 1868, when Benjamin Disraeli became Prime Minister, Britain had unequivocally become the world’s most powerful nation, and Disraeli loudly and frequently advocated this expansion, epitomized by the coronation of Victoria, at his instigation, as Empress of India in 1876. Disraeli’s “imperialist” foreign policies were further justified by invoking generalizations partly derived from Darwin’s theory of evolution. The argument was that imperialism was a manifestation of what Kipling referred to as “the white man’s burden.” The Empire existed, argued its supporters, not for the benefit—economic, strategic, or otherwise—of Britain, but in order that “primitive” peoples, incapable of self-government, could, with British guidance, eventually become Christian and civilized. This mentality served to legitimize Britain’s acquisition of portions of central Africa and her domination, in concert with other European powers, of China and other parts of Asia.

In the Victorian age, the study of “natural philosophy” and “natural history” became “science,” and students, who, in an earlier time, had been exclusively gentlemen and clerical naturalists, became, after their course of study, professional scientists. In the general population, belief in natural laws and continuous progress began to grow, and there was frequent interaction among science, government, and industry. As science education was expanded and formalized, a fundamental transformation occurred in beliefs about nature and the place of humans in the universe. A revival of religious activity, largely unmatched since the days of the Puritans, swept England. This religious revival shaped that code of moral behaviour which became known as Victorianism. Above all, religion occupied a place in the public consciousness that it had not had a century before and did not retain in the twentieth century.

The end of the Victorian age brought a variety of literature to the public. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae (1889), several novels of J. M. Barrie (who later wrote Peter Pan), Hall Caine’s The Bondman (1890), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and several of Wilde’s plays, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891) and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893), many works of Rudyard Kipling, and H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man (1897) all caught the public’s eye, to greater or lesser degrees. American works such as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) also drew attention.

A runaway “best-seller” of the decade was George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), a novel that, with its striking central image of a swooning young woman, bears some similarities to Stoker’s narrative.⁵ Although little read today, the book told of a young artist and his model, Trilby, who are lovers but separated by social class. When the artist leaves her, she falls under the influence of Svengali, a psychically vampiric impresario and hypnotist, who moulds her into a great singer, “La Svengali.” However, she is only able to—and is compelled to—sing in his trances. When Svengali himself dies, she appears to be freed, but a picture of him causes her to mechanically sing again, and she dies.

Upon publication, the novel caused a sensation in Britain and America. In its first year of publication, it sold 200,000 copies in America alone, and the term “Svengali” came to be applied to any hypnotist. The book was turned into a popular play, revivified the allure of la vie bohème, last glorified in Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie bohème (1851), and probably sparked interest in Puccini’s 1896 opera La Bohème.

Dracula is in many ways a book of its time. It reflects the Victorian fascination with the supernatural and the rising interest in Spiritualism and the nature of death. Its tale of the invasion of England by a dangerous foreigner mirrors larger concerns about Eastern European immigrants and the Irish question. The women of Dracula exemplify the Victorians’ struggle with the role of women, with Lucy embodying the traditional role and Mina the changing role. The narrative also depicts the confrontation between science and invention, in the form of typewriters, phonographs, cameras, telegraphs, the railroads, and the like, versus the superstitions and traditions of prior years. For a picture of the late Victorian period and its turmoil, Dracula encapsulates nearly every issue of the idea in its shocking story.

Trends in popular culture come and go. Most of them last a few months, a year on the outside. The really pervasive ones can last a decade, and even come to define that decade. Dracula is one cultural icon that breaks all the rules—and is currently enjoying its biggest moment in the spotlight ever.

First introduced to Victorian society by author by Bram Stoker in 1897, Dracula had a quiet start. At that time, the vampires of legend were considered monstrous creatures. Bram’s Count Dracula, a 15th century Romanian nobleman who could walk amongst the masses unseen, was perhaps ahead of his time.

Maybe it was the horrors of World War I or the influenza pandemic at this time, but the reality of death–whether on the battlefield or in your own home–made horror feel close, and familiar, no longer relegated to ancient superstition and distant far away lands.

Bram’s novel had become a bestseller by the mid 1920’s, and Hamilton Dean’s stage play of the novel was playing to sold out crowds all over the U.K In 1927, Dracula came to America. Bela Lugosi assumed the role of the count on Broadway and nothing would ever be the same again.

Bela Lugosi’s iconic stage characterization of Count Dracula was about much more than the evil that lurks amongst us. By making Dracula a more nuanced character, full of contradictions, Lugosi held up a mirror to his audience and showed their own conflicted beings. His portrayal was as at once frightening and eye-opening. Lugosi took America by storm—and his starring role in the later film mesmerized the world.

Since then, more and more have come to read Bram Stoker’s horror classic. Dracula has become an important part of the literary canon, and the character of the vampire has taken on countless forms in film, television, books, and other art forms.

There have been many schools of thought on why Dracula and vampires hold such sway on the masses. In my opinion, the root is that Dracula represents freedom. Dracula is not bound by the rule of law or man’s self-imposed morality. He has the strength of ten men. His powers over the human mind allow him his pick of women. These are all powerful fantasies to many an adolescent boy. For women, Dracula represents the ultimate alpha-male. Wealth, power, will and strength define him. He exists on a higher plane than human men, appealing to the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” mentality.

Dracula’s immortality also plays into the very common fear of aging that all humans share. He does not age, isn’t susceptible to illness. Man’s greatest fear is death. For Dracula, death is meaningless.

These qualities make Dracula timeless. He speaks to some of our deepest animal traits. Within each of us are the capacity for violence, vengeance, vigilantism, theft, and a yearning for the rules of the jungle. What makes us civilized as humans is our capacity to control these base instincts. Yet, perhaps we all wish at times to unleash them, whether we want to admit it or not. Dracula can. Dracula represents the evil of which all men are capable.

My sisters and I grew up with the knowledge that Bram Stoker was our great-grand uncle. We considered Dracula to be a cousin, someone whose story was intertwined with our own.

Halloween is a big deal for children in Canada, so growing up with a personal Dracula connection caused a certain stir, although our friends were more impressed by the idea than my sisters and I. Of course we dressed the part at Halloween. Thanks to the enduring popularity of all things vampire, even today some fangs and a cape make a simple, yet unmistakable costume.

Given the family connection, it may seem surprising that the first time I read Dracula was in college. I was writing a paper on the subject of repressed Victorian sexuality, and read the novel under the pressure of considering such knotty problems as what the characters ‘really’ represented, and all the potential subtexts and ‘deep meanings’ in the book. But almost immediately I was drawn into the narrative and swept away in its tide. I quickly came to the conclusion there is no need to examine Dracula too deeply in order to enjoy Bram’s most famous book. Even now, after all the time I have spent with the novel, I regard Bram as a hard-working and honorable man who happened to write a most remarkable story. I leave the psychoanalysis to others.

While researching that paper I became overwhelmed by the many variations of the story that were available in book and film form. Clearly my ancestor had struck a chord in the popular imagination. But what I found most confounding was that there seemed to be little or no respect for his original work.

Then I met Ian Holt, a young man who had his own fascination with Dracula and had spent twenty years researching both the historic Prince Dracula and Bram’s Dracula, lecturing and giving papers at scholarly gatherings around the world. At Ian’s suggestion, my wife Jenne and I made a pilgrimage to the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, drawn there like so many others seeking the genesis of Dracula. As I held my ancestor’s jotted notes in my hands, I sensed his presence and felt my connection with him flowing through my veins. It was the first time in my life I had felt so close to him, and this sense was pivotal in prompting me to dig deeper. I realized that my own research methods were similar, for while some of my ideas and information were methodically collected in spiral notebooks or in Word files, at other times I grabbed fleeting ideas, scribbling them on the backs of envelopes or whatever first came to hand.

I discovered that Bram Stoker carried out thorough research before writing Dracula, although he never set foot in the foreign lands he so accurately described in the novel. Instead, he made good use of stories told by my great-grandfather, Bram’s younger brother George, set in the rugged mountains of Eastern Europe where George served in the Red Crescent (originally the Ottoman equivalent to the Red Cross), as well as his own extensive research in the British Museum library. Similarly, in order for Bram’s characters in Whitby to use just a few words of the correct local dialect, Bram compiled for himself an entire dictionary of Yorkshire dialect during his visits to the area.

Sir William Thornley Stoker, Bram’s oldest brother, also contributed to his notes with diagrams and explanations of brain surgery which Bram used to describe Renfield’s medical condition.

When I introduce myself, someone is likely to ask casually, ‘Any relation to Bram Stoker?’ Until now there has usually been surprise when I answer, yes. Perhaps now, with the publication of Dracula: The Un-Dead, that will no longer be the case.

I am proud to have Bram Stoker as a relative, as well as many other Stokers, past and present, who have strived to their purpose, and have left high marks in their pursuits, professions, military service, sporting endeavors, and charity work. In reality, Bram is but one of many Stokers to be admired, and as much as we share characteristics, we also share the family motto, ‘whatever is true and honorable’.

I hope you will greatly enjoy this classic and beloved novel.

In 1908, Irish writer Bram Stoker (far better known in his own day as a theatre manager than as an author) approached a young Winston Churchill about an interview for a London newspaper. Churchill, who eschewed interviews, made an exception in this case because, as he told Stoker, “You are the author of Dracula.”

The novel Dracula was published in London in 1897. The book has never been out of print, and has been reissued in hundreds of editions including dozens of foreign language translations. Today, its title evokes instant recognition. It is one of those rare novels that just about everyone has heard of but few have actually read. While the novel was by no means a best seller during the lifetime of its author (Stoker died in 1912), its later adaptation into stage plays and movies would assure its immortality. The figure of Count Dracula has managed to permeate just about every aspect of our culture: from comic books to chamber musicals, from Halloween costumes to ballet productions, from Dracula websites to Dracula tours. In a way, Dracula has become a victim of its own success. The plot has been mangled (especially by the movies), and the figure of Count Dracula has been trivialized to the point of ridicule.

“Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!” With these words, Count Dracula invites Jonathan Harker (and the reader) into his castle. I have a word of advice for the first-time visitor to this unusual novel: leave all your preconceptions and misconceptions outside the castle door. Forget the tacky movies, forget “I vant to suck your blooood” (a line that does not appear in the book), forget the Count on Sesame Street, forget Anne Rice, forget Twilight. And above all, forget Vlad the Impaler!

Bram Stoker did not invent the vampire. While vampires are part of the folklore and legends of many cultures dating back to ancient times, they did not make their appearance in British fiction until the early nineteenth century, with the publication of John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819). Polidori based his vampire – Lord Ruthven – on his former employer, the infamous Lord Byron. Interest in vampire literature continued through the nineteenth century. But it was Dracula (1897) that became the yardstick by which all future vampires in both fiction and film would be measured. Though Stoker appropriated certain elements of earlier fiction, his novel represents a major break from the Byronic tradition. He reached back to folklore to establish his vampire as more animalistic and repulsive – a walking corpse with fetid breath, hairy palms and pointed fingernails. The Count Dracula of Stoker’s novel is not, to the disappointment of many first-time readers today, the romantic, suave figure that evolved during the twentieth century.

Thanks to the availability of Stoker’s Notes for Dracula (124 pages of plot outlines, lists of characters, descriptions, medical details, an article entitled “Vampires in New England,” and research notes), we know a great deal about the genesis and development of the novel. For example, the Notes indicate that Stoker found the name “Dracula” in an obscure history book (William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia) in the Whitby Public Library where he was vacationing in the summer of 1890. He had already started his novel, and even had a name for his vampire – Count Wampyr. He was attracted to the name “Dracula” because a footnote in his source indicated it was derived from a Romanian word meaning “devil.” He appropriated the name, and Dracula became a vampire. Apparently, Stoker knew very little about the original Dracula (Vlad the Impaler). As for Transylvania, that was not Stoker’s first choice as a homeland for his vampire Count. That distinction belongs to Styria, a province in Austria and the setting of Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872). The change was apparently inspired by Emily Gerard’s article “Transylvanian Superstitions” (The Nineteenth Century, 1885).

Prior to the 1970s, the academic community paid little attention to Dracula. That began to change, as post-modernist challenges to the traditional literary canon became more widespread. Dracula is now viewed by many as a significant novel. Indeed, its links with a vast range of disciplines, including anthropology, folklore, history, literature, medicine, psychology, religious studies and cultural studies have led to exciting scholarship and criticism. Many point to its psychosexual underpinnings. For others, it provides a window through which we can view the late Victorian age, the “fin-de-siècle” with its many fears and anxieties: the blurring of gender roles, waves of immigration from Eastern Europe, the erosion of traditional Christian beliefs in an increasingly skeptical age; the fear of regression, a reversal of evolution, a return to our more primal animal state.

In spite of its improbabilities, its overwrought dialogue and its internal inconsistencies, Dracula is a classic. The explosion of scholarly interest in what for decades was dismissed as an inferior novel is both a measure of Dracula’s significant contribution to the bridging of the gap between popular and elitist writing and an indication of the enduring power of the myth that Stoker borrowed and reshaped, a myth that resonates in different ways for each generation, inviting them to confront their own fears, anxieties and desires. Dracula has managed to implant itself firmly in our cultural consciousness. While the craftsmanship is somewhat flawed, we have in Dracula another example of what Harold Bloom once said of Edgar Allan Poe, a work that is “somehow stronger than its telling… What survives is the psychological dynamics and the mythic reverberations.”

It is a novel that demands to be read.

Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition. Transcribed and annotated by Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller. McFarland, 2008.

Clive Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and the Legend – A Study of Bram Stoker’s Gothic Masterpiece. Desert Island Books, 2001.

Elizabeth Miller, Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Documentary Journey into Vampire Country and the Dracula Phenomenon. Pegasus, 2009.

Paul Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker. Jonathan Cape, 2004.

Carol A. Senf, Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism. Twayne, 1998.

David J Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen. Faber & Faber, 2004.