Who Was Dracula? (12 page)

Fortunately, the book received more attention.

—

With its publication on the twenty-sixth of May 1897, the novel may not have been a hit, but it was a definite success.

W. L. Courtney, in the
Daily Telegraph
,
wrote a long and insightful review, offering praise for Stoker's style.

Never was so mystical a tale told with such simple verisimilitude. We are not allowed to doubt the facts because the author speaks of them as mere matters of ascertained truth. Such is Mr. Stoker's dramatic skill that the reader hurries on breathless from the first page to the last, afraid to miss a single word. . . . Though the plot involves enough and to spare of bloodshed, it never becomes revolting, because the spiritual mystery of evil continually surmounts the physical terror. Nevertheless, no part of the book is so good as the opening section. The reason is obvious . . . the local colouring [is] quite as important as the central incidents. When you are transported to an unknown region everything is possible.

The
Spectator
, similarly, remarked on the ordinariness of the modern setting.

The sentimental element is decidedly mawkish. . . . The up-to-dateness of the book—the phonograph diaries, typewriters and so on—hardly fits with the medieval methods which ultimately secure the victory for Count Dracula's foes.

But the
Pall Mall Gazette
adopted exactly the opposite opinion.

Mr. Bram Stoker lays the main scenes of his tale in England and London, right up to date, with the typewriter, the phonograph, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Zoo, and all the latest improvements complete. That is the way to make a horror convincing. The medieval is well enough in its way, but you don't care what sort of bogeys troubled your ancestors all that way back. . . . There are slight discrepancies, possibly, and the mechanism which helps the characters out is once or twice rather too obviously mechanism, but that is inevitable. There is a creep in every dozen pages or so. For those who like that, this is a book to revel in.

The
Athenaeum
thought that Stoker's approach was “too direct and uncompromising” and that the book “was wanting in the constructive art as well as in the higher literary sense.”

The early part goes best . . . but the want of skill and fancy grows more and more conspicuous. The people who band themselves together to run the vampire to earth have no real individuality or being. The German [
sic
] man of science is particularly poor and indulges, like a German, in much weak sentiment.

—

The first American edition was published just two years later. The
Wave
, a San Francisco newspaper, provided a uniquely negative review, detailing the book's “degeneracy.”

Here is a man who has taken the most horrible theme he could find in ancient or modern literature [and] has then gone on to carry the thing out to all possible lengths. The plain horrors were enough, perhaps, but the author goes farther, and adds insane asylums, dissecting rooms and unnatural appetites galore. No detail is too nauseating. In the first seventy pages, there are four cases of deaths caused by the preying of human vampires, one murder, one suicide, one lunatic with homicidal mania and a habit of eating flies, one somnambulist, one shipwreck, extent of fatalities not fully reported, one death by hysterical fright. Pleasant, isn't it?

But most American reviewers were swept up in the sheer exhilaration of thrills. The reviewer from the
Detroit Free Press
remembered the congenial Bram Stoker from his visits with Henry Irving's company, expressing honest astonishment that Stoker had penned such a weird, successful novel.

And Bram Stoker wrote it!

Think of him.

He—a great, shambling, good-natured, overgrown boy—although he is the business manager of Henry Irving and the Lyceum Theatre—with a red beard, untrimmed, and a ruddy complexion, tempered somewhat by the wide-open full blue eyes that gaze so frankly into yours! Why, it is hard enough to imagine Bram Stoker as a businessman, to say nothing of his possessing an imagination capable of projecting Dracula upon paper.

One suspects that Stoker's British associates had been similarly surprised, even if they were too polite to admit it.

—

Over the years, commentators have noted how different
Dracula
is in scope and ability from Stoker's other works. There's no question that it was his finest book, perhaps confusingly so. In 1927, the American fantasy author H. P. Lovecraft wrote to his friend Donald Wandrei:

Have you read anything of Stoker's aside from
Dracula
? . . . Stoker was absolutely devoid of a sense of form, and could not write a coherent tale to save his life. Everything of his went through the hands of a re-writer and it is curious to note that one of our circle of amateur journalists, an old lady named Mrs. Miniter, had a chance to revise the
Dracula
manuscript (which was a fiendish mess!) before its publication, but turned it down because Stoker refused to pay the price which the difficulty of the work impelled her to charge. Stoker had a brilliantly fantastic mind, but was unable to shape the images he created.

Mrs. Miniter was Edith Dowe Miniter, an American author of a 1916 novel,
Our Natupski Neighbors
. There's no reason to believe that Lovecraft's comment is anything more than gossip—and no reason why Stoker would have sought a young American author to revise his book. The discovery of Stoker's notes has effectively demonstrated that Lovecraft was wrong. Stoker composed the book himself. The notes also demonstrate why
Dracula
was his most successful book—it was carefully considered and revised over the course of seven years.

—

A century of critical analysis has pulled
Dracula
to pieces, hammering virtually every possible theory, psychoanalysis, or motivation into the vampire's corpse in an attempt to explain Stoker's masterpiece. It's a sad fate that even Dr. Van Helsing would not have prescribed.

Part of the difficulty has been a need to psychoanalyze Stoker himself—his quiet stoicism and his erratic literary career just frustrates scholars. So, he has been explained as a proponent of Irish home rule, a misogynist, a latent homosexual, a vengeful employee, an anti-Semite, or someone morbidly afraid of syphilis—or even better, a sufferer from syphilis. It is the doppelgänger. It is Freud. It is a grail romance. It is
Macbeth
. It is a twisted Oedipal fantasy.

The marvel of
Dracula
is that there are so many mythic themes—psychosexual, religious, cultural, fairy-tale—integrated into the vampire myth and brightly polished throughout Stoker's novel. There is truly something for everyone. A modern reader, examining the original criticisms, may be struck with how the book's erotic content went virtually unnoticed. This is a surprise for the late Victorian age, a period of fussy prudes who should have been decrying
Dracula
's suggestiveness. Perhaps their prudery allowed them to overlook it, and our “sophistication” allows us to fixate on it. By a modern standard, this might be the novel's most surprising deception. Dracula is about sex—and here scholars are free to debate the particulars of that sex. As the Victorian prudes tingled, they were deceived into thinking the tingle was caused by horror. Today we know better.

The question still remains whether Bram Stoker himself understood the eroticism that he had hardwired into his story—this is usually the jumping-off place for later psychoanalysis of the author. As we'll see, that answer isn't clear.

—

It's a good story, well told. It scares the hell out of you. It causes nightmares. Did anything more ever need to be said?

A popular author like Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a professional associate of Bram Stoker, seemed to instantly understand the novel's genius and wrote to him.

I think it is the very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years. It is really wonderful how with so much exciting interest over so long a book there is never an anticlimax. It holds you from the very start and grows more engrossing until it is quite painfully vivid. . . . I congratulate you with all my heart for having written so fine a book.

But perhaps the most pleasing comment for Bram Stoker was supplied by his mother, Charlotte Stoker, who was then in poor health in Dublin. It was Charlotte's supernatural stories from Sligo, related when Bram was a small boy, that first inspired his literary career, and after reading
Dracula
, she wrote two letters offering praise.

[It is] a thousand miles beyond anything you have written before and I feel certain will place you very high in the writers of the day[;] the story being deeply sensational, exciting, and interesting. . . . No book since Mrs. Shelley's
Frankenstein
or indeed any other at all has come near yours in originality, or terror[;] Poe is nowhere. I have read much but I have never met a book like it at all in its terrible excitement[.] It should make a widespread reputation and much money for you.

Her powers of prognostication were nearly perfect, and few critics of 1897 who read
Dracula
and then endorsed it with the usual polite words had Charlotte Stoker's foresight.

THE MURDERER, “MORBIDLY FASCINATING”

B
ram Stoker may have had dinner with Jack the Ripper.

At the very least, it's possible that he served as a host to two suspects in the case, Richard Mansfield and Francis Tumblety. Curiously, Stoker addressed this connection to the Jack the Ripper crimes only in vague terms, hinting that the famous murders of “Saucy Jacky” were inspirations for Dracula's terrors.

The 1901 Icelandic edition of
Dracula
contained a new introduction by the author. He used the opportunity to continue the conceit of the letters and diary entries, insisting that the protagonists were personal friends of his.

The reader of this story will very soon understand how the events outlined in these pages have been gradually drawn together to make a logical whole. . . . I have let the people involved relate their experiences in their own way; but for obvious reasons, I have changed the names of the people and places concerned. . . . The events are incontrovertible, and so many people know of them that they cannot be denied. This series of crimes has not yet passed from the memory, a series of crimes which appear to have originated from the same source, and which at the same time created as much repugnance in people everywhere as the murders of Jack the Ripper, which came into the story a little later. . . .

The introduction is signed “B.S.” and dated from London, August 1898.

First, the fiction: Stoker's casual dating of the events plays havoc with the time frame in the novel. Although events within his story suggest that the setting was 1893 or later, his suggestion that Dracula's crimes preceded Jack the Ripper's indicates that the events could not be later than 1888. Of course, his careful discussion of dates is nothing more than a bit of legerdemain—more of his earnest assurances about the truth of the story. But the hint about Jack the Ripper is fascinating, for the crimes that gripped London, the apparently random and rapid murders that swept through the East End, occurred less than two years before Stoker began composing his book.

The connection is not an obvious one.
Dracula
is remarkably crime-free. The murders seem to trouble a small group of people in Transylvania, and then a small circle of vampire hunters in London. Only Dracula's shipboard terrors or Lucy Westenra's nocturnal assaults rate newspaper coverage, and even then, Lucy's assaults seem a mere curiosity in the
Pall Mall Gazette
. Unlike the Jack the Ripper case—which was played out in lurid headlines, letters to the editor, and the shouts of newspaper boys—Count Dracula's bloodlust manages to avoid publicity.

So it's fascinating that Stoker made a decisive, fictional connection between his villain and the famous serial killer. And it's equally interesting that he never discussed his real connections to the case. The controversy stirred the Lyceum Theatre, and Bram Stoker discovered that the suspects were part of his professional circle.

—

“Modern” is, admittedly, in the eye of the beholder. Bram Stoker once praised Henry Irving as the “modern master of lighting.” By today's standards, it seems to be a confusing distinction. Irving's use of gaslight and limelight was refined and precise, but much of his work involved pushing this old technology along, devoting men, equipment, and hours to try to conquer the limitations of long-established Victorian systems. At the end of his career, Irving's own developments—however meticulous and artistic—were being supplanted by genuinely modern work with electric lamps, as pioneered by producers like Steele MacKaye and David Belasco. The Lyceum Theatre, in fact, had installed electric lighting in the 1880s, and bright clusters of electric lamps illuminated the hallways and lobbies. But electricity, Irving felt, was never suitable for the stage, and for his entire career he appeared in the warm, attractive glow of gaslight.

If Irving was a “modern master,” it's only because we can recognize him bumping against the limits of technology during the course of his career. He becomes a transitional figure between the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Similarly,
Dracula
is a novel that bumps against old-fashioned Victorian storytelling, the loud death throes of the classic Gothic novel. In
Dracula
, readers find many of the old clichés: a mysterious nobleman, a faraway castle, an obsession with Victorian purity, and a plot woven together from a bundle of letters and diary entries—the way Mary Shelley did in
Frankenstein
or Wilkie Collins did in
The Woman in White
. Reviewers noticed these old-fashioned trappings in
Dracula
. “It is odd that . . . one of the most curious and striking of recent productions should be a revival of a medieval superstition, the old legend of the ‘werewolf,'” W. L. Courtney noted in his
Daily Telegraph
review.

There are two things which are remarkable in the novel [
Dracula
]—the first is the confident reliance on superstition as furnishing the ground work of a modern society; and the second, more significant still, is the bold adaptation of the legend to such ordinary spheres of latter-day existence as the harbor of Whitby and Hampstead Heath.

When the critic from the
Spectator
scoffed at the “up-to-dateness” of the book, noting that Stoker had included references to typewriters, phonographs, or the underground, it was a similar comment on the timelessness of the story.

Actually, the “up-to-dateness” is the novel's most powerful twist, and the most jarring aspect of this otherwise-Gothic tale.
Dracula
begins in a deliberately foreign and timeless way, deep within the unknown (and invented) world of Transylvania. But then, the story suddenly shifts to more familiar territory. When the vampire invades Whitby, he is perfectly at home amid the windswept coast, the Georgian streets, and the ruins of the old abbey. Whitby forms a halfway point between ancient and modern societies. And then, horrifyingly, relentlessly, Dracula comes even closer. He inhabits several homes in London, entering the modern age. He moves within a sophisticated society, bringing an ancient, neglected curse to the modern metropolis. His power allows him to haunt all classes and indiscriminately infect any era. If the reviewer from the
Spectator
winced when Dracula invaded fin-de-siècle London, that was precisely what Bram Stoker had intended.

Dracula
was modern, but by no means unique. This distinctive mix of ancient horror in a modern setting had been anticipated in one of the great horror stories of Victorian England—Stevenson's
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
.

—

In 1886, during the time Stoker and Irving were occupied with their production of
Faust
, Robert Louis Stevenson published his short novel
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The story is told through the eyes of Dr. Jekyll's professional associates, and positioned as a sort of mystery. Mr. Hyde, a small, repulsive man with a criminal demeanor, has been tied mysteriously to the respected Dr. Jekyll, even to the point where Jekyll's attorney, Mr. Utterson, notices that Hyde is the beneficiary of Jekyll's will. But Jekyll refuses to discuss Hyde. The doctor becomes more and more reclusive and suffers mysterious bouts of illness. On one occasion, his friends notice a transformation in his appearance, which horrifies them. When Jekyll disappears and his laboratory door is locked, his friends break into the room. There they find Hyde's body, dead on the floor, dressed in Jekyll's oversized clothing.

A note from Jekyll's friend, and Jekyll's own written confession, explain his crimes. A passionate researcher, the doctor had developed a drug to demonstrate man's dual nature. Once he took the drug, it transformed him into Mr. Hyde. Hyde became his alter ego, the evil side of his personality. Gradually the drug overcame the doctor, and his transformation became unpredictable. When Jekyll realized that Hyde's personality had overtaken his own, he committed suicide.

In the book, Jekyll's transformation to the cruel, animalistic Mr. Hyde is not the work of an ancient spell or enchantment, but purely a state-of-the-art achievement of medicine—a special formula developed by a man of science. Just as Jekyll is a part of London's respected upper class, Hyde instantly descends to the disreputable areas of the city, where he moves comfortably.

Aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city . . . the figure [Hyde] haunted the lawyer all night . . . to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or to move the more swiftly, and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamp-lighted city, and at every street corner crush a child and leave her screaming.

The novel describes only two crimes committed by Edward Hyde, but other offenses are suggested: conversations stop short before the characters detail these crimes. In this way readers were forced to think the very worst of Hyde and imagine the instincts of an animalistic man let loose in London's crime-ridden areas—crimes that could not be discussed in polite society or, indeed, within a book.

Stevenson suggested savagery, but Stoker wrote of it; the comparison earned
Dracula
condemnation from the critic of the San Francisco
Wave
:

[The] fault is the lack of artistic restraint. Stevenson, the century's greatest artist in fiction [used] a theme like this one—in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
 . . . where the horror is suggested, hinted at, written around except for the one moment of the climax when it is brought home.

Jekyll's effete self-analysis, his learned desire to explore the various elements of a man's personality, and Hyde's savage and irrepressible villainy, were irresistible roles for an actor. There was a long tradition in the theater of the dual part, and Henry Irving himself had established his career with two meaty dual roles: in
The Lyons Mail
and
The
Corsican Brothers.
Irving himself might have been the ideal actor to play
Jekyll and Hyde
onstage, although Stevenson's story offered neither the melodramatic nor the historical sweep that Irving always craved. Coincidentally, in later years, when Henry Irving's son H. B. Irving became an actor, he made
Jekyll and Hyde
one of his most popular features, along with reprising some of his father's favorites.

The opportunity was left to an American actor, Richard Mansfield, who read Stevenson's book and realized the potential of the part. He quickly commissioned a writer named Thomas Russell Sullivan to develop the story into a script.

Mansfield was a popular actor who found his early successes in London before establishing his career in America. Critics debated his abilities. In some roles he was ideally suited; in others he seemed mechanical and ineffective. He was short of stature with thinning hair and could be unappealingly cold in his characterizations. One critic, John Ranken Towse, called him “imperious, willful, self-centered, and indocile. He was a terror to his managers.”

But Mansfield's portrayals of Jekyll and Hyde were a decided hit. His script took liberties with Stevenson's short novel and, like most later adaptations, added a love interest for Dr. Jekyll. Instead of playing him as a solid man of science, Mansfield's Jekyll was a young man “conscious of a dreadful fate impending,” according to the
New York Times
, and his Hyde exhibited “a fiendish brutality.” Towse felt that Mansfield was deficient in the part; instead of playing Stevenson's energetic, quirky, evil little man, Mansfield was a grotesque “nightmare of goblin hideousness.” He inserted a scene in which Hyde was supposedly haunted by the invisible ghost of one of his victims, an opportunity for some scenery-chewing in the great tradition of melodrama. A photographic portrait with Mansfield in both roles doesn't inspire confidence. His Hyde shows only a coarse grimace.

Audiences came to see Mansfield's wonderful transformation scenes, in which Jekyll was transformed into Hyde—this was the expected tour de force. The actor accomplished it without any special effects, although contemporary reviews suggest that Mansfield may have utilized directional lighting, or even colored lighting, to alter the appearance of his makeup, which was arranged in complementary colors. This trick of colored lighting was later repeated when Fredric March starred in the 1931 film.

The show opened in Boston in May 1888 and quickly moved to New York. Mansfield had taken the trouble to secure the rights from Stevenson, but because Stevenson's book was not copyrighted in America, he found that an unauthorized play,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, produced by Daniel Bandmann, was opening in opposition. Both shows raced to London, attempting to win that promising market.

Mansfield enlisted the help of Henry Irving, whom he had met at the start of his career in London and then again in America during the Lyceum company's tour. Irving offered the Lyceum stage to Mansfield; the Lyceum company would then be on tour in Scotland. Irving also calculated that Bandmann would need the Opera Comique in London for his own
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
. Irving secured the Opera Comique “for extra rehearsals,” cleverly delaying Mansfield's competition. In this way, Mansfield was able to hold his competition at arm's length while appealing to lawyers that he alone had the rights to Stevenson's work.

Stoker advised the actor on the program, schedule, and business plan at the Lyceum, and Irving lingered in London long enough to watch Mansfield's rehearsals. Irving had his doubts; he reported to his stage manager, Lovejoy, that the American company would “want looking after,” as the production seemed incredibly disorganized. Mansfield, in turn, complained in a letter that the Lyceum staff was unprofessional and difficult.

The men are slow to obey and argumentative, and full of importance and the conviction that they know it all, or least, much better than we do. . . . Scenery which has arrived at St. Louis or Grand Rapids at four in the afternoon, and been used without a hitch at eight in the evening, required [at the Lyceum] all Thursday night, all day Friday, and a scenic rehearsal which lasted from eight yesterday evening until two this morning!