Who Is Dracula's Father?

by John Sutherland

  There follows a ‘perfect tornado’. Hail falls in a violent cascade and the hero is forced to take shelter deeper in the tomb. He thinks he sees something inexplicable:

  as I am a living man, I saw, as my eyes were turned into the darkness of the tomb, a beautiful woman, with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier.

  He senses there is someone living, or, worse, not living, alongside him. Lightning strikes the iron stake pinning down the Countess; she rises screaming. The hero faints, as well he might. He half wakes to feel something (some ‘thing’) warmly ‘rasping’ at his throat. When he dares look, he sees it is a gigantic wolf lying on him. He is being raped by the beast.

  He is rescued, in the nick of time, by a troop of soldiers: werewolf hunters. They frighten off his furry assailant and take him back to the hotel. The manager has received a telegram from Dracula. It instructs him to take particular care of this guest. Dracula has need of the young man undamaged. He is to leave for Bistritz post-haste.

  One rather wishes that Stoker could have found a way of incorporating this vivid episode in his published text.

  * Stoker took over management of Irving’s Lyceum Theatre in 1878. The first production he took charge of was Vanderdecken, David Belasco’s take on the tale of the Flying Dutchman.

  † http://hauntedohiobooks.com/news/munich-dead-house. It is quoted and discussed by Skal.

  ‡ See the summary of Carmilla on pages 43–5.

  Why is Stoker’s vampire aristocratic?

  It’s odd. The image of the vampire before Stoker historically is typically of some low-born corpse who won’t lie still in his shallow grave. Proletarian at best, more often a peasant. Dracula is something else. He is a count to the tip of his unnaturally long and pointed fingernails. Well-bred.

  Romania, people who know about such things remind us, doesn’t have ‘counts’. It is, so spelled, a distinctly English honour. Dracula, in his own country, would be a boyar. That word appears four times in the text. ‘Count’ appears 237 times.

  There is a patina of British aristocracy layered over the Romanian vampire. Whence comes it? The question leads back to the most famed and notorious (if one excepts the Earl of Rochester) aristocrat in British Literature: George Gordon Lord Byron. It’s connected via that name to a backstory which takes us into the Regency literary world. The story is well known – novels and TV dramas have been written about it – but it merits retelling.

  The unprecedentedly wet summer of 1816 and the inconvenience it caused a party of distinguished literary tourists – Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont and John Polidori, Byron’s attendant doctor – is legendary. Climatically, the bad weather began far away in Indonesia, with the eruption of Mount Tambora. It hit seven on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, making it the largest such event in a thousand years. The result, worldwide, was the ‘year without a summer’ and a (less deadly) eruption of Gothicism in Villa Diodati, alongside Lake Geneva, where the English littérateurs were staying. Pent up by the foul weather, they beguiled the rainy days and nights with a competition to write the most spine-chilling ghost story their highly creative minds could come up with.

  Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) was evidently struck by the fact that Milton had once resided in Villa Diodati. She elected to rewrite Paradise Lost as Frankenstein. Shelley and Byron rather fizzled out: literature was, in the final analysis, more than a parlour game for them. Nonetheless, as a striking entry in Polidori’s diary testifies, they remained receptive listeners:

  L[ord] B[yron] repeated some verses of Coleridge’s Christabel, of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. Threw water on his face, and after gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs S[helley], and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him.

  Polidori was, like the eighteen-year-old Mary, young – in his case, barely twenty. The two of them got on well. A graduate of Edinburgh Medical School (the youngest ever to qualify, supposedly), Polidori had learned his sawbone trade (which he despised) on cadavers supplied by Edinburgh’s famous socalled ‘resurrectionists’ – a grim joke. Medical science needed corpses: the supply from the gallows and the stillborn (the only legitimate sources) was inadequate. Neither would rotting cadavers do. Anatomists needed ‘fresh meat’, still warm, ideally. Burke and Hare, the most notorious of the resurrectionists, solved the supply problem by murder.

  Polidori had written his thesis on ‘somnambulism’. He was fascinated by the paranormal. A second-generation Italo-Englishman, he was handsome, politically radical, and a vibrant (if rather too interruptive) conversationalist.

  Polidori had found himself at the Villa Diodati by a once-in-a-lifetime stroke of luck. Byron, immersed in sexual scandal, had decided that England was too hot for him. He would decamp, and he needed a travelling companion – preferably a physician. Byron was taken with Polidori, whom he had met socially. The young man was recruited for the duration of the tour abroad, on a handsome stipend of £500.

  Polidori was flattered to the point of intoxication. Byron’s closest friend, John Cam Hobhouse, loathed ‘Polly-Wolly’ and sowed as much distrust as he could. It was unnecessary. The young medic soon got on Byron’s nerves and things were not helped by ‘The Vampyre’, the tale Polly came up with in their ghost story competition. Clearly the hero of that short tale, Lord Ruthven, is a version of Byron.

  Intended as flattery, Polidori’s story was tactless and clumsy. The plot of ‘The Vampyre’ is simple. The sinister Lord Ruthven* takes the handsome young Aubrey on a continental tour with him. On his travels, Ruthven cold-bloodedly destroys every young person who comes his way. Finally, having sucked Aubrey dry, he turns his dead, grey, irresistible eye on Aubrey’s sister:

  Aubrey’s weakness increased; the effusion of blood produced symptoms of the near approach of death. He desired his sister’s guardians might be called, and when the midnight hour had struck … he died immediately after. The guardians hastened to protect Miss Aubrey; but when they arrived, it was too late. Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!

  No need to call for the ether. One’s spine is obstinately unchilled. Shortly after reading this Byron kicked Polidori out, sending him across the Alps alone, friendless and penniless. On his return to England, Polidori drifted, gambled wildly, and suffered a disastrous head injury in a coach accident in 1818, which exacerbated a temperamental disposition towards melancholy.

  ‘The Vampyre’ went into oblivion. Until that is, the rascally publisher Henry Colburn came on the scene. Colburn was infatuated with Byron and all things Byronic. Virtually every copy of his magazine the New Monthly contained something connected with the mad, bad lord – the most celebrated of Regency celebrities. Colburn duly arranged the publication of ‘The Vampyre: A tale related by Lord Byron to John Polidori’ in his magazine. Later, with some modification, it was published in booklet form, again purportedly as a tale by Byron, transcribed by Polidori.

  I discuss the chicanery and jiggery-pokery of this sorry episode elsewhere.† But, briefly, late in the day clarifications came after Colburn had made a mint of money and fended off lawsuits. The reading public did not care about intricacies of authorship.

  On its publication ‘The Vampyre’ was universally taken to be a shameless self-portrait by the world’s most ruthless womaniser (a founder member of the ‘League of Incest’). With Byron’s name attached to it, or dragged behind it, the ‘trashy tale’ was sensationally popular. Five book editions came out in 1819 alone. There were translations (pirated) in Europe, dramatic adaptations, and an opera. There was nothing new about vampires as such, but the literary effect of ‘The Vampyre’ was momentous. It not only inspired but forever ‘Byronised’ the genre. Polidori died aged 25 in 1821, suicidally depressed, and probably by a self-administered dose of pruss
ic acid.

  The ‘Vampyre’ affair was a murky business: But it left a consequence. The aristocratic vampire. This idea was picked up by Thomas Preskett Prest, taking the form of Sir Francis Varney in Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood. It was a penny serial for the masses. But the notable fact is that the hero is a blood-sucking, vampiric aristocrat. A ‘trope’ was founded.

  * The pseudonym Lady Caroline Lamb had applied to her thinly disguised Byronic villain-hero in her roman-à-clef Glenarvon.

  † In Lives of the Novelists (2011).

  Who invented the Dracula tux?

  Dracula’s sartorial standards are not, as Stoker portrays them, high. In one of the meaner of his acts, for example, he steals Harker’s clothes before going off on his epic jaunt to England. The notion of the enemy of mankind doing his worst in a stolen pair of solicitor’s clerk’s trousers is a bit of a comedown.

  Dracula wears, when the choice is his, an all-black outfit. His look. But white gloves and a straw hat are mentioned by workers at Doolittle’s Wharf, where his boxes are being transported. Elsewhere, the zookeeper recalls:

  ‘… There wasn’t much people about that day, and close at hand was only one man, a tall, thin chap, with a ’ook nose and a pointed beard, with a few white hairs runnin’ through it. He had a ’ard, cold look and red eyes, and I took a sort of mislike to him, for it seemed as if it was ’im as they was hirritated at. He ’ad white kid gloves on ’is ’ands, and he pointed out the animiles to me and says: “Keeper, these wolves seem upset at something.” …’

  As regards the straw hat, Van Helsing – not a connoisseur of dress – observes, ‘it suits not him’. One can’t see Christopher Lee going with it.

  Wardrobe became a critical issue with stage and film versioning. Max Schreck in the primal film Nosferatu simply went for East European drab. But Dracula is a count, even if he can hardly be said always to have noble blood in his veins. One wonders about how faddy he is. In Transylvania he leaves the peasant woman to the wolves and throws her babe to his harem. In England the only victims we see him interested in are the eminently upper-class Mina and Lucy.

  We associate Dracula with a certain mode of dress: essentially the dark dandyism pioneered by the novelist and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton in the 1830s, as a revolt against Beau Brummelism.* The well-dressed Victorian gent clothed himself as if going to a funeral. ‘Charcoal grey’ was the gayest colour.

  On stage the dark-dandy Dracula originates in 1924, with Hamilton Deane’s theatrical version. It was the first production to receive Florence Stoker’s assent and she granted the privilege partly as a protest against the grimy Nosferatu travesty, as she saw it (see page 59). Dracula should embody at least the outward quality of British gentlemanliness. Rephrase that as English gentlemanliness. He should be dressed adequately for the Windham gentlemen’s club.

  Renfield, before he took to the straitjacket, was a member of the Windham, as was Arthur’s father, Lord Holmwood. So too were Sir Henry Irving and his assistant, Mr Stoker. If it were just a question of external appearance they could have proposed Deane’s version of Count Dracula for membership, no questions asked.

  Playing the Count on stage, Raymond Huntley drew on his own wardrobe, allegedly, to create a Dracula who could, in appearance, quite easily have ambled into a Noel Coward drawing room comedy. Deane, in the supporting role of Van Helsing, was similarly well turned out. It was gent versus gent to the death.

  The production toured for years until Huntley was fed up to the false canines with it. He felt trapped in a role which was beneath his talent. But he had been instrumental in creating an image of Count Dracula which is still with us.†

  The black-tie dinner jacket – ‘tux’ in American parlance – became fashionable by its association with Dracula. Hamilton Deane took his Dracula to Broadway in 1927, Bela Lugosi replacing the fed-up Huntley and thereafter going on to star in the 1931 Tod Browning movie. Deane did the scenario. Bela Lugosi was duly tuxified, with an odd medallion hanging round his neck which has been an object of fascinated speculation among Dracula enthusiasts.

  American teenaged youth, a genus which rarely dresses for dinner, revels in the Dracula tux every Halloween. On that night in November, the Count ‘lives’ again.

  * That is, the colourful garb popularised – for those who could afford it – by the Prince Regent’s (and Byron’s) particular friend Beau Brummel, virtuoso of the cravat.

  † See http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-does-dracula-wear-a-tuxedo-the-origins-of-bram-stokers-timeless-vampire-101868474/#rZoSZKLSSfwCsjot.99. Huntley went on to do good work in film.

  How rich is Dracula?

  At the period Stoker was writing Dracula, 1890 until May 1897, H.G. Wells was writing a novel, originally intended to be published simultaneously. It was called The Sleeper Wakes.

  Wells, fearing Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee would distract England from his book, withheld The Sleeper Wakes until 1898. The novel’s early sections are set in 1897, its futuristic sections in 2001. It would have been pleasing if Stoker’s and Wells’s novels had come out cheek by jowl. There is a fascinating conjunction of theme.

  Wells’s ‘sleeper’ – Graham by name, a lone wolf by nature – falls into a deep sleep. Science cannot wake him, but it can preserve his body. Blood transfusions keep Graham going for two centuries. The procedure – the infusion of life into another body – was beginning to be successfully practised at Edinburgh in the early 1890s but not rendered entirely safe until 1901, when blood types were identified.* Had he survived into the 20th century, Dracula could have saved himself, and humankind, a lot of trouble by raiding hospital blood refrigerators.

  Graham wakes, in 2001, to find that by the miracle of compound interest he now owns all the wealth in the world. He is king, boss, master.

  Dracula has potentially had many more centuries to accumulate wealth than Graham. And he is very interested in ready money. Hence his laborious expeditions with spade over his shoulder on St George’s Night (see below, ‘Why is Dracula so interested in blue flames?’, page 159). It’s the only work, other than some bedmaking, we see him do.

  Dracula’s money is in very old gold. Harker sees a mountain of it in the castle treasure room. It is very valuable and growing ever more so. There was anxiety in the 1890s that the world’s supply of the precious metal was running out. Hence the British Empire’s willingness to fight a war for the possession of South African gold mines.

  How rich, then, is Dracula? If he can buy 50 houses in London he is manifestly an extremely well-heeled vampire. Right at the top of the 1893 international rich list. Wells’s scientific romance is a young socialist’s parable about accumulative capitalism and the tyrannies it spawns. It is worth spending a little time thinking about Dracula’s very different econo-politico-socio subtext.†

  The ever-illuminating Franco Moretti sees Stoker’s novel as fuelled by 1890s panic about foreign money flooding into Britain, sucking away its national selfhood. Assimilation is never in prospect on Dracula’s part. He sleeps on his own, consecrated, foreign soil. Fifty boxes of the stuff. He uses England. He has not the slightest intention of becoming English. Leave that to the serfs.

  Dracula, the oligarch vampire, can be aligned with vulgar depictions of, for example, the Rothschilds. Stoker played down any anti-Semitism in the novel (the first word in his notes, ‘Aaronson’, is erased and replaced with the gentile ‘Hawkins’). As a man of the London theatre, a traditionally philo-Semitic world, Stoker was never that way inclined. Nor was he carried away by the British anti-Jewish panic, as Russian pogroms drove multitudes of desperate Jews to seek last-hope refuge in the US and UK. But, nonetheless, there is a touch of 1890s anti-Semitic prejudice in at least one point of the novel (see ‘How much German does Jonathan speak?’, page 69). It does no damage but one wishes it wasn’t there.

  Dracula’s wealth is literally torn from the body of Romania, drenched as it has been in history by blood and treasure. Dracula loves
his blood- and gold-enriched native dirt. As he explains to a wondering Jonathan, who has witnessed him digging up gold from the tell-tale blue flames:

  ‘That treasure has been hidden … in the region through which you came last night, there can be but little doubt; for it was the ground fought over for centuries by the Wallachian, the Saxon, and the Turk. Why, there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders.’

  In the past, Dracula says, the population would bury their wealth to protect it from the invading hordes. Why, inquires Jonathan, hasn’t it been dug up since? The Count smiles: ‘Because your peasant is at heart a coward and a fool!’

  Gold, where geological forces have created it, is found in dirt and so is Dracula’s. The difference being that his gold is crusted in blood. And history. How rich a vampire is he? The richest.

  * Lucy was as likely to be killed by a disparity of blood types among her four donors as by Dracula.

  † I am indebted here to Jasmine Yong Hall, ‘Solicitors Soliciting: The Dangerous Circulations of Professionalism in Dracula’, in The New Nineteenth Century: Feminist Readings of Unread Victorian Fiction, eds Barbara Leah Harman and Susan Meyer (1999).