Referring to Emily Gerard's article, Stoker notes that perhaps “the most important day in the year is the feast day of St. George, 23rd of April, the eve of which is still frequently kept by occult meetings taking place at night in lonely caverns or within ruined walls, and where all the ceremonies usual to the celebration of a witches' Sabbath are put into practice.… This same night is the best for finding treasures.… On the night of St. George's Day (so say the legends) all these treasures begin to burn, or, to speak in mystic language, to ‘bloom’ in the bosom of the earth, and the light they give forth, described as a bluish flame resembling the color of lighted spirits of wine, serves to guide favored mortals to their place of concealment” (p. 134). Once again, Stoker incorporated these ideas into his book, when an old lady at the hotel in Bistria warns Harker, “It is the eve of St. George's Day. Do you not know that to-night, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?”
According to many traditions, evil spirits are thought to hold sway on the eve of important holy days. Halloween, an ancient Celtic devotion to dead ancestors, was transformed by Christianity into the eve of All Saints' Day, hence the name All Hallows' Eve, popularly pronounced as Halloween; on this night, like Saint George's Eve, goblins are thought to roam and cause mischief.
On May 8, Harker notices about Dracula that there was “no reflection of him in the mirror!” The notion that vampires do not cast any reflection in a mirror is authentic Romanian folklore. Emily Gerard cites it in The Land beyond the Forest. The basic idea behind it is that the vampire has no normal human soul and hence cannot have the usual appearance in a mirror.
In his very unscientific vampire search, Stoker quite freely mixes authentic superstitious beliefs about various creatures, as when he ascribes werewolf characteristics to the vampire, which, though related, is quite distinct from the werewolf in Romanian folklore. When Harker meets Count Dracula on the night of May 5, he fixates on Dracula's “peculiarly sharp teeth,” which “protruded over the lips.” He is also struck by his hands: “Hitherto I had noticed the back of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine; but seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse—broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point.” Characteristics such as these were freely borrowed by Stoker from Sabine Baring-Gould's Book of Were-Wolves, where the author, referring to a so-called authentic werewolf case, writes as follows: “The teeth were strong and white, and the canine teeth protruded over the lower lip when the mouth was closed. The boy's hands were large and powerful, the nails black and pointed like bird's talons” (p. 87). And again: “A werewolf may easily be detected, even when devoid of his skin; for his hands are broad, and his fingers short, and there are always some hairs in the hollow of his hand” (p. 107). With great poetic license, Stoker adapts these werewolf characteristics to his vampire count.
There are other instances of borrowings from sources, such as Stoker's citing the vampire's control over the animal world, particularly horses, who “smell blood,” a reference derived from E. C. Johnson's On the Track of the Crescent. Examples such as these are sufficient to demonstrate the variety of themes drawn upon by Stoker in creating his composite vampire.
Beyond written sources, Stoker's vampire creation was also inspired by experiences in his life. He had to spend the first seven years of his life on his back in bed because of some mysterious childhood ailment that was never properly diagnosed. It is not by chance that interest in strange undiagnosed disease permeates the entire novel Dracula. The symptoms of the vampire attack remain undiagnosed for a good part of the novel. In addition, Stoker's confined existence was similar to that of the vampire, since he was as bound to his bed as Count Dracula to his coffin. Stoker tells us in his Reminiscences of Henry Irving that when he was a child, he never knew what it was like to stand up straight. Later in life, Stoker's mother told him horrifying stories about the cholera epidemic that had taken place in County Sligo when she was a child. She referred to this in a letter to her son in 1872: “One house would be attacked the next was spared. There was no telling who would go next, and when one said good-bye to a friend he said it as if forever. In a very few days, the town became a place of the dead. No vehicle moved except the cholera carts or doctors' carriages. Many people fled, and many of these were overtaken by the plague and died by the way.” Count Dracula's attacks, as described by Stoker, resemble those of the plague, and they are just as unstoppable. (The similarity between the spread of vampire attacks and the Black Death, the dreaded bubonic plague, was exploited in the classic silent movie Nosferatu, the first Dracula film ever made, and also in the latest Nosferatu, by Werner Herzog. The rats seem to spread the Black Death in both of those movies, whereas it is the vampire who is in reality killing the people.)
Although he makes no reference to it in his notes, Stoker was always interested in Irish folklore. Long before Dracula, he wrote a series of horror tales, based on Celtic themes, for children. He spent time in the west of Ireland, his mother's home country, where Gaelic and the old traditions still held on in his day. The word for bad blood in Gaelic is drochfhuil and the genitive singular is drochfhola, which is pronounced very much like the word Dracula. Belief in the returning dead was very strong in Ireland. Stones were piled over the graves of the dead to try to discourage them from rising out of the ground.
However, in the last resort, it was the gloomy atmosphere of the Yorkshire moors, with which he was well acquainted from his many summer vacations, that seemed ideally adapted to the purposes of his gothic novel. (It had served the Brontë sisters equally well.) He was particularly struck by the stark and forbidding rocky coastline surrounding Whitby Harbour, a resort dominated by its Gothic cathedral, which overlooked a very desolate cemetery, where Stoker was fond of strolling, while he examined the inscriptions on sailors' tombs. By comparison, Gerard's descriptions of the Transylvanian countryside, which Stoker never visited, seem quite cheery.
Most relevant to our biography of the historical Dracula are Stoker's references to authentic Romanian history and geography. His concern for authenticity is demonstrated by two separate references incorporated in the novel to consultations with his “friend Arminius [Vambery],” professor at the University of Budapest, references to the library of the British Museum, and allusion to a document in which Dracula is described as a “vampyre.” How serious or extensive was Stoker's interest in the life story of the authentic Prince Dracula? Judging from his notes and citations of the books in the Rosenbach foundation holdings, Stoker's knowledge of Romanian history and of Dracula in particular was sketchy, to say the least, and some of it was clearly erroneous. Other historical errors, however, were deliberately manufactured by him—for the search for historical truth was hardly his concern as a novelist. He did, nevertheless, make a serious and unique effort to give his novel and his principal character a definite historical reference point. Stoker's historical gleanings were principally derived from the following books of unequal worth: Nina Elizabeth Mazuchelli, Magyarland (London, 1881); Andrew F. Crosse, Round about the Carpathians (London, 1878); E. C. Johnson, On the Track of the Crescent (London, 1885); Charles Boner, Transylvania: Its Products and People (London, 1865); and William Wilkinson, Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with Political Observations Relative to Them (London, 1820). Of these books those of Charles Boner, William Wilkinson, and Major William E. C. Johnson can be described as more or less accurate history. Wilkinson, who liked to describe himself as English consul in Bucharest, though he was in point of fact merely the representative of the English Levant Company, wrote the first substantive survey of Romanian history in English, with a remarkable eye for detail, very different from other, superficial travelogues. In the historical introduction, and particularly referring to Dracula's period, Wilkinson adopted the largely nega
tive German interpretation popularized in academic circles by Münster's Cosmographia, which had been translated into English and by that time had become a standard historical reference work. Dracula was described therein, essentially in the manner of the early fifteenth-century German pamphleteers, as an evil personality.
Stoker's acquaintance with Wilkinson's work came about in an accidental manner in August 1890, during his frequent trips to the local library at Whitby. Intrigued by the title, he checked the book out. The fact that it is the only work mentioned by a specific call number in Stoker's notes clearly indicates that he consulted the book repeatedly during subsequent visits in 1892 and 1895. No fewer than ten citations from Wilkinson's book have been incorporated into the novel.
Far more to the point, however, it was Stoker's reading of Wilkinson's book that was responsible for changing the title of the novel and giving it the specifically Romanian veneer concerning the historical Dracula. Until the summer of 1890, Stoker had been influenced chiefly by LeFanu's vampire story Carmilla. He had, in fact, chosen Austrian Styria as the locale for a book he entitled “The Wampyre Count,” a takeoff on Polidori's Vampyre. This preliminary sketch of the novel was later published as a special essay in Bedside Companion: Ten Stories by the Author of Dracula, and is inserted as a first chapter in a few editions of Dracula. However, fascinated by the unusual feminine ring of the name Dracula, and no doubt influenced by the evil reputation of the prince that Wilkinson had reviewed, Stoker, in a moment of inspiration duly recorded in his notes, struck out the name “Count Wampyre” from the title and substituted the words “Dracula-Dracula-Count Dracula,” as if he were savoring the sound of the name. Thus both Transylvania, the home of the vampire that he had adapted for his purposes from Emily Gerard's book, and Dracula, taken over from William Wilkinson, suddenly became magic words, instrumental in the final success of the book.
Most of the other citations that Stoker took over from Wilkinson's book were incorporated in one manner or another in the novel. They included some accurate historical details. Thus, Stoker knew that the name Dracula was that of the family, being applicable to both father (Dracul), son (Dracula), and his descendants: that is, the other “Draculas.” Stoker cited the fact that Ladislas (Ladislas III, king of Poland) had embarked on the Varna crusade against the Turks and that “four thousand Wallachians under the command of Dracula's son (Mircea) joined him.” He was informed of the details of Hunyadi's defeat at Varna; he learned of the murder of Dracula's father and his replacement by Prince Vladislav II (mistakenly identified by Wilkinson as Dan). As noted, in the prologue to the novel, Stoker used the defeat of the Hungarians and Vladislav II at the second battle of Kosovo, an episode that led to Dracula's first reign in 1448. Stoker also learned from Wilkinson that when Sultan Mehmed II was “occupied in completing the conquest of the islands in the Archipelago” the Wallachians found that this “afforded them a new opportunity of shaking off the yoke [of the Turks].… Dracula, did not remain satisfied with mere prudent measures of defense; with an army he crossed the Danube and attacked the few Turkish troops that were stationed in his neighborhood; but his attempt, like those of his precursors, was only attended with momentary success.” This is a clear reference to Dracula's Danube winter campaign of 1461, which found its way into the novel. Wilkinson adds that the sultan replaced Dracula with his brother Radu, another instance of historical fact, incorporated later into the fiction. We could find other examples of authentic history derived from Wilkinson which were inserted into the novel; mention of the Hungarian defeat at Mohácz in 1526, for one; a vague allusion to the victories gained by Michael the Brave, an indirect descendent of Dracula through his half-brother Vlad the Monk, who “defeated the Turks on their own ground,” over a century after the historical Dracula's death, being yet another example.
Most puzzling, on the other hand, are Stoker's references to Dracula's so-called Szekler—Stoker uses the term Szekely—descent, clearly a historical error that requires some comment. Judging both from the notes and the contents of the novel, there is no question that Stoker was quite fascinated by the destructive power of Attila the Hun's inroads deep into western Europe in the fifth century and intrigued by the relationship of the Huns with both the Hungarians and the Szekler tribes of Transylvania. He derived most of this information from A. F. Crosse's Round about the Carpathians and E. C. Johnson's On the Track of the Crescent. However, Stoker also incorporated some material from Nina Elizabeth Mazuchelli's two-volume Magyarland. In order to give some respectability to her account, Mazuchelli was fond of quoting the prominent Oxford University Orientalist Max Müller (1823–1900), with whom Stoker later engaged in a correspondence, to support her views concerning the origins of the Szeklers: “Max Muller, by the unerring guide of language, has traced the original seat of this interesting people to the Ural mountains which stretch upwards to the Arctic ocean; and pointing out the close affinity the Magyar tongue bears to the idiom of the Finnish race spoken east of the Volga, declares that the Magyars form the fourth branch of the Finnish stock, viz. the Ugric” (p. 45). But why should Stoker be so insistent on the vampire count's so-called Szekler descent?
One might answer, Why would Stoker care about authenticity on this point? He was, after all, a novelist, not a historian, using historical references in his plot only to gain a certain flavor of authenticity or else to derive for his central character the kinds of attribute that fitted best. What would have more dramatic impact than to make Dracula an indirect descendant of Attila, a man wicked enough to be known in history as “the scourge of God”? Stoker needed a pedigree of evil for his vampire count.
However, it is also possible to probe the missing Szekler connection a little further by tackling Stoker's problematic relationship with the famous Hungarian orientalist, philosopher, and professor of Eastern languages, Arminius Vambery (Hermann Vamberger), whose role is highlighted in the novel by Professor Van Helsing, Stoker's real hero. There is not a single reference to Vambery in Stoker's notes; and though this Hungarian scholar wrote dozens of tomes about Matthias Corvinus (he studied at the famous library of the Hungarian king), the Hunyadis, Sultan Mehmed II, and other principal characters of our plot, apparently he wrote not a word on Dracula. This fact is confirmed by Vambery's most recent biographers, Lory Alder and Richard Dolby. We do know that Stoker met the famous orientalist on several occasions, first briefly at a reception at Sandringham House, where Sir Henry Irving staged a command performance in honor of Queen Victoria in 1889. Later, in 1890, the two men met at the Beefsteak Club, essentially an annex of the Lyceum Theatre, a club where dinners often prolonged themselves deep into the night. Pending any further disclosure from the Stoker family, one may only guess at the nature of Stoker's personal conversations with Vambery, which were never transcribed. Certainly Vambery was in a good position to answer Stoker's many queries about the real Dracula, with whom he, as an eastern European historian, was obviously familiar from the works of Engel and Münster to which we have earlier referred. Vambery would have been able to confirm Wilkinson's negative image of the authentic prince, for whom no Hungarian historian ever had much interest or respect, a very good reason for Vambery's slighting of Dracula in his own writings.
In regard to the Szekler issue, it is possible that in these conversations Vambery laid emphasis on the Hungarian connection of the Dracula family, some of whom still lived in Hungary and Transylvania. After all, they had been honored with a patent of nobility by the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I in 1535 and had properties in what was essentially Szekler territory. Vambery may also have been familiar with the fact that this branch, which survived through its female line well into the seventeenth century, had acquired additional lands in the region of the Borgo Pass, in essence the site Stoker ultimately chose for his vampire castle. Referring to Dracula himself, Vambery undoubtedly knew that Mihály Szilágy had given the Wallachian prince a castle in that region for services rendered against the Saxons.
Encyclopedic a
scholar that he was, it is at least conceivable that Vambery also had some knowledge of Beheim's poem, the source for Van Helsing's statement in the novel that he had found a document in which Dracula was described as a blood drinker — a clear reference to one of Beheim's verses. This in turn provided Stoker with a significant historical matrix on which to base Dracula's identification with the vampire. Our assumption that these particular Stoker-Vambery conversations must have had some sort of substance is linked to Vambery's repute and prestige in London society. It is highly unlikely that Stoker manufactured the “blood drinker” statement out of hand; this might even have exposed the author to a possible lawsuit by the Hungarian scholar, since Van Helsing cites him indirectly as a source.
As for the details in the novel concerning geographic and topographical place names (obscure villages), descriptions of countryside, details concerning the costume and ethnic origins of the people, and other minutiae such as the bad condition of the roads in Transylvania and Moldavia, these are easily accounted for by some of Stoker's above-mentioned travel books and consultation of travel guides readily available not only at the British Museum but at almost any major library. Mention in the novel of the British Museum library, one of the greatest collections of books, further illustrates Stoker's concern for scholarly credentials.
Dracula, Prince of Many Faces Page 32