by James Reese
173. Pasted into Stoker’s journal.
174. Underlined in—presumably—Stoker’s own hand.
175. In Greek mythology, a place of pure darkness, passed through en route to Hades, i.e., Hell.
176. And copied out in a hand other than Stoker’s: Swanson’s, perhaps?
177. Shadwell Dry Dock blazed all through the night of Thursday, August 30, 1888.
178. Three pence was indeed the price for a pint of gin in 1888, but it was also the going rate for a “toss-off” in the streets. Stoker is here identifying the woman as a prostitute.
179. True: Stoker’s penmanship—never neat—devolves to a scrawl upon these pages.
180. Clipping—sources obscured, but dated 31 August 1888—pasted into Stoker’s journal. Around this is drawn, or scratched, as if from repeated tracings, a box in blackest pencil-lead, marking both Stoker’s mourning and, presumably, the long while he sat in consideration of these pages.
181. This last word circled in a hand presumably Stoker’s. Marginalia: “How gathered, how?”
182. Thornley Stoker lived a Rochester-like life in an Ely Place mansion, his mad wife—schizophrenic, by to-day’s diagnosis—requiring rooms of her own and constant care. Ironic, this, and sad: the reader of the Dossier is reminded that Thornley Stoker was preeminent amongst medical men treating madness.
183. Copied out in a hand not Stoker’s, this was presumably posted to Stoker in Dublin by his source within Scotland Yard and later laid into Stoker’s journal behind the preceding entry.
184. Marginalia: “He bagged the blood even as it spurted! And so: he plans. Speranza writes to posit that the imperfectly possessed would not have the capacity to plan; they would merely act. And so it is as we supposed, and the Church will avail us naught. ‘Pistols it must be,’ closes Speranza. But does not the bagged blood bespeak an increased physical facility? If so, his body grows accustomed to its two tenants even though he failed in excising her heart.”
185. Twice underlined; marginalia: “Damn him!”
186. Marginalia: “No. He tracks her. He hunts. He plans.”
187. And doubtlessly echoed later in Dracula, chapter 13, when Van Helsing—to whom Stoker would give a wife similarly afflicted—describes his own situation: “…me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church’s law, though no wits, all gone—even I who am faithful husband to this now-no-wife….”
188. Richmond Hospital, Dublin.
189. The newspaper Stoker found in the Liverpool train station was the prior day’s Pall Mall Gazette—that is, the issue of Saturday evening, 8 September 1888. Clipping the relevant pages, he slipped them into the Dossier without further commentary of any kind. Surely none was needed.
190. Still Sunday, 9 August 1888.
191. Robert Louis Stevenson, author of both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and its adapted play, which already the Lyceum had mounted with much success with Richard Mansfield—not Henry Irving—in the title role(s).
192. Mens sana in corpore sano: Latin: “a sound mind in a sound body.”
193. Handwriting matches previous reports.
194. Marginalia: “Heart then present?”
195. Marginalia: “The kukri? My kukri?”
196. Written in cipher.
197. This was fairly standard practice in cases of murder, it being held that the last image the victim saw remained on his retina. Earlier in 1888, a man had been convicted in France on the evidence of eyeball photography. Meanwhile, of course, fingerprinting and the use of bloodhounds had yet to find favour amongst criminologists.
198. And so we may presume he did; but first he slipped the discovered note into the Dossier, where it appears on parchment-like paper, same as the scroll, its red “ink” traced over in lead.
199. Location of Hawthorns, Caine’s home sitting outside of London; habitual residence of Mary and Ralph Caine.
200. The letter ends, mid-page, without signature.
201. Bram Stoker was alone amongst his brothers in not becoming a surgeon.
202. Referenced here is Wm. Stoker, long associated with Dublin’s Fever Hospital and House of Recovery; who, like other doctors of the day, frequently practised bleeding via the application of leeches or the opening of the temporal artery. It may be supposed that young Bram, being sickly, was subjected to these practices more than most.
203. Stoker pasted said letter into his journal at this point—best of luck, Ms. Durand, should your lawyers seek to cull the Dossier for DNA. Like the others, this letter is on parchment-like paper, and the medium would seem to be blood. (Nota bene: no envelope extant.)
204. Suspicion briefly fell on a Jewish Pole, an émigré named Kaminsky, also known as Leather Apron (owing to his work as a cobbler). Kaminsky was soon exonerated, but the rumour of his involvement threatened the large Jewish population of Whitechapel, many of whose members had lately fled pogroms in their home countries.
205. In point of fact, the infamous “Dear Boss” letter was posted on Thursday, 27 September 1888, not Friday the 28th, as agreed upon by its writers. Did Stoker worry that if he waited, the letter might not find its way to Abberline in time? We cannot know.
206. A Tuesday; one day after the composition of the “Dear Boss” letter.
207. This entry seems to indicate that Stoker and Caine also wrote what is known as the “Saucy Jacky” note, a postcard showing the same handwriting and written in the same red ink as the “Dear Boss” letter. Its contents:
“I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, you’ll hear about Saucy Jacky’s work to-morrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off. ha not the time to get ears for police. thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.” And again it was signed “Jack the Ripper.”
As the card referenced “the double event”—as it would henceforth be called—before it occurred, it succeeded in rousing the authorities upon its receipt, 1 October 1888. Of course, by then it was too late.
208. Strange, this; but the motto is Fluctuat nec mergitur: “It is tossed by the waves but does not sink.”
209. The word “petticoat” has been circled by Stoker. Marginalia: “Cloak?”
210. In eastern folkore—and in Dracula—the Scholomance is the school in which the devil teaches his secrets to the chosen few, claiming the soul of every tenth scholar as his due.
211. And well they may have. Peter Robinson’s was a department store, while Black Peter Robinson’s was an offshoot of same specialising in mourning attire.
212. Pedestrians, literally, or tourists.
213. Referencing, surely, the several hundred hoax letters sent to the authorities that autumn of 1888 in the wake of the two written by the Dossier’s self-styled “Children of Light.”
214. Thornley, Florence, and Noel Stoker, along with the governess, Mlle Dupont.
215. Matching in all particulars the previous reports, save that before pasting this one into his journal, Stoker first cut away what he must have considered its extraneous contents. (Ellipses in this transcription are mine, coincident with Stoker’s cuts.)
216. Should be “Dutfield’s” throughout.
217. Webster’s: a cachou is “a pill or pastille used to sweeten the breath.”
218. Should be “Ellen Street.”
219. Marginalia: “See me not/nor understand.”
220. Marginalia: “!”
221. Marginalia: “Chaos!”
222. Research has shown this to be Chief Inspector Donald S. Swanson’s report, yet Stoker’s copy in the Dossier has the signature struck through multiple times, rendering it illegible.
223. On October 9th and 10th, 1888, the bloodhounds Barnaby and Burgho were tested in, respectively, Regent’s and Hyde parks. The first test was successful, but the second—in which Police Commissioner Charles Warren ordered that the dogs seek him—was not, and it brought such embarrassment upon the police that soon both the dogs and the Commissioner were retired.
“From Hell.
“Mr Lusk
“Sir,
“I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman prasarved it for you. Tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise. I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer”
And it is signed, “Catch me when/ you can/ Mishter Lusk.”
225. Children of Light, presumably, i.e., Hall Caine, Lady Jane Wilde, and Thornley Stoker.
226. Richard Peck, City Astronomer of Edinburgh; present at the Isis-Urania Temple for “the Setian event,” and apparently recruited by Stoker for its sequel. The castle in question is Edinburgh Castle.
227. Thrice underlined by Stoker.
228. Dracula’s London estate will be named Carfax.
229. Readers of Dracula will recall that book’s Arthur Holmwood, AKA Lord Godalming. It is likely the name came to Stoker at the time of the Dossier owing to the fact that the city of Godalming had recently become the first in England to usher electric lighting into wide use, including in its theatres: a fact surely not lost upon Henry Irving and, therefore, all the people in his employ.
230. Uranian is a contemporary term adapted from the German Urning, first used by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in a series of writings collectively known, in their English translation, as “The Riddle of Man-Manly Love,” and adopted by those Victorians just beginning to discourse on same-sex issues.
231. John Doughty, Arthur Brice, Albert Fisher, and James Crowley, as history has it.
232. Though undated, this entry must have been made Saturday, 10 November 1888, in the hours after the discovery of murdered Mary Kelly.
233. Like prior reports, this was copied out—in evident haste—in a hand not Stoker’s and pasted into the Dossier.
234. Ecchymosis: the leeching of blood into tissue due to the rupture of blood vessels.
235. Marginalia: “Her name was Mary Kelly.”
236. In the hand of Bram Stoker.
237. Macbeth, Act I, Scene III.
238. It is my supposition—and a supposition only—that Stoker here refers to Constance Wilde and Wm. Butler Yeats, both of whom were 1. informed, 2. involved, and 3. beholden to Lady Wilde. Again, this is a bit of historical swashbuckling on my part; but though the historical record does not confirm their presence in Edinburgh, neither does it contradict it.
239. Macbeth, Act I, Scene V.
240. The Lyceum Company would indeed premier “the Scottish play” on 29 December 1888, going on to play 151 performances—still the tragedy’s longest run.
241. Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I.
242. Macbeth, Act II, Scene II. Similarly, Stoker’s last words to Tumblety—“blood will have blood”—come from Act III, Scene IV.
243. Act V, Scene VIII.
244. Act IV, Scene I.
245. Here Stoker has interleaved into his Memorandum a folded page of The Times dated Monday, 13 November 1888: the day after his return trip to London.
246. Marginalia: “Not extraditable.” Stoker and company must have known as much, and breathed a collective sigh of relief upon learning that their Tumblety was safely out of England.
247. Ellen Terry herself became a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire in 1925. She died three years later at the age of 81.
248. Sir Thornley Stoker, d. 1912. Having survived his wife, Emily, by two years, Thornley found contentment with her nurse, Florence Dugdale, who, upon Thornley’s death, became the typist for and eventually the wife of Thomas Hardy.
249. He did, albeit barely. Oscar Wilde died in Paris, 30 November 1900.
250. Lady Wilde took to her bed the day of her As-car’s sentencing and never rose from it again.
Upon her death, Willie Wilde had black-banded mourning cards made. They read, “In Memoriam JANE FRANCESCA AGNES SPERANZA WILDE, Widow of Sir William Wilde, MD, Surgeon Oculist to the Queen in Ireland, Knight of the Order of the North Star in Sweden. Died at her residence. London. Feb 3rd 1896.” And though Lady Wilde was buried in plot number 127 in Kensal Green Cemetery, Willie never bought a headstone nor paid for permanent sepulture; and so Speranza’s remains were removed after the standard seven years. Nothing marks the final resting place of she who was once Speranza of the Nation.
251. Thomas Henry Hall Caine, later Sir, d. 31 August 1931. Part of his considerable estate was bequeathed to the West London Mission “for the aid and reformation of fallen women.”
Caine and Stoker were friends to the end; and Caine’s dedication of his Cap’n Davey’s Honeymoon (1893) to Stoker both establishes that fact and shows why Hall Caine—in his day ranked amongst such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Wm. Makepeace Thackeray as novelists of the highest import—is to-day amongst the most deservedly forgotten of all forgotten writers:
“When in dark hours and evil humours my bad angel has sometimes made me think that friendship as it used to be of old, friendship as we read of it in books, that friendship which is not a jilt sure to desert us, but a brother born to adversity as well as success, is not a lost quality, a forgotten virtue, a high partnership in fate degraded to a low traffic in self-interest, a mere league of pleasure and business, then my good angel for admonition or reproof has whispered the names of a little band of friends, whose friendship is a deep stream that buoys me up and makes no noise; and first among these names has been your own.”
252. Sir Henry Irving, d. 1905, Friday the 13th, aged 67. Owing to the influence of his powerful friends, he was interred in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.
253. Florence Stoker, d. 1937, aged 78. As her husband’s literary executor, Florence fought till the end against those who she thought had misappropriated Stoker’s work, all the while referring to Dracula as “The Second Bathroom Book,” as all she’d been able to buy with the scant proceeds from its publication was a powder room set beneath her stairs. Her dogged efforts included a lawsuit the settlement of which stipulated the destruction of all existing prints of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). However, in 1931, Universal Pictures paid $400 for a still-extant print of the film and acquired the rights to a second film based on the book, this one starring an unknown Hungarian actor named Bela Lugosi.
Irving Thornley Noel Stoker, d. 1961, moved to France upon his maturity and later sued to have the first of his given names removed, saying he had no wish to pay homage to the man who’d taken his father from him.
254. Increasingly so: Stoker’s output would, in the end, be prodigious. Novels, stories, lectures, plays, and, of course, his monumental, two-volume Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906).
255. Dracula (1897), by Bram Stoker, b. 8 November 1847, d. 20 April 1912, aged 64.
256. Into the journal, at this point, a partial clipping—traceable to the Pall Mall Gazette of 3 October 1888—has been pasted.