Renfield values his neighbourhood closeness to Carfax. Most of all he relishes it when his Master is in coffined residence next door. He attacks the carters taking away the Count’s body in its massive box with homicidal fury. He does not, apparently, register that a new location is necessary for his master’s safety. Renfield, Seward notes, is violent by day, when Dracula is in the vicinity, quiet by night. Renfield is, as Van Helsing later puts it, the ‘index’ of where the Count is, a radar role taken on after his death by Mina.
Dracula kills Renfield because his slave has fallen in love (as everyone seems to, on the spot) with Mina. He betrays his master to protect her throat from the deadly kiss. He himself is killed by assault on his own neck, not by the fang he craves but a blow, shattering his spine. He will never achieve ‘perpetual life’. But then, at the end of the day, neither does Dracula. Or anyone, come to that. A solemn thought.
There are little black holes puncturing every inch of the Renfield story but, read carefully, they work to create a counterpoint; a not quite narrated story on the edge of the narrative we are reading. Renfield puzzles, but he can be defended as a thought-provoking part of the design.
* John Burdon-Sanderson and David Ferrier were actual living scientists.
† Non causa and ignoratio elenchi: ignorance of cause and fallacious argument. Renfield has been reading Schopenhauer.
‡ Note the capitalisation: Dracula is Renfield’s God. Literally.
Why are the Gypsies so loyal to Dracula?
The Count is superhumanly strong. He throws Harker’s luggage about as if it were eggshells. But how, to take one salient example, does he get 50 heavy boxes of good Transylvanian dirt to England, without help? It will be many days of back-breaking work, involving lurching transport, by horse and cart, over unmade roads, then complicated loading on board the cargo ship in Varna.
The point is made in the text that Dracula has no servants, domestic or manual, inside or outside of his castle. Which is why his home is in such a disgraceful state of unrepair inside and outside. We see him making the beds himself – and as I’ve suggested elsewhere (see page 37) he can be imagined washing his own underwear – but who does the heavy lifting around Castle Dracula?
Gypsies, in a word. Tzigany. One of the undeveloped areas of the novel is the loyalty that Dracula inspires in these unruly people, as alien in modern Transylvania as he is. Of course they ‘belong’ and are popularly thought to originate in Romania: what is their language? Romany. What are they called? ‘Roma’. (On the other hand, ‘Gypsy’ hints at distantly Egyptian beginnings. In reality, anthropological consensus puts their origin in India.) But they travel across frontiers – and are suspected of being incorrigibly criminal (‘didicoys’) wherever they set up their temporary living quarters. They are in the world but not of it. Like Dracula.
At various points in the narrative Gypsies are described doing this and that for their master. A desperate Harker gives one of them a letter to send back to England. A mistake. Despite Harker’s monetary bribe the Gypsy gives the letter straight away to Dracula.
Why do these notoriously independent people give Dracula their allegiance? In his notes (drawing, I suspect, on Sabine Baring Gould)* Stoker jotted down a line about the Gypsy tradition of service to ruthless masters which can be traced back to Pharaoh. It would not trouble them that he was spilling blood. Or drinking it.
There were, at the time Stoker was writing and researching, some 150,000 Gypsies in Hungary, and therefore, we might reasonably think, hundreds of thousands moving nomadically across the Balkans. ‘Gypsies hang on to Magyar castles,’ he noted, ‘and call themselves by names of the owner and profess his faith, whatever it be.’ They are, as the last scene depicts, prepared to fight to the death for him.
In an informative article, Beverley Richardson notes that
The ancient home of the Gypsies, India, has many mythical vampire figures. The Bhuta is the soul of a man who died an untimely death. It wandered around animating dead bodies at night and attacked the living like a ghoul. In northern India could be found the brahmaparusha, a vampire-like creature with a head encircled by intestines and a skull from which it drank blood.
The most famous Indian vampire is Kali, who had fangs,
wore a garland of corpses or skulls and had four arms. Her temples were near the cremation grounds. She and the goddess Durga battled the demon Raktabija who could reproduce himself from each drop of blood spilled. Kali drank all his blood so none was spilled, thereby winning the battle and killing Raktabija.
There was, it is interesting to note,
One Gypsy vampire [who] was called a mullo (one who is dead). This vampire was believed to return and do malicious things and/or suck the blood of a person (usually a relative who had caused their death, or not properly observed the burial ceremonies, or who kept the deceased’s possessions instead of destroying them as was proper.)†
More than one needs to know perhaps. But fascinating. One can boil it down to the folkloric fact that Gypsies and vampires have a traditional affinity. And one can wonder whether, given a long enough stay in London, Dracula might recruit a new set of helpers from England’s roads and encampments.
* For Stoker’s indebtedness to Baring Gould see the entry below on Dracula’s hairy palms (page 142).
† http://www.thingsthatgoboo.com/monsters/
vamphistorygypsies.htm
What else was happening in 1893?
Stoker, as his notes testify, began writing down ideas for Dracula in spring and summer 1890. He may have been thinking about the novel for some time before then. At any rate, it was anything but a rush job. The nineties were busy years for him, Henry Irving, and the Lyceum theatre. Finally the work was published on 26 May 1897. That year the Lyceum suffered a disastrous fire, and it had been clear for some time that Irving’s stardom was fading. He was not an actor who suited fin de siècle.
There may also have been things happening in the book world delaying the publication of Stoker’s novel. The venerable three-decker, the form of fiction which had, via the ‘leviathan’ circulating libraries, dominated since Walter Scott’s day, was overthrown, by authors’ and publishers’ boycott and protest, in 1893–4. Thereafter the sleeker one-volume hardback (at a standard 6 ⁄-) took over. Dracula awkwardly straddled this great change historically. One only has to weigh it in one’s hand to realise that it is a three-volume novel in one-volume format. Like a fat man in a too-tight waistcoat. This may have been one of the reasons it was not, on publication, a runaway bestseller. Dracula’s bestsellerdom had to await the knock-on effects of film and stage versions 30 years later.
While on the subject of dates, critics have argued about that of the action. A case can be made for it being a novel of the moment: 1897. But the most plausible date for the Count’s failed invasion of England is a few months in spring, summer and autumn 1893. Daily and monthly dates are prominent in that Stoker has been shown to have used a calendar for that year.* Seasonally it was originally to be set in a bitter winter. Stoker changed that, one might hazard, to centre the early action on St George’s Eve (4 May).
The reason for antedating the narrative four years in the past may be guessed at. 1897 was the year of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. It would have been too distracting to have Dracula wandering into London in Jubilee turmoil: although his making an assault on the royal throat(s) is a piquant fantasy. John Brown rushes in, his scien dhu flashing, to save his ‘little lady’ from a fate worse than state funeral. It could work.
If it is 1893 (I agree it is)† there is barely a reference to public events in England or the US. Renfield does bring up the Monroe doctrine when he meets Quincey but does not, as he could have done, touch on the current US annexation of Hawaii as an act of imperialism.
In Stoker’s notes Gladstone is mentioned. He may have thought of drawing some analogy with the 1893 prime minister, the GOM (‘Grand Old Man’) of British political life. Dracula, his country’s oldest (un)li
ving tyrant, might have been portrayed as the GOMpire of Romania. In the event Stoker decided to blank out all current political and world events. Dracula is a novel narrated against a featureless white background as regards history.
Nonetheless Dracula’s time-setting is structurally identified, very precisely, by something else. American technology. One of Stoker’s early ideas, his notes tell us, was to make Quincey an American inventor. It would have fit – although for action scenes in the late narrative the Winchester-toting Texan, Stoker decided, would fit even better.
The plot of Dracula runs electrically on American technology, and the appliances of the greatest inventor of them all, Thomas Edison. There is, in the techno-framework, some blurring of exact years, over 1893–7. It does not jar since invention takes time to reach the market place.
Jack Seward keeps his diary not in the shorthand Jonathan uses, but on a phonic voice recorder. These machines were invented, patented and mass-marketed in the 1890s by Edison, and Seward must have been an early British adopter.
It is relevant here to quote expert description which is well beyond my personal expertise, but which I find fascinating (there is, incidentally, no lengths to which lovers of Dracula will not go in fleshing out the novel’s contingencies, such as these. Good for them):
Edison indicated that the phonograph could be used for taking dictation, recording legal testimony, teaching languages and recording correspondence and even military orders. It seems likely that Stoker first encountered phonographic recordings while visiting Tennyson with Henry Irving in 1890, and later incorporated the technology into his novel. There are two phonographs in Dracula: the first belongs to Dr. Seward and is used for making clinical records; the second belongs to Lucy Westenra, presumably used for social and entertainment purposes, which Dr. Seward also employs. Jennifer Wicke suggests that Dr. Seward’s phonographic diary is ‘a technologized zone of the novel, inserted at a historical point where phonography was not widespread’; however, Edison had invented the original tin foil phonograph in 1877 and the more recent wax cylinder model described by Stoker in Dracula was invented in 1888. According to Eighteen-Bisang and Miller [the editors of Stoker’s notes for Dracula], the practice of using the phonograph to record clinical notations had become common at the time Stoker started to write the novel, and Kittler describes Dr. Seward’s phonograph as belonging to a category of ‘recently mass produced’ technology.‡
Jonathan Harker, a very go-ahead solicitor, is as ahead of the curve in photography as Seward is with phonography. Jonathan takes snaps of likely properties his firm has on its book with his ‘Kodak’. He has used the camera to take pictures of Carfax, ‘from various points’ to show Dracula. Again one reaches out to the 1890s technowhiz:
A Kodak was an old Victorian handheld camera, so popular that the Eastman Dry Plate Company that created it incorporated it into their name, becoming Eastman Kodak (still around and making cameras today). The Kodak, introduced in 1888, was cheap, compact, and easy to use. It made the previously very complicated process of taking photographs accessible to everyone. Their advertising slogan was: ‘You press the button, We do the rest.’§
Young Harker, if he survives his first Romanian client, will go far in the 20th century.
Jonathan keeps his diary in shorthand. We may make a persuasive guess at the notation he uses. The Gregg shorthand system – superior to the clunky old English ‘Pitman’ – was devised in the late 1880s by John R. Gregg. It inscribed sound, not spelling, as did the earlier Pitman. The phonics were/are (it is still current) cursively transcribed. Gregg could handle phrasing, abbreviated words, and required no lifting of pencil from notebook. Above all, it was faster, if harder to learn than Pitman (still being obsoletely taught in British secretarial colleges today).¶
John Robert Gregg was born in Northern Ireland. He was considered stupid. It was disability. His hearing had been destroyed by a brutal teacher banging his head. He left school at thirteen. Little was expected of John Gregg. As a copyist of office documents (he had a ‘good hand’) he was judged too ignorant to learn Pitman. He went on to invent his own, superior, shorthand. It gradually caught on, particularly in America, where new Americans (immigrants) couldn’t spell, but could accurately hear phonics.
A wonderful story. His invention was adopted universally in the US, where he emigrated in 1893, and in that year published the manual Gregg Shorthand. The system had been available in pamphlets in Britain a year or two earlier. Jonathan, as in other things, was an early adopter.
The faithful Mina (faithful, that is, until Dracula forces his vile fluid exchange on her) types. She has left the classroom, where she taught, to become a ‘New Woman’, a ‘stenographer’ – a shorthand typist. It was one of the gateways to female liberation. Women, traditionally dexterous from their sewing, could easily outperform sausage-fingered men on the keyboard. All this is portrayed in Grant Allen’s novel The Typewriter Girl, published in 1897 (that date again) under the name Olive Pratt Rayner. The technology which liberated such as Mina were the shorthand pad (‘take a letter, Miss Murray’) and, pre-eminently, the QWERTY typewriter.
Mina is not, however, chained to a clunky desk typewriter. She has what we would call a ‘portable’, a ‘laptop’ even. This means she can take the apparatus to Whitby with her, and even to Romania. In the 1890s, Mina’s typewriter would be called (as it is in the novel) a ‘traveller’. It is tempting to identify her machine as a Columbia portable, which came on to the market in 1885 and weighed only 6lbs. Stoker was, necessarily given the Lyceum theatre’s touring, a travelling man. He, it is surmised, may also have used a Columbia to type up Dracula.||
Jonathan and Mina will, once combined, make a formidable team. The venerable Exeter solicitors’ office, Hawkins and Co., will not know what hit it. The couple are new 20th-century bureaucracy incarnate.
So too is Quincey P. Morris a man of the day, as regards emerging American technology. At one stage in his early thinking about the novel Stoker intended to arm Quincey with a ‘Maxim’ – the American machine gun. A formidable thought.
In the event Quincey has one of the improved 1894 repeater-action Winchester rifles, with rapid reloading by the lever trigger guard. The ‘94’ would go on to sell by the many million, and become the bestselling civilian-purchasable rifle of all time.
Quincey proudly totes this fearsome all-American weapon (which, in point of historical fact, was doing more damage to the Native Americans of the Western states than to Romanian vampires).
Finally: in the last, high-action sections of the novel Mina plays a strange role as a receiver and transmitter of mental transmissions from the Count. She is a proto-radio set. The possibilities of this new device had been demonstrated by Nikola Tesla at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Stoker picked it up.
The narrative positively rattles with technological modernity – the modernity of the years 1890–7. Where did Stoker pick it up? Easily answered: from his accompanying Henry Irving on his third (1886) and, particularly, fourth (1893–4) American tours, in which he saw first-hand the techno-revolution which would shape the 20th century. Dracula senses it coming.
* See the chronological summary on pages 99–107 for the novel’s internal chronology.
† See also ‘Why Does the Bloofer Lady Target Children?’, page 46.
‡ Leanne Page, ‘Phonograph, Shorthand, Typewriter: High Performance Technologies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’. Professor Page’s informative article can be found online.
§ http://www.bookdrum.com/books/dracula/1128/bookmark/
84817.html
¶ My mother, who trained as a shorthand typist after being widowed in the Second World War, used both shorthand systems. I still in handwriting use some Gregg notation picked up from her.
|| http://www.bookdrum.com/books/dracula/1128/bookmark/
200109.html
Dracula:
a chronological plot summary
1 May [1893]: The young lawyer Jonathan Har
ker leaves Munich for Transylvania via Vienna. He arrives on 3 May at Bistritz, the nearest town to Castle Dracula with a train connection. He has come to facilitate a property transaction for Count Dracula, who intends to move to London. Dracula instructs him to go by the afternoon coach next day to the Borgo Pass, where he will be met. At nightfall.
After a terrifying drive by horse and carriage through the night, in which the driver does mysterious things, Jonathan is kept waiting at the door of the castle. He is finally offered entry by an old man – the Count – on condition that he enters freely of his own will. Which he does. The castle, Harker discovers, has no other occupants and no servants.
Over the period 5 May–25 June Jonathan keeps a shorthand diary in which he records that Dracula is sinister and, probably, intends to kill him. Jonathan does not, at this stage, know what vampires are.
He narrowly escapes losing his virginity, and possibly his life, to three ‘weird sisters’. An attempt to kill Dracula, lying in his coffin, with a shovel, fails. Finally Jonathan discovers himself alone in the castle. Dracula has left for England, taking Jonathan’s clothes and 50 boxes of dirt. Jonathan faces death at the mouths of the three bloodsucking sisters. His diary stops. We know nothing more of him.
9 May: The novel switches back in time to an exchange of letters between Jonathan’s fiancée, Mina Murray, and her old school friend, Lucy Westenra. Lucy, just nineteen years old, has received three proposals of marriage: from the asylum keeper, Jack Seward; from the rich American adventurer, Quincey P. Morris; and from the aristocrat Arthur Holmwood. She chooses Holmwood.
25 May: Jack Seward’s phonograph diary. He is mortally disappointed by Lucy’s rejection.
Who Is Dracula's Father? Page 7