Bram Stoker's "Dracula" (1897)

Doubleday & McClure Co., New York, 1899

From 1890 to 1897, Bram Stoker wrote his most famous novel, Dracula, while traveling around Europe. Using the folklore of vampires as well as the historical background of Transylvanian-born Vlad III Dracula (also known as Vlad Tepes) of Wallachia, his book describes the struggle of several London aristocrats, doctors and scientists in their attempt to stop a seemingly-ageless vampire named Count Dracula from making a new home in London (and starting a new generation of monsters there).

Archibald Constable and Company, Westminster, Abridged pb, 1901

The book is structured in epistolary form (through letters, journal entries and news articles), and changes locale several times, ranging from the Carpathian mountains to Whitby in north England to London. Although the book itself is divided into 27 chapters, the letters and diary entries are not neatly divided up according to chapter breaks. In fact, some entries cross over the chapter breaks, and several entries are found in each chapter.

Stoker at one point structured the book into four "acts", although these are not noted in its final published form:

• I. TRANSYLVANIA TO WHITBY
• II. TRAGEDY IN WHITBY AND LONDON
• III. DISCOVERY
• IV. PUNISHMENT

I had originally started to write a synopsis based on chapters, but it soon seemed to make more sense to reorganize my analysis in chronological order. After I had finished, I discovered the fantastic Dracula site The Dracula Project, which also has a chronology-based synopsis, but with much greater detail. My version is much more compressed, but that site is highly recommended.

Edward Gorey, 1978

Chronological Synopsis

I. TRANSYLVANIA TO WHITBY: Harker is imprisoned as Dracula prepares to relocate to London

• May 3-4: A Londoner named Harker travels through the Carpathian Mountains towards Transylvania and is amazed at the strange scenery and fearful populace. His panicky carriage driver brings him to the Borgo Pass where a black carriage driven by a bearded, red-eyed character takes Harker on towards Dracula’s castle. On the way, the mysterious driver stops several times to engage in some kind of odd ritual near blue flames seen in the forest. At one point, when wolves threaten the carriage, the driver suddenly returns and turns them away with some kind of strange power.
• May 5: Harker arrives at the castle and is eventually greeted by Count Dracula. Harker informs Dracula that he has come to help finalize the Count’s purchase of a plot of land in London named Carfax, which is next door to a lunatic asylum. Harker is invited to remain at the castle for a few days, as the Count is suffering from gout and cannot immediately depart. When Harker inquires about the blue flames seen on the previous night’s journey, Dracula tells him that on certain ritual nights blue flames will appear to indicate the presence of buried treasure, but also wryly notes that the peasant driver will never be able to find the sites in the daylight. In the following days the Count questions Harker about England but only appears during night hours.

“Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make!” 

• May 8: Harker notices that the Count’s reflection does not appear in his shaving mirror. When Harker cuts his chin and draws blood, Dracula reaches out to him but is halted by the presence of a crucifix around Harker’s neck - a superstitious gift from one of the fearful local peasants. 

“Take care how you cut yourself. It is more dangerous than you think in this country.”

• Later, Harker realizes that all of the exits from the castle are locked and that he is essentially Dracula’s prisoner. Harker realizes that Dracula has no servants at all and must have been the coach driver as well. Over dinner, Dracula reminisces about how he and his people (Szekelys descended from Attila the Hun) had resisted the Saracen Turks throughout the ages. He then has Harker write letters to his friends in London indicating that he will stay with the Count for the next month.

  

  1919 Edition

• May 12: Harker sees the Count peek out his window and then crawl down the castle wall like a lizard.
• May 15: Harker discovers a secret room in the castle and begins to fall asleep. Three ghostly females appear and try to bite his throat. Dracula suddenly appears and warns them off. They eventually depart after Dracula gives them a sack containing a kidnapped baby. Harker passes out.

“How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you’ll have to deal with me."

• May 19: Dracula has Harker write letters post-dated in advance, indicating that he has left the castle.
• May 28: Harker tries to send a letter to his fiance Mina, but the gypsy he passes it to in turn passes it on to the Count.
• June 17: Slovaks bring large boxes and begin to fill them with Transylvanian dirt. Dracula goes into town and kidnaps a child while dressed in Harker’s clothing. He returns and gives the child to the three vampiresses. When the child’s mother later appears begging for the return of her child, Dracula calls on a pack of wolves to tear her apart outside his gate.
• June 24: Climbing the castle wall, Harker creeps out his window to Dracula’s window and learns that the Count sleeps (eyes open) in a box. However, he cannot find a key to unlock the door in order to escape.
• June 29: Dracula tells Harker that it is his last night in the castle and that he will be allowed to depart the next day. Harker insists on leaving immediately, but when he approaches the front door a pack of wolves appears and forces him back into the room. He later overhears the Count telling the three vampiresses that Harker will be their victim the next day.
• June 30: The next morning, the doors are still locked. Harker again makes his way to the sleeping Count by climbing the outside wall. He tries to brain him with a shovel, but Dracula’s eyes mesmerize him and the blow only causes a gash in the Count’s forehead. Slovaks suddenly arrive and load up the 50 boxes of earth (including the one containing Dracula) onto their wagon. They leave, while Harker remains trapped in the castle. Harker resolves to climb down from his window somehow and escape.

II. TRAGEDY IN WHITBY AND LONDON: Dracula arrives in London and makes Lucy Westenra his first victim.

• May 9: At Whitby, Lucy Westenra receives three marriage proposals in one day (Dr. Seward, the American Quincey Morris, and her eventual choice, Arthur Holmwood).
• May 25: Seward takes interest in a patient at his lunatic asylum, a man named Renfield.
• June 5-July 20: Renfield begins to obsessively eat flies, spiders, and sparrows. He gets angry when a cat is refused him.
• July 18: The crew of a Russian ship (the Demeter) begin to detect the presence of a stranger on board, who apparently de-materializes when attacked. One by one the sailors begin disappearing during the night.
• July 24: Mina visits Lucy at Whitby and they frequent a stone cliff-side chair facing the sea. Lucy begins to sleepwalk for some reason and becomes agitated when locked in her room at night.
• Aug 8: The Demeter drifts inland during a great storm. It somehow escapes destruction on the reef when a fog blows in. After it runs aground, a dog leaps from the ship and escapes into the forest. The captain is found dead, strapped to his wheel.
• Aug 10: The captain of the Demeter is buried. The local animals fear the cliff-side seat which Mina and Lucy frequent.
• Aug 11: Mina finds Lucy out on the stone chair in the middle of the night, seemingly with a dark figure who disappears when Mina approaches. Lucy is found to have small wounds on her neck.

  

  Edward Gorey

• Aug 13: When Lucy is locked more securely in her room at night, a great bat hovers around her window. Each night she spends time at the window, and each morning she seems to have lost some blood.
• Aug 17: Dracula’s boxes of Transylvanian earth arrive at Carfax Abbey. At Whitby, Lucy begins to regain her strength.
• Aug 19: A letter from Harker arrives asking Mina to come to his aid in Budapest while he recovers at a sisterhood. In London, Renfield escapes over the wall of Seward’s asylum and tries to get inside Carfax Abbey. He is recaptured and then calms down, resolving that he can wait for his Master. He loses any interest in spiders or cats. During a second escape attempt, he calms only when he sees a bat appear above him.
• Aug 24: Harker and Mina marry in Budapest and then settle in Exeter. Harker tells Mina to hide away his Transylvanian diary and not to speak of it or ask him about his journey.
• After returning to Hillingham in north London, Lucy’s health begins to fail again. Holmwood asks Seward to examine Lucy for disease.

  

  Edward Gorey

• Sept 2-3: After examining Lucy, Seward asks his old mentor from Amsterdam Professor Van Helsing to come and help diagnose her condition. After examining her, Van Helsing begins to suspect darker forces at work, but keeps his suspicions to himself.
• Sept 7: Lucy’s condition deteriorates drastically, forcing Van Helsing to perform a blood transfusion from Holmwood to the girl. Van Helsing is distressed to see her neck wounds and returns to Amsterdam to do further research. When he returns, Lucy has lost blood again, and so Van Helsing puts wreaths of garlic in her room for an unspecified reason.
• Sept 12: Van Helsing’s cure is briefly stymied when Lucy’s mother unwittingly removes the garlic from her room. However, in the following days she begins to recover, while a frustrated bat hovers outside her window.
• Sept 17: Dracula befriends a wolf at the zoo. When the wolf smashes through Lucy’s window, Lucy’s mother dies of fright. Dracula drinks Lucy’s blood. The next morning Seward, Van Helsing and the recently arrived Quincey Morris work to replace Lucy’s lost blood with more transfusions. While Lucy sleeps she seems to look stronger, (and her teeth sharper), but while awake she seems to weaken. Just before she dies, her neck wounds disappear and she tries to bite her fiance Holmwood. Van Helsing holds them apart, after which Lucy apparently dies. However her appearance seems to improve with her death.

III. DISCOVERY: Van Helsing and the other vampire hunters try to stop Dracula's designs.

• Sept 22: Mina and Harker visit London to attend a friend’s funeral. At a café, Harker is stunned to see Count Dracula, somehow grown much younger than he had been in Transylvania. The Count departs as Harker faints. A couple days later, Mina decides to read Harker’s diary of his experiences in Transylvania. She believes it to be a record of madness.
• Sept 25: A few days after Lucy’s corpse is placed in her tomb, in Hampstead Heath, reports surface of a “bloofer lady” (beautiful lady) who has been luring children away at night. In the morning, the children return home with neck wounds. That same day, Van Helsing makes contact with Mina to ask her questions about her correspondences with Lucy. Mina decides to ask Van Helsing to help her husband (who is at that time out of the house) and gives him Harker’s journal to read. The next day Van Helsing meets with Harker and invigorates Harker’s self-resolve with the confirmation of the reality of his nightmare. Van Helsing heads back to London but on the way is distressed to read a newspaper article about the “bloofer lady”.
• Sept 26: Van Helsing convinces Seward to join him on a visit to Lucy’s tomb. Inside, his suspicions are confirmed when Lucy’s body is missing from her coffin. A white shape eventually appears which deposits a small figure on the ground. Van Helsing and Seward discover that it is a sleeping child and bring it back to safety.

  

  Edward Gorey

• Sept 27: The next day they return to the tomb and see that Lucy’s body is back in her coffin, and seems more radiant than ever. Van Helsing tells Seward that Lucy has now become one of the Un-dead. He decides that they should return later with Arthur so that he can witness the final beheading (removing any doubt in Lucy’s fiance’s mind).
• Sept 28-29: Quincey, Arthur and Seward meet with Van Helsing. Arthur is horrified at what Van Helsing proposes but is willing to accompany their party to the tomb. There, they intercept Lucy on her way back to her tomb. She tries to seduce Arthur but Van Helsing repels her with a cross. They allow her to return to her tomb. The next day they return and Arthur is given the unenviable task of putting a stake through Lucy’s heart, after which she appears to be at peace.
• Mina Harker arrives in London and Seward brings her back to his asylum. He fills her in on Lucy’s fate and although stunned, she handles the news well and is resolved to defeat Dracula. Meanwhile, Harker goes to Whitby to try and trace the final destinations of Dracula’s earthboxes. He learns that the Count’s headquarters is Carfax Abbey next to Seward’s asylum. The group convene at the asylum and vow to destroy Dracula’s earthboxes at the Abbey. However, it is decided that, for her own safety, Mina will not join them on their mission.
• Sept 30: Just before the men head towards the Abbey, Renfield seems to have completely recovered his sanity and asks to be released. Seward meets with him, bringing along Mina and Van Helsing. Seward refuses Renfield’s request, after which Renfield tells Seward to remember that he had once tried to convince him.
• Oct 1: The five men enter Carfax Abbey and discover 29 of the 50 earthen boxes. Meanwhile, a white mist creeps across the grounds to reach Renfield’s window. The mist asks Renfield for permission to enter the asylum walls. When Renfield hesitates, the Count demonstrates his power by calling forth a swarm of rats and promises their life force to Renfield. Renfield gives his permission. Dracula enters Mina’s sleeping chamber. In a “dream”, Mina sees two red eyes and a pale face emerge out of the mist (Dracula mesmerizes her and drinks her blood).
• The swarm of rats converge on the vampire hunters in the Abbey, but Arthur uses a whistle to call on his dogs which scatters the rats. With no sign of Dracula, they head back to the asylum.
• Oct 2: Mina takes a sleeping aid so that she can sleep more peacefully (Dracula drinks her blood a second time). Harker tracks down the locations of some of Dracula’s other earthboxes in London.

  

  Edward Gorey

• Oct 3: When Mina visits Renfield again, the madman senses that Dracula has been drinking her blood. In the middle of the night, Dracula enters through Renfield’s window once again. Jealous and angered over what he has been doing to Mina, Renfield attacks Dracula hoping that his “madman’s strength” will allow him to defeat the vampire. However, Dracula brains him and breaks his back. Severely injured, Renfield later confesses to Seward and Van Helsing his interactions with the Count. Finally realizing that Mina is Dracula’s newest victim, the vampire hunters rush to her bedroom where they find Dracula and the Harkers. Harker is in a state of mesmerization while Mina drinks blood from an open vein in Dracula’s breast. Dracula tries to attack them but Van Helsing uses Holy Wafer to drive him off. Dracula turns into a bat and disappears into the west (but not before finishing off Renfield). Mina tearfully recalls that Dracula had desired to have her under his spell and be irresistible to his call. In order to ensnare her in this way, he had forced her to drink his blood.

“Silence! If you make a sound I shall take him and dash his brains out before your very eyes. First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions. You may as well be quiet; it is not the first time, or the second, that your veins have appeased my thirst! And so you, like the others, would play your brains against mine. You would help these men to hunt me and frustrate me in my designs! You know now, and they know in part already, and will know in full before long, what it is to cross my path. They should have kept their energies for use closer to home. Whilst they played wits against me—against me who commanded nations, and intrigued for them, and fought for them, hundreds of years before they were born—I was countermining them. And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for a while; and shall be later on my companion and my helper. You shall be avenged in turn; for not one of them but shall minister to your needs. But as yet you are to be punished for what you have done. You have aided in thwarting me; now you shall come to my call. When my brain says “Come!” to you, you shall cross land or sea to do my bidding; and to that end this!”

• Oct 4: The men use pieces of the Holy Wafer to prevent Dracula from using his earthboxes in Carfax Abbey. The men then go to Piccadilly where they “desecrate” 8 more of Dracula’s earthboxes. Dracula eventually arrives at the Piccadilly house (he can travel during the day but not transform) but the vampire hunters drive him off with Sacred Wafer and other weapons. 

“You think to baffle me, you—with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher’s. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! You think you have left me without a place to rest; but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine—my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!”

• They then return to Seward’s asylum to keep watch over Mina. Van Helsing tries to protect her with the Host, but the Wafer burns her forehead. Before dawn, Mina asks Van Helsing to mesmerize her. Under hypnosis she describes the feeling of being on a boat. Van Helsing realizes that Dracula is in his last remaining earthbox and escaping London by water. He explains that they must pursue him back to Transylvania or Mina is damned.

IV. PUNISHMENT: Van Helsing and the vampire hunters pursue Dracula back to Transylvania.

Edward Gorey

• Oct 5: The group realizes that Dracula may be able to discern their plans through his blood connection to Mina (who is subtly showing signs of transformation) and so decide to keep her out of their plans. However, she insists on joining their mission to intercept Dracula’s ship.
• Oct 11: Mina has the men promise that they will kill her if she becomes a danger. She has them perform a service in advance of her demise. The next day they depart by train for Varna in order to arrive before Dracula’s ship, the Czarina Catherine, does.
• Oct 17: The vampire hunters arrive at Varna and await the ship to arrive. Van Helsing and Seward keep an eye on Mina in case she shows signs of “turning”. Her trances indicate only the sound of water.
• Oct 28: The vampire hunters learn that Dracula’s ship has bypassed Varna and instead landed further on at Galatz. Van Helsing realizes that Dracula has been using his connection to Mina to keep aware of their plans and has successfully eluded their trap at Varna. However, he suspects that Dracula does not yet realize that Mina is able to observe Dracula’s activities as well.
• Oct 29: The vampire hunters take the first train to Galatz but are too late to intercept Dracula. Mina reasons that Dracula must be taking a river onwards to his castle. Arthur and Harker pursue in a steamboat. Seward and Quincey follow on horses along the river bank. Van Helsing and Mina travel by land on train and carriage. Van Helsing explains that they must destroy Dracula before he goes into hiding. If he does this then he can sleep for a century, after which Mina will be resurrected as one of the vampiresses of his castle.
• Nov 3: Mina and Van Helsing reach the Borgo Pass by carriage and find their way follow directions found in Harker’s original diary. Mina begins to sleep more and more and Van Helsing becomes unable to mesmerize her. Her eyes begin to take on a strange gleam.
• Nov 4: Van Helsing uses the Host to draw a protective circle around their camp. He sees that Mina is unable to go beyond the circle. That night, the three vampiresses from Dracula’s castle try to attack but are repelled by the sacred circle until the dawn.



Edward Gorey

• Nov 5: Van Helsing leaves Mina in the protective circle and goes on alone to Castle Dracula. There, he uncovers the tombs of the vampiresses. Their beauty almost mesmerizes him, but he hears a wail from Mina in the distance and is jarred out of his enchantment. He stakes them all and they turn into dust. After rejoining Mina, they head down the mountain to rendezvouz with their friends. Eventually they see a Szgany cart carrying the Count’s earthbox, racing towards the castle in order to beat the sunset. All of the vampire hunters (as well as wolves) converge on the gypsy cart. The gypsys attack but the vampire hunters fight their way to the cart and Harker throws the earthbox to the ground. When the lid is torn off, Dracula smiles as the sun falls just below the horizon. Before Dracula can attack, Harker cuts off his head, while Quincey stabs him in the heart. Dracula turns to dust. Quincey eventually dies from an injury sustained by a gypsy knife, but with his last breath happily points out that that the burn mark on Mina’s forehead has disappeared.

• Seven years later, Harker notes that he and Mina now have a son named Quincey, and that Seward and Arthur are both happily married. Van Helsing tells Harker that his son will someday know the bravery of his mother through the notes they have taken.

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“We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, ay, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that the were-wolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia had mated with the devils in the desert. Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?” He held up his arms.

“Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race; that we were proud; that when the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar, or the Turk poured his thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back? Is it strange that when Arpad and his legions swept through the Hungarian fatherland he found us here when he reached the frontier; that the Honfoglalas was completed there? And when the Hungarian flood swept eastward, the Szekelys were claimed as kindred by the victorious Magyars, and to us for centuries was trusted the guarding of the frontier of Turkey-land; ay, and more than that, endless duty of the frontier guard, for, as the Turks say, ‘water sleeps, and enemy is sleepless.’ Who more gladly than we throughout the Four Nations received the ‘bloody sword,’ or at its warlike call flocked quicker to the standard of the King? When was redeemed that great shame of my nation, the shame of Cassova, when the flags of the Wallach and the Magyar went down beneath the Crescent? Who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed!

"Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey-land; who, when he was beaten back, came again, and again, and again, though he had to come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered, since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph!

"They said that he thought only of himself. Bah! what good are peasants without a leader? Where ends the war without a brain and heart to conduct it? Again, when, after the battle of Mohács, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were amongst their leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the Szekelys—and the Dracula as their heart’s blood, their brains, and their swords—can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. The warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told.”

Dracula on Google Books (Modern Library edition)