Transylvania and Romania in Scholarly Editions of Bram Stoker's

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Transylvania and Romania in Scholarly Editions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Thèse

Cristina Artenie

Doctorat en littérature d’expression anglaise Philosophiae Doctor (Ph.D.)

Québec, Canada

Résumé

À partir des années 1970, le roman Dracula de Bram Stoker (1897) a connu une série inattendue d’éditions critiques, qui ont contribué en même temps à la canonisation d’une

œuvre de fiction considérée auparavant comme dédaignable et à la perpétuation des points de vue du roman sur la Transylvanie et la Roumanie. En général, les éditeurs suivent le principe selon lequel les annotations doivent permettre au public d’aujourd’hui d’avoir une expérience de lecture similaire à celle des premiers lecteurs et aussi proche de l’intention de l’auteur que possible. Dans le cas de Dracula, cela présuppose que beaucoup des choix idéologiques de Stoker restent inexpliqués et indisputés, tandis que ses représentations des peuples et des lieux “lointains” sont soutenues par l’usage que font les éditeurs des notes de travail du romancier. Stoker a pris note, en les modifiant, des centaines de citations de différentes sources qu’il a ensuite incorporées dans le texte du roman. Les éditeurs de

Dracula se fient à ces notes, sans prendre en compte les changements opérés par le romancier, les passages qu’il a utilisés mais qui n’apparaissent pas dans les notes, ou le fait que les sources sont souvent biaisées ou simplement érronées. Ainsi, les éditions critiques du roman de Stoker préservent et même contribuent au processus d’altérisation commencé par l’auteur de Dracula. L’analyse du discours d’altérisation est directement liée à la discussion du contexte historique du roman, c’est-à-dire le statut néo-colonial de la

Roumanie, abordé dans la deuxième partie de cette étude. Les faits qui y sont mis en valeur montrent que ce que Stoker savait et ceux qu’il connaissait ont influencé ses choix d’endroits, de personnages et d’intrigue. L’implication de la Grande Bretagne dans l’économie et la politique de la region, avant et après la Guerre de Crimée, attestée par la

iii présence des aventuriers coloniaux britaniques et par celle de la marine militaire anglaise sur le Danube, n’a guère était étudiée par les historiens. Le même peut être dit de l’implication de Londres au sein de la Commission Européenne du Danube. La présente

étude pourrait aussi être utile aux spécialistes du postcolonialisme, de la mondialisation ou

à ceux qui s’intéressent aux transformations apportées par le capitalisme dans le Bas

Danube et à l’intégration des principautés roumains dans le marché économique mondial.

Stoker a trouvé ses sources parmi les écrits des voyageurs en Transylvanie et Roumanie qui se préoccupaient des avantages économiques offerts par ces pays. Leurs écrits ont d’abord stimulé et ensuite soutenu l’implication de la Grande Bretagne dans l’économie de la région. La présente thèse va au-delà d’une autre frontière, en passant des études littéraires à l’anthropologie. Les anthropologues culturels peuvent trouver utile la discussion du temps et de la différence dans le roman de Stoker et dans les annotations des éditeurs. Dans les deux cas, il s’agit de la collection et de la manipulation des données concernant une région européenne « lointaine ». La (non)existence des croyances aux vampires est une situation qui peut fournir un aperçu des pratiques traditionnelles mais aussi, ce qui est plus important, des conséquences profondes du travail anthropologique du dix-neuvième siècle.

Bien qu’elle soit un examen des éditions les plus richement annotées du roman de Bram

Stoker, la présente étude est interdisciplinaire. Elle utilise des théories et des conceptes de plusieurs domaines, tout en attirant l’attention sur les liens complexes entre la culture, l’histoire, la politique et l’économie. Ce que cette étude montre surtout, c’est le lien étroit entre l’objet littéraire et le contexte dans lequel il a été produit.

Abstract

Since the 1970s, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) has gone through an unexpectedly long series of scholarly editions, which has contributed both to the canonisation of a work of fiction previously considered undeserving and to the perpetuation of the novel’s views on

Transylvania and Romania. As a rule, editors follow the principle according to which their annotations should allow today’s audience a reading experience similar to that of the original reader and as close to the author’s intention as possible. In Dracula’s case, this means that much of Stoker’s ideological choices remain unexplained and unchallenged, while his representations of “remote” people and places are supported by the editors’ use of the writer’s working notes. Stoker took down, in altered form, hundreds of quotes from several sources that he incorporated into the text of the novel. The editors of Dracula rely heavily on these notes, without taking into account the changes brought by the novelist, the passages that he used but do not appear in the notes, and the fact that the sources were often biased or simply wrong. Thus, the many scholarly editions of Stoker’s novel preserve and even enhance its original process of othering. The analysis of the othering discourse is closely linked to the discussion of the historical context of the novel, that is, to the neo- colonial status of Romania, examined in the second part of this study. The information unearthed here shows that who and what Stoker knew influenced his choice of place, plot and character, which can provide a new line of inquiry for both literary critics and historians. The involvement of Great Britain in the economy and politics of the region,

v before and after the Crimean War, attested by the presence of British colonial adventurers and by that of the British navy on the river Danube, has only been marginally studied by historians, and the same is true about the study of the British involvement in the European

Commission of the Danube. The present study can be equally useful to scholars engaged with postcolonialism, globalisation, and the transformations brought about by capitalism in the Lower Danube region and by the integration of the Romanian principalities into the world market economy. Stoker’s sources were travellers to Transylvania and Romania who were preoccupied with the economic advantages those countries had to offer. Their writings both stimulated and, later, supported the British involvement in the economy of the region.

This dissertation crosses yet another boundary, from literary studies into anthropology.

Cultural anthropologists can find useful the discussion of time and difference in Stoker’s novel and in the annotations of the editors, both of which involve the collection and manipulation of data from a “remote” European region. In the case of Dracula, the

(non)existence of vampire beliefs is an interesting case study which provides insight into the practice but, more importantly, into the far-reaching consequences of nineteenth- century anthropological work. Although an examination of the most heavily annotated scholarly editions of Bram Stoker’s vampire novel, the present study is interdisciplinary. It employs theories and concepts from several fields, thus bringing to the fore the intricate links between culture, history, politics and economy. What this study shows, more importantly, is the close link between the literary object and the context in which it was produced.

Table of Contents

Résumé ...... iii

Abstract ...... v

Table of Contents ...... vii

List of figures ...... ix

Note on Quotations ...... xi

Introduction ...... 1

Part I Dracula and Editorial Theory ...... 17

Chapter 1 Footnotes, Endnotes, Lateral Notes ...... 19 1.1 The Editor as Mediator ...... 28 1.2 The Politics of Annotation ...... 33 1.3 Types of Annotation ...... 40

Chapter 2 The Fight for a Masterpiece ...... 47 2.1 Leonard Wolf: The Annotated Dracula (1975) ...... 48 2.2 Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu: The Essential Dracula (1979) ...... 52 2.3 Leonard Wolf: The Essential Dracula (1993) ...... 54 2.4 Clive Leatherdale: Dracula Unearthed (1998) ...... 57 2.5 Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller: Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula (2008) ...... 60 2.6 Leslie S. Klinger: The New Annotated Dracula (2008) ...... 62 2.7 Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal: Dracula by Bram Stoker (1997) ...... 64 2.8 Glennis Byron: Dracula by Bram Stoker (1998) ...... 68 2.9 John Paul Riquelme: Dracula: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism (2002) ..... 71 2.10 A.N. Wilson: Dracula by Bram Stoker (1983) ...... 76 2.11 Maud Ellmann: Dracula by Bram Stoker (1996) ...... 78 2.12 Roger Luckhurst: Dracula by Bram Stoker (2011) ...... 79

Chapter 3 The Editors of Dracula and the Places of the Imagination ...... 81 3.1 The Extratextual Myth ...... 82 3.2 Hunters and Enthusiasts ...... 90 3.3 Places of the Imagination ...... 99

vii Part II The Historical Context of Dracula ...... 107

Chapter 4 Who Stoker Knew ...... 108 4.1 Crimea and After ...... 111 4.2 Wars of Independence ...... 119 4.3 Friends of James Knowles ...... 131

Chapter 5 What Stoker Knew ...... 145 5.1 On the British Danube ...... 149 5.2 Learning about Romania ...... 161 5.3 The Historical Dracula ...... 176

Chapter 6 Dracula, the Other ...... 185 6.1 The Contemporary Dracula ...... 186 6.2 Dracula’s Daughter and the Finnish Connection ...... 196 6.3 The Right Kind of Blood and the Wrong Kind of Marriage ...... 207

Part III Dracula, Transylvania and Romania ...... 218

Chapter 7 Othering: Place ...... 219 7.1 The Lay of the Land ...... 222 7.2 Landscapes ...... 240 7.3 Cityscapes ...... 252

Chapter 8 Othering: Time ...... 263 8.1 The Time of the Other ...... 265 8.2 The Burden of History ...... 278 8.3 The Unbearable Lightness of Ahistoricity ...... 293

Chapter 9 Othering: People ...... 309 9.1 Exotic Transylvania ...... 311 9.2 The Whirlpool of Races ...... 327 9.3 Nosferatu ...... 338

Conclusion ...... 354

Bibliography ...... 367

viii

List of figures

Figure 7.1. Map of Romanian provinces in the fifteenth century………………… 226

Figure 7.2. Map of historical Romanian provinces……………………………...... 227

Figure 7.3. Map of Romanian provinces today…………………………………… 227

Figure 7.4. Map of the Romanian Carpathians……………………………………. 244

Note on Quotations

Several scholarly editions have been used in this study, but all quotations from Stoker’s novel, identified with the title in italics between brackets (Dracula) followed by the page number, come from Glennis Byron’s edition (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1998). Of all editions discussed here, hers is the only one published in Canada and the one I started working with years ago. Whenever an explanatory note or any other contribution of the editors themselves is mentioned, it is identified with the name(s) of the editor(s) between brackets. This is also true of the Notes for Dracula, quoted as Bram Stoker’s Notes when the source is Stoker, but identified with the names of the editors (Eighteen-Bisang and

Miller) when the quotation reproduces a commentary on Stoker’s text. If two or more works of the same author are quoted, the title is also mentioned after the author’s name. To avoid repetitions, the name of Dracula is omitted from such titles. Quotations from other works by the editors are always identified with the name and title. The editions themselves are mentioned only by the name of the editor.

Introduction

One of Stoker’s biographers recently acknowledged that, when he “began to write a biography of Bram Stoker in the mid-1990s, [he] did not expect to be still engaged with the subject almost two decades later. . . . New commentators entering the field suggest fresh possibilities, while the frequent unearthing of new material is constantly altering seemingly fixed perspectives” (Murray, “The Facts and Fictions” 72). The same can be said of the perspectives on the novel’s aesthetic value. In their much debated introductions to the first

Oxford University Press editions of Dracula, both A.N. Wilson and Maud Ellmann rejected the literariness of the novel. In an essay published in the same year as Wilson’s edition,

Franco Moretti confessed that “[o]nly a few years ago, to write about Dracula meant being taken for an eccentric loafer, and one’s main worry was to prove that one’s work was legitimate: ‘You see, Dracula is part of literary history too’” (Moretti 15-16, original emphasis). However, the view persists today: one expert in Gothic literature recently introduced a volume of essays on the novelist by stating that “No one, except a maniac, would claim that Stoker was a particularly great writer, although he is better than his reputation would have you believe. Admittedly, his novels are often tedious, over and under plotted, sometimes nonsensical, confusing, confused, and Dracula, in as much as it is a Gothic masterpiece, is clearly a kind of fluke. Even with Dracula, we are dealing with a very uneven novel” (Killeen 16).

Dracula is, after all, an adventure story and a horror novel with fairy-tale undertones: the hero becomes the captive of a monster who later threatens his beloved but,

1 with the help of several allies, he manages to destroy the brute back in its remote lair. In

“The Children of the Night: Stoker’s Dreadful Reading and the Plot of Dracula,” Dick

Collins argues convincingly that, in the choices he made in the spring of 1890 and later,

Stoker was crucially influenced by the characters and plot of The String of Pearls (1846-

1847), the “penny dreadful” series that introduced the character of Sweeney Todd. In both narratives, there is a young solicitor1 who is engaged but goes abroad on business leaving his fiancée behind in England; the young woman has a friend who is courted by three suitors; all of them, led by an older, wiser man, join a quest to kill the monster who is the young solicitor’s employer; and the monster flees England in a boat, but is later killed (see

Collins 3ff). All this might explain the reluctance of some readers (including myself) – and moviegoers – to accept Stoker’s novel as a masterpiece, albeit of the Gothic kind.

Unlike the editors discussed in the following study, with the notable exception of the Romanian-born Radu Florescu, I never read Dracula as a child or as a teenager. While in Transylvania, one of Stoker’s major sources wrote that Hungarians

greatly prefer English authors. They do not, however, care for the “sensational,”

preferring the sentimental and romantic. In their cheap journalistic literature the

kind of pabulum known as “penny dreadful” does not exist. The Hungarians of the

lower class do not care to take their “horrors hot;” and such things as delight an

Englishman of the same calibre fall flat upon the mental palate of a Hungarian.

(Mazuchelli II, 50)

The traveller’s words still ring true more than a century later, in that part of Europe, at least for Romanians. I first read Dracula for a graduate seminar on the British novel and it did

1 Collins deliberately conflates Tobias Ragg, who is employed by Sweeney Todd, and Mark Ingestrie, a sailor who had been studying to be a lawyer. 2

not surpass my expectations. I did understand, however, that it is a work of fiction worth studying as representative of late-nineteenth-century attitudes in Britain, especially with regards to the notion of degeneration and the encounter with the European Other.

Therefore, I expected the novel to include a series of misrepresentations about the lands visited by its characters in the first and last chapters.

On the other hand, I was surprised at the mistakes in the annotations concerning

Transylvania and Romania in the editions of the novel; indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that, in any of the scholarly editions of Dracula, it is almost impossible to find a single annotation on Transylvania and Romania that does not include at least one error. The present study is the result of my inquiry into the reasons for this situation. Over the years, I discovered that some of the mistakes had been caused by the editors’ desire to follow a “rule” generally accepted by textual critics, according to which explanatory notes should use sources that were available to the original reader of the work, in this case late- nineteenth-century British sources, rather than more recent reference books. This poses a series of unexpected problems for a text like Dracula. First, much of the information about

East Central Europe in the Victorian era did not come from the most reliable sources.

Second, and more important, most of the information about Transylvania and Romania provided by Bram Stoker came not from encyclopaedias, guidebooks or newspapers and thus it was not common knowledge. Rather, it came from the works of a series of travellers who had passed through the region in the quarter of a century before 1890, when it is generally assumed that he began working on the novel.

Up to 2015, there have been five extensively annotated editions of Dracula, identified here as Wolf 1975 (to differentiate it from his later edition, from 1993),

3 McNally/Florescu, Wolf, Leatherdale, and Klinger. There are also three more sparsely annotated editions, which use instead a considerable amount of background material

(Byron) or background material and critical essays (Auerbach and Skal, and Riquelme).

Finally, Oxford World’s Classics has published a more generously annotated edition

(Luckhurst), after the very succinct ones by Wilson and Ellmann.

Leonard Wolf first published The Annotated Dracula (1975), a pioneering work in which he correctly identified many of Stoker’s sources, although he did not have access to the novelist’s working notes. These notes were discovered by Raymond McNally and Radu

Florescu, the editors of The Essential Dracula (1979). Wolf borrowed this title for his 1993 revised edition of the novel, in which he again did not use Stoker’s notes. The edition produced by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (1997) is notable for the consideration, both in annotations and in the supplementary material, of the novel’s adaptations. Glennis

Byron’s edition (1998) uses extracts from other works by Stoker, while Riquelme’s (2002) includes essays that analyse the novel from different critical perspectives. The most heavily annotated editions are Clive Leatherdale’s Dracula Unearthed (1998) and Leslie Klinger’s

The New Annotated Dracula (2008): the former introduces a religious perspective, while the latter is the first edition to make use of Stoker’s manuscript. Whenever they explain information originating in one or more of these travelogues, the editors of Dracula appear to quote from these very texts. They were, after all, nineteenth-century sources. However, they were neither common knowledge to readers of the time nor entirely reliable.

Moreover, with few exceptions, the annotations do not quote from these texts directly, but rather from Stoker’s research notes, which include misreadings, misinterpretations, and reworkings of the original. They usually summarise long passages and thus often hide some

of the information that shows both how Stoker constructed his fictionalised version of

Transylvania and why he might have chosen to include such details in his narrative. It is the study of the sources, in fact, that spearheaded the in-depth study of the novel: “More extended and admiring treatments of Dracula began to appear when critics examined in detail the book’s relation to folkloric and historical sources and its narrative techniques.

Source studies and commentaries concerned with literary form provided a backdrop against which later critics could treat Dracula seriously from psychological and social perspectives” (Riquelme 411). However, the discovery of Bram Stoker’s research notes for the novel has been a boon and a bane for Dracula studies. All editors have been persuaded to use them to the exclusion of most other source texts, including the actual passages that

Stoker summarised, distorted or used out of context. Paradoxically, the notes’ existence has made research into Stoker’s notes redundant.

The scholarly editions of Dracula give the impression that Stoker’s sources have been researched and all or most of the relevant passages have been matched with, and explained through, these sources. In reality, the editors have used Stoker’s notes – containing brief jottings, general ideas and some quotations out of context – instead of his actual sources to explain passages in the novel. Literally, the editors annotate Stoker by quoting Stoker, while referencing the travellers. Instead of explaining the information in

Stoker’s text, these notes rather compare the final version of Dracula with its earlier avatars contained in the author’s research for the novel. As Stoker’s working notes often find their way, almost unchanged, into the text of Dracula, the author’s research can be considered an early draft of the story. This means that the editors explain the novel through the novel itself. The reader almost never finds out how Stoker manipulated the information of his

5 sources or how much of that information was erroneous in the first place. The travellers from whom Stoker borrowed the information about Transylvania and Romania, including the part about the belief in vampires (taken from an essay by Emily Gerard), are introduced as authorities or without any comments. To support the information about vampire beliefs among Romanians, the editors use, without questioning, two sources from the 1920s

(Agnes Murgoçi and Montague Summers), even though Stoker could not have known them. More often, however, they simply make unsourced statements about Romanian,

Transylvanian or even “Balkan” lore. The idea that “Stoker used some authentic lore in his novel” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 128) is taken for granted and none of the editions ever mentions a single Romanian source about the folklore or the history of the region. In many ways, the scholarly editions of Dracula reclaim Transylvania for the West as its own fictional construct. Furthermore, what the editors do not say can be just as important as what they do say: the non-fictional aspect of Dracula, in other words the historical and biographical facts that Stoker would have been tempted to use in his novel, are consistently avoided by his editors. Yet, Stoker was “literal rather than literary” (Frayling, “Mr Stoker’s

Holiday” 196) and much that remains unexplained in the scholarly editions of Dracula can become less obscure if one takes into account the fact that Stoker had many other opportunities to find out about his subject than just the five books and one essay from which he took research notes.

A look at the most impersonal of the editors of Dracula can be quite revealing.

Reviewers have noticed that “Riquelme is particularly objective in his notes, preferring concise historical facts and word etymology to any subjective commentary or interpretation” (Martin 107). The objectivity as well as the brevity can be explained

through the list of books consulted by Riquelme for his annotations: five are guides (four concern London or Great Britain, only one the Austrian-Hungarian empire, none Romania); six are dictionaries and encyclopaedias (two versions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the rest are English dictionaries and a dictionary of law); the works of Shakespeare and Pope’s translation of the Odyssey; and Wilkinson’s Account and Emily Gerard’s book (Riquelme xii). Heavily relying on encyclopaedias, the annotations in his edition are often perfunctory.

There is very little independent research and the choice of encyclopaedias is never explained. Some notes rely on a recent online version of the Britannica, some on the eleventh edition published in 1910, and others on both. The reader is therefore introduced sometimes to knowledge from about the time of the publication of the novel and others to knowledge from the time of the publication of the Riquelme edition.

Riquelme provides a similar cursory treatment of the article “Vampire” from the

1888 Encyclopaedia Britannica. The name of the author of the article is not given, and we are only informed that he was “a scholar who died in 1895, before Dracula was published”

(Riquelme 375). This indicates that Riquelme knew that the author of the article was

Surgeon-Major George Edward Dobson, a zoologist and a leading expert on bats, fellow of the Royal Society, with two decades of military service in India. It appears, however, that

Riquelme is unaware of the fact that Dobson and the author of Dracula had more than a trivial connection. Both were Anglo-Irish – Dobson was born on 4 September 1848 in county Longford (he was, thus, less than a year younger than Stoker) – both entered Trinity

College Dublin in 1864, and both were granted an M.A. in 1875.2 Dobson entered the

2 Dublin (Trinity College) was one of only three universities (along with Oxford and Cambridge) that granted an M.A. on application, without any graduate courses or research. The candidate needed only seniority as 7 Army Medical Service in 1868 and retired in 1888. Before taking charge of the museum of the Royal Victoria Hospital, Netley, he was stationed in India (Flower xv-xvi), like two of

Stoker’s brothers, Thomas (1849-1925) and Richard (1851-1931). Documents of Trinity

College Dublin show Dobson and Stoker next to each other on the list of the university’s

“senators” in the early 1890s (Dublin University Calendar 511). Riquelme inserts the article on “Vampire” because Stoker could have read it; the article’s author remains unnoted, although, as a specialist in vampire-bats, he is the closest thing to a real-life

“vampire hunter” that Stoker could have met.

The editors’ inclusion of such background material is discussed in the following study, although the focus will always be on the annotations. However, I have included the annotations that are relevant to the topic of the present study, which is the representation of

Transylvania and Romania in Bram Stoker’s Dracula as explained by the novel’s editors.

The fact that their ideas are usually very similar has been helpful. While each editor (or duo of editors) builds his or her own parallel narrative about the novel, together they also build one common narrative. They quote each other, they borrow from each other, they dialogue within the space of the annotations. Riquelme admits that he has used Auerbach/Skal and

Wolf in “writing the glosses for Dracula” (Riquelme viii). Auerbach/Skal is rather lightly annotated but Wolf provides rich annotations and Riquelme puts them to good use, as he sometimes quotes Wolf directly in his own “glosses.” In historical and geographical matters, the more sparsely annotated editions (Auerbach/Skal; Byron; Riquelme;

Luckhurst) often rely on the two most popular annotated editions that have preceded them:

member of the university (including his undergraduate years). While Dobson had previously obtained a Master of Surgery degree in 1867, Stoker had received a B.A. as an “unclassed candidate” in 1870.

Wolf and McNally/Florescu. All the editors are discussed in each of the nine chapters of the present study.

Although I have relied mostly on a close reading of the annotations, introductions and other materials included by the editors, as well as on historical research, each of the three parts of the study can be said to have its own methodology. The first part is an attempt to understand the inner workings of scholarly editions of modern fiction in general, and of the editions of Dracula in particular. The first chapter analyses the eight critical editions of

Stoker’s novel strictly from the point of view of editorial theory; the notions of “textual note,” “note of recovery” and “explanatory note” are used to distinguish the various types of annotation found in these editions. The way these notes are arranged on the page as well as the part played by illustrations and supplementary material is also analysed here. More importantly, perhaps, I discuss the widely circulated precept according to which editors should explain a text with sources contemporary with the text itself. The second chapter is descriptive and introduces the eight editions that are analysed in this study, along with three others that have played an important role in the editorial history of Dracula and with the

2008 edition of Bram Stoker’s working notes for the novel. Each of these versions of the work is placed in its historical and cultural context, which includes the way they have been received. The third chapter introduces the editors and the reasons behind many of their editorial decisions. Transylvania is discussed for the first time as a “place of the imagination,” constructed by Stoker and kept alive by the “Dracula enthusiasts.”

The second part discusses the extent of Stoker’s knowledge and his interest in all things Romanian, both of which are usually disregarded by the editors of Dracula, who prefer to use the little that has been preserved in the novelist’s research notes. Although

9 A.N. Wilson’s claim in the introduction to his 1983 edition of the novel that Stoker “did some – but very little – research for his fantasy” (Wilson x) is universally rejected, the editors also insist that “Stoker himself never visited Transylvania and seems to have limited his library research on Tepes to a single volume by William Wilkinson” (Auerbach and

Skal 331). Whether they make it explicit or not, all editors seem to agree that Stoker did not read “beyond the references found in . . . his listed sources” (Leatherdale 11). Elsewhere,

Leatherdale ambiguously acknowledges “Stoker’s known researches into folklore, the occult and much else. . . . Whatever the extent of Dracula’s shortcomings, allegations of lack of research on Stoker’s part are difficult to substantiate” (The Novel and the Legend

12). As another editor explains, “the author of Dracula was a well-informed writer who had spent substantial time doing research for the book, which he wrote over a period of seven years” (Riquelme 411). This is, in fact, a widespread opinion among the editors: that Stoker researched more than one might be tempted to think (and more than some had thought before), but that, paradoxically, he restricted his research to only a few choice topics, so that he knew almost nothing about Transylvania and Romania except for what has been preserved in his research notes.

The third part discusses the ways in which the editors of Dracula use Stoker’s notes, as well as other resources, to explain the people and places of Transylvania and Romania.

Stoker’s vision is regularly reinforced through the annotations in various ways. The author’s working notes are used instead of the original sources, which often paint a different picture, and the reader does not find out how much is received information and how much is fictionalised. The editors never question the idea, preserved in a single paragraph in Emily Gerard’s article about “Transylvanian Superstitions,” that “the vampire,

or nosferatu” is a real folk belief; instead, they seek ways to confirm it. Romanian sources are conspicuously absent from all the editions, despite the fact that the most heavily annotated passages are those concerning Transylvania and Romania. Ultimately, the editors of Dracula preserve and sometimes enhance the operation of “othering” initiated by Bram

Stoker.

In order to trace the genealogy of the sanctioned interpretative directions of the novel as well as of the editorial notes, it is useful to review, however briefly, the development of Dracula Studies. Overlooked for more than half a century, Bram Stoker’s

1897 novel Dracula was reborn as a subject of literary study in the late 1950s and early

1960s, when two competing readings of the novel emerged, one historicist and the other psychoanalytical, which were to remain the leading interpretative approaches for the quarter of a century that followed. The historicist view on Dracula began with two essays in which Stoker’s character was identified with a Romanian medieval ruler better known as

Vlad the Impaler: Bacil F. Kirtley’s “Dracula, the Monastic Chronicles and Slavic

Folklore” (1956) and Grigore Nandriş’s “The Historical Dracula: The Theme of His

Legend in the Western and in the Eastern Literatures of Europe” (1966). This was supported by the first biography of Bram Stoker, published in 1962 by Harry Ludlam and based on interviews with the author’s only son Noel, who also suggested that the novelist had found out about Vlad from a Hungarian acquaintance named Arminius Vambéry. The beginning of the psychoanalytic reading of Dracula is also usually placed in the late 1950s, with the publication of Maurice Richardson’s 1959 essay on “The Psychoanalysis of Ghost

Stories.”

11 Dracula’s second rebirth in literary studies was in 1972. Several books on Dracula and his Romanian origins appeared in the early 1970s (including a new biography by

Daniel Farson, Stoker’s great-nephew, and Leonard Wolf’s first critical edition of the novel, both from 1975), but none were as important as the 1972 bestselling In Search of

Dracula by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu. In the following years, McNally and

Florescu published more books on the subject and were invited on TV shows as experts on both Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, who had by then come to be automatically associated with Stoker’s vampire Count. In 1979 they, too, provided a scholarly edition of the novel.

The two critical approaches mentioned above were influential in the shaping of the annotations in the first scholarly editions of the novel.3 In the meantime, the medieval stories about Vlad Ţepeş were studied, among others, by William C. McDonald, Matei

Cazacu and Raymond McNally, while Harry A. Senn worked on cognizant tales and legends, resulting in his monograph Were-Wolf and Vampire in Romania (1982).

Starting with the early 1980s, however, the two most important avenues of critical inquiry in Dracula Studies have been, on the one hand, the scholarly edition, the biographical study, the collection of essays and the close reading of the novel; and, on the other hand, examinations of the political and cultural implications of Dracula. New biographies were published by Phyllis Roth (1982), Barbara Belford (1996; revised edition,

2002), Paul Murray (2004) and Lisa Hopkins (2007). New editions included those edited by A.N. Wilson in 1983, followed by Maud Ellmann in 1996 for Oxford University Press;

Leonard Wolf (1993, a revised version of the 1975 edition); Nina Auerbach and David J.

3 The most widely quoted essays of the psychoanalytical approach are Christopher F. Bentley, “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1972); Joseph S. Bierman, “Dracula: Prolonged Childhood Illness, and the Oral Triad” (1972); Phyllis A. Roth, “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1977); and Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1984) 12

Skal (1997); Clive Leatherdale (1998); Glennis Byron (1998); John Paul Riquelme (2002);

Leslie S. Klinger (2008); and Roger Luckhurst (2011). Clive Leatherdale also published

Dracula: The Novel and the Legend (1985) and edited excerpts from Stoker’s sources for the novel in The Origins of Dracula (1987). Elizabeth Miller edited Bram Stoker’s Dracula:

A Documentary Volume (2005) and, together with Robert Eighteen-Bisang, a facsimile edition of Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula (2008). Some of the most influential essays on the novel have appeared in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Sucking through the Century (1997; ed.

Carol Margaret Davison); Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow (1998; ed. Elizabeth

Miller); Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic (1998; eds. William Hughes and Andrew Smith); Post/Modern Dracula (2007; ed. John S. Bak); and Bram Stoker:

Centenary Essays (2014; ed. Jarlath Killeen). Studies of Dracula as a response to nineteenth-century cultural realities in Great Britain, more specifically reflecting the fears of Victorian society, began chiefly with Carol A. Senf, “Dracula: Stoker’s Response to the

New Woman” (1982); Franco Moretti, “The Dialectic of Fear” (1982); Patrick Brantlinger,

“Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel” (1985); and

Daniel Pick, “‘Terrors of the Night’: Dracula and ‘Degeneration’ in the Late Nineteenth

Century” (1988), republished in Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848- c.1918 (1989). Some of the most influential studies belonging to this second avenue of research appeared in the 1990s: Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation” (1990); Kathleen L. Spenser, “Purity and Danger:

Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis” (1992); Judith

Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1993); Alexandra

Warwick, “Vampires and the Empire: Fears and Fictions of the 1890s” (1995); and David

13 Glover, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction

(1996).

The most recent studies focus on the context of Imperial Britain and attempt to approach the novel from a postcolonial perspective: William Hughes, Beyond Dracula:

Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context (2000); Eleni Coundouriotis, “Dracula and the Idea of Europe” (2000); Matthew Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question (2006);

Jimmie E. Cain, Jr., Bram Stoker and Russophobia (2006); and Thomas McLean,

“Dracula’s Blood of Many Brave Races” (2013). These are all studies that focus solely on

Stoker’s Dracula and that struggle to find the best way to approach and explain Stoker’s attitudes as a man of his time, closely connected to those who kept the Empire running.

There have also been important theoretical developments that help the advancement of postcolonial inquiry in Dracula Studies, particularly Maria Todorova’s seminal study

Imagining the Balkans (1997) and Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania: the

Imperialism of the Imagination (1998). The former traces the discursive construction of the

Balkans (understood as all Central and Eastern European territories that were, at various times, under Ottoman rule) in the Western imagination and how this biased representation has informed the attitude of policy makers and intellectuals in what is today called the first world towards the Balkans. Applying Todorova’s balkanist framework would be beneficial to the study of a great number of British and American works of fiction and non-fiction.

Many of the novel’s descriptions of peoples, places, and cultures can be revealed as informed by prejudice and the belief in the British superiority. Until now, no such approach has been introduced in Dracula Studies. This work would have been a perfect tool for this research, had it not been limited to countries that, as Todorova explains, have never been a

colony of the West. In the beginning, Todorova’s study was indeed the study I was using to build my theoretical approach. However, as I discuss in the second part of this study, the

Romanian Principalities are a special case. In the nineteenth century and up until the end of

World War Two, the Lower Danube, which features prominently in Stoker’s novel, was a neo-colony of the West, especially of Britain. In the case of Stoker’s vampire novel, the already established methodology of postcolonial inquiry, as outlined by Raymond Kennedy

(1945) and Daniel Chirot (1976), proves to be more helpful in uncovering the coloniser- colonised relation that informs Dracula and that often influences the work of the editors and various commentators who analyse the “Romanian” elements of the novel.

Furthermore, this dissertation is greatly influenced by Edward Said’s study Orientalism

(1978). Said discusses how the West’s construction of the East is an exercise in power which leads to the orientalising of those who cannot represent themselves but must be represented (21).

More important for the study of Dracula from a postcolonial perspective has been

Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. Goldsworthy’s examination of the literary colonisation of lands and peoples in Central and Eastern Europe by Western writers is compelling and extremely pertinent for a discussion of Stoker’s novel. Goldsworthy has an interesting section on Dracula in which she builds a strong case of literary colonisation. Albeit insightful and new, Inventing Ruritania has remained virtually unnoticed in Dracula Studies. It is my hope that this research will bring to the fore certain problematic aspects and generate the type of scholarship that is needed. However, although I could not entirely avoid interpreting the novel, the focus of the present study is the work of the editors of Dracula: what they say and do not say, how and when they say it.

15 In the end, it is my hope that it will prove of use to those working on critical editions of any work so that they can reflect on their roles of mediators between the text and the reader.

The underlying politics of editorial practices cannot and should not be underestimated.

Part I Dracula and Editorial Theory

Chapter 1 Footnotes, Endnotes, Lateral Notes

Dracula has been in print ever since it was first published in 1897. It has also gone through a surprising number of critical editions beginning in 1975. In these editions, explanatory notes or fragments of Bram Stoker’s source documents (or both) are provided so as to elucidate places, names, and allusions in the novel. Dracula’s “meanings” and its place in English literature and culture are analysed in critical introductions and supplementary historical, biographical or bibliographical essays. With each new edition, the novel is repackaged according to a preferred interpretation and the reader is offered a new, reconstructed version. A study of Dracula’s editions will show the mechanisms through which Stoker’s novel has been re-imagined by each of the individual textual scholars that have edited and annotated it. In order to understand more adequately and more thoroughly the ways in which the editors of Dracula treat the text of the novel, the editions will be discussed in light of recent theoretical approaches to editions and annotations.

Textual scholarship4 is the study of written documents, usually in view of their subsequent publication in annotated editions. Most often these documents are hundreds, or even thousands of years old; they are written in languages that fewer and fewer people understand; and they may have circulated in several more or less different versions. The job

4 This branch of study is also known as textual studies or textual criticism or by its older names of philology and bibliography; its theoretical arm is sometimes called editorial theory or editions theory. The most important academic journals dedicated to textual scholarship today are Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), Variants: The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols), and Studies in Bibliography (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press). 19 of the textual scholar is to make these documents accessible, by providing a reliable text;5 by explaining or even translating its language; and by supplying a critical apparatus that will give the reader access to the historical and cultural background of the work.6 However, editorial theory studies almost without exception the treatment of texts, whether complete or fragmentary, in view of providing an authoritative version, whereas the practices of annotating and commenting on texts are seldom analysed, unless the annotation refers strictly to the choices made by the editor when faced with variants and fragments. In The

Powers of Philology: Dynamic of Textual Scholarship, an examination of the textual practices in North America and Europe, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht makes this clear. He indicates that “[i]dentifying fragments, editing texts, and writing historical commentary are the three basic practices of [textual scholarship]” (3), but he also states that the main task of textual scholarship “is the identification and restoration of texts from each cultural past in question” (3). Thus, annotating and supplying background (historical) information for the text that is being restored is seen as one of the practices of the editors, but not as their principal mandate.

Another topic that is underrepresented in textual studies is that of editing and annotating modern novels. This has been noticed and discussed in three seminal essays in

5 This can be a single text, either chosen by the editor among the variants as the one version that represents more genuinely the author’s wishes (and without the errors of earlier transcriptions) or a text entirely constructed by the editor as an aggregate of the variants when these wishes are deemed unknowable. Also, it can be a multiple text which reproduces several distinct versions. 6 Textual scholars usually distinguish between “text” and “work”: the former is any of the versions that the work can take, whether in manuscript, typescript, or print form. A literary work is the sum total of its own textual avatars. The classics of Anglo-American textual scholarship include: W.W. Greg, “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950-1951), 19-36; Fredson Bowers, Bibliography and Textual Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). A good introduction is Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). A detailed history is provided by G. Thomas Tanselle, Textual Criticism since Greg: A Chronicle, 1950-2000 (Charlottesville: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 2005). 20

the field of annotation: Arthur Friedman’s “Principles of Historical Annotation in Critical

Editions of Modern Texts” (English Institute Annual 1941 [1942], 115-128); Martin C.

Battestin’s “A Rationale of Literary Annotation: The Example of Fielding’s Novels”

(Studies in Bibliography 34 [1982], 1-22); and Ian Small’s “Annotating ‘Hard’ Nineteenth

Century Novels” (Essays in Criticism 36: 4 [October 1986], 281-293), later revised and expanded as “The Editor as Annotator as Ideal Reader,” in The Theory and Practice of

Text-Editing (eds. Ian Small and Marcus Walsh; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991, 186-

209). In Friedman’s pioneering essay, which remained the only guide in the field for four decades, annotations are presented as an instrument that helps re-situate the work in the historical context of its creation. Battestin’s essay is a direct response to Friedman, whose ideas it develops and expands, starting from the experience of annotating eighteenth- century classics. In turn, Small fleshes out, questions and elaborates on Battestin’s earlier work, while also taking into account two less theoretical essays, written by Ian Jack and

Stephen Wall, respectively. Using nineteenth-century examples, Small distances himself from Friedman and Battestin by arguing that it is not always possible or desirable to historicise the work.

The relative underrepresentation of the issue of editing and annotating modern fiction in textual scholarship can be easily explained by the fact that “the systematic editing of novels is a recent development – the first four Oxford English Novels appeared in 1964, closely followed by a number of novels in the Penguin English Library” (Jack 321). That these editions were so late to appear can, in turn, be explained by a few factors: the effort to produce a critical edition seemed unnecessary as long as most modern works were known to have been published in reliable versions, usually supervised by the authors themselves;

21 critical editions and annotations were, and are, deemed to be a measure of classicisation and canonisation – and editors before the 1960s were reluctant to work on Victorians or

Edwardians, who seemed too recent; finally, because “classic English novels . . . often still feel close enough for us not to realise how far off they have become” (Wall 6). Perhaps even more importantly, English literature as an object of study in Anglo-American universities is fairly recent and the study of the moderns remained marginal even until the

1950s (Graff 197).

It is all the more surprising, then, that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in a critical edition relatively early (Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Dracula appeared in 1975), when the novel was far from being widely acknowledged as a classic masterpiece; and that no fewer than ten other such editions of the novel were published in the following three and a half decades. However, the canonising gesture (or, rather, gestures, because Wolf’s 1975 edition was soon followed by the McNally/Florescu edition in 1979) occurred in the United

States, where critical editions of mid- and late-nineteenth-century works of fiction had also been underway since the early 1960s. In fact, one could speak of three different traditions of critical editing of nineteenth-century fiction in the Anglo-American world, two of which originated in North America. The British tradition, that of the Oxford University Press and

Penguin, mentioned by Ian Jack (himself the editor of Wuthering Heights in the Oxford

World’s Classics series and general editor of the Oxford Brontë novels series), ordinarily provides a reliable text preceded by a critical introduction (also, very often, a chronology of the author’s life, a bibliography, and a note on the text) and followed by the annotations presented as endnotes, to which a few appendices might be added. Dracula went through three Oxford World’s Classics editions (for reasons that will be discussed below): A.N.

Wilson’s version, in 1983; Maud Ellmann’s, in 1996; and Roger Luckhurst’s, in 2011.

Maurice Hindle’s Penguin Classics edition, very sparsely annotated, is from 1993 (and it was reissued in 2003 with a preface by Christopher Frayling and two additional appendices).

Two different traditions emerged almost simultaneously in the United States, the better known of which is the one initiated by W.W. Norton in 1961 with critical editions of

American masterpieces: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter, followed by The Red Badge of Courage in 1962. By the mid-1960s, W.W. Norton was already publishing British classics of the nineteenth century: Tess of the d’Urbervilles in

1965, Pride and Prejudice and Hard Times in 1966.7 The Norton Critical Editions series typically provides (as it is usually announced on the front cover of its volumes) the

“authoritative text,” preceded by a brief introduction, and followed by “background and sources” (articles and excerpts from books that may have influenced the author or that exemplify the zeitgeist as well as contemporary reactions to the work) and by “essays in criticism” (an anthology of representative interpretations of the work, usually covering several decades and using different approaches). The annotations to the text are always included as footnotes. The Norton Critical Edition of Dracula was overseen in 1997 by

Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal. In a similar vein is Glennis Byron’s 1998 edition published by Broadview (a Canadian academic press that abandons critical essays in favour of more background documents and contemporary reactions). An offshoot of this tradition is the “casebook” or “case study,” in which different carefully selected critical approaches are applied to the same work. John Paul Riquelme edited Dracula in 2002 in the “Case

7 In 1961 it had already published an eighteenth-century classic: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. 23 Study in Contemporary Criticism” series for Bedford/St Martin’s Press, using footnotes and including both background material from Stoker’s known (and possible) sources and five analytical essays from different schools of critical thought.

The other American tradition of critical editing of modern works is also the first one in chronological order. It originated not in a university or academic press, but in the milieu of smaller imprints of general-interest publishing houses, most notably Clarkson N. Potter, an imprint of Crown, established in 1959 by the eponymous editor (1928-2001). Almost immediately, Clarkson N. Potter started a series of annotated books, published in hardcover and on letter-size paper, with the collaboration of two editors from outside academia. The first was Martin Gardner, who debuted with two Lewis Carroll works: The Annotated Alice

(1960) and The Annotated Snark (1962), and continued with The Annotated Ancient

Mariner (1965) and The Annotated Casey at the Bat (1967). The other was William S.

Baring-Gould, editor of The Annotated Mother Goose (1962) and, most notably, The

Annotated Sherlock Holmes, published in two imposing volumes in 1967.8 This small-press tradition publishes fully illustrated books, in which the text is preceded by critical and historical essays and followed by various useful appendices, while the annotations are printed in the margins. These lateral notes tend to be exhaustive in their attempt to explicate as much of the text as possible. Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Dracula was published by Clarkson N. Potter in 1975, and this edition uses the format established in

1960 by The Annotated Alice.

8 Martin Gardner (1914-2010) was a science writer known especially for his newspaper columns on mathematical puzzles. William S. Baring-Gould (1913-1967) was an executive of the Time, Inc. media conglomerate and prominent member of the Sherlock Holmes aficionados club known as the Baker Street Irregulars. Coincidentally, he was the grandson of Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, one of Stoker’s main sources. 24

Other small presses followed this pattern, including Mayflower Books from New

York, which published McNally and Florescu’s The Essential Dracula in 1979, the second edition of the novel that is fully illustrated and uses lateral notes. However, this type of critical editing was rapidly welcomed by the other traditions: The Annotated Alice was reissued by Penguin as early as 1965; Martin Gardner also published The Annotated Father

Brown with Oxford University Press in 1987. The series initiated by Clarkson N. Potter was discontinued after 1981 (Leonard Wolf also published there The Annotated

Frankenstein in 1977), but it was revived by W.W. Norton, which, in addition to its Critical

Edition series, now also publishes the Annotated Books series. This began with the reprinting of revised and expanded versions of the Clarkson N. Potter books: The

Annotated Alice and The Annotated Hunting of the Snark (both edited by Martin Gardner), but has included books originally published by other houses.9 Instead of William S. Baring-

Gould’s edition, W.W. Norton published Leslie S. Klinger’s three-volume The New

Annotated Sherlock Holmes. The same editor was invited to publish The New Annotated

Dracula in 2008.10

The three editorial traditions I have identified can be easily traced if one follows the most common practices of the major publishers involved. However, this does not mean that one particular publisher is bound to follow one of these traditions forever. Nor does it mean that there are no special cases of hybrid versions, such as Leonard Wolf’s second edition of

9 For example, The Annotated Uncle’s Tom Cabin, edited by Philip Van Doren Stern and published in 1964 by P.S. Eriksson, was reissued by Norton four decades later, this time edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. 10 This tradition, before and after its takeover by W.W. Norton, has been remarkably successful. The Annotated Alice sold over half a million copies before being reprinted (according to the back cover of its Norton version) and was translated into several languages. Klinger’s The New Annotated Dracula was translated into Spanish by Juan Rodrigo Puertolas as Drácula Anotado (Madrid: Akal, 2012), in the same format and with all the notes and the original background material. Several notes of the translator are inserted within Klinger’s own notes and usually explain particularities of some English phrases. 25 Stoker’s novel, The Essential Dracula, published in 1993 by Plume, an American division of Penguin. Here, Wolf changed the lateral notes of his first edition into Norton-style footnotes, while adding between chapters an unusual series of reactions to Stoker’s novel from present-day horror writers. The same kind of footnote was used by Clive Leatherdale in his 1998 edition, Dracula Unearthed, published by Desert Island Books (owned by the editor), although the supplementary material that opens the volume is similar to the one used in the small-press tradition. However, the publication of so many annotated editions of

Dracula is in part explained by the existence of these distinct traditions of editing modern fiction classics. At least inasmuch as the internal organization and the physical appearance of the text are concerned, the risk of one edition being similar to the others is rather small.

A second reason is that the complete original text of Dracula exists in three slightly different versions.11 The first edition, published in 1897 by Archibald Constable and

Company in London (actually, Westminster, as it appears on the title page), is generally recognized as the “copy-text,” i.e., the most authentic version of the text of the novel.12 As such, it has been used by most of the critical editions analysed here: Wolf, Auerbach/Skal,

Leatherdale, Byron, Riquelme, and all three Oxford University Press versions. The second possible copy-text is that of the 1899 American edition (Doubleday & McClure), which has been preferred by McNally/Florescu – although the two editors have not provided a “Note on the Text” explaining or at least indicating their choice. This version includes one minor, although much interpreted, difference: in Harker’s diary entry of 29 June, where all the other versions show Dracula telling the female vampires “Tomorrow night, tomorrow night

11 I am not counting the 1901 abridged version, published by Constable, and which may or may not have been overseen by Stoker. 12 Robert Eighteen-Bisang argues that the edition published in Hutchinson’s Colonial Library (also in 1897) may have appeared earlier, although “The only observable differences between the Constable and Hutchinson editions are the binding, the copyright and the title page” (Eighteen-Bisang 5). 26

is yours” (Dracula 82), the Doubleday version has Dracula say “To-night is mine. To- morrow night is yours” (McNally and Florescu 80).

Finally, the 1912 edition published by Rider of London – and “subsequent editions from Jarrolds, Hutchinson and Arrow” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 114 n. 30) – corrects many of the typographical errors of previous editions and inserts another minor change: in chapter 12, Lucy Westenra’s hair is no longer “sunny,” but “shiny.” This is consistent with her description in the tomb, in chapter 16, as a “dark-haired woman” (Dracula 249).

Several editors have been baffled by the inconsistency in the Constable edition: “The nagging question is still, what colour is Lucy’s hair?” (Wolf 201 n. 30). Some have tried to find an explanation for the change: “Lucy’s blonde hair is appropriate to her role as innocent young girl, but . . . when her role changes her hair colour will change as well”

(Auerbach and Skal 146 n. 6). Clive Leatherdale explains that “In later editions Stoker changed ‘sunny’ to ‘shiny’” (244 n. 128), without indicating which editions and perhaps presuming too much about Stoker being the one behind the modification. The 1912 Rider edition, despite providing a corrected version and the last one that Stoker could have supervised himself, has rarely been used. It is the copy-text of the 1993 Everyman series

(with an introduction by Marjorie Howes) and the 1996 Barnes & Noble Dracula: The

Definitive Edition (edited by Marvin Kaye), neither of which includes annotation. In general, the editors of Dracula prefer to correct the errors tacitly, with the exception of

Wolf, who reproduces the text of the novel in facsimile, “by the photo offset process” (iv), and prefers to introduce a correcting note for each typographical error. If “there are no burning questions about the ‘authoritative’ text” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 86) of Dracula, every new edition, reprint, or reissue of the novel is, in fact, a new textual version. Even

27 reprints “do not always reprint, inasmuch as they may include intentional or unintentional intrinsic changes, or reflect the extrinsic influence of political and economic conditions”

(Grigely 199). Each time Dracula is edited, the audience is presented with a new Dracula.

1.1 The Editor as Mediator

Another reason – perhaps the main reason – for the existence of so many annotated Dracula editions is that there is much ongoing debate surrounding the annotations themselves, especially those concerning the first chapters of the novel, when

Jonathan Harker is in Transylvania. The first two annotated editions (Wolf 1975, revised

1993; and McNally/Florescu 1979) drew largely on the idea advanced by McNally and

Florescu in their 1972 In Search of Dracula that Stoker’s character was based on the

Wallachian ruler Vlad the Impaler. This was (sometimes hotly) contested later by

Auerbach/Skal in 1997 and Leatherdale in 1998, whereas the latest editors (Klinger 2008 and Luckhurst 2011), although in agreement with their immediate predecessors, also incorporate much of the initial hypothesis. That annotators of the same novel can make radically different choices may derive in part from the fact that annotation itself is a territory much less regulated than the editing of texts and fragments of texts. There is always a certain degree of anarchy in annotation, since editors “have no comparable set of principles to guide them in that other, . . . no less important operation, the annotation of the text” (Battestin 2). The two main questions the annotator has to answer are what and how to annotate. In both cases, the “rules” are few and sometimes controversial.

The decision on what and how to annotate is generally influenced by two very elusive notions: the author’s intention; and the expectation of the audience. The annotator is supposed to bring before today’s audience exactly what had been meant by the author for his own contemporary audience. The representation that the annotator has of both audiences, although it affects even “the decision itself to annotate or not to annotate”

(Battestin 6), can only be subjective. So is the author’s intention, as reconstructed by the annotator (4). Nonetheless, the editor is often asked to “annotate only what his author has to say about a subject, not the whole subject and everything connected with it. Yet very frequently editors seem unable to omit anything they know or have found interesting”

(Friedman 119). Leatherdale, for example, has been criticised for providing unnecessary information: “what is the point of notes informing us that Chinese trains under communist rule are punctual (p. 30), ‘that the Virgin Mary is “Blessed” may be found in Luke 1:48’ (p.

147), or that Pepys mentioned trepanning (p. 384)?” (Hopkins, Review of Leatherdale 269).

Such guidance is not without its merit and Hopkins is probably right about trains in communist China, although Leatherdale’s sentence comes at the end of a useful footnote stating that Harker is wrong about trains in late-nineteenth-century China, which were managed by western companies (Leatherdale 30 n. 34). However, it seems very difficult to know exactly what the author means to say about a given subject when writing for an intended reader.

These two slippery notions – the author’s intention and the intended audience – are the main issues, at the same time accepted and debated, in the three founding texts in the field of annotation mentioned above. The three theorists agree that, as a “matter of practice

. . . [the] concept of authorial intention . . . is more useful – in the sense that it does more

29 work – than any other theory” (Small, “The Editor” 207). For the editor, the concept of authorial intention is a “once derided but now rehabilitated concept” (Small, “Annotating”

286), since even the most fundamental editing job, namely establishing the text, is done so as to respect the author’s intention about his or her work (Friedman 115). However, the author’s intention about the final form of the text can be the subject of intense debate which, in the case of Stoker’s novel, is related to the editors’ decision to include and/or annotate “Dracula’s Guest,” published for the first time in 1914 by Stoker’s widow in a collection bearing the same title and presented as “a hitherto unpublished episode” from the novel. In 1979, McNally and Florescu inserted “Dracula’s Guest” before the novel itself, because they considered it “part of the original manuscript of Dracula” (28). As such,

“Dracula’s Guest” has in their edition its own annotations and illustrations. Wolf, who in his 1975 edition had no room for “Dracula’s Guest,” published it in the 1993 edition, as

“Appendix A,” with no footnotes or illustrations, but bearing the subtitle “The Deleted

Original First Chapter of Dracula.”

In their 1997 edition, Auerbach and Skal provide “Dracula’s Guest” only as the last of their four “contexts” of the novel, but with an introductory note citing Florence Stoker’s opinion that it represents a deleted first chapter of Dracula. Coming after strong suggestions in the 1980s and early 1990s that the story has, in fact, little to do with the novel (Leatherdale, The Novel and the Legend 115-117), Auerbach and Skal’s editorial decision has been criticised: “This is one of the few missteps made by the editors, who were perhaps overly persuaded by Auerbach’s polemical view that Stoker removed the

‘chapter’ wilfully in order to erase evidence of the influence of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 lesbian vampire story ‘Carmilla’” (Latham, “Dracula’s Century” 134). Leatherdale’s 1998

Dracula Unearthed does not include “Dracula’s Guest,” but Byron’s edition, published in the same year, follows Wolf in placing it immediately after the novel, as “Appendix A.”

The story is missing in Riquelme’s 2002 edition, but resurfaces in Klinger’s 2008 The New

Annotated Dracula, where it is “Appendix 1” and is annotated. The first two editions in the

Oxford World’s Classics series (Wilson 1983 and Ellmann 1996) do not include “Dracula’s

Guest,” but in the third (Luckhurst 2011) it is presented as the only “Appendix” and is, once again, annotated.13

The editor must make the author and his words “genuinely accessible” (Monod 18) to the reader and therefore his principal function is understood as that of a mediator between the author and the reader (Battestin 4). That is why, especially when he annotates,

“his job is to convey the author’s work to his readers, not to show off his own scholarship; and the readers are interested not in the editor but in the edition” (Gaskell 7). In the case of

Dracula, the editors from the OUP tradition are the most self-effacing. Their annotation is always placed after the text of the novel and their name does not appear on the front cover

(there is only a brief mention in small letters on the back cover and a brief note in the front matter). In the Norton tradition, the annotator is more visible: his commentary is presented as footnotes and thus accompanies the reader on every page; his name appears on the front cover (also on the spine in the Broadview version, which is Glennis Byron’s case); and he is introduced in a few sentences on the back cover. Yet more visible are the editors of the small-press tradition. They are in fact everywhere: on the back and front cover, on the spine; and they are more thoroughly introduced, on the back cover or on the back flap of

13 Similar, though less debated, has been the fate of Stoker’s Preface to the 1901 Icelandic version of Dracula. Only Leatherdale and Klinger include it in their editions but, whereas the former places it before the text of the novel, the latter places it immediately after Stoker’s dedication to Hall Caine and his brief note on the authenticity of the journals and recordings, i.e., inside what Klinger calls “The Text of the Novel.” He also gives it the title “Author’s Preface” and annotates it (Klinger 5-8). 31 the dust jacket (McNally and Florescu even with photos). The most visible is Leonard Wolf who, on the title page of his 1993 edition, seems to take Stoker’s place as author of the book: “The Essential Dracula, Written and Edited by Leonard Wolf, Including the

Complete Novel by Bram Stoker” (iii).

The recipient of the annotator’s mediating endeavour, i.e., the intended audience, remains “the most commonly invoked criterion of appropriateness for annotation” (Small,

“The Editor” 197). New editions and new annotations appear to be necessary because audiences change: “There is always a new audience, with its new ignorance” (Jack 323).

Leonard Wolf, the first annotator of Dracula, assumed that some of his readers were “about

. . . to reread” (ix) the novel. However, later annotators address brand-new readers: Klinger encourages “a new generation of Dracula students to enjoy solving the puzzle” (xiii) of the novel; and Luckhurst’s “Introduction” begins with a “spoiler alert”: “Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot may prefer to treat the Introduction as an Epilogue” (vii).

The reader’s ignorance drives the efforts of the annotator: Leatherdale, for example, writes

“for an international readership. I therefore hope British readers will not be irked to find footnotes explaining that King’s Cross is a London railway terminus, which is tantamount to telling Americans that Greenwich Village is in New York City” (24).14 The annotator also “cater[s] to the needs of [his] contemporaries” (Gumbrecht 42), which is just as important as catering to their ignorance. There is always a new audience, with new needs.

Providing information that matches these needs may be influenced by the annotator’s

14 Ian Small suggests that annotators might be persuaded by the publishers and general editors of the series in which the novel is being published always to annotate “allusions which a moderately well-educated, non- native speaker of English would not understand” (“The Editor” 187). 32

personal beliefs and judgements about the text he is presenting; in turn, these beliefs reconstruct the text.

1.2 The Politics of Annotation

Since literary annotation is primarily the attempt of a particular editor to mediate between a literary work and a particular (real or assumed) kind of reader, it will necessarily vary from one edition to the other (Battestin 7). What does not change is that “the editor cannot help governing, to some degree, the reader’s response to the text” (14). The hegemonic position of the editor/annotator makes it possible to speak of “politics in textual scholarship . . . [and of] partisan purposes” (Warren 119). Deliberately or not, the annotator tends to limit the plurality of the text:

Annotation will by its very nature validate some readings and attempt to disable

others: such, after all, is one of its undeclared purposes. And often annotation,

although rarely explicitly so, tends to point to one reading to the exclusion of others.

. . . This tendency to assign priority to one particular reading at the expense of

others, to move in the direction of an allegedly “correct” reading, may not always be

the intention of the annotator, but it is a simple consequence of selectivity or

partiality. (Small, “The Editor” 190; emphasis his)

In the case of the editors of Dracula, this tendency is often intentional, and reviewers have noted, for example, that McNally and Florescu’s goal is to prove the connections between the Count and the historical Dracula and that they “ride their hobby-horse to the point of exhaustion” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 186). On the other hand, “What Leatherdale seems 33 most interested in doing is using the edition to attack a number of what he sees as misconceptions about the novel, principally the ideas that the short story ‘Dracula’s Guest’ is the missing first chapter of the novel, and that Stoker was well informed about the historical Vlad the Impaler” (Hopkins, Review of Leatherdale 269). If Leonard Wolf always seems to promote a “psychosexual reading of the text” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense

186), “[t]here is an unfortunate tendency in [the Auerbach/Skal] edition towards foregrounding Dracula’s homoerotic ‘connections.’ This particular slant is clear in the notes” (Davison 358).

The one reading imposed by the editor/annotator comes largely from the way in which the text is “historicised,” that is, from the way in which the annotated text is accompanied by other documents. On the one hand, the reader is constantly offered the historical and cultural background of the text; on the other, contemporary sources, which the author may or may not have known or consulted, are often quoted in annotations in support of the understanding of the text as suggested by the annotator. Textual scholars often perceive a certain distance that separates today’s readers from the text presented to them and, consequently, “annotation is always a testimony to alienation from the text, always represents a response to a prior culture from which one believes oneself (and consequently, nearly everyone else) distanced” (Hanna III 178). The annotator tries to backtrack this distance and “enable his contemporaries to read a book as its original audience read it” (Jack 323). Here is where a key political issue of annotation emerges: should the annotator backtrack to the historical and cultural context of the annotated text while keeping the original distance; or should he simply cancel it through his annotation?

Arthur Friedman and Martin C. Battestin, as well as other commentators of the practice of annotation, have strongly suggested that, in order to mediate meanings, the annotator needs simply to reconstruct for the reader the context in which the meanings have been produced. Friedman speaks mostly of “notes of which the aim is to set a work in its historical context” (117), and that is why he prefers to identify “historical annotation” as the main mediating activity of the editor. Battestin advises the editor to reconstruct “the historical and intellectual milieu that influenced [the author’s] thought, for he will then be better able to tell when the author is using concepts that carried a special significance for him and his first readers of which a modern audience may be unaware” (15). For a successful mediation, this theorist sets down the following rule: “Since the aim of annotation is to reconstruct what a passage meant to the author and his first readers, all such information should be drawn as far as possible from contemporary sources rather than from modern reference books” (Battestin 20). However, while historicisation can be a healthy endeavour (and the source of most annotations in general), since it is tantamount to

“suspending the ‘naïve’ presupposition that any object we encounter will be somehow pertinent for us” (Gumbrecht 60), it can also lead both to the distortion of meanings and to objectionable politics.

In his response to Battestin, Ian Small hints at the two shortcomings of Friedman’s original principle: first, that the annotator may assume too much about the knowledge of the earliest audience; and second, that it is a fallacy “merely to recreate a contemporary historical context, defined without reference to any present-day demands” (Small, “The

Editor” 198). For his first argument, Small discusses annotations that explain dialect words used in nineteenth-century fiction (Ian Jack argues in favour of glossing such words in

35 Wuthering Heights). Small maintains that such a need is “implausible . . . because it is far from clear whether or not many contemporary readers were in fact in possession of such linguistic knowledge” (“The Editor” 201; emphasis his). Or, one might add, whether or not the author himself was in possession of such linguistic knowledge. Bram Stoker, for example, had to rely on a glossary of Whitby dialect (Bram Stoker’s Notes 143-150) and, very probably, on other sources for all the regionalisms that he uses in Dracula. However, when the editors translate such dialect, they are lauded: Wolf provides “useful ‘translations’ of difficult parts of Mr Swales’s dialogue (rendered by Stoker with an impenetrable Whitby dialect)” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 185); one reviewer finds “useful . . . [Leatherdale’s] translation of Whitby dialect” (Hopkins, Review of Leatherdale 269). However, “the annotator should at least entertain the possibility that [the author] did not intend dialect words to be understood” (Small, “The Editor” 201-202; emphasis his).

As for the second and more important argument, Small suggests that “all annotation is by its very nature contingent . . . and thus annotation, willy-nilly, like all other texts (and, indeed, all human products), will bear witness to the specificity of the moment of its production” (“The Editor” 190-191). Yet, paradoxically, annotators hope to be able to provide a definitive reading experience that is specific to another moment of production. In the case of Dracula, such a paradoxical attempt of giving today’s reader an experience similar to that of Stoker’s contemporaries takes the form of annotations quoting from

Stoker’s sources and background material either reproducing at large the same sources or providing contemporary theoretical works, without mentioning that either Stoker’s sources or Victorian social sciences may be outdated or wrong. For example, Glennis Byron provides passages from works by Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso (mentioned by

Abraham Van Helsing in the novel) but only writes that “Theories of degeneration were widespread in the second half of the century and scientists from diverse areas contributed to the debate over society in crisis” (468). About Nordau, Byron says that he “did much to popularise the concept of degeneration” (470), but does not say whether the concept is in any way problematic. The same is true of the excerpts from Stoker’s sources. Moreover, these are usually praised as accurate: Emily Gerard’s travelogue is described as “accounts of the customs and folktales” (439) of Transylvania; Charles Boner “has a keen eye for

Transylvanian scenery, particularly the human female variety” (444); Sabine Baring-Gould

“had a particular interest in myths and folktales” (448).

With any new edition, a literary work is, as Joseph Grigely says, re-inscribed, re- contextualized, or “grafted” (199-200) onto the historical moment of its new publication.

Nevertheless, Dracula’s editors re-inscribe the novel in 1897 by solely providing annotation and editorial apparatus that would have been available to Stoker and the initial readers of Dracula. As Small explains:

A familiar argument in hermeneutics holds to the view that, if through the passage

of time a literary work has come to be culturally distant from the modern reader,

then there can be no guarantees that works (or documents) taken from other

discourses or disciplines will not have also suffered from a similar process of

hermeneutic obfuscation: bluntly put, if the understanding of a literary work has

become “corrupt” (in whatever way), then so too has the understanding of texts (or

works) from all other discourses. (“The Editor” 196-197)

Such “corrupted” works might be abstruse, but they might also be obsolete and include information that has been discarded. The uncritical reproduction of passages from such

37 works, either in the notes or in the background material of the edition, may either puzzle the modern reader or persuade him to have a similar outlook with that of the author’s contemporaries. For example, when the editors of Dracula provide sources such as Emily

Gerard or Sabine Baring-Gould without at least mentioning the possibility that such documents might be crude exaggerations, they perpetuate the idea that Transylvanian folklore is replete with vampire beliefs, and that Catholicism and Orthodoxy are mostly collections of superstitions. One should also note that the editors of Dracula are not always consistent in their historicising endeavour: as Emily Gerard is the only nineteenth-century source for the existence of vampire beliefs in Transylvania, all editors quote from two much later sources: Agnes Murgoçi’s 1926 article “The Vampire in Roumania” and

Montague Summers’s 1929 The Vampire in Europe (which in fact reproduces Murgoçi’s text). In consequence, the general belief today, of academics and public alike, is that

Romanians believe in vampires and that their lives are, or at least were at the turn of the last century, guided by rituals and superstitions related to the undead. Critical material continues to be published in which Romanian beliefs are central to the investigation, yet none of these investigations cite Romanian sources – which would contradict them. Instead, the same sources Stoker used, along with Summers and Murgoçi, constitute the basis of these writings.

Moreover, the account of the past that is advanced by the historicising annotator should emerge from the “critical study of all sources” (Grafton 77), because “historical truths could be established only by critical, comparative study of the sources” (89). Too often, the editors of Dracula rely on obsolete encyclopaedia entries or on their own observations as tourists. Since Dracula has come to be understood as an encyclopaedic,

multi-layered work, the editors become amateur historians, ethnographers, and folklorists, following in the footsteps of the amateur folklorists Emily Gerard, Agnes Murgoçi and

Montague Summers. This is especially evident in all things Romanian. In both his 1975 and his 1993 edition, Leonard Wolf mentions only two Romanian specialists in his acknowledgements: Alex Besuan and Ioan Puia from the Cluj Agronomic Institute. They were consulted on one trivial matter: the existence (or inexistence) of the “Golden

Mediasch” wine. In their 1979 edition, McNally and Florescu acknowledge the support of

“Mihai Pop, professor emeritus and former director of the Folklore Institute in Bucharest”

(4), although it is not clear from their notes what kind of support they have received from him. One has to look at the first book that McNally and Florescu co-authored in 1972 and in which they gave him the wrong name: “Professor Ion Pop, director of the Folklore

Institute, who provided the assistance of his team of experts” (In Search 7). The only situation in which Romanian folklorists appear to have helped the two authors is in gathering a couple of contemporary legends about the historical Dracula (79-81).

In his discussion of the issues facing the editor of a nineteenth-century British novel, Stephen Wall admits that the author may at times use inaccuracies and suggests a kind of annotation that could “help us to assess, at such a point, how much his picture of the world around him was record and how much fantasy – or, more probably, at what point the one modulates into the other” (3). If, in fact, the modern reader were supposed to have the same experience as the earliest reader, he would not need such an illuminating note. If, on the other hand, we may assume that the modern reader can be allowed to know when the author and his sources fantasise or are simply wrong, the entire critical apparatus should clarify this. The editors of Dracula often show the plot’s contradictions; or, like

39 Leatherdale, they signal an error regarding the punctuality of trains in China. This is inconsistent: if some errors are shown, then errors all of kinds could be shown, including – or especially – ideological ones. Vesna Goldsworthy’s observation that it is possible for writers today to propagate distortions about East-Central Europe “which would appal them if applied to Somalis or the peoples of Zaire” (xxviii) can easily be extended to editors. The

Norton Critical Edition of Heart of Darkness, for example, has included, since 1988, background documents and analytical essays that criticise Joseph Conrad’s depiction of

Central African natives. However, no edition of Dracula attempts to counterbalance

Stoker’s representations, while Romanians are castigated for their “determination to counteract the notion that Romania is the natural home of the vampire” (Miller, Sense &

Nonsense 129).

1.3 Types of Annotation

Editors usually distinguish between textual and explanatory notes: “textual notes differ from and are sometimes kept separate from explanatory notes, which are intended to help readers make sense of the passage in question, providing definitions or explanations of arcane. Textual notes are instead concerned almost wholly with microhistories of the text”

(Kelemen 116). In his edition of the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Ian Small, for example, uses the textual notes, which he calls “textual apparatus,” as footnotes, and the explanatory notes, which he calls “commentary,” as endnotes. More often than not, especially when the editor finds few reasons for the “textual apparatus” to be very large, textual and explanatory notes are not at all separate. Since the former gloss on the text that 40

is being provided, while the latter explain the work, many editors find the distinction problematic for the reader: “Can we say anything about the text that will conduce to understanding of the work? Is it useful, or fatal, to this or any effort at annotation to admit such a distinction into our project?” (Middleton 174; emphases hers).

However, in his pioneering essay, Arthur Friedman calls the second type “historical notes,” which he subsequently divides into “notes of recovery” and “explanatory notes.” As he understands them, notes of recovery “supply information that would presumably have been known to the author’s contemporaries, but that has been lost by the passage of time

[while] ‘explanatory notes’ . . . attempt to make a work more intelligible by showing its relationship to earlier works” (118). Friedman illustrates this through a comparison between Alexander Pope’s letters and David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural

Religion:

In Pope’s letters we find many allusions to contemporary persons, places, and

events, all of which we may suppose were readily understood by the recipients of

the letters, but many of which are not understood by readers today. The intention of

annotating this sort of allusion is the recovery of lost information so that the modern

reader can read a work with something like the same understanding as the author’s

contemporaries for whom the work was originally intended. (117-118)

On the other hand, in Hume’s Dialogues “where there are few allusions, the problem of recovery is a minor one; and the main job of the annotator would be to explain the text by showing its relationship to earlier writings” (118).

Friedman admits, though, that the distinction between notes of recovery and explanatory notes “often turns out in actual practice to break down; allusions which at first

41 sight seem to call for only a little information can often be satisfactorily explained only by a thorough search through the author’s background” (Friedman 128). Battestin still uses this distinction (9-10), but later writers on the subject do not and prefer, instead, to call them both “explanatory.” This is the term used in the OUP editions of Dracula: all annotations are gathered after the text of the novel as endnotes in a section entitled

“Explanatory Notes.” However, both Wilson’s and Ellmann’s annotations can be considered “notes of recovery.” Only Luckhurst goes as far as to link the text of the novel with earlier writings and possible influences. In any case, Friedman argues convincingly that both types of notes should make use of contemporary sources (125-126), rather than sources that might be possible but are too old or sources that are impossible because they have been published at a later date. What Friedman does not discuss – perhaps because he analyses two nonfictional bodies of writing – the private letters of a poet and the theological work of a philosopher15 – is the fact that, apart from allusions to contemporary people and places or to earlier writings, a piece of literature (and especially a piece of fiction) can include mistakes, exaggerations, or distortions which are based on precisely those contemporary sources that he thinks “enlightening” (125).

Unlike textual notes, explanatory ones (including what Friedman calls “notes of recovery”) manage to add to the text, to become part of it, or at least to enter in a dialogue with it. Thomas McFarland, who wrote on “The Myth of Annotation” in 1991, calls textual notes “reference” notes and explanatory ones “dialogical” and insists that they be either separated (with the former placed after the text of the novel) or else kept together at the

15 Also, perhaps, because his examples (and Battestin’s) are from the eighteenth century. Of the three major theorists of annotation, Small (editor of Wilde) is the only one who specialises in the (late) nineteenth century, the age of the maximum expansion of the British Empire and perhaps the richest era of British fiction. Instead, Friedman edited the collected works of Oliver Goldsmith and Battestin several works by Henry Fielding. 42

bottom of the page as footnotes (McFarland 155). McFarland thus contributes to the valuable discussion of the relations of power that exist within the “[m]aterial forms [of the book] between editor and text, edited text and source materials, edited text and readers, different parts of the edition itself” (Warren 125). Annotations may be in a dialogic relationship with the work, but they are physically present in the text, and, as such, they command a similar form of respect as the edited material. The place of the annotations signals the importance given the mediation process that, in turn, may lower the weight of the annotated text.

For the annotator, the notes “either are or are not part of the text, that is to say, essential to the text or not essential. If they are part of the text, they should be presented as part of the text, that is, at the bottom of the page. Only if they are not considered part of the text, and therefore not essential, may they be relegated to the back of the book” (McFarland

153). The mere presence of the footnote may “establish more direct networks of power”

(Warren 125) than those suggested by the “absence” of the endnote. However, endnotes also have a sort of autonomy, even though they are relegated in another space than that of the text and, as such, do not converse with the text. The most privileged position is occupied by lateral notes, precisely because they are placed in “the lateral and not the inferior margins of the principal text” (Derrida 193). Lateral notes such as those of the first

Wolf, McNally/Florescu, or Klinger16 occupy a space that is similar to that of the annotated text inasmuch as it covers the entire height of the page.

Lateral notes create a special space for the annotator, which runs parallel to the principal text and, unlike the space occupied by footnotes, is kept free if the annotator has

16 For another example, see Patricia Meyer Spacks’s recent edition of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard UP, 2013). 43 nothing to say. McNally and Florescu, for example, have scores of pages in which the margins remain blank: “the annotation is unbalanced, extensive in the sections in which

Stoker drew from his sources (especially the first four chapters), and much lighter (at times non-existent) elsewhere” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 186). The use of lateral margins allows the editor to include not only annotations, but also photographs and engravings that participate in the construction of the text. In Klinger’s edition, the richest in term of illustrations, “at times the secondary material overshadows the text itself. In a number of instances, the text of the novel disappears for an entire page as the commentary and illustrations roll on filling both columns” (Holte, Review of Klinger 430). On the other hand, endnotes, which are preferred by the OUP in its World Classics series, are the only annotations that do not share the page with the annotated text, and hence display no desire to compete with it or even to explain it.

The layout of the page also marks the attitude of the publisher and of the editor (or at least the general editor of the series in which the text is being published) towards the edited text. Layouts “can emphasize similarities among texts (uniform shapes for disparate sources, familiar modern forms for ancient sources) or differences” (Warren 125). In

Wolf’s first edition, the text of the novel is reproduced in facsimile, with numbers signalling a note placed at the end of the line, and lateral notes positioned as closely as possible to the respective lines. The title page, Stoker’s dedication to Hall Caine, and

Stoker’s note about the factuality of the subsequent “papers” are not numbered and seem to be part of the editorial apparatus. Moreover, these are separated from the main body of the edited text by another unnumbered page that reproduces a nineteenth-century drawing of the Széchenyi Bridge, while page number 1 contains only the first lines of Chapter 1. Thus,

in Wolf’s 1975 edition, the writer and the editor appear to collaborate in introducing the novel. In the 1993 revised edition, Wolf introduces opinions of science-fiction writers about Dracula between the chapters of the novel, thereby expanding the text into a sort of collective chapbook.

Many editions (especially, but not necessarily, those that prefer endnotes) belong to annotators that try to appear “self-effacing” (Jack 334), but that keep their interpretations for the introduction. After all, “[a]lthough historical annotation should help in analysis, it can never take the place of it; alone it will give only a very partial explanation” (Friedman

124-125). The introduction, the background information and excerpts of sources, the various essays, maps, and graphs that may be furnished by the editor play a part that matches and sometimes exceeds that of the annotation in the power relationships of the edited text. “The proportionality of ‘apparatus’ to ‘text’ can physically signal the power plays of editorial practice; when the apparatus far exceeds the text, it signals a kind of interpretative exhaustion even before the reader reaches the text itself” (Warren 125). Here,

Warren alludes to editions that place their apparatus before the text itself; however, this is often positioned after the text – and the sheer length (and weight) of the subsequent pages dominate the edited text before and during the act of reading.

On the other hand, when the apparatus is “reduced to a bare minimum or even eliminated, the silence signals the text’s self-sufficiency, naturalising editorial intervention”

(Warren 125). It is usually trade editions that “naturalise” editorial intervention, by making no reference to the changes brought to the text. In practice, many critical editions use the fairly similar procedure of introducing a brief “Note on the text” in which such changes are summarily explained. All the editors of Dracula do this, with one significant exception:

45 Leonard Wolf, who keeps all the typos of the 1897 edition intact and annotates them. This is another way through which the editor, advertising his intervention, exercises the powers provided by his position as mediator of the text. A more “silent” annotator can still speak through the background material. This is achieved, for example, by Glennis Byron, who sometimes inserts a note that sends the reader to the appendices placed after the text of the novel. Thus, the background material can indirectly participate in the annotation. Through his or her commentary, the supplementary documents, critical and biographical essays, and even illustrations, the editor succeeds in mediating not only the text, but also in providing an interpretation – his or her interpretation – of the work.

Chapter 2 The Fight for a Masterpiece

The annotations provided by the many editors of Dracula, as well as the background material usually placed after the text of the novel largely contribute to the imposition of a certain reading preferred by the respective editors. In fact, despite several minor differences, the existence of only two competing readings can be easily traced from the moment these were first suggested by Leonard Wolf and by Raymond McNally and

Radu Florescu, respectively, until today. In the small-press tradition, Wolf gives the novel

(twice, in 1975 and 1993) a “psychosexual” reading, as it has been called by other editors.

McNally and Florescu suggest a “historicist” reading, which is also adhered to, although with different results, by Leslie Klinger and by the editors of Bram Stoker’s Notes (which I will add in this chapter as an example of a partial attempt at annotating Dracula). Clive

Leatherdale oscillates between the two readings but insists on a third, a theological one, which might explain in part why his edition is much less discussed than the others. Nina

Auerbach and David J. Skal prefer the “psychosexual” reading, as does Glennis Byron despite her hesitations, whereas John Paul Riquelme chooses the “historicist” one. In the

OUP editions, A.N. Wilson is less concerned with providing a particular reading, Maud

Ellmann takes a psychosexual approach, and Roger Luckhurst’s approach is historicist.

Inevitably, such preferred readings give rise to intense debate over the meaning of some passages, Stoker’s intentions, and his use of sources and informants. Consequently, much effort is spent by the Dracula editors in countering each other’s hypotheses. Another

47 major issue that consumes a lot of effort on the part of the editors is that of the (literary) value of Dracula. In general, when an editor decides to present a new textual version of a literary work, it is because its literariness is accepted by a large number of professional readers (Small, “The Editor” 191). The editors of Dracula have not been able to find a similarly categorical consensus among literary critics and, apart from the effort of

“[c]anonisation through commentary” (Gumbrecht 47), their editions also construct the novel’s canonicity discursively, mostly in the critical introductions. In each of the three traditions I have identified, even though the starting points are considerably different, the canonising effort gains momentum from one edition to the next.

2.1 Leonard Wolf: The Annotated Dracula (1975) Wolf’s first edition of the novel, The Annotated Dracula opens with a general appreciation of the novel and of the eponymous character, with sentences such as these:

“What an elegant monster he is! How strong, how graceful, how lonely, how wise. And above all – and here is his central mystery – how deadly . . . and erotic” (ix). Eroticism is a recurrent theme in Wolf’s annotations. This elegant monster, Wolf thinks, is the main reason for the novel’s success: he suggests that Stoker’s legacy consists in having written

“one – and only one – work whose central figure could become an overwhelming symbol of the crimes and temptations of the twentieth century” (xviii). This is the main idea of his

1972 essay A Dream of Dracula, in which he analyses the vampire subcultures and the influence of vampire movies in America. A Dream of Dracula appeared in the same year as

McNally and Florescu’s In Search of Dracula, which Wolf mentions as “a popular study”

(xiv). In the bibliography, Wolf gives their names as “Florescu, Radu, and McNally,

Raymond T” (357), even though the order is actually vice versa.

Although Wolf fully embraces McNally and Florescu’s idea that Count Dracula is based on a Romanian medieval ruler known as Vlad the Impaler, he prefers to quote other sources such as Harry Ludlam and Gabriel Ronay or to use his own research. The rival scholars are mentioned in the annotations (always as “Florescu and McNally”) mainly to be contradicted: Wolf does not agree with the association they make between the German word “wüttrich” and the English word “berserker” (31 n. 9); and he is more confident than his predecessors that Arminius Vambéry is the model for “my friend Arminius” (214 n.

10). Wolf provides “Appendices” that are quite similar to those used by McNally and

Florescu in their book In Search of Dracula: maps of Transylvania, Europe, England,

Whitby, London, and the Zoological Gardens (335-342); a Calendar of Events (343-349);

“Dracula Onstage,” which (despite the misleading title) provides a list of the Count’s appearances in the novel (350-351); “Selected Filmography” (352-353); “English-language and Foreign Editions of Dracula” (354-355); and a “Bibliography” (356-360), in which he promises to “list the various editions of Dracula that have appeared” (356). He does not, in fact, because the only edition listed in the bibliography is the 1897 Constable.

Elizabeth Miller has summarised well Wolf’s Annotated Dracula: “As the first annotated edition of the novel, this is a pioneer work. Its more than 600 notes reveal an admirable erudition, albeit that many are tangential to the novel” (Sense & Nonsense 185).

Although Miller’s last sentence seems more appropriate for Wolf’s 1993 edition, some of the annotating choices of 1975 are surprising, simply because Wolf is driven by the effort to show and prove the novel’s literariness. For example, where Doctor Seward ends his

49 diary entry of 10 September by noting: “It must have been my weakness that made me hesitate to tell it to my friend, but I felt it all the more, like unshed tears,” Wolf comments:

“This is another of those fine lyric sentences that give one a startled glimpse of Stoker’s submerged poetic power” (124 n. 28). One reason for such commentary is that very little

(favourable) interpretation of the novel was available in the early 1970s, and in his introduction Wolf can only quote from Anthony Boucher and Montague Summers.

However, not even these two sources, neither of whom was a literary critic,17 were entirely ready to accept the novel’s literariness and Wolf is forced to amend their words:

Cultivated readers of the book, like Anthony Boucher who obviously loved and

appreciated it, are willing to concede that “it is . . . a masterpiece of a kind, if not a

literary one.” Montague Summers, nearly forty years before Boucher, would

concede to Stoker only brilliantly selected subject matter and occasionally

“admirable” writing. Summers . . . admired the first chapters of Dracula but wished

that “the whole story [could] have been sustained at so high a level.” “Then,” says

Summers, “we should have had a complete masterpiece.” Let me say at once that

we have a complete masterpiece, flawed here and there, as the Chinese insist

masterpieces should be, but, nevertheless, the real thing. (ix-x)

Wolf then repeats this opinion in a brief introductory note to the “Bibliography,” which is, according to him, “a testimonial to Stoker’s pack-rat mind which, while it was engaged in making a masterpiece, was also busy stuffing its pages with helter-skelter references to all sorts of things” (356).

17 Boucher was a mystery writer who provided an illustrated edition of Dracula in 1965; Summers was a clergyman who wrote widely on the subject of vampires and witches in the 1920s and 1930s. 50

Stoker’s curious mind and his wide-scale research appear to be the ultimate reasons for the partial or total canonisation of Dracula – they are that upon which later editors will base their appreciation or rejection of the novel. Wolf, the first to advance this theory, uses it to counter one last “mystery” behind the writing of the novel:

Anthony Boucher . . . asks: “How did the most successful horror novel in the

English (and possibly in any) language come to be written by a man whose first

published book was entitled The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland?” One

might extend the question to inquire how Dracula came to be written by the same

man who wrote [his other fictions]. Anthony Boucher, shrewdly, did not try to

answer his question, and I have no intention of answering mine. Literary greatness

is easier to acknowledge than to explain. It is enough that the world was lucky.

(xviii)

Wolf himself states that “Stoker was a hasty writer with the habits of a hack” (x), and his explanation for the literary value of Dracula is, in fact, his very “Introduction” to the novel. After first suggesting that it is a flawed masterpiece, he writes a history of Gothic literature in Britain (x-xii), mentions vampire lore and lauds Emily Gerard (xiii) for gathering it, then he moves on to the historical Dracula as a model for the vampire count

(xiv-xv). Thus one may infer that, in Leonard Wolf’s 1975 perspective, Dracula should be placed within the realm of Gothic literature, where it remains a masterpiece, notable for the imaginative use of vampire beliefs and the clever fictionalisation of a historical character.

51 2.2 Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu: The Essential Dracula (1979) In 1972, McNally and Florescu dedicated their first co-authored book, In Search of

Dracula, “to the memory of Bram Stoker on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his masterpiece – Dracula” (McNally and Florescu, In Search 4). However, seven years later, in The Essential Dracula, McNally and Florescu take their cue from Boucher and Wolf when they ask themselves “how Stoker, a notorious writer of potboilers, came to create this masterpiece of Gothic horror” (McNally and Florescu 20). Their answer is very similar to

Wolf’s: Stoker cleverly used vampire beliefs and fictionalised a historical character, as well as “the circumstances of his life at the time he came to write the book” (20). Yet, however highly McNally and Florescu think of Dracula as a novel, they doubt that the author of potboilers could have written the final draft of the Gothic masterpiece:

Recent startling evidence has called into question Stoker’s final authorship. In the

Lovecraft Collection at John Hay Library, Brown University, there is an

unpublished letter by H.P. Lovecraft. . . . In the letter Lovecraft writes: “. . . Stoker

was a very inept writer when not helped out by revisers. . . . I know an old lady who

almost had the job of revising Dracula back in the early 1890s – she saw the

original ms., & says it was a fearful mess. Finally someone else (Stoker thought her

price for the work was too high) whipped it into such shape as it now possesses.” . .

. Now that we have found Stoker’s notes, it is clear that Stoker at least did all the

basic research for the book, as well as the outline of its contents. But was he capable

of completing this massive re-write? (24)

As they rely on Farson’s biography, McNally and Florescu suggest that “the early stages of syphilis” (24) might have prevented Stoker from doing the work anyway. While it seems 52

hard to nominate the real author of the final version of Dracula, “we would opt for . . . Hall

Caine [who] was one of the best-selling authors of his day. He wrote The Eternal City, which sold a million copies, and The Manxman, which Stoker helped him to draft. And they certainly were intimate: Caine was one of the few friends who attended Stoker’s funeral in 1912” (25).

As they explain the most important (and aesthetically valuable) aspects of the novel through circumstances in Stoker’s life, McNally and Florescu list all possible models for the Count and for sightings of the undead: Florence Stoker; various stage characters; a man whom Stoker tried unsuccessfully to save from drowning on 14 September 1882; his brother George’s experiences in the 1877-1878 war (20-22). What is most striking in the

McNally/Florescu edition, as well as its “‘claim to fame’ . . . is that it takes into account

Stoker’s Notes, and integrates whole chunks of them into the annotations” (Miller, Sense &

Nonsense 186). McNally and Florescu emphasise that “Wolf did not have access to the notes” (17), but no other mention of Wolf’s edition is made until the bibliography, where it is described as a “[w]idely publicized annotation of Stoker’s novel containing a number of errors. . . . Weak on Romanian history and folklore” (309). Instead, McNally and Florescu insist on Wolf’s previous essay and emphasise Wolf’s preference for a psychosexual reading of the novel: “Leonard Wolf, in A Dream of Dracula, is searching for a twentieth- century living American vampire, dressed up in funky California-modern dress . . . then proceeds to ruminate about Victorian repressed sexuality” (18).

53 2.3 Leonard Wolf: The Essential Dracula (1993) Wolf is the only editor of Dracula who had the opportunity (and a span of 18 years) to expand and revise his earlier edition. He did so by increasing his annotations “by one third. Alas, the expansion did not take into account the one thing that should have been obligatory: Stoker’s Notes. . . . What Wolf provides in this edition is the same psychosexual reading of the text, bolstered with entertaining (though for the most part irrelevant) commentary by present-day writers and aficionados” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 186).

Indeed, Wolf’s The Essential Dracula is only expanded, but not revised. It is also much less illustrated and the lateral notes of the 1975 edition have been replaced by footnotes.

The front cover of the 1993 edition bears the following subtitle: The Definitive Annotated

Edition of Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel. Thus, Wolf made the choice of not simply improving, but literally replacing one edition with another. Inside the front matter of Wolf’s last words on the matter, his 1997 book Dracula: The Connoisseur’s Guide, on a page listing other works by Leonard Wolf, only The Essential Dracula of 1993 is mentioned

(The Connoisseur’s Guide ii). As a consequence, this is the only Wolf edition I will refer to from now on.

The 1993 edition remains, as Elizabeth Miller concedes, “[o]ne of the most widely consulted texts” (Sense & Nonsense 17) on Dracula. It was published by Plume, a division of Penguin Books (and it has been alternately presented in subsequent bibliographies as being published by either Plume or Penguin). In fact, the front matter of the volume also identifies this edition as a “Byron Preiss Book.”18 The text of the novel is followed by

“Dracula’s Guest” (missing in the 1975 edition), which replaces the calendar of events.

18 Byron Preiss (1953-2005) was a publisher who specialized in fantasy and children’s literature and who developed titles for HarperCollins, Random House, and others. 54

Other appendices are identical with the first edition, but the “Bibliography” now includes a few new titles: McNally and Florescu appear this time not only with In Search of Dracula, but also with their 1979 edition, The Essential Dracula (although the year given is 1977).

Wolf’s “Acknowledgments,” unchanged since 1975, include both “Raymond McNally, coauthor of In Search of Dracula” and “Radu R. Florescu, coauthor of In Search of

Dracula.” Thus, the rival annotators are not acknowledged as such; and Wolf adds a middle initial that Florescu used neither when he signed the 1979 edition nor as coauthor of In

Search of Dracula. The “Introduction” is identical in the two editions, except for the last part, in which Wolf now includes a few pages about the legacy of the book, both on film and paper (xix-xxiii). Here, he praises Anne Rice’s vampire fiction: “her work has a visionary grandeur of nearly epic proportions” (xxi); he sees her as the true heir of Bram

Stoker’s legacy.

Like in the 1975 edition, the text of Stoker’s novel begins just as Wolf’s introduction ends; in fact, the two are merged together: Stoker’s dedication to Hall Caine as well as his introductory words about “how these papers have been placed in sequence” are placed on page xxiv, as if they were still part of the paratext of one and the same book. As stated before, the annotation itself has not really changed from one edition to the other: here are the same notes (presented on the lateral margins in 1975 and on the bottom margin in

1993) with the same (now) conspicuous lack of reference to Stoker’s working papers. The new annotations either help the reader keep track of the plot by reminding him of previous occurrences or signalling inconsistencies, or make reference to the way in which some aspects of the novel have been used in film adaptations.

55 The most important difference between the two editions, though, is that in the 1993 version most chapters of Dracula are supplemented by a personal thought, sometimes a personal story, about the novel, provided by science-fiction authors and vampire aficionados. These are separated from the text of the novel by a vignette representing a bat and appear in italics. However, they belong to this textual version of Dracula even more than Wolf’s footnotes since they occupy the same part of the volume’s layout as the novel itself and use a font of the same size (unlike the much smaller characters used for the footnotes). Perhaps the most obvious role of these insertions is that of being Wolf’s mouthpiece in his effort to suggest that Dracula is a masterpiece. Here, L. Sprague de

Camp proclaims the novel “A masterpiece of skilled storytelling” (266).

Among many other contributors to Wolf’s 1993 edition, Ramsey Campbell states that “Dracula is more than the epitome of the Gothic villain, revitalised by the supernatural, though that would be enough; he has become one of the lasting myths of modern fiction”

(36). Joe R. Lansdale writes that the novel works “on some deeper literary level that taps the darker more primal nature of the human experience and opens a gate inside of us from which dark and ancient allegories escape” (266). Thomas F. Monteleone explains why he has never written a vampire novel: “When something has been done right the first time, only a fool is going to try to redecorate the Sistine Chapel” (328). Wolf perhaps feels that he needs the help of all these contributors, because he still believes Dracula to have been an accident. In his last book about Dracula, he still wonders “[w]hat makes a writer of mediocre skills and mediocre vision somehow reinvent himself . . . my own tentative explanations . . . [are] that even a mediocre mind . . . can, like someone carrying a family member down the stairs of a burning building, have access suddenly to the intellectual

adrenaline he needs to outdo himself. Before and after Stoker wrote Dracula, his work expressed the thoroughly mediocre man he was” (Wolf, The Connoisseur’s Guide 147).

2.4 Clive Leatherdale: Dracula Unearthed (1998) Clive Leatherdale does not seem to think that Dracula is the exception in an otherwise lacklustre literary career. His annotated edition was published by Desert Island

Books, a press he owns, in the “Dracula Library,” a series that “promotes the study of

Dracula, vampirism, and the works of Bram Stoker” (according to the dust jacket of

Dracula Unearthed). In 1996, in the same series, Leatherdale had already published an annotated edition of The Jewel of Seven Stars – and more annotated editions of Stoker’s oeuvre were to follow.19 From the very first book he wrote on Stoker’s novel (Dracula: The

Novel and the Legend, 1985), Leatherdale seems convinced that Dracula is a masterpiece.

However, given that the novel had been overlooked even by studies of the Gothic, he oscillates between showing that Dracula is a “Gothic masterpiece” (3) and one of the

“classics” (The Novel and the Legend 12). First, he insists on the former and deplores the fact “that serious examination of supernatural fiction can, and does, frequently sidestep

Dracula. This wholesale dismissal of the novel borders on the extraordinary. It is akin to discarding Plato from the study of Western philosophy, for Dracula is almost the Gothic novel par excellence” (11). Nevertheless, he ends by suggesting that the novel “deserves to be treated as a major work of fiction” (13).

19 Desert Island Books has also published annotated editions of Stoker’s The Primrose Path (1999; ed. Richard Dalby), Snowbound (2000; ed. Bruce Wightman), The Shoulder of Shasta (2000; ed. Alan Johnson), The Lady of the Shroud (2001; ed. William Hughes), and Lady Athlyne (2007; ed. Carol Senf). 57 Thirteen years after his critical study of the novel, Leatherdale seems less convinced of the literariness of the novel and insists, rather, on its versatility: “Dracula’s endurance and appeal, at least for the present writer, stem not from Stoker’s literary style, which superior critics are happy to condemn, but, firstly, from the complexity and density of the text. Few novels of my acquaintance permit so many readings as Dracula” (Leatherdale

10). Here, he does not hesitate to call the novel “superficial” and “profound” in the same breath: “there is more to Dracula than textual richness. It is, and I use the word carefully, a profound book. Though it may be enjoyed as a superficial horror tale, it possesses surprising depths” (10). The depths he mentions are mostly of a religious nature: “Stoker was a [sic] intensely scriptural writer, punctuating The Jewel of Seven Stars and Dracula

(and no doubt other tales) with theological references that are frequently overlooked by modern critics” (10). Such a statement announces, to use Ian Small’s formula,

Leatherdale’s “one” reading of the novel as an allegory of the age-old battle between good and evil, which pervades many of his footnotes.

Probably unaware of the fact that Auerbach and Skal were preparing a critical edition for Norton (which appeared, in fact, in 1997, before his own) and Glennis Byron another one for Broadview (1998), Leatherdale feels compelled to explain “the need for another annotated text. Other than a revised edition of Wolf’s (1993), no fresh annotated edition of Dracula has appeared for thirty years” (Leatherdale 9). Here, he does not take into account the first two OUP editions, too sparsely annotated. He also obviously means

“(almost) twenty years,” since the McNally/Florescu edition is from 1979. Leatherdale first distances himself from the two editors from Boston and posits himself as the first British annotator of Dracula: “When annotating a novel set largely in England, a British scholar

enjoys certain advantages over those based in America. Added to which, Florescu and

McNally’s forte is the historical Dracula” (9). Then he explains Wolf’s major flaw: “though

I am no less indebted to Leonard Wolf’s researches, I would question his lack of references to Stoker’s research papers” (9). After his 11-page “Introduction” and a list of Stoker’s sources, Leatherdale includes a “Select Bibliography” of only 15 authors (13 if one leaves out Stoker and Leatherdale himself). The two previous annotated editions of Dracula are here, but no other works by Wolf or by McNally and Florescu.

Dracula Unearthed remains the most heavily annotated of all the Dracula editions, with its 3,500 footnotes extending to “110,000 words, only 50,000 fewer than the text of

Dracula” (Leatherdale 24). Not all seem pertinent enough, and one reviewer observes that they “are indeed copious. Unfortunately, however, I would term 90 per cent of them fatuous, 5 per cent plain wrong, and only the remaining 5 per cent of any actual use or interest” (Hopkins, Review of Leatherdale 269). The same reviewer points out a series of

“egregious errors. . . . [He] seems to confuse ‘mendacious’ with ‘mendicant’ . . . and

‘implies’ with ‘infers.’ . . . He errs too in declaring that ‘Omnia Romae venalia sunt’ is

‘Latin for “All Romans are venal”’ (p. 112). . . . And I cannot imagine why . . . he should attribute The Lost World to Jules Verne (p. 436)” (269). Another reviewer states plainly “I cannot urge to acquire Leatherdale’s book” (Latham, “Dracula’s Last Gasp” 363), recommending instead “Leonard Woolf’s [sic] The Essential Dracula (1993), still in print from Plume” (363). Leatherdale has one passionate champion in Elizabeth Miller, who writes of this edition: “The reliability far surpasses that of either of its predecessors” (Sense

& Nonsense 187). It is true, though, that Miller was Leatherdale’s collaborator and

“provided invaluable assistance with the annotations” (Leatherdale 24).

2.5 Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller: Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula (2008) One decade after the Leatherdale edition, Elizabeth Miller collaborated with another

Dracula enthusiast in producing a new, more original, and perhaps more eloquent, canonising gesture: an “annotated and transcribed” facsimile edition of the contents of the box of Stoker’s papers “discovered” in 1970 at the Rosenbach Foundation in Philadelphia by McNally and Florescu. Eighteen-Bisang and Miller are so convinced of the place held by Dracula in the history of literature that they call it an “immortal masterpiece” twice, the first time in a chapter on the “Methodology” of arranging the papers (Eighteen-Bisang and

Miller 9). Most remarkable in this edition (published by McFarland, an independent academic press based in North Carolina) is that it is structured like many other annotated editions of Dracula. It has a series of appendices (295-314), including a biography of

Stoker; a bibliography; a list of nonfiction sources for the novel and another of possible literary influences; as well as the encyclopaedia article on “Vampire” also provided by

Riquelme. It includes an essay on “The Myth of Dracula” (291-294) and an “Overview”

(275-289) in which the editors discuss many of the original issues raised by Wolf and

McNally/Florescu: the year in which the novel is set; the range of Stoker’s knowledge about Transylvania; the similarities between Count Dracula and Vlad the Impaler.

Moreover, the annotations to Stoker’s meagre jottings read like annotations to the novel. To give a single example, when Stoker’s memo reads simply “Chapter 7 – return of the Texan – new light on Dracula – the Professor’s lecture in history,” the editors add a long note. They begin by quoting amply from Dracula (Van Helsing’s report of Arminius’s

letter on the Count in Chapter 18) so as to make their comment more naturally based on the text of the novel, then say, “With the exception of the reference to the Voivode Dracula who pursued the Turks, this account is fiction not history.” The note continues with yet another quote from Van Helsing (Chapter 23), after which the annotators add, “Again, this

‘history’ is fictional” (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 73 n. 170). There is no “history,” fictional or not, however; the “account” the annotators are referring to does not exist in

Stoker’s working papers, but only in the novel itself.

Eighteen-Bisang and Miller write the correct forms of words misspelled by the author: for example, where the notes say “wehr wolf” and “Fins,” they transcribe

“werewolf” and “Finns” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 200-201)20; instead of “handl” and “gulgas” they write “hendl” and “gulyas” (212-213); instead of “Bukorest” they write “Bucharest”

(246-247). In other places, they misspell what Stoker has written correctly: “nópte” becomes “nopte” (120-121); “Dieu” becomes “dieu” (122-123); “these men said of legend” becomes “these men said if legend” (152-153); “Religio Medici” becomes “Religico

Medici” (236-237). Sometimes they do not see a mistake and neither correct nor annotate when Stoker writes “My Major Johnson” instead of “By Major Johnson” (220-221). They rearrange Stoker’s lines: when a note reads “fox or wolf good” and then “woman with full jug of water lucky,” the editors transcribe “fox or wolf” and then “good woman with full jug of water lucky” (122-123). These are only a few of the mistakes in the Notes. They are just a symptom of the editors’ main concern, that of providing a particular reading for

Dracula, according to which the historical voivode was not the real model for the Count and Stoker did not do any further research on him other than what he found in Wilkinson

20 The first page given here refers to the facsimile; the second, to the transcription. 61 (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 285); and, although Stoker did more research than originally thought (the editors take the opportunity to lambaste A.N. Wilson for believing the opposite), he did just enough and did not pursue any matters relating, for example, to

Transylvania (287). This is a methodological double bind that Miller prescribes more clearly elsewhere: “It would be foolhardy to claim that Stoker’s sources are limited to what he mentions in the papers. But it is just as absurd to claim that he ‘must have’ read this or that, when there is no supporting evidence” (Sense & Nonsense 18).

2.6 Leslie S. Klinger: The New Annotated Dracula (2008) Leslie Klinger replaced Leonard Wolf when W.W. Norton took over the Annotated series from Clarkson N. Potter. He immediately acknowledges Wolf’s first edition as the real forerunner of his own: “I crossed paths with Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Dracula shortly after its appearance in 1975. . . . Its scope and erudition were broad, and its production values beautiful. Wolf took Dracula seriously, and I wanted to as well” (Klinger xi). However, he emphasises that Wolf’s updated edition does not include Stoker’s Notes.

He salutes but criticises “the groundbreaking The Essential Dracula by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu . . . which made extensive use of Bram Stoker’s then newly discovered notes for the book . . . but leaned heavily on the erroneous theory that Vlad the Impaler and

Dracula were the same person” (xi). Klinger also mentions the “Norton Critical Edition with notes by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal . . . [the] John Paul Riquelme . . . edition with notes . . . and Clive Leatherdale’s 1998 Bram Stoker’s Dracula Unearthed . . . the most heavily annotated” (xii).

Klinger is most critical of literary critics: “In recent years, Dracula has become a cottage industry for esteemed academics and serious scholars, who see the text as proof of virtually every wrong that may be blamed on the Victorians” (Klinger xii). He suggests, instead, treating the text of the novel as an enjoyable piece of fiction: “My principal aim, however, has been to restore a sense of wonder, excitement, and sheer fun to this great work” (xii). This is as far as he gets in proclaiming the literariness of the novel, after calling it “one of the most influential books of the nineteenth century . . . [a] timeless work” (xi).

The edition does seem intended to enhance the pleasure of the encounter with Stoker’s story and characters, as it includes abundant illustrations and constant accounts of the editor’s own search for the places, the objects, and the people mentioned in the novel. One reviewer has said that Klinger’s edition “may be trying to do too much” (Holte, Review of

Klinger 430) and that “a reader coming to the novel for the first time might benefit from a less visually bewildering text” (432).

The most extensive appendices of The New Annotated Dracula are those dedicated to the novel’s legacy in literature and on the screen, which are usually treated by other editors as well. The only entirely original background material in Klinger’s edition is an appendix on “The Friends of Dracula” (581-583), about the societies organized by the

“legions of fans” (581) starting with the early 1960s. The most influential are: the Dracula

Society, founded in London in 1973 by Bruce Wightman and Bernard Davies (581-582); the Transylvanian Society of Dracula (which publishes a Journal of Dracula Studies), created in 1991 in Bucharest and with several branches in other countries, of which the most active is the Canadian chapter led by Elizabeth Miller; and the Bram Stoker Society, formed in 1980 in Dublin. Some of the members of these societies are academics; many are

63 “Dracula scholars” or, as Jim Holte calls them, “scholars of the night.”21 Holte gives a passionate account of the way this community regarded with much pleasure how each edition contributed to the appreciation of Dracula as a literary work and Stoker as a writer, but emphasises the importance of the Auerbach/Skal edition: “the announcement of a new

Norton Critical Edition was the equivalent of a papal proclamation of canonisation, literally. . . . [I]n 1997, when Norton brought out its Dracula, edited by Nina Auerbach and

David Skal, there was celebration throughout the community of the scholars of the night.

We had arrived, big time. We were canonical” (Holte, “A Clutch of Vampires”).

2.7 Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal: Dracula by Bram Stoker (1997) Paradoxically, though an established student of vampire literature and film, Nina

Auerbach does not consider Stoker’s novel one of the best works in the genre, let alone a literary masterpiece. Prior to her edition of Dracula, she published a study of the genre entitled Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995), in which, as a rival editor of Dracula puts it,

“[h]er views are distinctly and provocatively at odds with many critics’ characterisations of

Dracula. . . . Auerbach prefers instead to examine both material that antedates the book and later developments, including films and our own contemporary situation. . . . Auerbach’s interpretation of earlier literary representations of vampires enables her to argue that Count

Dracula is not a transgressive figure” (Riquelme 421-422). Another rival editor makes a

21 Clive Leatherdale is not the only Dracula scholar to have founded a publishing house dedicated to the canonisation of Bram Stoker. Robert Eighteen-Bisang owns Transylvania Press, which has published Dracula: The Rare Text of 1901 (1994, introduction by Raymond McNally) and Elizabeth Miller’s Reflections on Dracula (1998). Robert Reginald founded Borgo Press, specialized in science-fiction, but which also reissued rare Stoker titles like The Watter’ Mou’, Under the Sunset and The Lair of the White Worm. 64

similar comment: “Nina Auerbach’s fine study of the perpetually mobile metaphor of the vampire, Our Vampires, Ourselves, works hard to dismiss Stoker as the least interesting and most conservative element in a long and sinuous history” (Luckhurst viii).

Indeed, the Norton editors insist that the novel owes much to the Wilde trials of

1895, although Stoker’s vampire suffers from “abstinence”: “Compared to such earlier vampires as Polidori’s Lord Ruthven and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Dracula is scrupulously hygienic, even monogamous. . . . Later, more comfortably progressive decades would develop these faint hints of a vampire existence that eludes patriarchal categories: in the 1970s, Dracula was transformed into a poignantly androgynous liberator of trapped women, while Anne Rice’s best-selling Vampire Chronicles are openly homoerotic” (Auerbach and Skal xii). As for Dracula’s literary value, the novel is described as “commonplace”: “Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, authors such as H. Rider

Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H.G. Wells turned out hordes of tales – several more eloquent and sophisticated than Dracula” (ix).

As the annotations in the Auerbach/Skal edition are “somewhat skimpy” (Latham,

“Dracula’s Last Gasp” 363) and the introduction is only four pages long, the reader has to rely on the supplementary material. After all, “The principle of the Norton Critical Editions is that readers like to be stimulated by hints and documents to carry out their own investigations” (Monod 33). True to Nina Auerbach’s opposition to “historicist readings . . . which situate the book in relation to its historical context” (Riquelme 421-422), the

Auerbach/Skal edition provides only four texts as “contexts” – and only one of these is a source used by Bram Stoker: two excerpts (four pages) from Gerard’s 1885 article on

“Transylvanian Superstitions.” Much lengthier (forty pages) is the following section about

65 “Dramatic and Film Variations.” Both Wolf and McNally/Florescu include treatments of theatre and film adaptations, and many references to Stoker’s sources and other background information have found their way into their annotations. The real novelty of the

Auerbach/Skal edition is the inclusion of critical essays, many of them published after

Wolf’s 1975 edition and McNally and Florescu’s work from 1979.

The section of “Criticism” includes seven texts (not all in complete form): five of them offer psychoanalytic readings; one is a Marxist reading; Arata’s essay “The

Occidental Tourist” is the only “historicist” text and is notable by its assumption that the novel has an unstable “meaning” and that today’s readers should be informed of the expectations of Stoker’s implied reader of 1897. The same reviewer who pans

Leatherdale’s Dracula Unearthed writes about the Auerbach/Skal edition that it is

“indispensable . . . in a league of its own” (Hopkins, Review of Auerbach and Skal 84).22

Others observe, on the contrary, that with Auerbach/Skal, “the reader enters more ideologically-charged terrain. . . . On the basis of what appears to be no evidence at all, the editors argue that Stoker ‘may, in freer days [before his marriage to Florence Balcombe] have been involved in the homosexual community later ostracized in [Oscar] Wilde’s person’” (Davison 358). In fact, the Norton editors go as far as to suggest that “[t]he [1895]

Wilde trials generated the terror that took the form of Dracula” (Auerbach and Skal xii), which makes Elizabeth Miller exclaim: “They most certainly did not! . . . The Notes make clear that most of the ingredients that comprise the novel’s terror were there from the early

1890s” (Sense & Nonsense 69).

22 The reviewer, Lisa Hopkins, although originally a specialist in Elizabethan literature, later wrote about Dracula herself, in Giants of the Past: Popular Fictions and the Idea of Evolution (2004) and Screening the Gothic (2005), then published a new biography of Stoker: Bram Stoker: A Literary Life (2007). 66

The debate around the reading of the novel – and hence the perceived need for more editions – necessarily focuses on annotation or, when they play a lesser part, on the documents provided as background material. The most controversial choice in the

Auerbach/Skal edition is Talia Schaffer’s essay “‘A Wilde Desire Took Me’: The

Homoerotic History of Dracula”: “Working from the highly speculative and unsupported premise that ‘Dracula explores Stoker’s fear and anxiety as a closeted homosexual man during Oscar Wilde’s trial,’ Schaffer’s essay is an example of . . . flawed scholarship in this field . . . it should have been replaced by one of several noteworthy essays considering the science-versus-faith question, an extremely pertinent theme in Dracula” (Davison 359).

Schaffer’s essay “was likely included due to Auerbach’s fascination for the general subject.

. . . Similarly, Auerbach’s interest in nineteenth century images of demonic women . . . probably explains the presence of the brief excerpt from Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of

Perversity” (Latham, “Dracula’s Century” 135). Latham, too, suggests that not only

Schaffer, but also Senf and Dijkstra, should “have made room for two other, more trenchant critical pieces – which might have included Judith Halberstam’s study of Stoker’s anti-

Semitism . . . or a sample of David Glover’s fine work on nationalist ideology in Stoker’s texts . . . or Friedrich Kittler’s potent meditation on information-processing systems in the novel” (135).

In the end, Riquelme’s observation about Auerbach’s opposition to historicist readings appears to echo several reviews of the Norton edition, as well as comments generated by Auerbach’s earlier work.23 In this view, it seems less surprising that the one-

23 For example, a reviewer of her 1982 Woman and the Demon concludes that “the flaws in her presentation awaken us to the dangers of ahistoricity: of confusing mythic, psychological, and social realities” (Moglen 232). 67 and-a-half-page “Selected Bibliography” of Auerbach/Skal mentions only Wolf’s 1993 edition, while McNally and Florescu appear with In Search of Dracula, which, according to the Norton editors, “lavishes far more research on the historical figure than Bram Stoker himself ever attempted and is therefore more revealing as history than as a key to Stoker’s literary intentions” (Auerbach and Skal 488). While In Search of Dracula is, indeed, a historical rather than a literary study, it is surprising, although undoubtedly part of the debate around the reading of Dracula, that Auerbach and Skal mention it while, at the same time, they do not consider the 1979 Florescu/McNally edition.

2.8 Glennis Byron: Dracula by Bram Stoker (1998) Byron’s introduction is considerably longer than Auerbach and Skal’s, devoting seventeen pages to discussing Stoker’s life and literary activity and about why Dracula as a

Victorian novel is still relevant today. Unlike Norton, Byron’s publisher (Broadview) does not include critical essays, which instead allows the editor to bring together more sources and other background material. In the Byron edition, a brief chronology of Stoker is followed by appendices. The first were authored by Stoker: “Dracula’s Guest” and the 1908 article in favour of “The Censorship of Fiction,” presented as containing “what many see as a central precept of the novel: for the sake of the social purity of the nation, the frontiers must be patrolled, and the corrupting infection to which women are particularly susceptible, whether it be vampire or impure text, must be beaten back” (Byron 434). The following section, entitled “Transylvania: History, Culture, and Folklore,” includes five pages of excerpts from Emily Gerard’s essay on “Transylvanian Superstitions,” three and a half pages of excerpts from Charles Boner’s 1865 Transylvania: Its Products and Its People, 68

and three full pages of excerpts from Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Werewolves

(Baring-Gould does not mention Transylvania, but he does speak of werewolves, berserkers, Slovaks, and Elizabeth Báthory).

Another section, entitled “London,” includes four and a half pages of excerpts from the 1898 Baedeker travel guide about the British capital. This holds a place similar to the maps in the first editions by Wolf and McNally/Florescu or to some of the notes in

Leatherdale or Klinger, both of whom use the same Baedeker as a source for their annotations. Byron includes it, of course, because her own edition is lightly annotated. Its presence might indicate that Byron wants her intended reader to have the same kind of knowledge as the readers of 1897. However, this wish is belied by the fact that Byron’s annotations repeteadly refer to present situations.

A section entitled “Mental Physiology” includes excerpts about Mesmer from

Stoker’s 1910 book Famous Imposters and eight pages of excerpts from William B.

Carpenter’s Principles of Mental Physiology, about “unconscious cerebration,”

“somnambulism,” and “mesmerism.” Two more sections deal with “Degeneration” (two pages of excerpts from Lombroso and three pages from Nordau) and “Gender”: brief excerpts from John Ruskin’s lecture “Of Queens’ Gardens”; Stoker’s essay, “Women as

Men,” first published in his Famous Imposters; Thomas Laycock’s 1860 Mind and Brain;

Lombroso and Ferrero’s The Female Offender; and a passage about Otto Weininger from

Stoker’s 1908 Lady Athlyne. While only the fragments from three of Stoker’s sources and the last section, “Reviews and Interviews” (including reviews from The Athenaeum, The

Spectator and Punch, and an interview with Stoker in British Weekly) are deemed notable by Elizabeth Miller (Sense & Nonsense 187), all the others (covering 30 pages) are

69 consistent with the reading suggested by Byron in her introduction and which is quite similar to Nina Auerbach’s. If the Norton editor contends that Dracula hints at numerous transgressions without being transgressive, Byron posits that “The text allows for a both exhilarating and threatening experience of freedom from boundaries before firmly reinstating them at the end with the destruction of Dracula” (16). Byron suggests three major themes of the novel as worthy of study today: the representation of women, the degeneration of society, and the advancement of science and technology. These topics might seem “historicist”; however, Byron places them under the aegis of an “anxiety over boundaries” (16).

Byron takes a “psychosexual” stance as she believes that “the last word, for now, must go to Nina Auerbach who, in Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995), has so alarmingly pulled the carpet out from under the feet of much recent criticism” (24). Sufficient unto itself, this edition includes no mention of any predecessors (Auerbach appears only as a

Dracula specialist). The book ends with a bibliography (four and a half pages) which does not include editions. Yet, the ghost of Leonard Wolf, who informs many of Byron’s notes, is present in the “Introduction”: when the Broadview editor writes her last line, “Perhaps

Auerbach is right: the monster is not Victorian England, the monster is us” (25) she echoes the last lines in both of Wolf’s editions: “Finally, Stoker’s achievement is this: he makes us understand in our own experience why the vampire is said to be invisible in the mirror. He is there, but we fail to recognize him since our own faces get in the way” (1975, xviii;

1993, xxiii).

2.9 John Paul Riquelme: Dracula: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism (2002) Riquelme does not call Dracula a literary masterpiece, preferring more neutral descriptions, labelling it as “a . . . well-known book, whose importance and influence has continued to grow . . . [and] has left an indelible mark on literature, film, and popular culture” (Riquelme 19). However, he insists that the book was “unusual” for its contemporaries and an “astonishingly new artwork” (12) that even today we are learning to appreciate. An original section in his edition is “A Critical History of Dracula” (409-433), which narrates the reception of the novel and ends with these words: “we recognize

Dracula as a book whose continuing relevance to our modernity we are just beginning to understand” (428). The introduction, entitled “Biographical and Historical Contexts” (3-

21), is in fact a biography of Stoker, stressing the novelist’s place in the literary field of late-Victorian England. It is here that Riquelme finds ways of proclaiming the artistic excellence of the novel and of its author, by putting them on equal footing with other, already canonised works and/or writers.

He compares Stoker’s literary life with that of Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde:

“Like them, he was an active member of the community of artists and writers in London in the 1880s and 1890s, when Victorian tendencies . . . were . . . transformed into what eventually became literary modernism. In that transformation, Dracula (1897) arguably holds as important a place as Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) or Wilde’s Salomé

(1893)” (Riquelme 3). Likening Dracula to other late-Victorian works set in faraway and dangerous places, Riquelme contends that “Stoker produced a narrative combining the menace of Gothic writing with the fascination for the exotic that was strong at the end of the nineteenth century. Like Joseph Conrad in The Heart of Darkness (1899), who also 71 combines a dark menace with exotic materials, he evoked important issues concerning home and homeland” (11-12). The same kind of favourable comparison is applied even to

Stoker’s Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving: “The book’s sometimes fragmented, disjointed character recalls various autobiographical works by Stoker’s younger, modernist contemporaries, including Yeats’s Autobiography, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man, and Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being” (13-14).

Rather than pronouncing Dracula’s canonicity, Riquelme acknowledges it as a fait accompli: “The increased availability of the book in reliable editions and the more frequent, more various scholarly writing about Dracula suggest that it has crossed into the canon of literature regularly taught and discussed in university classrooms, as Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein did in the 1970s” (414 n. 4). Here, Riquelme mentions Dracula’s presence in what has been termed “the pedagogical canon” (Harris 113), which consists of the texts that are favoured in literature courses over a given period of time, and to which these annotated editions contribute by providing easily available and easily teachable versions of the novel. Dracula still lacks the recognition of the most powerful canon-making instruments in English studies, however. It is absent from major literary histories as well as from popular anthologies of British literature such as Norton and Longman. Consequently, like other editors of Dracula, Riquelme has to keep a certain degree of ambivalence with regard to a novel that he is canonising through his annotation as well as through the material presence of the edition he has prepared.24

24 Also interesting is that Riquelme uses Stoker’s literary life to justify the writer’s canonicity, although the biographical details about Stoker that are available to us suggest his marginality. In Philip Waller’s 1,181- page survey of Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain, 1870-1918 (OUP, 2006), Stoker is only mentioned a few times, mainly as a friend of Hall Caine. 72

Riquelme’s edition includes brief excerpts from Richard Burton’s Vikram and the

Vampire, Major E.C. Johnson’s On the Track of the Crescent, Sabine Baring-Gould’s The

Book of Were-Wolves, Emily Gerard’s The Land Beyond the Forest, Cesare Lombroso’s

Criminal Man, Max Nordau’s Degeneration, Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia

Sexualis, Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, Karl Marx’s Capital (for which Riquelme provides his own translation), Friedrich Nietzsche’s Joyful Wisdom (again in Riquelme’s translation), James Frazer’s Garnered Sheaves: Essays, Addresses and Reviews. The contextual documents also include two texts in their entirety: Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 poem “The Vampire” and the article on “Vampire” from the ninth edition of the

Encyclopaedia Britannica (1888), the one that Stoker would have used. All the contextual documents cover sixteen pages, out of which Stoker’s confirmed sources (Gerard, Johnson,

Baring-Gould) account for only a little over four pages. A reviewer has noticed that, in the

Riquelme edition, “there is relatively little on Whitby and its topographical significance in the novel” (Mulvey-Roberts 194). This is actually true, and somewhat surprising, of the

Byron and Auerbach/Skal editions as well. Riquelme indicates that some of the documents included appeared “while Stoker was working on Dracula” (374). However, several seem directly connected not with the novel, but rather with the critical studies at the end of the volume.

These studies, which are the second-largest part of Riquelme’s volume (after the text of the novel itself), constitute the actual “case study”: each essay is preceded by an introduction to the type of critical approach that is being used, with a selected

73 bibliography.25 The five essays are “Corruption of the Blood and Degeneration of the Race:

Dracula and Policing the Borders of Gender” by Sos Eltis, as an example of the gender studies perspective; “‘The Little Children Can Be Bitten’: A Hunger for Dracula” by

Dennis Foster, as an example of psychoanalytic criticism; “Ambivalence and Ascendancy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” by Gregory Castle, as an example of the new historicist approach; “Doubling and Repetition/Realism and Closure in Dracula” by John Paul

Riquelme as an example of the deconstructionist approach; and “Vampiric Typewriting:

Dracula and Its Media” by Jennifer Wicke, which is said to be “combining perspectives.”

There is no mention, in any of these studies, of the historical aspects of Dracula or of the historical context at the time of its publication, other than that in Ireland. In fact, Castle’s new historicist essay analyses “Stoker’s ambivalent Anglo-Irishness” (522) and understands Dracula “as an allegory of Ascendancy deracination” (533).

The studies make no mention of any of the previous annotated editions, either.

Instead, as Riquelme admits, “[i]n writing the glosses for Dracula, I consulted various editions but primarily those by Nina Auerbach, Maud Ellmann, Marjorie Howes, and

Leonard Wolf, whose efforts I acknowledge with thanks” (Riquelme viii). Howes published an edition of Dracula for Everyman without annotations; the Auerbach/Skal and Ellmann editions are lightly annotated; only Wolf provides rich annotations and Riquelme puts them to good use, as he sometimes quotes Wolf directly in his own “glosses.” The most heavily annotated edition (Leatherdale) is peculiarly absent, although Riquelme mentions

Leatherdale’s 1985 study Dracula: The Novel and the Legend in his “A Critical History of

Dracula” (413-414). Similarly, McNally and Florescu are barely mentioned as the authors

25 In his 1985 Dracula: The Novel and the Legend, Clive Leatherdale performs a one-man case-study of Dracula, similarly providing “five alternative readings of the novel” (13). 74

of In Search of Dracula (411), with a footnote adding that “McNally and Florescu have together and separately published other volumes focussing on the history and legends that stand behind the figure of Dracula, including their The Essential Dracula (1979) and

McNally’s Dracula Was a Woman (1984). I have not included these books in the review of criticism, since their subjects are more historical than literary” (411 n. 2). While Riquelme reproduces here quite accurately Auerbach’s justification, he does mention The Essential

Dracula, but the reader has no inkling that the “volume” going by that name is, in fact, an annotated edition of the novel.

In historical and geographical matters, not only Riquelme, but all three editors who provide numerous appendices (Riquelme, Auerbach/Skal and Byron) rely heavily on the two most popular annotated editions that have preceded them: Wolf and McNally/Florescu.

For example, the note for “Carpathians” in McNally/Florescu begins with the following lines: “The heavily forested Carpathian mountains form a V-shaped mountain range. . . . In essence, this range of mountains with few peaks reaching eight thousand feet, separates

Transylvania proper from the other two Romanian provinces – Wallachia to the south and

Moldavia to the East” (52 p. 9). Auerbach summarises it as follows: “A heavily forested,

V-shaped mountain range separating Transylvania proper from other Romanian provinces:

Moldavia to the east and Wallachia to the south” (9 n. 5). Wolf’s note is quite brief (and not entirely accurate): “A mountain range extending 800 miles from northeast Czechoslovakia to northern Romania. The highest peak is 8,737 feet” (2 n. 9), but Byron summarises it anyway: “Mountain range extending from Czechoslavakia [sic] to Romania” (31 n. 5).

About “Bucovina,” the McNally/Florescu edition provides a note ending with the words “it was reconstituted into an autonomous duchy (which was its status when Bram

75 Stoker wrote Dracula) and administered by an Austrian governor who resided in the capital of the new province, Gernauti (Czernowitz)” (53 n. 11). Auerbach also writes that “In the

1890s, Bukovina was an autonomous duchy within the Austro-Hungarian Empire” (10 n.

8), but does not keep the wrong spelling of Cernauti (Cernăuţi), which resurfaces instead in

Klinger: “Gernauti (Czernowitz) was its capital” (17 n. 22). Later, in Chapter 3, McNally and Florescu quote Major E.C. Johnson to explain “bloody sword” as a “signal of national emergency” in Hungary (67 n. 5). Auerbach writes, similarly, without quoting, that it is “In

Hungary, a signal of national emergency” (34 n. 4). Wolf prefers the more poetical equivalent of “gauge of battle” (41 n. 18). Byron conforms and writes: “Gauge of battle”

(60 n. 7). Riquelme makes it more prosaic and writes simply “Call to battle” (53). Most telling is, perhaps, the treatment of the term “Huns.” McNally and Florescu give no definition, but the San Francisco-based Leonard Wolf calls them “an Asiatic race of warlike nomads who invaded Europe” (4 n. 19). Auerbach and Skal realise the term has become offensive and write “Asian nomads,” but Byron is still loyal to Wolf and calls them “an

Asiatic nomadic tribe” (32 n. 5). Well into the twenty-first century, the first two heavily annotated editions of Dracula act as reference books for the more recent editors.

2.10 A.N. Wilson: Dracula by Bram Stoker (1983) In his 1982 essay on “Annotated English Novels,” Stephen Wall praises the

American Norton Critical Editions and especially the French series Classiques Garnier, writing that the latter “characteristically prints a higher proportion of editorial and annotatory matter than any English series that might reasonably be compared with it –

Oxford English Novels, for example, or the New Wessex Edition of Hardy . . . or the 76

revamped but essentially perfunctory World’s Classics” (Wall 4). The year after Wall’s essay was published, the World’s Classics series of the Oxford University Press issued the first of its three versions of Dracula. Fittingly, the editor, A.N. Wilson, provides only two pages of annotations at the end of the volume. In the absence of any background material, the reader has to rely on the editor’s introduction for any supplementary information.26

Still, vampire aficionados were probably hoping that Dracula would achieve canonicity right then, in 1983. It was a momentous event, not only because of the prestige of the publisher – arguably, the most important academic press in the world – but also because

Dracula had just been added “as the one hundredth book” (Luckhurst viii) of the World’s

Classics series.

However, “A.N. Wilson did not seem entirely comfortable with introducing such a potboiler” (Luckhurst vii). Far from considering it a masterpiece, the first OUP editor writes that Dracula “is patently not a great work of literature” (Wilson xiv) and that “No one in their right mind would think of Stoker as a ‘great writer’” (xiv). Writing almost three decades later, the third OUP editor recounts that, back “in 1983, there was some press concern that the notion of the literary classic was being undermined [by the inclusion of

Dracula in the series.] . . . Stoker’s other novels, needless to say, were considered ghastly, beneath contempt” (Luckhurst vii-viii). That Wilson disparages the novel he is editing is certainly surprising, but statements about literary value are not easy to challenge.27 Instead, proponents of the literariness of Dracula as well as other editors of the novel (from

26 Works by modern writers in the World’s Classics series are edited with explanatory notes placed at the end of the volume. Instead, Shakespeare plays in the same series have much longer introductions, background material, and footnotes on every page rather than endnotes. 27 A.N. Wilson concedes, however, that “with Dracula [Stoker] composed, indeed, one of the World’s Classics” (x), which might be explained by the fact that, according to the back matter of the volume, the World’s Classics series also publishes such popular titles as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone or Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. 77 Leatherdale to Klinger) have attacked another of Wilson’s statements, according to which

“[i]t would seem likely that [Stoker] did some – but very little – research for his fantasy”

(x). In his 1991 Vampyres, for example, Christopher Frayling retorts: “Evidently, A. N.

Wilson had done some research for his anaemic contribution – but very little” (297; emphasis his). In their “Overview” to Bram Stoker’s Notes, Eighteen-Bisang and Miller go much further and use Stoker’s proven research as evidence of the novel’s value: “The Notes put the lie to Wilson’s remark. Research from diverse sources combined with incessant revisions and emendations testify to a fervour and commitment that elevate Bram Stoker’s immortal masterpiece to a level none of his other works aspire to” (Eighteen-Bisang and

Miller 275).

2.11 Maud Ellmann: Dracula by Bram Stoker (1996) The second OUP editor provides ten and a half pages of annotations and a much longer introduction than Wilson. She also seems unwilling to give a unique reading to the novel: “Dracula . . . can never be pinned down” (Ellmann xxviii). This has been noticed by reviewers: “Ellmann resists the inclination to direct her readers’ interpretation of Stoker’s work” (Davison 357). However, the analysis of Dracula in her introduction could be summarised as follows: Stoker drew inspiration from history, folklore and especially

Gothic fiction and invasion literature to create a novel that showcases his “fascination with cutting-edge technologies” (Ellmann xviii) and that can easily – “perhaps too easily” (xxiii)

– be interpreted through a Freudian lens. She calls Dracula “Stoker’s stroke of serendipity”

(viii), thereby joining other previous editors who thought the novel an accident in an otherwise less than brilliant career. When it comes to the literary value of the novel and to 78

Stoker’s merits as a writer, Ellmann is hardly gentler than Wilson: “Stoker is a cack-handed narrator . . . the novel wouldn’t be so good if it weren’t so very bad” (viii). Ultimately, just like Wilson, Ellmann leaves the reader with the same question: “Why did she choose to edit a ‘very bad’ novel?” (Davison 358).

2.12 Roger Luckhurst: Dracula by Bram Stoker (2011) The first thing Nathalie Saudo-Welby notices in her review of Roger Luckhurst’s edition is that the Oxford World’s Classics series now provides thirty pages of notes

(Saudo-Welby 260). She also notices that in Luckhurst’s introduction the literary value of the novel is no longer doubtful, although she writes that the editor is “less concerned with the stylistic aspects of the work and more with its rich cultural and ideological content”

(260) and that, in the context of David Punter’s query (in The Literature of Terror) about the universal or the historical nature of the Gothic, Luckhurst “seems to take place rather in the second approach” (261). Indeed, the third OUP editor insists that Gothic fiction is a modern genre (Luckhurst xii) and so are vampire superstitions (xv): both are creations of the Age of Enlightenment. Like Ellmann, he enumerates possible interpretations of the novel: sexual terrorism, questions of race, the conflict between science and superstition

(xx-xxxi). Yet, he discourages too much interpretative equivocation: “This is not a licence to read anything into the novel, however. All of the concerns identified here reinforce a central problem in Dracula: the integrity of Anglo-Saxon identity in a moment where it was perceived to be under pressure from all manner of insidious attacks” (xxix). The editor reiterates his “historicist” conclusion in a later essay: “Count Dracula is defeated by an alliance of Anglo-American-Dutch Nordics, with only the occasional fit of unmanly 79 hysteria to mar their restoration of proper order. The vampiric pollution is chased out of

London, pursued back through the dark night of Europe to its Balkan limits again, and there pitilessly dispatched” (“Gothic Colonies” 63). However, this reading is absent from the annotations, which often summarise the commentary supplied by previous editors.

The Luckhurst edition is notable for acknowledging other annotated editions “by

Auerbach and Skal, Klinger, McNally and Florescu, and Wolf” (Luckhurst 363), and by the first use of the 2008 facsimile edition of Bram Stoker’s Notes. As for the literary value of the novel, although he ends by admitting that Dracula “is still a rattling good read retaining a genuine power to unsettle and unnerve” (Luckhurst xxxii), the 2011 editor actually begins by repeating one of Ellmann’s phrases as well as the original “mystery” formulated by

Leonard Wolf more than 35 years before: “The achievement of Dracula is all in spite of its author, whose cack-handed attempts at literature only accidentally unleashed the primal force of myth” (viii). In fact, Luckhurst questions the literariness of the entire Gothic genre:

“Gothic texts . . . are not ‘good’ novels on the measure of the art of fiction determined by

Henry James, but they were never meant to be, and to judge them on this criterion is absurd” (xiv). Dracula is more interesting today than at the time of its initial publication because “historical distance reveals the book to be an uncanny echo-box of its place and time” (xix). Stoker himself “was merely a vehicle for the cultural energies of the late

Victorian period, currents that he did not necessarily fully control” (viii). Thus, with

Luckhurst, the editors of Dracula have completed a full circle: just like in the mid-1970s, the novel appears again remarkable for creating a cultural myth, to which Stoker, a mediocre writer, had come by accident.

Chapter 3 The Editors of Dracula and the Places of the Imagination

The issue of Dracula’s literariness or lack thereof informs much of the critical apparatus provided by the novel’s editors. Three other predicaments act on a deeper, ideological level, to influence both the textual version of Dracula that is presented to the reader by each editor and the ways in which key passages in the novel are explained and commented upon. The first of these predicaments is that of embracing or rejecting the

“extratextual myth” (Grigely 206) of the novel, especially the one created over the last hundred years through stage and screen adaptations. As two of the editors of Dracula complain, “it is difficult to detach the novel from its vigorous twentieth-century life: we tend to superimpose on Bram Stoker’s enigmatic monster Bela Lugosi’s intonations or

Frank Langella’s sinuous seductiveness or Gary Oldman’s tears” (Auerbach and Skal ix).

Some editors use the extratextual myth to illustrate the version of the novel that they provide; or to keep the characters and the plot alive through the “filmographies” that they discuss in supplementary materials; or to enliven the annotations themselves by referring both to the novel and to the other media. By contrast, other editors prefer to downplay or even conceal the novel’s adaptations.

The second predicament originates in the ambiguity of the vampire itself and of the place it has in Gothic literature. Alternately seen as a force of pure evil and as a figure of

81 subversion, flaunting its difference before Victorians, the vampire elicits antithetical reactions from its commentators. As many of the Dracula editors confess to having long been fascinated by vampires in general and the Dracula character in particular – they are

“even more loyal to the vampire, perhaps, than Renfield” (Auerbach, Our Vampires 204 n.

32) – their perspective on the Count often takes on a personal note and they refashion themselves according to their own relation with Dracula and their own ideas about vampires. Thus, they might introduce themselves to the reader as someone who belongs somehow to the world created by Bram Stoker and other Gothic writers. The last and perhaps most consequential predicament has to do with the country of the vampires as described by Bram Stoker. The fact that the places imagined by the novelist do not match reality has gradually been accepted by the editors. However, they hesitate to dispel the magic of Stoker’s Transylvania and they continue to rely on the novel’s sources.

3.1 The Extratextual Myth

The decision to use or not to use the extratextual myth of Dracula in critical editions seems to be directly connected with the editors’ belief in either the literariness or the cultural significance of the novel. By foregrounding Dracula’s lasting legacy in the film industry, some editors emphasise the fact that the novel is “omnipresent in Western culture” (Klinger l). Others, instead, choose to conceal it because it might be detrimental to the text of the novel itself. The most explicit in this respect is Clive Leatherdale who suggests that, if he were alive today, “Bram Stoker would be unhappy . . . because the creation of his pen has been overtaken and habitually trivialised by the creation of the 82

cinema [and by] the cinema’s prurient debasement of Stoker’s novel” (The Novel and the

Legend 11). As a consequence, Leatherdale’s 1998 edition does not include a discussion (or even a list) of film adaptations. Instead of a still from one of the movies, which has been the practice of most Dracula editors, Leatherdale’s book uses as cover illustration a painting “of Dracula as depicted in the novel” (according to the front flap of the dust jacket). The author of the painting is actor Bruce Wightman, co-founder and chairman of the Dracula Society.28 This indicates not only the editor’s mistrust of the extratextual myth of Dracula but also his loyalty to the Dracula Society in London which, in the early 1980s,

“welcomed [him] among its ranks” (The Novel and the Legend 9).

Similarly, no film adaptation is mentioned in either the introduction or the five critical essays of Riquelme’s 2002 edition of Dracula. The only time the reader finds out that the novel even has an extratextual myth is in one sentence: “Dracula, the most memorable of Stoker’s varied and numerous publications, has left an indelible mark on literature, film, and popular culture” (Riquelme 19). Since this edition is one of the more recent ones, one should probably note that the extratextual myth contributes to the popularity of the novel itself (and the appearance of successive editions) while at the same time it finds itself expelled from these textual versions.29 There are no “filmographies” and the illustration on the dust cover of Riquelme’s edition includes a detail of Caspar David

Friedrich’s 1817 Epitaph for Johann Emanuel Bremer, with what appears to be a Gothic landscape. With this painting fashioned 80 years prior to the publication of Stoker’s novel,

28 The illustration is in fact reminiscent of old photographs of Transylvanian peasants and it has been used before in two other Leatherdale books (The Novel and the Legend 104; Origins 49). 29 In her “Introduction” to Ian Jack’s Oxford World’s Classics edition of Wuthering Heights, Patsy Stoneman remarks how difficult it is to explain a novel that “has assumed an ‘after-life’ to some extent independent of its origin” (vii) because of film and TV adaptations. Her introduction was published for the first time in the 1995 reissue of the novel, whereas the text and Jack’s notes date back to 1976. 83 the editor (or the publisher) seems to wish to place Dracula in a longer tradition of Gothic writing.

Similarly anachronistic is Byron’s edition, which uses as cover illustration an 1862 photograph showing “Visitors to the International Exhibition, London.” A tall, dark figure with a top hat is towering mysteriously over two little girls and a thumbnail version of his head is reproduced on the book’s spine. The photo continues on the back cover and one can see a woman, presumably the mother, looking in the direction of someone or something outside the picture. The man might very well be the father, but the old photo is out of focus and he appears frightening, all the more so if he is to be associated with Count Dracula, because his presumed victims on the cover are two little girls, rather than nubile women, like in Stoker’s book. An explanation is found on the last page of the book: “The distinctive cover images for the [Broadview Literary Texts] series are . . . designed to draw attention to social and temporal context, while suggesting that the works themselves may also relate to periods other than that from which they emerged – including our own era” (Byron, back colophon). Glennis Byron mentions Dracula’s cinematic legacy only to criticise Coppola’s

1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula for “humanis[ing] . . . Stoker’s King Vampire because . . . the cold impersonal horror he personifies and portends is too uncomfortably close to home”

(25).

An interesting, and consistent, choice is that of the Oxford University Press.

Although it makes little mention of film adaptations, A.N. Wilson’s 1983 edition has Bela

Lugosi on the front cover, staring grotesquely from behind a wall. An enhanced detail of the same picture, namely Lugosi’s face, was kept by the Oxford University Press for Maud

Ellmann’s 1996 edition. Luckhurst’s 2011 version uses, instead, a frame from Murnau’s

1922 Nosferatu, namely Count Orlock’s shadow on the wall. No other pictures or stills are used in these editions. The three editors seem hesitant to reject entirely, but also to accept wholeheartedly, the extratextual myth.

If editors for whom Dracula is a literary masterpiece try to avoid any reference to adaptations, those who find the novel’s power insufficient and its artistry doubtful make constant use of the novel’s extratextual myth. For example, in his two editions of the novel

(the 1975 Annotated Dracula and the 1993 Essential Dracula), Leonard Wolf insists that

“[e]verywhere one looks, the power – or the legacy – of the book is felt. The film industry in a dozen countries inexhaustibly reinvents the adventures of the Count or his various semblables” (viii; 1975 ix). Both of Wolf’s editions provide a “Selected Filmography,” much expanded in 1993 (12 pages compared to only 2 in 1975). If the cover of the 1975

Annotated Dracula uses a fairy-tale-like illustration of a medieval castle on top of a mountain on its cover, the 1993 edition displays a colour movie still from Werner Herzog’s

1979 Nosferatu, showing actor Klaus Kinski planting his fangs in a female victim’s neck.

The omnipresence of the novel’s extratextual myth is in fact announced by the book’s back cover: “Leonard Wolf . . . examines the cultural history of the Dracula myth [up] to Francis

Ford Coppola’s blockbuster Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) . . . [The edition also includes]

Commentary by leading contemporary horror writers, including Harlan Ellison, Robert

Bloch, and many more.”

Dracula belongs, undoubtedly, to that category of texts that are continuously recreated long after their first textual manifestation and that Paul Davis calls, in his 1990

The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge a “culture-text.” Stoker’s novel, just like

Dickens’s tale, can be understood both ways: “The text of A Christmas Carol is fixed in

85 Dickens’s words, but the culture-text, the Carol as it has been re-created in the century and a half since it first appeared, changes as the reasons for its retelling change. We are still creating the culture-text of the Carol” (Davis 4). Leonard Wolf, for example, proclaims his loyalty to the culture-text of Dracula which “managed to interject into the culture of the

West the image of a creature of such symbolic force that he has become something like a culture hero . . . Everywhere one looks, the power – or the legacy – of the book is felt”

(Wolf vii-viii; 1975 ix). If the novel’s legacy is present only sparsely in Wolf’s 1975 edition – especially via photographs of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee as Dracula (viii) – the 1993 edition includes commentary from science-fiction and horror writers that have been influenced by Dracula and from scriptwriters and filmmakers involved in the numerous big-screen adaptations of the novel. The continuous references to films and to other fantasy texts play two roles: they enhance the reader’s experience of the “magic” world of the culture-text, which might be somewhat lost in the encounter with the novel alone (and with Stoker’s late-Victorian discourse); and they constantly remind readers of the iconicity of Dracula and the perenniality of the story.

Wolf’s commitment to Dracula’s legacy is not confined to his editions and to other books about the novel or its extratextual myth (his first book, A Dream of Dracula is entirely dedicated to the latter). He is also inextricably linked with the myth itself through his indirect contributions to the novel’s literary and cinematic afterlife. Anne Rice, the author of The Vampire Chronicles, a series of novels begun in 1976, was Wolf’s student in the early 1960s (Wolf, The Connoisseur 188). In 1975, Rice brought Wolf the manuscript of her first novel, Interview with the Vampire: “She wondered whether I would mind giving her book a critical reading. Of course I did not mind. I read her book with pleasure and

made notes of the changes I would suggest that I thought would tighten the story line and would make her narrative flow more smoothly” (189). Something similar happened two years later, when James V. Hart started working on a screenplay that would become the

1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “The first thing I did was to seek out Leonard Wolf . . . [at]

San Francisco State University, and engage his services. . . . I knew that if I ever took a meeting with the devil, I wanted Wolf there to hold my hand” (Coppola and Hart 7). Wolf appears in the film credits as “historical consultant”: “With Coppola and Hart, I reviewed a nearly final print of the film and was pleased to see how scrupulous the filmmakers had been to be as historically accurate as possible” (Wolf, The Connoisseur 242).

Equally committed to the preservation of Dracula’s extratextual myth are Raymond

McNally and Radu Florescu. The front cover illustration of their 1979 edition shows actor

Frank Langella as Dracula in a film adaptation by John Badham that premiered in the same year. The back cover shows Castle Bran, while the endpapers consist of a negative photograph of Whitby or, rather, “Whitby Harbor by Moonlight,” according to the book’s

“list of illustrations” (6). Thus, McNally and Florescu encapsulate the text within its own extratextual myth, not only the cinematic legacy, but also the tourism associated with the novel and the films, which the two editors support by providing an appendix about

“Dracula Tours” (315-320). The book also uses what the editors call a “frontispiece” (6), which again shows “Frank Langella in Dracula” (4). The next illustration is that of Klaus

Kinski in Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of Nosferatu (8). “Dracula’s Guest” is preceded by another photograph of Frank Langella in Dracula (34). The text of the novel itself is preceded by a photograph of Bela Lugosi in the 1931 adaptation (45) and one of Klaus

Kinski and Isabelle Adjani in the 1979 Nosferatu (46). The photos on pages 34 and 46 are

87 reused, in much smaller versions, as illustrations for the text at the end of Chapter XXI in

Stoker’s novel (221-222). The “Annotated Filmography” is preceded by another full-page photograph reproducing a movie still, namely Bela Lugosi in Dracula (278). This filmography has 27 pages, one of which is dedicated entirely to another still of Frank

Langella as Dracula (303).

Klinger’s edition uses a silver engraving of a basilisk on the front cover, as well as the novel title in blood-red letters and a special “gothic” calligraphy by Charles Brock, which was exactly the same used for the posters of Coppola’s 1992 adaptation. The front matter includes a photograph of Bela Lugosi as Dracula, framed by the name of the publisher: “W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London” (iv), which makes this look like a second, alternative, cover for the edition (although it imitates the Norton Critical

Edition type of cover). Apart from photographs, drawing and maps that can be said to accompany the text of the novel, Klinger’s edition includes almost one hundred illustrations that pertain solely to the extratextual myth of the novel, ranging from the omnipresent stills from movies (not only Dracula adaptations, but also other vampire films) to postcards, souvenirs, and a 32-cent stamp with Bela Lugosi as Dracula.

The cover illustration of Auerbach and Skal’s edition is a photograph of Henry

Irving as Mephistopheles in Lyceum’s staging of Faust, rather than a movie still. This has been interpreted as “tacit support for the increasingly prevalent association of Dracula himself with Henry Irving” (Hopkins, Review of Auerbach and Skal 85). However, this edition provides the lengthiest and most scholarly discussion of Dracula’s theatrical and cinematic legacy, with articles signed by the editors themselves and an excerpt from

Gregory A. Waller’s book The Living and the Undead about Todd Browning’s 1931 film.

The editors announce from the introduction their opinion about the text and the culture-text, respectively, when they describe Dracula as a “novel that seemed commonplace in its time

[but] unfurled into a legend haunting and defining the next century” (Auerbach and Skal ix). The author of Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach “derives comfort from the novel” (Wolf, The Connoisseur 259) and thinks of vampires “as [her] confederates”

(Auerbach, Our Vampires 3). On the occasion of the novel’s centenary, Auerbach summons the vampire in a speech reminiscent of spiritist séances: “Dracula is with us, a hungry guest at his own birthday party, because we have invited him, as we have done before in this bloody century” (“Dracula Keeps Rising” 23).

Auerbach and Skal do not provide a dedication for their 1997 edition of Dracula.

Nor do Leatherdale in 1998 and Riquelme in 2002. Klinger dedicates his edition “To Bram

Stoker,” to which he adds in guise of epigraph Van Helsing’s words: “we want no proofs; we ask none to believe us!” (vii). Wolf is more explicitly loyal to the culture-text both in

1975 and in 1993 as his thoughts go to a film actor: “This edition of Dracula is dedicated to

Bela Lugosi” (iv; 1975 iv). McNally and Florescu are committed to an extratextual version contemporary with their own edition and dedicate it “To Frank Langella, whose portrayal of Dracula reveals new dimensions of the immortal count” (5). Others are more personal:

Glennis Byron dedicates her edition “For Rose, who will still shudder as one should” (5); or go so far as to identify themselves with the characters of the novel: Robert Eighteen-

Bisang dedicates the edition of the author’s working notes “To Matilda: My wife, my muse, my Mina” (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller v).

89 3.2 Hunters and Enthusiasts

The editors’ second predicament is the one that also face many of the novel’s legions of fans: that of choosing between hunting the vampire and being the vampire. It is, perhaps, less of a predicament because the editors, just like the fans, routinely choose to do both. For the Dracula editor, the vampire Count is “a culture hero whom our first duty it is to hate even while we have for him a certain weird admiration” (Wolf vii-viii). Nina

Auerbach literally “identifie[s] with vampires” (Miller, The Shade and the Shadow 15) and she equates the chase for the undead with the operation of bringing vampires into the light:

“We thank all other Dracula-hunters who preceded us in leading the vampire out of the shadows. We wish good hunting to the many who will surely follow” (Auerbach and Skal xiv). The two editors obviously refer here to all those involved in the field of “Dracula studies” and such wording is far from unusual. Here is how a reviewer of Riquelme’s edition expresses her enthusiasm:

Riquelme has gathered a wide range of critical and theoretical material relating to

Bram Stoker’s Dracula in a truly vampiric embrace. . . . Riquelme’s edition should

come with the warning that the additional material be consumed in moderation. If

ignored, its richness can lead to an engorgement that leaves the reader

uncomfortably satiated. . . . Riquelme’s achievement in hunting down these

secondary sources should not be underestimated for he has succeeded in

vampirising the vampirists in a manner worthy of the Count. (Mulvey-Roberts 193-

195)

Several of the Dracula editors are members of the fans’ organisations that Leslie

Klinger calls “The Friends of Dracula” (581): Clive Leatherdale is a member of the Dracula

Society in London, while Elizabeth Miller, who assisted Leatherdale in the annotation, is president of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula and of the so-called Lord Ruthven

Assembly. In 1995, the first of these organisations made her Baroness of the House of

Dracula (Miller, The Shade and the Shadow 18). Leslie Klinger himself is a member of both the Dracula Society and the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, and he is also a prominent member of the Baker Street Irregulars. Scholars and fans often get together and exchange opinions, as it happened at “Dracula 97,” the Centenary Celebration at Los

Angeles, in August 1997: “Sponsored by the American and Canadian chapters of the

Transylvanian Society of Dracula and the Count Dracula Fan Club, this convention brought together scholars and fans alike to pay homage to a novel that has never been out of print since its initial appearance in 1897” (Miller, “Introduction” 9). The result of the convention was the volume Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow, published in 1998 by Leatherdale’s press, Desert Island Books.

What the fans and the scholar-fans have in common is the fact of taking pleasure in the novel and that of urging the readership that Dracula’s literary value justifies their own fascination with Stoker’s creation. None, perhaps, has tried to turn the critical opinion about Dracula more than Elizabeth Miller, the president of the Transylvanian Society of

Dracula, editor of Bram Stoker’s Notes to Dracula and Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A

Documentary Volume in the “Dictionary of Literary Biography” series. Author of many books and articles on the subject and, until recently, editor of The Journal of Dracula

Studies, Miller commands a lot of respect among the Stoker experts and her works on the

91 more controversial issues raised by the novel (the 1997 Reflections on Dracula and the

2000 Dracula: Sense & Nonsense, revised in 2006) are among the most frequently quoted books in the field. As both a prolific scholar and a leader of the novel’s fans, Miller occupies a privileged position at the epicentre of the controversy around Stoker’s sources, the role played by Vlad the Impaler in the novel, and the literariness of Dracula.

The way Miller justifies Dracula’s literary value by quoting those who already saw it when the novel was first published is revealing of the unusual position in which the editors/fans find themselves when they begin their work of persuasion:

There are certainly many who did not think so [that the book was “trashy”]. Arthur

Conan Doyle, for example, told Stoker: “I think it is the very best story of diablerie

which I have read for many years,” while Winston Churchill consented to be

interviewed by Stoker, partly because “you are the author of Dracula” (qtd in

Belford 275, 311). Anthony Hope Hawkins (The Prisoner of Zenda) observed that

Stoker’s vampires “had robbed him of sleep,” while Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady

Audley’s Secret) found Dracula superior to her own vampire story “Good Lady

Ducayne.” (Sense & Nonsense 99)

None of those quoted here are critics; none are really known as authors of great fiction; and none say anything more than the fact that they know the book while offering only relative superlatives: the book is better than others, it is better than other “diableries,” etc. In the full quote, Churchill actually explains that the book appealed to his “young imagination”

(Belford 311), thereby placing it in the category of juvenile literature.

In fact, most of the editors became fans of Dracula in their early years. Clive

Leatherdale confesses to having been “hooked as a teenager” (“Introduction” 6). Even in

his 1998 edition, he reminisces: “My own fascination for Dracula dates back to my teens, when I first read the book. Its impact was immense” (Leatherdale 9). Nina Auerbach’s fascination began much earlier. In the notes “About the Contributors” (usually provided by the contributors themselves) for the volume of essays Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow, she is introduced as follows: “Nina Auerbach read Dracula surreptitiously when she was seven and has identified with vampires since then” (15). Leonard Wolf also speaks of his

“fascination with Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, and the myth that he turned loose into the world in 1897” (The Connoisseur 3) and admits being a fan of the horror genre: “I love the scary arts. Almost at the top of my voice, I have praised the juicy accounts of depravity in novels like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. I admire as a work of genius a film like The Bride of Frankenstein, whose mix of poignancy and horror brings tears to my eyes even as my hair stands on end” (62). Such fascination cannot but have some influence on the work of the editors, because “there will always be areas . . . where annotation will reveal as much about the values and social experience of the annotator as it does about the work in question” (Small, “The Editor” 199-200).

With Dracula often considered an example of “genre fiction,” the Dracula editors can get to see themselves marginalised and even victimised. In an interview with People magazine shortly after the publication of his first edition of the novel, Leonard Wolf declared that “[t]here are a lot of people who are very, very angry that I am fiddling around with monsters. . . . I have received some anonymous letters from vicious colleagues”

(“English Prof Leonard Wolf”). In one of her books dedicated to vampire literature and cinema, Nina Auerbach speaks of a long list of “friends and colleagues [who] provided invaluable food for this book, though some of them look down on vampires – or claim to”

93 (Our Vampires vii). She thanks those who “read drafts of the manuscript with an empathy and wisdom that transcended their initial distaste for its subject” (vii). She also confesses her “love” for vampires, but decries the fact that “most women I know are less accepting: I was received with polite revulsion at a Women’s Studies symposium when I gave my paper on undeath” (3). Even others among those involved in the promotion of the novel can unsettle the editors, which makes Clive Leatherdale explain that there is “pleasure and pain in being an aficionado of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The pleasure comes from the novel itself, from grappling with Stoker’s multi-faceted meanings and in probing its many layers of construction (“Introduction” 6). The pain, instead, “comes from writing of those who, whether well-meaning or mischievous, have jumped aboard the Dracula bandwagon to pen articles or books that pay scant respect to the rules of evidence, or, to put it bluntly, are just plain daft” (6).

The Dracula editors do not always know one another very well. Riquelme mentions

Glennis Byron’s 1999 Dracula: A New Casebook but is unaware that she is a woman, so he writes about the way “Byron organizes his selected bibliography” (410 n. 1; emphasis mine). If they often contest each other’s hypotheses, sometimes they also call into question each other’s credentials: “Florescu and McNally were able to grab the inside lane and dominate the race from the outset. Inevitably, those first on the scene bring their own perspective to bear. The two professors are primarily historians of eastern Europe: they are not students of literature, far less authorities on Bram Stoker, nor would they pretend to be”

(Leatherdale, “Introduction” 8). In fact, similar arguments could be made of several of the

Dracula editors. Leatherdale himself “has a Ph.D. in Arabian history” (Miller, The Shade and the Shadow 17). David J. Skal, author of books on genre cinema and fantastic

literature, obtained a B.A. in journalism from Ohio University in 1974. When he published the first OUP edition of Dracula in 1983, Andrew Norman Wilson (born in 1950) was a novelist and newspaper columnist. Leonard Wolf taught poetry in the Creative Writing department of the San Francisco State University (The Connoisseur 188) before and after he became an editor of Dracula. Nina Auerbach and Glennis Byron have always been interested in Gothic, especially from a feminist perspective. However, John Paul Riquelme,

Maud Ellmann (both experts in modernism) and Roger Luckhurst (a specialist in contemporary science fiction) changed the focus of their research for a shorter or longer period of time.

A way of justifying their research comes, somewhat unexpectedly, through the association with the vampire Count or with his place of origin. Leonard Wolf explains that writing his first book about the influence of Stoker’s novel, the 1972 A Dream of Dracula

(Little, Brown, 1972), “had nothing to do with the fact (proclaimed, naturally, by my publishers on dust jackets ever since) that I was born in Transylvania” (The Connoisseur 7).

His 1975 edition of Dracula is the most explicit in this respect, because, underneath a photograph of the bearded, bushy-eyebrowed30 editor (the largest photograph in the entire book), the caption begins “Leonard Wolf was born in Vulcan, Romania (in Transylvania)”

(Wolf 1975, back cover). Even Maud Ellmann has some Romanian origins, since she is the daughter of Richard Ellmann (1918-1987), famous as biographer of James Joyce and Oscar

Wilde, and the granddaughter of James Isaac Ellmann, a Jewish-Romanian immigrant to the United States.

30 The journalist who interviewed Wolf for People magazine in 1975 writes that he “resembles Christopher Lee, the horror film star, with a sinister beard added” (“English Prof Leonard Wolf”). 95 Leonard Wolf (born in 1923) was only 7 when he left Romania and settled with his family in Cleveland, Ohio (“English Prof Leonard Wolf”). Radu Florescu (1925-2014) left

Romania at the age of 14 and joined “his parents in London, where his father was serving as a Romanian diplomat” (De Luca and Quinlan 7-8), then settled in “the United States, a country he was already familiar with having lived in Washington for a while in the 1930s, when his father was, in essence, the head of the Romanian embassy” (8). As his son recounts, in 1939, Florescu “boarded one of the last West-bound Orient Express trains weeks before the outbreak of WWII” (John Florescu 9). Had it been the very last (not “one of the last”) Orient Express trains, this would have sounded even more like a thriller.

However, Romania only entered the war in June 1941, two years after Florescu’s escape to

England. The Orient Express did stop running in 1939, but Florescu’s native country was at peace long enough after that and he could have gone to London in a less romantic means of transportation.31 If Wolf was too young when he left to have gone to school in Romania,

Florescu did not either, although he “was educated in his early years by tutors in Bucharest and at their family country home in wine vineyards on the banks of the Argeş river. As a son of a diplomat, his schooling extended to Washington D.C., Berlin, London and Oxford where he finished his secondary education at St. Edwards school” (John Florescu 9).32

Radu Florescu goes the furthest in constructing his connection with the historical character he believes was Stoker’s main source for the vampire Count. In the first book on the subject, published together with Raymond McNally, he finds his origins in the times of

31 He could have followed in Dracula’s footsteps and travelled to England by sea. Romanian ships carried passengers out of the country all through World War II. For example, he could have gone to France’s “Free Zone” until the end of 1942 or to Spain after that and then taken another transport to London. 32 The fact that they were not educated in Romania may explain why both hesitate to reject (or even accept outright) the term “nosferatu.” Elizabeth Miller observed that “[e]ven Leonard Wolf, of Romanian origin, claims that it is a Romanian word for ‘not dead’” (Sense & Nonsense 40). McNally and Florescu, instead, claim that it might come from a Romanian word that means “sizzling” (McNally and Florescu 40 n. 11). 96

Vlad the Impaler: “the Florescus trace back to a boyar family of Dracula’s time, and one prominent in 15th-century Wallachian history” (In Search 12). He also uses the word

“boyar,” mentioned several times in Stoker’s novel, although relatively unnecessary in fifteenth-century Wallachia, whose social stratification was much more complex than in

Stoker’s times.33 Seven years later, in the edition of Dracula he co-edited with McNally, the boyar from Vlad’s time is replaced by Vlad himself: “Radu Florescu is Romanian and an indirect descendant of the historical Dracula, Vlad the Impaler” (McNally and Florescu, back flap of dust jacket). A revised version of the first book leaves aside the word “boyar” but keeps a reference to Dracula’s relatives: “the Florescus can trace their line back to an aristocratic family of Dracula’s time with marriage connections to Dracula’s family” (In

Search 1994, 3). In 1998, the editors of a festschrift say he was born “into an old boyar family . . . count[ing] . . . heads of state, generals, diplomats, and academicians” (De Luca and Quinlan 7) or simply that he “descend[s] from an old boyar family with deep roots in

Romanian history” (John Florescu 9). However, Florescu’s last book, published one year before his death and co-written with Matei Cazacu, the 2013 Dracula’s Bloodline: A

Florescu Family Saga, suggests that a sister of Dracula “may have been” (19) married to a

Florescu. The book has no bibliography and Florescu admits in the preface that he uses no documents.

Sometimes even a research assistant can provide an indirect connection with the novel. Such is the case of Riquelme, who acknowledges: “My primary debt concerning the annotations, however, is to Theodora Goss, my research assistant during the project of

33 “Boyars” (in Romanian, “boieri”) in medieval Wallachia were exempt of taxes in exchange for military service and, until the seventeenth century, “boieri” was a term applied to all men who owned land, regardless of the size of their property (Giurescu 61). By contrast, “dregători” were a powerful class of wealthy landowners who acted as cabinet ministers. In the fifteenth century, there is such a prominent “dregător” called Florescu, a loyal follower of the Dans, adversaries of the Draculas (Stoicescu 26-27). 97 editing Dracula. She contributed substantially to every aspect of our work in common, but especially to the annotations” (Riquelme viii). Theodora Goss is a fantasy short-story writer who in 2011 completed a Ph.D. dissertation entitled “The Monster in the Mirror: Late

Victorian Gothic and Anthropology.” More importantly, she was born in Budapest, the city located, according to Harker, on the border between East and West. Since Riquelme’s edition is, in many respects, the most sophisticated one, Goss could very well be credited with the most unsophisticated part of the volume, namely the annotations, which most often quote encyclopaedias or even previous editions. Some research assistants are mentioned on the cover (Roxana Stuart in Wolf’s 1993 edition and Janet Byrne in Klinger), others only in the acknowledgments like Goss or Elizabeth Miller: “I am indebted . . . particularly [to]

Elizabeth Miller, who provided invaluable assistance with the annotations and proof- reading” (Leatherdale 24). Miller later commented on Leatherdale’s edition: “The reliability far surpasses that of either of its predecessors” (Sense & Nonsense 187) in a book that had been conceived together with the same editor (Leatherdale, “Introduction” 8-9).

If some editors seek a connection with Vlad the Impaler, Transylvania, Romania, or

Hungary, others identify with vampires and vampire-hunting. Raymond McNally is described in his festschrift as a sort of James Bond: “During the three years he spent in

Berlin [1953-1956, when he was working on his Ph.D. dissertation], he also served in the

Intelligence Branch of the United States Air Force” (Carol McNally 1). However, he prefers to be associated with Catholic vampire hunters like the eighteenth century Augustin

Calmet and early twentieth-century Montague Summers, to whom he dedicated his 1974 A

Clutch of Vampires: These Being Among the Best from History and Literature: “To the memory of Augustin Calmet (1672-1757) and Montague Summers (1880-1948), holy

fathers in the Christian faith and the spiritual fathers of all latter-day vampirologists” (A

Clutch of Vampires 5). When he taught at Boston College, he adorned his office with vampire-related souvenirs and vampire-hunting paraphernalia. Starting with the mid-1990s,

Florescu, his colleague at the same school, disavowed some of their collaborative findings and explained: “Unlike Ray, I am not a Gothic movie buff, nor a specialist in Stoker or vampire lore and have avoided capes and Bela Lugosi imitations” (Florescu, Essays 73). A similar type of “buff” is Leonard Wolf: “As a gimmick, and to spark a little media attention, Wolf began decorating his office with garlic, the traditional defence against vampire, and carrying a vampire-killing kit: an oaken stake and two knives” (“English Prof

Leonard Wolf”).

3.3 Places of the Imagination

What many Dracula fans as well as many Dracula editor-fans do is travel to

Transylvania, Whitby, and other places mentioned in the novel, following in the steps of the vampire and/or of the vampire-hunters. Leonard Wolf went both to Transylvania and to

Whitby and took photographs that he included in his 1975 edition. In their 1979 edition,

McNally and Florescu included an Appendix on “Dracula Tours.” The six-page text gives details on possible planned tours on the track of Dracula and Bram Stoker, in London;

Hampstead; Purfleet; Whitby; Cruden Bay; Bucharest; Târgovişte; Curtea de Argeş; Târgu

Jiu – for the Monastery of Tismana, described as Dracula’s “favourite residence” (McNally and Florescu 317); Râmnicu-Vâlcea; Bistriţa; Câmpulung; Suceava; Sighişoara; Braşov;

Sibiu; Hunedoara; Innsbruck; Bosen; Buda; Visegrad; Csejthe Castle (of Elizabeth 99 Bathory). The book also ends with a panoramic photograph of “Bathory Castle and the valley below” (320). These Dracula Tours have become a “must” for Dracula scholar-fans

(they are described at length by Leslie Klinger) who sometimes take part in their organisation: Elizabeth Miller wrote the official brochure offered by Romanian authorities to Dracula tourists, later expanded in her 2005 A Dracula Handbook.

“Everyone has heard of Transylvania, but not everyone realises that it exists,” explains Miller (Sense & Nonsense 119). What everyone knows, in fact, “is the mythology that has grown up around Transylvania [but] many in the West are surprised to learn that

Transylvania is a real place” (Light 28). This is true even of a Dracula editor like Raymond

McNally: “More than 15 years ago, as a fan of Dracula horror films I began to wonder whether there might be some historical basis for their vampire hero. I re-read Stoker’s

Dracula, and noted that not only this novel but almost all of the Dracula films are set in

Transylvania. At first, like many Americans, I assumed that this was some mythical place”

(In Search 9-10). More than fifteen years before this statement McNally was working on his Ph.D. in Berlin. Another example is that of the British geographer Duncan Light, the author of the 2012 The Dracula Dilemma, about the phenomenon of Dracula tourism.

Light remembers “looking at an atlas during an A level Geography lesson and being surprised and a little startled to discover that Transylvania really existed. I’m sure I’m not the only person to have reacted in this way” (1).

Less known as a real place, “Transylvania has come to exist in the West more as a fantasy” (Gelder 5). In his recent book on Places of the Imagination, Dutch cultural geographer Stijn Reijnders uses the topic of Dracula tourism to support his idea that the pilgrimage to what Pierre Nora has called “places of memory” (“lieux de mémoire”) is

100

doubled by another one, “not so much concerned with collective memory, as [with] collective imagination” (Reijnders 8), which he calls “places of the imagination.” Elizabeth

Miller also notices that “[m]any visitors to Transylvania, especially Dracula pilgrims (or journalists catering to them), romanticise the region, seeking confirmation of their preconceptions. Cultural conditioning has created a Transylvania that is significantly different from the actual one” (Sense & Nonsense 119). Nevertheless, in the name of her

Transylvanian Society of Dracula the adjective refers precisely to such a place of the imagination, rather than the real place. Reijnders also identifies a circular movement that he calls “the circuit of the imagination. In the case of media tourism, this can be split into four consecutive phases: (1) Physical places inspire artists; (2) Artists construct places that they have imagined; (3) Imagined places are appropriated by fans; and (4) Fans go in search of physical references to imagined places” (110).

Reijnders wants to find out what motivates the Dracula tourists to book a trip to

Transylvania or to Whitby and questions several of them (all North Americans) and discovers a reaction very similar to that of McNally’s back in the 1950s: “most of the respondents mentioned that at a certain moment they had the thought that perhaps Dracula was more than just imagination. For example, they discovered that Transylvania is the name of a real province in Romania” (Reijnders 88). There are other similarities with the efforts of the Dracula editors. Reijnders observes, for example, that the Dracula tourists reverse Stoker’s imaginative process:

While Stoker used existing surroundings and local history to create his story, the

Dracula tourists take the story itself as their point of departure, proceeding to search

for signs of reality in the story. The Dracula films and the book are carefully sifted

101 for information: references to existing place names are checked, the travel routes

described are traced on the map, and departure and arrival times are compared with

official travel times, preferably historical sources from the late nineteenth century.

(90)

The Dracula tourists also wish to come “closer to the story” and bring it back to life through re-enactments “in which fans have the sense that they are summoning Count

Dracula and are personally becoming part of the story” (Rijnders 100), just like Wolf and

McNally used to do.

Rijnders’s previous observation about tourists looking for signs of reality in

Stoker’s descriptions deserves a few more lines, especially as the editors of Dracula act in a similar way. Rijnders’s “places of the imagination” should perhaps be divided into three distinct categories: real places that have not (or have barely) been re-created by the author(s)/filmmaker(s), such as the Oxford corner visited in the Inspector Morse Tour

(Rijnders 1-2) or Whitby in Dracula; real places entirely re-created (by Stoker but also by the extratextual myth), like Transylvania; and places created by imagination, like Tolkien’s

Middle Earth, now “visited” in New Zealand (3-4) after being made “real” by Peter

Jackson. In terms of the imagination, the second and the third category are similar (both have two versions: written and filmed, although the latter does not, or cannot, match the former34). In terms of place, the first and the third are similar, because tourists visit the locations of movies or TV series. Whitby, which Stoker knew and researched, belongs to this group. Transylvania, deliberately turned by Stoker into the land of vampires, belongs to the other group and is in fact closer in kind to Middle Earth than to Whitby.

34 No major adaptation or spinoff of Stoker’s novel has been filmed in Transylvania. 102

The Dracula editors (many of whom have gone on Dracula Tours) also look for signs of reality in Transylvania – from “finding” the Dracula Castle to simply keeping their annotation in concordance with Stoker’s description (and sometimes going further than the novelist). Most editors/annotators do not indicate inconsistencies in the text, and those who do resemble the fans who look for “facts,” but who deliberately mix up real facts with fictional “facts.” The best example is Leslie Klinger, who follows his work in The New

Annotated Sherlock Holmes of employing

a gentle fiction . . . that the events described in Dracula “really took place” and that

the work presents the recollections of real persons, whom Stoker has renamed and

whose papers (termed the “Harker Papers” in my notes) he has recast, ostensibly to

conceal their identities. In looking at the materials from this historical perspective, I

point out the “cover-ups,” inconsistencies, and errors in the names, dates, locations,

and descriptions of people and events. I also provide background information on the

times, using contemporary Victorian sources, to understand the history, culture,

technology, and vocabulary of those remarkable individuals. I compare the

knowledge gleaned about vampires from these records with other accounts,

including those of Anne Rice, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and the creators of Buffy the

Vampire Slayer. (Klinger xii)

This long passage deserves a closer look, as it includes, in exaggerated tones, several issues concerning the annotations in the editions of Dracula. Klinger’s argument can be summarised as follows: if one assumes that everything in the novel is real, then everything it says is true; to show the truth in all its splendour, the editor can use contemporary

Victorian sources, although he can also use anything about vampires, no matter how recent;

103 if anything seems untrue, it is thus only through lack of correspondence with the rest of the

“facts” of the novel.

Klinger extends the “facts” to the entirety of Stoker’s writings, especially the working notes and the manuscript. Consequently, he assumes that some names of characters who appear in the working notes belong to “real” people, but “Stoker went to great lengths to conceal the involvement of several people in the events” (Klinger 7 n. 11).

This is actually a strategy employed by the editor-fans of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who take everything kept in the “Canon” as “fact.” For example, William Baring-Gould, the editor of the first Annotated Sherlock Holmes, discusses at length the locations in which

Sherlock could have been hiding between 1891 and 1894, when the character disappears from Doyle’s writings.35 An example of a similar confusion between “facts” is Klinger’s discussion of the Golden Krone hotel in Bistriţa, which the editor/tourist discovers to be fictitious. Because Christopher Frayling has shown that there used to be a Krone Hotel in

Oraviţa, mentioned by Crosse (10), Klinger infers that “it is possible that Harker stayed there” (23 n. 42), about 400 miles away, rather than in Bistriţa. Not much different is

Leatherdale, who often speaks “of all the characters of the novel as though they were real people (and never missing an opportunity to blame them for not doing things differently)”

(Hopkins, Review of Leatherdale 269).

The belief in the “reality” of the text makes Klinger set the events of the novel in

1890 and Wolf (in his first edition) in 1887.36 The fact is that, if the events take place in

1893 (as is the consensus), then the epilogue, written by Harker seven years after the fight

35 Baring-Gould begins his “biographical” chapter about Holmes thus: “And now let us go from the Sherlock Holmes of fiction to the Sherlock Holmes so many of us would like to think of as fact” (47). 36 Wolf changed his mind in his second edition, but later changed it back again (The Connoisseur 301-308). 104

with the Count, must refer to a time post-1897 which Stoker could not have known. And if it is in the future, then it is not real. Wolf’s choice is also supported by Stoker’s remark in the 1901 Icelandic preface (that is, another place in the novelist’s writings and, thus, another source of “facts”) that the events in the novel took place a little while before the

Jack the Ripper murders. For one who believes in the factuality (albeit fictional) of the entire “canon” of an author’s writings on a series of characters, inconsistencies can be explained away, but the idea of untruth is unacceptable. Something similar happens, with both tourists and editors, when it comes to the comparison between imagined history and authentic history, as presented by Romanian tour guides and historians, respectively: “some fans see historic ‘corrections’ of the story as a satisfying and enriching addition, while others consider this a direct assault on their imagination, as the demystification of a cherished world” (Reijnders 99-100).

What Dracula fans, tourists, and editors alike often prefer to do is to keep alive, enhance, and use the places of the imagination, together with their imagined histories. Just like the tourists questioned by Reijnders, Dracula’s editors search for signs of reality in

Stoker’s imagined people and places. The complexity of the novel (arising, at least in part, from its inconsistencies) can be overwhelming. It is little wonder that for those who choose to offer commentary on the novel, knowledge becomes knowledge of the novel and reality becomes the reality of the novel. Then, again like the Dracula tourists, they make the reverse trip and apply that knowledge and that reality on the world outside the novel. For a more accurate understanding of Stoker’s “intentions,” as Ian Small insists an editor is still obliged to do, I propose that the original trip be restored. Instead of starting from what we know from and about the novel, I suggest we start from what and who Stoker knew.

105

106

Part II The Historical Context of Dracula

107 Chapter 4 Who Stoker Knew

The issue of Bram Stoker’s sources for Dracula is covered in the explanatory notes of the annotated editions, in introductions and in the supplementary material, as well as in other books and articles written by the novel’s editors. What Stoker used or did not use is both important and controversial, on the one hand because of the richness of information included in Dracula, and on the other because some of the author’s choices, if proven or disproven, can provide the tools for a certain interpretation of the novel. Stoker’s working papers were discovered as early as 1970 and most annotators have used them. However, as the editors of these documents admit, “[i]t is not possible to determine if [what has been found] includes all of his preliminary Notes. . . . Almost half the events in the novel are not mentioned in the Notes. . . . [Stoker] probably bridged the gap between them [and the novel] with one or more lost drafts” (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 9). The most useful part of the Notes consists in extracts from various works or informants that Stoker wrote down and later used in the novel. Nevertheless, the Notes also include information that Stoker never used as well as simple references to works and authors (but no extracts). Also, they do not include works that are used almost verbatim in the novel (for example, the 1896

Baedeker guide Austria, Including Hungary, Transylvania, Dalmatia and Bosnia); names of friends, acquaintances and family members37 who provided information or became characters in the novel; and earlier Gothic works that were influential in the shaping of

Dracula.

37 With the exception of a “memo” on head injuries written by the novelist’s elder brother, Sir William Thornley Stoker (Bram Stoker’s Notes 179-185).

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In his “Principles of Historical Annotation,” Arthur Friedman sets down “as a principle that the most convincing explanatory notes are those in which unmistakable plagiarism from earlier writings is shown . . . it follows that other notes . . . will be convincing and enlightening to the extent that the parallels pointed out approach plagiarism” (121-122). In the case of Dracula’s editors, this principle has been faithfully applied beginning with the 1979 McNally/Florescu edition, in which quasi-plagiarised passages are provided in lateral notes, next to Stoker’s sentences. Parallels between

Dracula and other possible sources which do not appear among Stoker’s Notes remain more questionable. As Elizabeth Miller puts it,

While the Notes ought to be required reading for any Dracula scholar, they are not

the “be-all-and-end-all” of the background of the novel. It would be foolhardy to

claim that Stoker’s sources are limited to what he mentions in the papers. But it is

just as absurd to claim that he ‘must have’ read this or that, when there is no

supporting evidence. (Sense & Nonsense 18)

The only way out of Miller’s predicament – avoiding the improbable but accepting the fairly possible – is to say that Stoker “could have” read or known something. The question remains about when and how often one can do that.

This issue is addressed by Arthur Friedman, who wonders about “the value of the kinds of notes which appear in even the best editions where the author being edited is paralleled with writers whom he may not have, or probably had not, read” (122). The solution he provides can be very helpful in deciding whether or not a certain idea or piece of information is relevant as a possible source of inspiration, an allusion and/or an undeveloped plotline in Dracula:

109 The answer is, I think, that the value of such annotation depends largely upon the

kind and number of the parallels. If, for example, a passage in Goldsmith’s works

written in 1760 were to be annotated by quoting from an obscure work published,

let us say, in 1525 and from another obscure work published in 1610, we should

probably conclude that unless there were unmistakable signs of plagiarism the

parallels were in no way significant. If, on the other hand, the same passage written

in 1760 were annotated by drawing parallels from a dozen equally obscure works

published between 1750 and 1759, we should probably consider the notes very

illuminating. For in the second case we should conclude that the works cited were

representative of a popular current of thought in Goldsmith’s own day and that,

whether or not he had read any of these particular works, he was probably

acquainted with the ideas expressed in them by reading similar works or by

conversation. (122-123; my emphasis)

The most contested parallels made in the Dracula editions, again beginning with

McNally/Florescu, are those that link the setting, the plot, the characters of the novel, as well as the more general topos of the fear of invasion and racial degeneration with the story

(and the personality) of a medieval Romanian ruler and with the country in which he lived.

The question of what Stoker could have known, that is to say what he had access to, is directly connected with the question of who he knew. Apart from the books and articles that show up in the writer’s Notes, family, friends and acquaintances from the circles in which

Irving and his manager circulated provided Stoker the access he needed to acquire, as

Friedman says, “by reading . . . or by conversation” the information and the ideas that were put to work in the creation of Dracula. Two observations should be made from the start: that it is not always possible (or helpful) to make a radical distinction between who and

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what Stoker knew; and that he only needed a relatively small circle of interconnected individuals to bring forth the plotline and the characters and to consolidate the ideology of his 1897 novel.

4.1 Crimea and After

Bram Stoker had an abundance of possible informants for the places where the first and the last chapter of Dracula are set. Romania – or, rather, the Romanian Principalities of

Wallachia and Moldavia, as they were known until 1859 – suddenly became the centre of attention and the subject of heated debate in Britain in 1852-1853, when it was occupied by

Russian armies. As Orlando Figes has shown in The Crimean War,38 this Russian occupation of the two principalities provided in Britain a similar reaction to the German military interventions in Belgium and Poland in the world wars of the twentieth century

(122-129). Although largely forgotten today, “for our ancestors before the First World War the Crimea was the major conflict of the nineteenth century, the most important war of their lifetimes, just as the world wars of the twentieth century are the dominant historical landmarks of our lives” (Figes xix). Bram Stoker was still a child during the 1853-1856 conflict, but echoes of the battles would have reached him, thanks to the many correspondences and photographs from the front – a practice that was introduced during

Crimea and which has been called “the mid-century revolution” of war reporting (Matthews

52-78). Moreover, the Crimean War “left a deep impression on the English national identity. To schoolchildren, it was an example of England standing up against the Russian

38 Published in the United Kingdom as Crimea: The Last Crusade.

111 Bear to defend liberty” (Figes 479), which means that Stoker would have been exposed to stories of the battles precisely because he was a child.

In his Dublin diary, in which he wrote down especially what other people say in view of using their words in his literary works (many found their way into his early fiction),

Stoker mentions an Irishman demonstrating against a candidate in the elections, addressing the military and speaking of “Crima-an medals & Victory crosses” (The Lost Journal 102).

Here, the diarist reproduces, as he often does, the speaker’s peculiar pronunciation as well as his lack of familiarity with the symbols of the Empire: the Victoria Cross (rather than

“Victory cross”), the highest military decoration in Britain, was established during the

Crimean War. Stoker, on the other hand, was familiar with stories of the conflict thanks to a well-informed source: his father-in-law, Lieutenant-Colonel James Balcombe. Stoker’s first biographer, relying on information received from Noel, Bram’s only son, writes that the

Colonel “found [Stoker] a ready listener to his tales of army service in the Crimea and

India” (Ludlam 48). Starting from Ludlam’s sentence, Jimmie E. Cain, Jr. writes in Bram

Stoker and Russophobia that the author of Dracula listened “to the Colonel’s tales of the horrific battles of Inkerman, Alma and Sevastopol in the Crimean campaign” (Cain, Jr. 9).

In fact, Balcombe was not present at Alma, because the ship carrying his regiment

(HMS Mauritius) was delayed by a storm and then it stopped to “coal” in Constantinople, according to the Historical Record of the Fifty-Seventh, or, West Middlesex Regiment of

Foot, published in 1878 by lieutenant-general Henry James Warre (116). James Balcombe joined this regiment in 1835, “being then under age” (281), and rose through all the grades of Non-Commissioned Officer until 1851, when he was appointed Quartermaster. The 57th, known as “the Die Hards,” returned from India in 1846 (where it had been stationed since

1830) and its headquarters were moved to Dublin in 1848 (Warre 101), then to Kilkenny

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and Cork. The men served in Crimea from October 1854 to May 1856, where the

Quartermaster distinguished himself, “especially in bringing up supplies and rations during the very severe winter of 1854” (282), after which they were stationed for two years in

Malta (139-145). Quartermaster Balcombe returned to Ireland in 1858 and left the 57th with the rank of captain in 1859, becoming Adjutant of the Royal South Down Militia.

Promoted to major in 1875, he retired as lieutenant-colonel in December 1876 and, in 1878, when Bram Stoker became his son-in-law, he was serving as Secretary to the Clontarf

Township, County of Dublin (282).

The Colonel had five daughters, the third of whom, Florence, became Bram

Stoker’s wife in December 1878. She had been named “either after Florence Nightingale or after the town of Floriana in Malta where the Colonel was stationed in 1857” (Belford 83-

85). Daniel Farson, Stoker’s great-nephew, writes on the contrary that “apparently she was named not after Miss Nightingale, but after the Italian town” (Farson 38) of Florence.

Starting in 1878, as Henry Irving’s manager, Stoker spent many “delightful hours”

(Personal Reminiscences I, 315) in the company of veterans of the Crimean War, such as

Field Marshal Wolseley, who lost an eye at Sevastopol (I, 321); Field Marshal Sir

Frederick Haines (I, 324); Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar, who took part in most of the major battles before being appointed aide-de-camp to the Queen (I, 324); General Frederick

Thesiger, who was in Ireland before the war and then served in the 2nd Division (I, 317);

Sir Coutts Lindsay, who commanded the 1st Regiment of the Italian Legion (I, 321); war correspondents like Irishman E.C. Godkin (I, 321), who just before the war had published a book on The History of Hungary and the Magyars, and the famous William Howard

Russell (I, 317), who wrote not only about the Charge of the Light Brigade, but also about

113 Moldavia and Wallachia39; and veterans of the Black Sea fleet like Admiral Henry Keppel

(I, 315), Admiral Lord Frederick Alcester (I, 319) and Ernest Prince of Leiningen (I, 325).

One of the Crimean veterans receives special treatment in the Personal

Reminiscences: Stoker recounts ten meetings with him between 1878 and 1886. This is

Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890), perhaps the most famous of all Victorian explorers

(with the possible exception of Livingstone), who became quite a close friend of Stoker’s.

After their last meeting, Stoker asked Burton’s wife for a picture of her husband, to which she complied, although she expressed Burton’s dislike of having his photograph taken:

“Dick said he would give it you, because it was you; but that he wouldn’t have given it to any one else!” (Personal Reminiscences I, 360-361). The only (indirect) reference to

Burton in Dracula is in Chapter 3, when Jonathan Harker compares his own diary with “the beginning of ‘Arabian Nights,’ for everything has to break off at cock-crow” (Dracula 61).

All annotators point to the fact that Stoker (and Harker) would have known the book in

Burton’s translation, but not all mention the fact that Stoker knew the translator.

Byron is the most succinct: “The best-known nineteenth-century translation is by Sir

Richard F. Burton. Shahrázád breaks off her stories at dawn” (61 n. 3). Both Wolf and

Auerbach/Skal mention the translator but not the friendship, and focus instead on what the reference to the book might suggest: “Given the complex, if subvert, relationships that will develop between Jonathan Harker, Harker’s wife-to-be, Mina, and Dracula, this early reference to The Arabian Nights makes it worthwhile to recall that adultery is the framework in which that collection of tales is firmly set” (Wolf 43 n. 27); “exotic amalgam of storytelling and murder; enormously popular in Victorian England, especially in Sir

39 His 1858 History of the British Expedition to the Crimea was reprinted, in a revised edition, in 1876, on the verge of yet another conflict spurred by “the Eastern Question.”

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Richard Burton’s 1885 translation” (Auerbach and Skal 35 n. 3). Other editors mention the relationship between the two authors: “The Thousand and One Nights, a new translation of

The Arabian Nights, was published in 1885 by Stoker’s friend Sir Richard Francis Burton”

(Klinger 71 n. 37); “A new unexpurgated translation of the Nights had been published in

1885 by the notorious traveller Sir Richard Burton, a friend of Stoker, who dined at the

Lyceum Theatre’s ‘Beefsteak Club’” (Luckhurst 370).

Other editors make a connection between Burton’s personality or his writings and

Dracula. Riquelme mentions one of Burton’s earlier writings that Stoker could have known: “Stoker’s friend Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890) . . . also translated a vampire story, Vikram and the Vampire (1870), which he called the ‘rude beginnings’ of the

Arabian Nights” (54).40 McNally and Florescu mention that “Burton’s magnificent personality and ‘prominent canine teeth’ impressed Stoker, who knew Burton personally”

(McNally and Florescu 68 n. 91). Leatherdale goes further and provides a longer quote from Personal Reminiscences: “Richard Burton . . . was known personally to Stoker and described in these striking terms: ‘Burton’s face seemed to lengthen when he laughed; the upper lip rising instinctively and showing the right canine tooth… As he spoke the upper lip rose and his canine tooth showed its full length like the gleam of a dagger’” (69 n. 48).

Stoker was, indeed, fascinated with Burton: “When in the early morning of August

13, 1878 . . . I met him [in Dublin] . . . the man riveted my attention. He was dark, and forceful, and masterful, and ruthless. I have never seen so iron a countenance” (Stoker,

Personal Reminiscences I, 350). He then told Irving: “‘I never saw any one like him. He is steel! He would go through you like a sword!’” (I, 351). Over the next eight years, Stoker,

40 Elizabeth Miller makes a similar suggestion: “Stoker may have been familiar with Richard Burton’s translation of Vikram and the Vampire (1870). Significantly, this book had been reissued in London in 1893, while Stoker was working on Dracula” (Sense & Nonsense 23).

115 Irving, Burton and Burton’s wife met several times. Stoker recounts the unpleasantness of having to share Burton with a larger crowd. It is always “a disappointment” (I, 356) when the four of them cannot share what he calls a “partie carée”: “there was not the charm of personal reminiscence, which could not be in so large a gathering” (I, 358) Though he only met Burton in 1878, Stoker “had been hearing about him and his wonderful exploits as long as [he] could remember” (I, 352). He managed to inspect the adventurer’s face better in

February 1879 and noted its main features: “the darkness of the face – the desert burning; the strong mouth and nose, and jaw and forehead – the latter somewhat bold – and the strong, deep, resonant voice” (I, 352). Also in February 1879, Burton “spoke of life in

South America and of the endurance based on self-control which it required” (I, 353).

Stoker gives no other details, but Burton had explored a “vampire cave” in Brazil in 1867

(Hitchman 283) and he could have mentioned it then.

Stoker recounts admiringly the conversations with Burton; however, he is constantly impressed with the latter’s physical characteristics, such as the way he talks – “ to this day

I can seem to hear the deep vibration of his voice” (Personal Reminiscences I, 354) – and laughs. When Stoker makes a joke, Burton laughs and his “face seemed to lengthen . . . the upper lip rising instinctively and showing the right canine tooth. This was always a characteristic of his enjoyment. As he loved fighting, I can fancy that in the midst of such stress it would be even more marked than under more peaceful conditions” (I, 355). The last observation with the apparent parallel between laughter and combat seems quite unusual. However, it simply foreshadows another instance in which Burton shows his

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canines when recounting the killing of an Arab “lad”41 who was about to blow his cover on the road to Mecca:

He said it was quite true, and that it had never troubled him from that day to the

moment at which he was speaking. Said he: “The desert has its own laws, and there

– supremely of all the East – to kill is a small offence. In any case what could I do?

It had to be his life or mine!” As he spoke the upper lip rose and his canine tooth

showed its full strength like the gleam of a dagger. Then he went on to say that such

explorations as he had undertaken were not to be entered lightly if one had qualms

as to taking life. That the explorer in savage places holds, day and night, his life in

his hand; and if he is not prepared for every emergency, he should not attempt such

adventures. (Stoker, Personal Reminiscences I, 359)

Despite the possible comparison between Burton’s teeth-baring tic and Count Dracula’s iconic representation, one should note that the famous traveller is shown as an example of

Western mettle in “savage places” and “supremely of all the East,” where the adventurer must kill or be killed. Rather than an inspiration for the vampire, Burton’s figure seems to be a model of fortitude and resoluteness for Dracula’s vampire hunters.

As for Burton’s other possible influences on the novel, apart from the 1870 novella

Vikram and the Vampire, it is just as possible that Burton mentioned to Stoker and Irving his nonfiction. In 1875, only three years before their first meeting, Burton had finished two short treaties, The Jew and The Gypsy (both were published posthumously, in 1898). Like

Stoker, Burton never visited any of the Romanian provinces, but using previous sources he wrote in great detail about them simply because they had Jewish and Roma minorities –

41 Focused as he was on the speaker’s features, Stoker may have misremembered Burton’s version of the story, since the traveller’s biographers insist that he vehemently denied the legend of the killing (Lovell 185- 186; Rice 136-137).

117 Burton only admired the latter and convinced himself that he was partly Gypsy (Lovell

222). In his chapter on “The Gypsy in Hungary,” Burton uses John Paget’s 1839 Hungary and Transylvania and Andrew Crosse’s Round about the Carpathians (the latter, at least, one of Stoker’s major sources for Dracula) and describes in nuce the characteristics of the

Gypsies in Stoker’s novel: they “prefer to be mere hangers-on at the castle of the Hungarian

Magnate” and “are trusted as messengers and carriers” (Burton 265); “they dug for treasure, and they washed for paillettes of gold the Transylvanian affluents of the Danube” (265);

Wallachians “play with fire” (266) when they are not scared enough of the Gypsy curses.

Stoker did not meet Burton for six full years, between February 1879 and June 1885, when the traveller was in the service of the Ottoman Khedive (Viceroy) of Egypt and was making plans for one last journey:

Burton had in hand a work from which he expected to win great fortune both for

himself and his employer, the Khedive. This was to re-open the old Midian gold

mines. He had long before, with endless research, discovered their locality, which

had long been lost and forgotten. He had been already organising an expedition, and

I asked him to take with him my younger brother George, who wished for further

adventure. He had met my suggestion very favourably, and having examined my

brother’s record was keen on his joining him. He wanted a doctor for his party; and

a doctor who was adventurous and skilled in resource at once appealed to him.

(Stoker, Personal Reminiscences I, 356-357)

The expedition did not take place, but in 1885 Stoker, who had never travelled very far eastwards, seemed ready to do it vicariously through his adventurous younger brother. The

“record” he mentions has to do with George’s presence in close proximity to the places

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later described in Dracula: from 1876 to 1878, the younger Stoker had lived and worked in

Bulgaria as an army doctor.

4.2 Wars of Independence

The possible links between George Stoker’s career in Bulgaria and Bram Stoker’s literary works (especially Dracula and The Lady of the Shroud) were only brought to the attention of Dracula specialists in 2006, when two book-length studies on the political and ideological attitudes of the two brothers were published: Bram Stoker and Russophobia by

Jimmie E. Cain, Jr. and Dracula and the Eastern Question by Matthew Gibson.42 This explains in part the fact that only Roger Luckhurst, the latest editor/annotator of Dracula

(his OUP version is from 2011) makes reference to Stoker’s younger brother as an influence on the text of the novel. To be sure, two previous editions mention George, but in a different context. In both cases, he appears in the introduction, rather than in the annotations, and no connection is made between George’s wartime experiences and any of the information in the novel. McNally and Florescu suggest he had been a model for the character of a “Mad Doctor,” who appears in Stoker’s working notes for an early draft of the London chapters:

The Mad Doctor might be an oblique reference to Stoker’s own brother George who

was a doctor. Among Stoker’s notes is the quote: “The divisional surgeon being

sick, the doctor is asked to see the man in the coffin and restores him to life.”

42 Jimmie E. Cain, Jr. first stated the main ideas of his 2006 book in the article “With the ‘Unspeakables,’ Dracula and Russophobia: Racism, Tourism and Imperialism,” published in the 1998 volume Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow (ed. Elizabeth Miller). Gibson first published a shorter version of his study under the title “Bram Stoker and the Treaty of Berlin” in the November 2004 issue of Gothic Studies.

119 Stoker’s brother George had served with the Turkish army as divisional surgeon and

Chief of Ambulance of the Red Crescent during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78.

(McNally and Florescu 22)

Riquelme, on the other hand, speaks of George as one member of Stoker’s family with whom the novelist remained in contact and suggests that Bram helped him with the writing43 of his campaign account:

In 1878, he worked with another brother, George, on With “the Unspeakables”; or,

Two Years’ Campaigning in European and Asiatic Turkey (1878), an account of his

brother’s experiences as a medical officer during the last of the Russo-Turkish Wars

(1877-78). . . . Through Bram Stoker’s influence, George became a consulting

physician for the Lyceum Theatre. (Riquelme 5)

The difference between the McNally/Florescu and Riquelme editions, on the one hand, and the version provided by Luckhurst, on the other, is that the latter’s comments are in the annotations and also that he suggests that some of the information in Dracula might have come from Stoker’s brother. In doing so, Luckhurst gives a short summary of the

Eastern Question in the late 1870s and the ensuing war between Russia and Turkey:

In the late Victorian era, the establishment of modern Bulgaria in 1878 had been a

place of atrocities conducted by both Bulgars, Turks, and the advancing Russian

army; there had been a public outcry in England against Russian cruelty. Bram

Stoker’s brother George worked in Bulgaria as a volunteer doctor between 1876 and

1878, and admired the Turks but denounced the Bulgars and their Russian allies.

(Luckhurst 369)

43 This is supported by the accounts of several biographers, e.g., Ludlam (49), Farson (156), Belford (128).

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Luckhurst writes all this at the end of a lengthy note on “Magyar, Lombard, Avar, Bulgar,” that is, the migratory peoples that have come through Transylvania, according to Count

Dracula. In the process, he conflates “Bulgar” (the Turkic people who settled south of the

Danube in the early Middle Ages) and “Bulgarian” (the Slavic people who have lived there in the modern era). Luckhurst writes again about George Stoker when he explains for the reader that the Bosphorus is “the strait that divides Europe from Asia. Controlled by the

Turkish authorities, it was necessary to pay baksheesh, a small fee or bribe, to pass.

Stoker’s brother George describes his journey through the Bosphorus in the opening pages of his memoir, With ‘the Unspeakables’ (1878)” (Luckhurst 376).

What is common to all these editors, though, is that none identifies George Stoker’s actual wartime experiences as possible inspiration for the setting, the atmosphere, the characters, the themes or the ideology of Dracula. Before Cain Jr. and Gibson only David

Glover, in his 1996 Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of

Popular Fiction, suggested that in With the “Unspeakables”

one discovers an account of the Balkans that contains many of the features that later

graced Stoker’s 1897 novel: the men with their enormous black mustaches and

traditional peasant dress consisting of wide baggy trousers and white homespun

shirts; the simple, almost superstitious, religiosity of the local people; the packs of

wolves coming down from the hills to terrorise the villagers; and the difficult

journey across the snow-clad mountains through precipitous gorges and dangerous

ravines. (Glover 33)

More daring on the subject are some of Bram Stoker’s biographers, such as Barbara

Belford, in her 1996 Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula and Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne, in their 1997 The Un-Dead: The Legend of Bram Stoker and Dracula,

121 who speculate that George was the first of the Stoker brothers to find out about the historical Dracula while on the frontline of the 1877-1878 war and soon informed Bram of this fascinating character (Belford 128; Haining and Tremayne 122).

What is certain is that George, like Bram Stoker, orientalises the part of Europe that he describes in his memoir. Like Jonathan Harker, who famously enters the East while crossing a bridge in Budapest, the narrator of With “the Unspeakables” prefers the general notion of “the East” (George Stoker 4) instead of what the Victorians usually called “the

Near East.” In order to get to Constantinople, George Stoker took the train via Vienna,

Budapest, Belgrade, Baziaş; then the steamer from Baziaş via Vidin to Ruse (Rustchuk); then the train from Ruse to Varna; and finally another steamer from Varna to

Constantinople. When he boarded the steamer at Baziaş, he met other British doctors who had joined the Ottoman army, including Charles Ryan, originally from Melbourne, who was to play a key role in George’s adventures in Bulgaria and in the Caucasus. In 1897,

Ryan published his own memoirs of the 1876-1878 campaign, entitled Under the Red

Crescent: Adventures of an English Surgeon with the Turkish Army at Plevna and

Erzeroum. This is how the Australian doctor remembers the steamer trip down the Danube:

“Among the others on board . . . several of my professional brethren, including Dr. George

Stoker, brother of Bram Stoker, Sir Henry Irving’s manager. . . . There were a number of pretty Roumanian women on board too, and altogether we had a jolly party” (Ryan 10-11).

Here is how George Stoker remembers the same moment:

After passing Widdin, Rustchuk is the most important and characteristic town one

sees on Turkish territory whilst following the direct route to Constantinople, being,

as it is, the terminus of the Varna Railway. On approaching the town the traveller’s

attention is at once attracted by the tall minarets rearing their graceful forms, with

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their gilded summits glistening in the bright sunlight. From these the gaze wanders

earthwards, at once caught by the peculiar construction of the houses – more

especially the cool verandahs and latticed windows. These latter suggest to the

stranger thoughts of harem life, beautiful Circassian slaves, jealous husbands, and

unfaithful wives tied in sacks and cast into the waters. (George Stoker 1)

Although, unlike his brother, George is not trying to write a Gothic novel, he identifies himself as a “stranger,” one whose gaze captures only Oriental elements and then imagines women enslaved in harems and routinely killed. He does not see the “pretty Romanian women” on equal footing with other passengers, including the British male narrator. There is no “party” on board his ship.

However, what is most evident in the young doctor’s memoir of the war is his

Turkophilia. George Stoker was actually a doctor in the Turkish Army first, and only afterwards transferred to the Red Crescent. The first half of With “the Unspeakables” describes his experiences as an Ottoman officer (especially the campaign in the Caucasus).

In his book, George Stoker admits that there are some corrupt Turks, but only because they have acquired their “views of civilisation and honesty . . . from their intercourse with oriental Christians” (George Stoker 4). He is sure that the Turks deserve to win and, in his position as an Ottoman officer, he calls the Turks “our troops” and “our fellows [who] fought splendidly” (58). The Turks are the more moral side, whereas “morality is an unknown quality to the Bulgarian” (7) and the reports of Ottoman atrocities were “greatly exaggerated” (40). George Stoker’s memoir also “reiterates Russophobic fears and stereotypes prevalent during the Crimean War” (Cain Jr. 105) and presents Russians as

“virtually subhuman savages, loathsome figures prone to corruption, ignorance and wantonness” (104).

123 When George was in Bulgaria, the entire Stoker family was afraid of what the

Russians might do to him, and apparently his mother even feared he would be cannibalised:

“She seemed to think that just then the Russians might be taking him with onions” (Stoker,

The Lost Journal 147). Bram Stoker undoubtedly shared his brother’s Russophobia.

Dracula both invades and evades England on ships with Russian names and/or sailing under a Russian flag (Demeter and Czarina Catherine). The crew of both ships include

Romanians, who are singled out as more superstitious than the others and also as more knowledgeable about vampires, similar in this respect to the Transylvanians encountered by

Jonathan Haker in the first chapters of the Dracula. Their role is minimal, they function as extras, necessary either as native populace or as expert witnesses of vampires. Romanians call the 1877-1878 conflict their War of Independence, but in With “the Unspeakables” they are barely mentioned. Even when the young chief of ambulance visits Plevna and converses with the Ottoman commander Osman Pasha, George Stoker makes room for a single reference to the Romanian army (86) that was actually besieging the Turks. In the same sentence he then calls the Romanians “the Russian allies,” after which he only speaks of Russians.

George Stoker’s picture of the 1877-1878 war as a confrontation between the rightful suzerain of the Balkans (the Turks) and the greedy conquerors (the Russians) supported by insignificant smaller nations is consistent with the general view of the conflict in Britain. This was especially true of the Disraeli cabinet, which was influential at the

Treaty of Berlin. Their position is well summarised in James William Ozanne’s Three

Years in Roumania, an 1878 book that the two Stoker brothers could have known. The author condemns the alliance between Romanians and Russians, which, he insists,

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bad as it was, was as nothing in comparison with the wickedness which was to

follow. The armies of the Czar, which had previously won victory after victory,

were brought to a standstill before Plevna, which Ghazi Osman defended with an

amount of spirit and energy simply marvellous. Foiled and beaten, the Czar, who

had often before declined with contempt the offers of Prince Charles, fell on his

knees and besought the Roumanians to save him. Well did the Roumanians fight,

and it is clear that, but for their hearty co-operation, the troops of the Czar could

never have held their own, but must have been driven back until they took refuge on

friendly soil. Thus did Prince Charles add to his previous treachery the sin of

warring against his Suzerain Lord. (Ozanne 222-223) 44

The fact that George Stoker omits to say that the Romanians, led by their Prince Charles of

Hohenzollern (1866-1914), and not the Russians, were the actual winners at Plevna, is probably inspired by the prevalent idea that Romania had been a mere instrument and never an agent in the Eastern Question. This idea is formulated, among others, by James

Samuelson, author of Roumania, Past and Present (1882), a book that Stoker mentions in his working papers (Bram Stoker’s Notes 221). Samuelson describes in detail the Romanian participation in the war and suggests that Prince Charles was forced by the advances of the

Russian army to enter into an alliance that the country did not wish (Samuelson 236).

By the end of the nineteenth century, the notion that Russia was an insufferable enemy was no longer that widespread in England, where at least the second Gladstone cabinet (1880-1885) was “mildly pro-Russian” (Gibson 238). Even Turkophilic sentiments

44 Ozanne’s account is consistent with that of Lieutenant-General Valentine Baker (a Briton serving in the Ottoman Army) who, in his 1879 memoir War in Bulgaria, writes: “nor can it be doubted by any impartial military historian that but for the aid of the Roumanian forces, the whole Russian army which was fighting north of the Balkans would inevitably have been driven into the Danube” (II, 334).

125 like those of George Stoker were being curbed. What persisted, nevertheless, was the idea that the Ottoman dominance in the Balkans was preferable to the British and that it was preferred by the locals.45 Revealing in this respect is a passage from Scrisori către Vasile

Alecsandri [Letters to Vasile Alecsandri], the memoirs of Ion Ghica, first published in

1884, when the author was Romania’s ambassador to London. In a chapter about David

Urquhart, perhaps the most Turkophile British MP of the mid-nineteenth century, the memoirist, now a canonical author in Romania, remembers that

after he listened with the greatest attention and interest as long as I was telling him

of Russia’s behaviour in the Principalities, of the claims that she sought to enforce

and of her ambitious plans, when I also began to speak of Turkey’s wrongdoings . . .

I was startled to see him incensed: his charming, good-natured countenance

suddenly became wild and menacing; his entire bearing was so crumbled that one

could no longer recognise him; his hands were tense, his fists were clenched and his

arms took the stance of a pugilist. When I saw that, I left him in the care of the good

Lord and, every time I met him afterwards, I avoided him. (Ghica 108-109)

That the Romanians might see the Turks as historical enemies is unacceptable for

Turkophiles like Urquhart and George Stoker. As for the author of Dracula, his sentiments are made obvious by his choice of turning an anti-Ottoman warrior into a vampire.

The scenario suggested by Barbara Belford and by Peter Haining and Peter

Tremayne, although undeniably far-fetched, could benefit from being placed in the right context. Elizabeth Miller finds inadmissible the idea that George Stoker could have heard of the historical Dracula while on the Bulgarian battlefields because the latter’s incursion

45 At least one of the editors of Dracula maintains this idea: Radu Florescu, the author of The Struggle against Russia in the Romanian Principalities (1964).

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south of the Danube did not take him as far south as Plevna. Also, she finds it “difficult to accept on faith that Bulgarians and Turks in the 1870s spent their spare time telling tales of a Romanian voivode from the distant past” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 175). In fact, Plevna is only 50 kilometres (31 miles) south of the Danube and the Turks were facing there, for the first time in centuries, a Romanian army. When the Romanian troops, as Francis Welch, a British officer at Plevna reports, assaulted the Turkish positions in a series of bayonet charges after having shot 240 million rounds at them (Welch 341) and forced Osman Pasha to surrender, some of the more learned Turkish officers with whom George Stoker often conversed could have remembered another formidable and fearsome enemy coming from the left bank of the Danube.

Although Vlad Ţepeş (the Impaler) was “a voivode from the distant past,” as

Elizabeth Miller puts it, he was not forgotten in Turkey. An interesting piece of evidence about this comes from the first Turkish version of Dracula, published in 1928 as an original novel by Ali Rıza Seyfi (1879-1958) under the title Kazıklı Voyvoda (The Impaling

Voivode). This work formed the basis of the first Turkish horror movie, the 1953 Drakula

Istanbul’da. As Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar has shown in “Adding towards a Nationalist Text:

On a Turkish Translation of Dracula,” Kazıklı Voyvoda is in fact a translation/adaptation of

Stoker’s novel, partly abridged, partly enlarged and a clear case of plagiarism, since it was presented by Seyfi as his own creation. Furthermore, Turkish literary historians considered

Kazıklı Voyvoda an original novel until 1998 (Gürçağlar 127), whereas several editors of

Dracula were more or less aware of the connection with Stoker’s novel.

The “Annotated Filmography” of McNally and Florescu’s 1979 edition includes a description of the movie:

127 Drakula Istanbulda [sic] (1953), Demirag, Turkey: producer, Turgut Demirag;

director, Mehmet Muktar; screenplay by Unit Deniz, after the novels Dracula by

Bram Stoker and The Impaling Voivode by Riza Seyfi. The first film to link Stoker’s

vampire Dracula with Vlad the Impaler. Alif Kaptan, an aged Turkish actor, plays

the lead. The plot of the Turkish novel is very similar to Stoker’s, except for some

minor details and the fact that the setting is Istanbul and Romania. It even imitates

Stoker’s epistolatory style, so that the story unfolds through letters, diaries, and

notes. (McNally and Florescu 286)

The two editors seem aware of Seyfi’s plagiarism, but still credit the similarities, at least partly, to the fact that the film is based on the 1897 Dracula as well as on the 1928 Kazıklı

Voyvoda.46 Finally, the editors acknowledge that Drakula Istanbul’da is the first film to present Count Dracula unmistakably as Vlad the Impaler but do not seem to realise that

Seyfi’s “novel” had already done so as early as 1928.

Wolf has no place for Drakula Istanbul’da in the brief filmography of the 1975 edition and does not mention it in his 1997 Connoisseur’s Guide. Nevertheless, in the 1993 edition he describes the movie (he calls it “Drakula Istanbula”) as the “first non-Western adaptation” (Wolf 460) of Dracula, but makes no mention of Seyfi’s version. Better informed is Klinger who, in his 2008 edition, relates that

The 1953 Turkish production Drakula Istanbul’da, directed by Mehmet Muhtar,

was the first to show Dracula climbing his castle wall facedown and suggests a

connection to Vlad the Impaler. Set in contemporary Istanbul, the script is based on

46 In fact, the movie, just like Seyfi’s translation/adaptation, makes no mention whatsoever of Stoker’s novel. The titles and the credits include only references to the author of the Turkish version.

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Ali Riza Seyfi’s 1928 novel The Impaling Voivode, “inspired” by Stoker’s work,

and features a fine, bald, fang-sporting vampire. (560)

The quotation marks surrounding the word “inspired” suggest that Klinger is aware of

Seyfi’s plagiarism. Elizabeth Miller goes further and considers Kazıklı Voyvoda an

“abridged adaptation” of Dracula (like the Icelandic version Makt Myrkrann):

Virtually unknown in the West, this text retains much of Stoker’s plot, although it is

considerably shortened and uses Turkish characters and settings. The author, Ali

Riza Seyfi, introduces one major variation: Count Dracula is more clearly identified

as the infamous Impaler who wreaked havoc on the Turks in the fifteenth century.

This adaptation probably had a nationalistic agenda, in that it was published

immediately following the Turkish War of Independence. (Sense & Nonsense 85)

The interpretation of Seyfi’s work as part of the author’s nationalistic agenda is also Şehnaz

Tahir Gürçağlar’s thesis. Seyfi needed a fierce enemy from Turkey’s past to use in his nation-building project and he chose Stoker’s novel because he knew very well that it was about Vlad Ţepeş.47

As Gürçağlar shows, the author of the 1928 version, who was in fact known as a translator from English, changed his mind when he realised that Stoker had written about the Romanian medieval ruler: “while translating Dracula, Seyfi renamed it Kazıklı

Voyvoda, associating it right from the start with an evil figure from Turkish history”

(Gürçağlar 130). All the heroes as well as Dracula’s victims are Turks in Seyfi’s version.

Doctor Resuhi (the Turkish Van Helsing) “often comes back to the pains inflicted on innocent Turks by Vlad the Impaler, and this may be considered a deliberate attempt to

47 Thus, Seyfi is the first to identify Count Dracula as Vlad the Impaler in 1928, long before Bacil Kirtley in 1956, Grigore Nandriş in 1959, Harry Ludlam in 1962 or McNally and Florescu in 1972.

129 forge a strong sense of nationhood” (141). The references to Vlad the Impaler and his war on the Ottoman Empire abound in the letters produced by Azmi (Jonathan Harker) and

Güzin (Mina), and “it is no coincidence that, at the end of the novel, as Dracula is being stabbed to his eternal death, Seyfi has one of the characters say: ‘This is the revenge of my fellow nationals impaled on the banks of the Danube!’” (140). Although the last part of the novel involves a chase through Istanbul (the vampire-hunters, all former officers in the

1919-1923 Turkish War of Independence, do not need to follow Dracula back to his lair) and the enemy’s powers are curbed by Muslim weapons (for example, the crucifix is replaced by the Quran), Kazıklı Voyvoda remains faithful to Stoker’s original. What the

Turkish adaptation suggests, however, is that even 50 years after George Stoker’s campaign south of the Danube, and in the context of another devastating war in the Near East,

“Dracula is identified with the nation’s enemies” (Gürçağlar 140), which makes it quite likely for Vlad the Impaler to be identified as such a powerful symbol in 1877-1878, when the Turks were actually fighting Romanians and Bram Stoker’s brother George had the opportunity to listen to their concerns and fears.

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4.3 Friends of James Knowles

By seeking independence in 1877, Romania was the enemy of the status quo established by the British victory in the Crimean War.48 Public opinion in Great Britain during the Near Eastern crisis of the mid- and late 1870s was overwhelmingly in favour of the preservation of the Ottoman Empire and against the independence or autonomy of its dependent territories in the Balkans. William Gladstone’s opposite view, thunderously expressed in Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, a pamphlet published in

September 1876, is well-known. At the time, Gladstone was, however, the most prominent member of “a small, though vocal, minority” (Hammond 609), whereas Disraeli’s pro-

Turkish position reigned supreme. Although Stoker knew and admired Gladstone, his views regarding the Eastern Question were “firmly Conservative . . . and in keeping with the legacy created by Disraeli” (Gibson 239). The author of Dracula only met the Earl of

Beaconsfield once, but Henry Irving “met him often and liked to talk about him” (Stoker,

Personal Reminiscences II, 37). When, in Chapter 9 of Dracula, Stoker has Dr Seward say,

“‘The unexpected always happens.’ How well Disraeli knew life” (Dracula 143), all editors

(with the exception of McNally and Florescu) try to identify the quote. Some believe it comes from Disraeli’s Endymion (Leatherdale 179 n. 51; Byron 143 n. 1); others place it in

Henrietta Temple (Klinger 178 n. 25; Luckhurst 378); Auerbach and Skal think it is from

Sybil (102 n. 8); finally, others think it does not come from Disraeli at all (Wolf 142 n. 10;

Riquelme 125). None mentions the fact that Stoker met Disraeli and had reasons to admire him.

48 This was made clear by the then prime-minister Benjamin Disraeli. See Richard Millman, Britain and the Eastern Question: 1875-1878 (267-269). For a Romanian view, see Nicolae Iorga, Histoire des relations anglo-roumaines (160-163).

131 In fact, Stoker’s account of the relationship between Irving and Disraeli seems much embellished, perhaps because of his own admiration for the Conservative Prime Minister.

Most of the chapter dedicated to Disraeli consists of anecdotes related by other people who had known the Earl of Beaconsfield. The only time that Stoker met him, on 17 November

1880, when he came to see a performance of The Corsican Brothers (Stoker, Personal

Reminiscences I, 168) might also be the only time that Henry Irving met him, despite

Stoker’s statement that the two men “met often.” Of Disraeli’s opinion of the famous actor,

Stoker writes cautiously: “I think also that Beaconsfield liked him” (II, 37) and “I believe

[he] expressed himself pleased with [the play]” (I, 168). On the contrary, in a letter to Lady

Bradford, dated 26 November 1880, the former Prime Minister (he had been succeeded by

Gladstone on 21 April of that year) writes: “I liked the ‘Corsican Brothers’ as a melodrama, and never saw anything put cleverer on the stage. Irving, whom I saw for the first time, is third-rate and never will improve; but good enough for the part he played” (Disraeli II,

395). If Disraeli saw Irving for the first time in late 1880, a few months before his final illness (he died on 19 April 1881), during which he rarely went out and grew almost blind

(Weintraub 655), it is very likely that Irving never met him again and that Disraeli never changed his opinion of Irving’s acting skills. The fact that Stoker included a chapter on

Beaconsfield in his Reminiscences, immediately after the one on Gladstone, suggests both that he wanted to preserve the illusion of Irving’s unblemished level of recognition in late

Victorian England and that he inserted his own opinions of Disraeli in the memoir about the actor.

Gladstone, instead, became in time a close friend of Henry Irving and came regularly to the Lyceum “[f]or fourteen years, from 1881 to 1895” (Stoker, Personal

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Reminiscences II, 26).49 As the title of an article he published in the June 1878 issue of The

Nineteenth Century shows, the new prime minister was in favour of “Liberty in the East and West.” He supported the independence of the new states emancipated from Ottoman domination (for this reason he was made an honorary Romanian citizen in 1861) and Home

Rule in Ireland. Knowing his latter interest, Stoker sent Gladstone a copy of The Snake’s

Pass and Gladstone replied with a letter that Stoker later published in facsimile (Stoker,

Personal Reminiscences II, 27-28). When Charles Stewart Parnell issued the manifesto “To the People of Ireland” that caused division in the Irish Parliamentary Party, Gladstone lent an ear to Stoker: “though I was a philosophical Home-Ruler, I was much surprised and both angry at and sorry for Parnell’s attitude, and I told Mr. Gladstone my opinion” (II 31).

Another time, Stoker put to use his experience as former inspector of petty sessions and penned his opinion on a new Rule of Procedure for the House of Commons, “which I sent to [Gladstone] through the kindness of his friend James Knowles” (II, 31).

An architect turned editor, James Knowles (1831-1908) played an important role in late Victorian intellectual and social life and also became somewhat of a mentor to Stoker.

In July 1877, when he was still a Dublin civil servant and was vacationing in London,

Stoker was urged by Irving to visit Knowles at the office of The Nineteenth Century. Irving knew of Stoker’s “wish to get to London where as a writer [he] should have a larger scope and better chance of success than at home” (Stoker, Personal Reminiscences I, 44) and thought Knowles more qualified to give advice to the aspiring novelist. Knowles invited

Stoker to publish in The Nineteenth Century, which only happened in June 1890. But the editor and his periodical remained influential in Stoker’s career: “From that hour Sir James

49 In fact, as Jeffrey Richards shows in his biography, Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and His World, Gladstone had first seen Irving in Hamlet as early as 1875 (Richards 178).

133 and I became close friends. I and mine have received from him and his innumerable kindnesses; and there is for him a very warm corner in my heart” (I, 46). It was in The

Nineteenth Century (the July 1885 issue) that the author of Dracula read Emily Gerard’s essay on “Transylvanian Superstitions.” Only one of the editors mentions the fact that

Stoker was close to Knowles, in an endnote to a study of Dracula: “This journal was edited by a friend of Stoker’s Sir James Knowles” (Leatherdale, The Novel and the Legend 231 n.

31). However, none of the editions, Leatherdale’s included, make this connection.

Knowles appears in a few other, crucial, moments in Stoker’s Personal

Reminiscences of Henry Irving.50 Apart from his role as liaison between Irving’s manager and Gladstone, Knowles introduced Stoker to Alfred Tennyson (I, 201) and, at the first dinner with the translator of A Thousand Nights, Stoker “sat between Burton and James

Knowles” (I, 351). The editor of The Nineteenth Century is also present indirectly in

Stoker’s memoir: just like Disraeli before him, Gladstone came to the Lyceum for a performance of The Corsican Brothers on 3 January 1881 (the first time Stoker met him), but it was in fact a double bill, the other play being The Cup, written by Tennyson and with sets designed by Knowles. Both Tennyson and Gladstone were members of the

Metaphysical Society, which was founded by Knowles in 1869 and had monthly meetings until 1880 to discuss the relationships between religion and science.51 The members included, alongside Gladstone, Tennyson and Knowles, many Victorian luminaries: John

Ruskin, Walter Bagehot, Thomas Huxley, Cardinal Manning, Arthur Balfour, Leslie

50 The title of Stoker’s memoir may be inspired by Knowles’s policy of publishing “personal reminiscences” in The Nineteenth Century. See, for example, “Gordon at Gravesend: A Personal Reminiscence” by Arthur Stannard, in the April 1885 issue. 51 A brief but useful history is provided by Knowles himself in a “Note from the Editor” attached to Richard Holt Hutton’s article “The Metaphysical Society: A Reminiscence,” in The Nineteenth Century 18:102 (August 1885), 177-179.

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Stephen, James Anthony Froude, and Dr William Benjamin Carpenter, who coined the term

“unconscious cerebration,” later used by Stoker in Dracula.

According to Knowles’s biographer Priscilla Metcalf, the former architect became a kind of “midwife” to the divided post-Darwinian intelligentsia of London and also to the various branches of the Royal Family (Metcalf 308). Knowles was especially close to the

Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII), at whose Sandringham House in Norfolk he spent many weekends between 1884 and 1908 (it was there that the King knighted him in

1903). All the members of the Metaphysical Society became contributors to The Nineteenth

Century, the monthly periodical with the highest circulation in Late-Victorian Britain

(Metcalf 285). As Julia Stapleton writes in her study of Political Intellectuals and Public

Identities in Britain since 1850, Knowles was a “facilitator” and an agent for the intellectual elite. He “achieved extraordinary influence, not only with the foremost intellectuals of his day but also among royalty, whom he frequently entertained at his

London home” (Stapleton 23). Many of Knowles’s friends became Irving’s and Stoker’s friends and appear in the latter’s Personal Reminiscences as guests at the various banquets offered by the Lyceum. In fact, if one sets aside all the American and foreign guests as well as the many writers, actors, painters and sculptors (usually involved somehow in the theatre), the remaining cast of characters in Stoker’s memoir are politicians, intellectuals and socialites belonging to one or more of the three circles that made up James Knowles’s social life: former members of the Metaphysical Society; contributors to The Nineteenth

Century; and friends of the Prince of Wales.

Stoker’s list of guests includes five prominent members of the Metaphysical

Society: Knowles, Gladstone, Balfour, Tennyson and Froude, all of whom were

135 contributors to The Nineteenth Century and close to the Royal Family.52 Other contributors to Knowles’s journal who frequented the Lyceum were Ray Lankester, author of

Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880); Garnet Wolseley, military correspondent; the Earl of Dunraven, war correspondent during the 1877-1878 conflict; and Edward Dicey, who accompanied the Prince of Wales on a trip to Russia in 1867 and later published copiously on matters related to the English presence in Egypt. In 1870 he also published

The Morning Land, a travelogue describing his trip down the Danube and then all the way to the Holy Land after crossing a bridge that divided the West from the East, which may have inspired Jonathan Harker’s account of a slow voyage beyond Budapest. Dicey also writes in the form of a diary and, when he goes through the Danube’s Iron Gates, he remembers: “For the last thirty hours I have been travelling East, due East, as fast – it would be more true, but less poetical, to say as slowly – as rail and steam could carry me.

During that time I have traversed the whole length of Hungary” (Dicey I, 1). What is distinctive is also Dicey’s view of his trip as eastwards, although the steamer that took him down the Danube from Budapest to Orşova, where he wrote this diary entry, had to sail southwards, following the flow of the river.

Among the guests of the Lyceum there were several who were employed by the

Prince of Wales (e.g., Sir Dighton Probyn, the Earl of Albemarle, Sir George Lewis, Lord

Knollys); many who were his close friends (e.g., the Earl of Lytton, Horace Farquhar,

Alfred de Rothchild, the Duchess of Manchester); and two of his mistresses (Agnes Keyser and the Countess of Warwick). However, two of the guests who were close to Queen

Victoria and to the Prince of Wales, respectively, were of crucial importance for the writing

52 Gladstone and Balfour were Liberal and Conservative leaders, respectively; Tennyson was the Poet Laureate; Froude knew the Prince of Wales through his best friend Charles Kingsley, the Prince’s tutor.

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of Dracula: German-born Max Müller (1823-1900) and Hungarian-born Arminius

Vambéry (1832-1913). Both were famous Orientalists celebrated in Victorian England.

Both were contributors to The Nineteenth Century. And both became characters in Bram

Stoker’s novel: Max Müller is the likely model for Abraham Van Helsing, while Vambéry is the former’s “friend Arminius” from the University of Budapest.

There is no direct reference to Max Müller in Dracula and only the

McNally/Florescu edition makes the connection between Van Helsing and the Oxford professor:

Stoker was especially interested in Muller’s book Comparative Mythology and cited

his work Magyarland in his working notes to the novel; the Brotherton Library at

Leeds University has a letter which Dr. Muller wrote to Stoker on April 13, 1886.

Muller may have been one of the general models for Van Helsing. (McNally and

Florescu 117 n. 191)

In the letter, Müller asked Irving’s manager for tickets to Faust and later studies have shown that Magyarland was actually written by Elizabeth Sarah (better known as “Nina”)

Mazuchelli (1832-1914), a mountaineer and explorer. This might explain why McNally and

Florescu’s suggestion has been disregarded in subsequent editions. Only two others discuss

Van Helsing when the character shows up in Chapter 9. Leonard Wolf implies that the professor from Amsterdam is the hero of the novel because of his name: “If we have any doubts about whose side the author is on in the battle between darkness and light in the novel, we need only compare Van Helsing’s first name with Stoker’s own. ‘Bram’ is a contraction of ‘Abraham,’ which was also the name of Stoker’s father” (Wolf 148 n. 20). A similar comment is made by Klinger (185 n. 48). Leatherdale insists on Stoker’s practice of

137 “adding the final, crucial member of the dramatis personae well into the book” (184 n. 91), which he also does in The Jewel of Seven Stars.

Stoker does mention Müller’s name in his research notes, but only as he writes down ideas from Magyarland, where he is cited. The editors of Stoker’s papers explain that

“Max Muller may have been the model for Professor Van Helsing” (Eighteen-Bisang and

Miller 201 n. 308). In their “Overview” at the end of the book, they add: “If there was a live model for Van Helsing, a case can be made for a contemporary German professor at

Oxford, Max Muller, while the Notes champion Bram’s brother William Thornley as a candidate” (283). In a note to this, they explain: “Many scholars believe that this professor from Germany, who lectured in mythology and religion [Max Müller], inspired the character of Van Helsing” (283 n. 375).53 The scholars who turned the tide in favour of

Max Müller as model for Van Helsing are two Germanists, David B. Dickens and Clemens

Ruthner, each of whom published an essay arguing this in the 1998 volume Dracula: The

Shade and the Shadow edited by Elizabeth Miller. Dickens concludes that Van Helsing is based on Max Müller because Van Helsing speaks German, not Dutch; Stoker knew Müller and his ideas; Müller’s personal tragedies mirror Van Helsing’s; and Müller once withdrew to Whitby (Dickens 36-37). Ruthner believes the same because Stoker mentions in the preface to the Icelandic version that Van Helsing is based on a “highly respected scientist, who appears here under a pseudonym”; in the working papers, Van Helsing appears first as a German professor called Max Windschoeffel; and Müller was familiar with vampire legends (Ruthner 61-62).

53 One the editors of the notes repeats this elsewhere: “a strong case can be made for a contemporary German professor at Oxford, Max Müller” (Miller, “A Dracula ‘Who’s Who’” 221).

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All these arguments are valid and convincing, although it remains a little unclear why Stoker would have chosen this particular professor instead of another. More information regarding Müller’s reputation and character can be revealing. Nirad C.

Chaudhuri, Müller’s biographer, writes that he was characterised by tenacity, zest for life and wit, features that can also describe Van Helsing. When he was up for an important

Professorship at Oxford (the election became a cause célèbre in 1860), Müller was defeated and his imperfect knowledge of English was one of the arguments against him (Chaudhuri

227). Van Helsing’s use of the English language may be an allusion to Müller’s (whose written English was, nevertheless, impeccable). Stoker could have read about the scholar in an essay-portrait dedicated to him in the October 1878 issue of The Dublin University

Magazine, an independent academic journal owned and managed by Sheridan Le Fanu.

There, the anonymous author quotes from one of Müller’s speeches, in which he gives directions for a spiritual battle “if Christianity is to retain its hold on Europe and America, if it is to conquer in the Holy War of the future” (“Professor Max Müller” 482). Van

Helsing’s exhortation to his comrades that they “go out as the old Knights of the Cross” recalls Müller’s lecture “On Missions” quoted above.

Another argument suggesting that Max Müller could be the model for Abraham Van

Helsing is that Stoker was well aware of the scholar’s fame and of the respect that he was due. The first meeting between Stoker and Müller in the former’s memoir was on 7 March

1886 at Oxford, where Irving and his manager were among the fourteen guests of an exclusive dinner. Three of the guests were Müller, his wife and his daughter (Stoker,

Personal Reminiscences II, 252). The second meeting took place on 14 April 1886 at the representation of Faust followed by a supper in the Beefsteak Room, situated above the

139 theatre. As Stoker recounts the events of the night, it becomes clear why Müller had asked him for tickets. Franz Liszt came especially to see the play and

musical London made such a rush for the old man that it was absolutely necessary

to guard him when he came to the theatre. . . . As it was necessary to keep away all

who might intrude upon him – enthusiasts, interviewers, cranks, autograph-fiends,

notoriety seekers who would like to be seen in his box – we arranged a sort of

fortress for him. (II, 145-146)

Müller was among those that were invited to dine with Liszt. This was not so surprising because, as a teenager in Leipzig, where he was intimate with Felix Mendelssohn, Müller had met Liszt and, being a tenor, had shared the stage with him (Chaudhuri 29-31).

Stoker could not have been unaware of Max Müller’s fame in Victorian England.

Not just “a contemporary German professor at Oxford” or a “professor from Germany, who lectured in mythology and religion,” as the editors of Bram Stoker’s Notes call him, Müller was a “world figure” (Chaudhuri 1). He was especially famous in late Victorian Britain, where he “occupied a central role in the intellectual life of the nation” (Beckerlegge 179).

He has been described as “one of the giants of the English intellectual world” (Kitagawa and Strong 184) of the time. Thanks to his “uncomplicated prose and his concern to write as much for the layman as for the scholar, he can truly be ranked alongside those great and eloquent ‘sages,’ such as Ruskin, Kingsley, Spencer and . . . Arnold, all of whom were to some extent the father-figures of the Victorian fireside” (Trompf 200). He was also close to the Prince of Wales (Chaudhuri 2-4), but especially to Queen Victoria, “as a result of links forged with Albert, the Prince Consort” (Beckerlegge 185). The Queen offered him a knighthood in 1886 but he refused, then in 1896 appointed him to the Privy Council “for his scholarly work and not for his services to the Indian Empire as Queen Victoria had

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originally proposed” (185). Much of his most widely read and discussed scholarship was published in The Nineteenth Century. From January 1882 (“Mythology among the

Hottentots”) until November 1899 (“Literature before Letters”), he contributed fourteen essays to James Knowles’s periodical.

In the January 1885 issue, to which Müller contributed an essay on “The Savage,”

Arminius Vambéry’s signature also appeared. The “noted Russophobe,” as the historian

R.W. Seton-Watson calls him (Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question 4), published in The Nineteenth Century essays about the Russian peril in Central Asia. The one from

January 1885 (with a second part in the February issue) was entitled “Will Russia Conquer

India?” and coincided with one of Vambéry’s many visits to London. Unlike Max Müller, his name (or at least his first name) and his position as professor at the University of

Budapest are mentioned explicitly in Dracula. Consequently, all editors (except Wilson and

Ellmann, the first two OUP editors) sanction the connection and acknowledge the fact that

Stoker knew Vambéry personally (McNally and Florescu 193-194 n. 274; Wolf 291 n. 22;

Auerbach and Skal 212 n. 3; Leatherdale 337 n. 65; Byron 280 n. 1; Riquelme 245; Klinger

340-341 n. 41; Luckhurst 385). However, Klinger also writes that “my friend Arminius” could be based on a sixteenth-century Dutch Reformist, and in a 1997 essay Leatherdale suggests that “Stoker threw in his [Vambéry’s] name in passing, as a fleeting and unthinking tribute. This accorded with the author’s long habit of dropping into his fiction the names of personal acquaintances” (“Stoker’s Banana Skins” 142-143). Furthermore,

Elizabeth Miller notes that Stoker “devoted several pages of Reminiscences to Burton compared to just over a page on Arminius Vambery” (Sense & Nonsense 23).

However, the name of Arminius could not have been thrown in passing. It can only refer to Vambéry because both he and Stoker’s character teach at the remote University of

141 Budapest. Moreover, just as Arminius is Van Helsing’s friend, Vambéry knew Max Müller and they had similar scholarly interests (both wrote extensively on Central Asian languages and on their relation with Fino-Ugric and Turkic idioms). Also, the few lines on Vambéry in the Personal Reminiscences are placed strategically at the very end of the first volume, after the accounts on two other travellers: Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley.

Stoker relates two meetings with the Hungarian: on 30 April 1890, in the Beefsteak Room, when Vambéry told stories of his adventures in Central Asia and “Irving was delighted with him” (Personal Reminiscences I, 371-372); and two years later, when the Hungarian was being given a degree at the Tercentenary of Trinity College Dublin where “he shone out as a star. He soared above all the speakers, making one of the finest speeches I have ever heard. Be sure that he spoke loudly against Russian aggression – a subject to which he had largely devoted himself” (I, 372). Stoker had probably met Vambéry at least once before 1890: he describes a visit with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry at the Prince of Wales’s

Sandringham House to entertain the Queen on 26 April 1889 (II, 212-215). The Hungarian was also a guest at the same time (Vambéry, “Professor Vambéry Speaks” 383) and was subsequently invited for dinner and an overnight stay at Windsor Palace.

Far from being one of the more obscure references in Dracula, Arminius Vambéry, just like Max Müller, was famous worldwide. An autodidact polyglot, he jumpstarted his career in the early 1860s by travelling from Constantinople to Samarkand and back disguised as a dervish and then publishing his account simultaneously in London and

Budapest. His close relationships with monarchs, particularly that with the sultan Abdul

Hamid II, the success of his lectures and books based on voyages through Central Asia and

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on the Anglo-Russian rivalry along the frontier of India,54 as well as his first autobiography, the 1884 The Life and Adventures of Arminius Vambéry Written by Himself, subsequently turned him into a much sought-after European celebrity. Richard Burton, who had become equally famous thanks to an incognito trip to Mecca, met Vambéry as early as

1864, when the Hungarian had just come to London to promote his first book (Isabel

Burton I, 348). The Prince of Wales also met him in 1864 (Vambéry, “Professor Vambéry

Speaks” 382) and they became such good friends that Vambéry was later cited as an expert on the future king (Legge, More about King Edward 278-279).

An interesting argument in favour of the hypothesis that Vambéry was the first to mention the name of Dracula to Bram Stoker is that the library in Whitby, where the novelist found Wilkinson’s Account on the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, “was not, in fact, a public library – it was a private subscription library” (Frayling, “Mr Stoker’s

Holiday” 188) and visitors had to ask for specific books. Stoker met Vambéry in the

Beefsteak Room right before his holiday in Whitby and may have been advised by the

Hungarian about books such as Wilkinson’s or Johnson’s. One of Stoker’s main sources on

Transylvania, Major E.C. Johnson (author of On the Track of the Crescent) also knew

Vambéry in his position as Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. When the Hungarian professor lectured before the society in 1885 (Goldsmid 388), Johnson was a member of the board.55 Another member was Max Müller. By that time, Vambéry’s fame was such that a chapter was dedicated to him in William Henry Davenport Adams’s In Perils Oft:

Romantic Biographies Illustrative of Adventurous Life (1885), where he was in the

54 The most important books he published in Victorian England are Travels in Central Asia (1864), Sketches of Central Asia (1868; a sequel to the previous title), Central Asia and the Anglo-Russian Frontier Question (1874) and The Coming Struggle for India (1885) which prompted his invitation at Windsor. 55 Stoker could have known Johnson personally. The major was an M.A.I., that is to say “Magister in Arte Inginiaria,” a degree only conferred by the University of Dublin.

143 company of other famous explorers, such as General Gordon, Samuel Baker and Edward

Henry Palmer.

During one of the meetings with Burton (Stoker, Personal Reminiscences I, 356),

Irving was especially eager to learn of the fate of his good friend Edward Henry Palmer

(Stoker mistakenly writes “Edmund Henry Palmer”), who had been murdered by marauders in Egypt in 1882. Burton was a member of the investigation sent there afterwards. Palmer, whom Irving had known since the early 1850s, when they were both clerks in merchant’s offices (Brereton 6-12), was very knowledgeable both in Arabic (he translated the Quran) and in Romany. He “first learned to talk Romany as boy. He knew all the varieties of it, from the pure gipsy language, spoken in its integrity by very few English gipsies, to the tinkers’ road talk and thieves’ patter” (Besant 177). In 1875 he published a bilingual volume of English Gipsy Songs. When he returned from the journey through the Holy

Places (recounted in the two volumes of his 1871 The Desert of the Exodus: Journeys on

Foot in the Wilderness of the Forty Years’ Wanderings), Palmer travelled from North Syria to Constantinople and then “came home by way of Vienna, where he met Arminius

Vambéry, who became and remained one of his firmest friends” (Besant 110-111). The men that Stoker knew (either through family connections or through Henry Irving) and contributed, voluntarily or not, to the shaping of Dracula in the 1890s and even before were scholars and explorers specialising in the Near and the Middle East, usually Russophobes and/or Turkophiles, and often gravitating around the British Royal Family.

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Chapter 5 What Stoker Knew

Bram Stoker’s working notes give us some indication of the research he did for

Dracula and the editors of the novel (with the exception of Leonard Wolf) have put them to use in their annotations. However, much of what he wrote about the people of Transylvania and what was then the Kingdom of Romania can only be explained through information he gathered from books that are not mentioned in his papers; from newspapers; and from conversation. There are many things that Stoker (and many well-informed Britons of his time) simply knew (or thought they knew) about Romania. As a commentator of the novel has recently put it, “the Victorians in general knew more about Eastern Europe than we give them credit for knowing, and . . . Bram Stoker in particular was surrounded by friends, family, and acquaintances who understood much of the history, politics, and conflicts of these lands” (McLean 339). Much of what Stoker knew cannot be found in his working notes and therefore is not commented on by Dracula’s editors; however, this knowledge is manifest in the novel. The editor is supposed to explain such implicit knowledge because

“he has a responsibility to share his knowledge and understanding with the reader by providing whatever information may be necessary to make the author’s meaning intelligible” (Battestin 10). Starting from the information that was available to Stoker and that he could have worked into Dracula, an editor of the novel might be able to reveal more about the author’s intentions.

145 Rather than choosing Transylvania merely as a more convenient setting for Dracula

(in that it was remote and not much utilised in previous fiction and therefore more original),

Stoker was keen on writing about lands inhabited by Romanians. In an 1897 interview with

Jane Stoddard from the British Weekly, Stoker is quoted as saying “I learned a good deal from E. Gerard’s ‘Essays on Roumanian Superstitions,’ which first appeared in the

Nineteenth Century, and were afterwards published in a couple of volumes” (Byron 486-

487). Here, Stoker conflates Gerard’s 1885 essay called “Transylvanian Superstitions” and her 1888 book The Land beyond the Forest into one work that he identifies as “essays” not on the several ethnicities of Transylvania (Gerard actually speaks of Saxon and Gypsy superstitions as well as Romanian),56 but on Romanians only.

The fact that Stoker knows that the book had two volumes and that he speaks of

Gerard’s “essays” (in the plural) suggests that he may have consulted the book.57 He may, in fact, have known other works by Emily Gerard and may have found inspiration in her

1886 novel The Waters of Hercules, initially published serially in Blackwood’s Edinburgh

Magazine, which Stoker had known and read since his early years (Dick Collins 4). The

Waters of Hercules is set on the frontier between Hungary and Romania and recounts the mystery surrounding a place called “Gaura Dracului” – the name is kept in Romanian in the novel, but it is also aptly translated by the author as “the devil’s hole” (Gerard, The Waters of Hercules 95). The heroine of the novel, forced by circumstance to search for her roots, is

56 “Transylvanian Superstitions” begins with Romanians and continues with Saxons and then Gypsies. The Land beyond the Forest begins with Saxons, continues with Romanians, then goes back to Saxons in the second volume, in which Gypsies are added. 57 Elizabeth Miller suggests he did not (Sense & Nonsense 21) but later, in a note, expresses “a nagging doubt” about this: “One piece of vampire lore used in Dracula is that ‘The branch of wild rose on his coffin keep him that he move not from it.’ This does not appear in Gerard’s article . . . But [it does] in The Land beyond the Forest” (44 n. 9).

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the granddaughter of the enigmatic “Count Damianovics de Draskócs”; both this name and the name of the place foreshadow that of Stoker’s famous vampire.

In another interview, granted to The San Francisco Call on 13 March 1904, Stoker speaks neither of Transylvania nor of Romania but, as it had been traditional during the nineteenth century, of “the wildest country of the Danubian banks” (Stoker, Forgotten

Writings 212). This formula shows, again, that the author of Dracula regarded his novel as a kind of Romanian tale, set somewhere close to the mouth of the Danube, with which the country was conventionally associated.58 Romania was created in the aftermath of the

Crimean War59 through the union of Wallachia and Moldavia, previously known as the

Danubian Principalities60 and the country was frequently referred to as “the Danubian lands” or a similar periphrasis. Stoker’s interest in the region is also attested to by the fact that he owned F.D. Millet’s 1892 travelogue The Danube, from the Black Forest to the

Black Sea, which was on the list of books auctioned off by his wife Florence in 1912 (Bram

Stoker’s Notes 313). Stoker’s copy bears the inscription: “To Bram Stoker, Esq. with regards of F.D. Millet, New York, 1893” (Stoker, Forgotten Writings 229). While there is no way of knowing if Stoker actually read the book, the fact that he knew its author suggests that he was at least aware of its contents. In typical fashion, Millet describes the descent down the Danube, south of Budapest, as the passageway to the Orient. Just like

Jonathan Harker who, in Dracula, believes he is “leaving the West and entering the East”

58 Stoker wrote down the fact that the Russian schooner Dimitry (the model for the Demeter in the novel) was bringing to Whitby “silver sand – from mouth of Danube” (Notes 139), although in Dracula he had the ship sail from Varna, a port well-known by his brother George. 59 The unification was achieved despite the opposition of Britain, Turkey, Russia and Austria-Hungary. The union was brought about in 1859 by electing the same prince in both Moldavia and Wallachia. Britain finally recognised it in 1861, one of its most vocal advocates being Gladstone, who was made an honorary Romanian citizen for his support. 60 They were described as such by Sir Patrick O’Brien, later MP for King’s County in Ireland who, on the eve of the Crimean War, published a Journal of a Residence in the Danubian Principalities in the Autumn and Winter of 1853. However, British travellers continued to describe Romania as Danubian Principalities even after the union (see, e.g., James Creagh’s 1876 Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah).

147 when he crosses a bridge in Budapest, Millet catches the “first glimpses of Oriental life”

(Millet 160) after leaving Budapest and, when he approaches Vidin (some 300 miles south of the Hungarian capital), he finds himself “well across the line that separates the Orient from the Occident” (240). George Stoker, it will be remembered, also thought himself in the Orient somewhere close to Vidin. Millet also travels up and down the river on steamers, which may have encouraged Stoker to have Arthur Godalming and Jonathan Harker go upstream on a “launch” in the last chapter of Dracula.

A renowned American painter and sculptor, Millet was a guest in the Beefsteak

Room (Personal Reminiscences I, 323) but Stoker probably met him through their mutual friend Mark Twain.61 That he gave Stoker a book about the Danubian lands rather than a painting or a drawing suggests that he was aware of the novelist’s interests. A natural topic in their conversation would have been the 1877-1878 war, in which George Stoker took part and during which Millet was a correspondent for both the New York Herald and the

London Daily News. In letters sent to the British newspaper at the end of the war, the correspondent suggests the strong links between Romania and Transylvania: “It is well- known that Roumania hopes at some future day to have Transylvania and other Austrian provinces where Roumanian is spoken” (The War Correspondence of the “Daily News”

578). Stoker’s conflation of different Romanian-speaking lands in his interviews can be explained by such readings and conversations. On the other hand, this suggests, on Stoker’s part, a more general interest in Romania and Romanians.

61 Known today chiefly as a victim of the Titanic sinking, F.D. Millet (1848-1912) was good friends with Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Mark Twain, both of whom were witnesses to his marriage in 1879 (Twain was his best man). In Personal Reminiscences, Stoker also relates a visit to the United States in 1886 when he tried to arrange for a bust of Walt Whitman to be sculpted by Saint-Gaudens (II, 108-109).

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5.1 On the British Danube

The idea that after Budapest one entered “savage Europe”62 was current in Victorian

England. Scottish missionary Catherine Edward (1813-1861), who lived in present-day

Romania between 1846 and 1848 seeking to convert Jews to Protestant Christianity, makes a similar comment in her memoirs of Missionary Life among the Jews in Moldavia, Galicia and Silesia, published in 1867 and narrated in the third person: “they set out on the route to

Moldavia, which was by carriage to Ratisbon on the Danube, and then by steamer to

Vienna and Pesth and Galatz. The first halt was made at Pesth, where – previous to venturing into the wilds of South-eastern Europe – she was cheered by the conversation and hospitality of the brethren . . . of Jewish Missions” (Edward 34-35). During her stay in

Moldavia, Edward spent a lot of time in Galaţi (Galatz), where she met not only Jews, but also Britons. She was accompanied through Moldavia by one of the early converts,

Reverend Dr Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889) who, in later life, was a preacher and professor at Oxford. Count Dracula’s Jewish minion that the vampire hunters meet in Galaţi is called

Immanuel Hildesheim and this name may have been inspired by that of the Jewish-born

High Churchman.63

Although the vampire hunters spend only one, very eventful, day in Galaţi, the city’s name appears eighteen times in the novel (Dracula 379-393), which makes “Galatz”

62 The phrase was used by traveller Harry de Windt (1856-1933), younger brother of Margaret Brooke, Ranee of Sarawak (hosted by Stoker in the Beefsteak Room), in his 1907 book Through Savage Europe, Being the Narrative of a Journey . . . throughout the Balkan States and European Russia. 63 The name of the character in Dracula is even more similar to that of an important spiritual leader of Berlin Jews, Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer (1820-1899), with roots in the German province of Hildesheim. However, there are no connections between him and the city of Galaţi.

149 the fourth most frequently mentioned locality in the entire book.64 It is, in fact, the most frequent Romanian toponym, more frequent than “Transylvania” itself, which is mentioned fifteen times.65 The name’s recurrence could seem fortuitous unless one took into account the fact that, from the earliest stages of his work on the novel, Stoker was interested in

Galaţi and keen on using it in Dracula. In August 1890, when he took down information from William Wilkinson’s Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, after five other notes on Romanian history and before notes on local colour, he wrote: “Galatz is in Moldavian [sic] close to Wallachia at broadest & deepest part of Danube 60 miles from

Black Sea and 72 from Bukorest [sic]” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 246-247). The original sentence was not much different: “Galatz is in Moldavia, but nearly touches the frontier of

Wallachia: it is situated at the beginning of the broadest and deepest part of the Danube, distant sixty miles from the Black Sea, sixty-five from Yassi, and seventy-two from

Bukorest” (Wilkinson 79). Stoker kept all the information, including the spelling of the

Romanian capital’s name and the much too optimistic distances,66 but he was not interested in the Moldavian capital Iaşi. Since he transcribes almost verbatim, as he usually does, the omission is conspicuous; it suggests that in 1890, the author was confident that he was not going to mention the city of Iaşi in the novel.67

64 After London (67 times), Whitby (43 times) and Varna (24 times) but before Exeter (16 times) and Purfleet (6 times). More frequent than “Galatz” are also the Count’s two estates: the castle (44 times) and Carfax (24 times). 65 These two are followed by: Borgo Pass (11 times), Bistritz (9 times) and, rather surprisingly, Bukovina (8 times). 66 Wilkinson is quite accurate with the distance between Galaţi and the Black Sea (he came to the Principalities by sea from Constantinople) but, writing as he was in the times before railways, he is wrong about the other two distances; both should be doubled. Stoker obviously researched further, since he has his characters cover the distance from Varna to Galaţi via Bucharest by train in a little over 24 hours. 67 Stoker’s research notes are never very extensive. He only wrote down what he thought he might use and later added signs marking what he had used, might still use or was no longer interested in. However, as they are all typed from a pre-existent handwritten original, they may be abridgements of longer notes.

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In Dracula, Bram Stoker speaks of a part of Europe that had been much talked about in Victorian England. The British Empire was interested in Romania’s economic potential and the city of Galaţi played an important role in the international trade in the region. In 1802, the Ottomans granted British commercial ships the right to sail the Black

Sea and to use the ports of the Danube (Cernovodeanu, “British Economic Interests” 107).

As early as 1800, Francis Summerers was sent to the Danubian Principalities as acting consul. He was recalled in 1807, but the Levant Company, which regulated the British trade in the region, appointed William Wilkinson as the new consul in 1813. This is, of course, the author “discovered” by Stoker in Whitby’s public library. Although the Account that he published in 1820 about Wallachia and Moldavia provided vital information for Dracula, it had a very different purpose, namely to raise awareness about the commercial opportunities in that part of Europe and to invite Britons to partake in the “opulence” (Wilkinson 74) of the “Peru of the Greeks” (71).68 Wilkinson describes Galaţi as “the great market for the produce of the two principalities, and the only landing-place for some articles of importation” (80), prophesying that its harbour “would soon stand in rivalship with all the ports of the Black Sea, not excepting Odessa” (85).

However, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, British interests on the

Lower Danube were severely threatened by Russian headway. The 1829 treaty of

Adrianople had given Russia control over the entire Danube Delta and Britain accused the

Russian authorities in Sulina, “the only navigable entrance connecting Galaţi and Brăila with the Black Sea, of trying to block the Danube to favour the commerce of its own port,

Odessa” (Ardeleanu, “The European Commission of the Danube” 73). In the early 1830s,

68 In the early nineteenth century, Wallachia and Moldavia had Greek princes and Hellenophone elites. In a similar vein, British merchants of the mid-nineteenth century thought Sulina, the port of entry into the Danube, was “a little California where fortunes are to be made” (Focas 179).

151 navigation on the Lower Danube became a “European question,” at least in the eyes of

Great Britain, which “found a profitable place to acquire high-quality, inexpensive grain after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and the great famine in Ireland in 1847. This led to a spike in traffic. . . . Grain exports to Britain soon became lucrative” (74).69 In the two decades prior to the Crimean War, despite Russian chicaneries, the British Danubian trade had increased dramatically: “In 1837, British exports to the principalities were worth

97,405 pounds sterling; by 1848, they were worth 606,694 pounds. . . . In 1853, about one- third of the ships calling at Brăila and Galaţi were either British or bound for Britain”

(Chirot 93).70 Consequently, “the demand for a free outlet for the corn of Roumania began to assume a louder tone” (Stokes 561). The Vienna Note of 8 August 1853, drafted by

English and French diplomats, gave Russia an ultimatum, asking specifically to remove any obstacle to the navigation on the river (Rossetti and Rey 6).

After victory in the Crimean War, the 1856 Treaty of Paris created the European

Commission of the Danube (ECD). More exactly, the ECD “resulted from an important modification in international maritime law which provided that if a state which controlled an important sector of an international river was unwilling or incapable of [providing] free navigability of the waterway, the other powers could intervene to ensure free commerce”

(Ardeleanu, “The European Commission of the Danube” 75-76). Its creation originated with Charles Cunningham, vice-consul in Galaţi since 1836 (Krehbiel 39) and was largely a

British enterprise. Stoker could have known about the ECD and the importance of Galaţi

69 Some time after the end of the Crimean War, Sir John Stokes, the first British Commissioner of the European Commission of the Danube, admitted that, because of “the great importance to Western Europe of the corn supply of the countries bordering on the Danube . . . it is not surprising that all the negotiations for peace . . . contained provisions for placing the Danube mouths under European control” (Stokes 561). 70 In a letter sent from Iaşi on 13 March 1847, Catherine Edward reports that “The famine in Britain has, strange to say, been felt even here; so much Indian corn has been exported, that bread and mamilika, as the meal is called, is much raised in price, in fact, there was a fear of scarcity, and the exportation has been stopped” (Edward 80).

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for British trade simply by reading the newspapers or from the first pages of a book like

James Samuelson’s Roumania, Past and Present (1882), which he mentions in his working notes (Bram Stoker’s Notes 220-221).71 This possible source for Dracula indicates that

“[t]he greater part of the external trade of the countries bordering on the Danube which passes in and out of the Sulina mouth, the only navigable embouchure, is carried on in

British bottoms” (Samuelson, Roumania 30).72 In November 1873, the Journal of the

Society of Arts reported that “the exports from the Danube to Great Britain far exceed those to any other country; on a moderate calculation they may be valued at £ 1,500,000 a-year on an average of the last five years” (“The Trade of the Lower Danube” 341). The first lines of Samuelson’s book are very telling about the British sentiments concerning

Romania: “There is no country in Europe which at the present time possesses greater interest for Englishmen than does the Kingdom of Roumania” (Samuelson, Roumania v).

He also speaks of the European Commission of the Danube and adds that, at the 1878

Congress of Berlin, “its jurisdiction was extended to the Iron Gates” (32), that is to say, on the entire Romanian course of the Danube.

Formed at Great Britain’s suggestion, the Commission was supposed to be temporary, that is, as long as there was need of works to facilitate the navigation on the

Lower Danube.73 The catch was that the British could always justify the necessity of new

71 Though a barrister, James Samuelson (1829-1918) was first known as a writer of popular science books (some in collaboration with John Braxton Hicks) and editor of The Popular Science Review and Quarterly of Journal of Science where future contributors of The Nineteenth Century also published. In later life, he published country monographs: Roumania: Past and Present (1882), Bulgaria: Past and Present (1888) and India: Past and Present (1890), in which he uses an epigraph from Max Müller and cites Arminius Vambéry as a friend and correspondent (Samuelson, India 27). 72 The author also provides a table showing that the total tonnage of British ships entering and leaving the Danube in 1880 was 412,706 (carried on 479 steamers and only 15 sailing ships) while that of all the other nations was 384,848 (on 242 steamers and 1,526 sailing ships). 73 At the 1855 Vienna Conference, Austria had suggested the commission be formed by riparian countries (that is, the three empires, Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman), but Lord John Russell (the English representative) protested. In 1856, at the Paris Conference, Russia was stripped of its riparian status (to this

153 technical works on the river (Ardeleanu, “La Grande Bretagne et Ses Efforts” 706-707) and, consequently, the European Commission of the Danube survived until 1948. The

Commission’s power grew with each renewal of its mandate. At first, it only governed over the waterways from Sulina on the Black Sea shore to Isaccea (thereby including the Danube

Delta), although its headquarters were upstream in Galaţi. Its dominion was extended to

Galaţi in 1878 (by the Treaty of Berlin) and to Brăila in 1883 (Treaty of London). It was directly administered by an Executive Committee formed by the British, French and

Austrian commissioners.74 Of these three, the Briton was the most powerful, in part because the British Navy was still in the Black Sea and up the river for years after the end of the Crimean War (Ardeleanu, “The Little Known Autobiography” 94-97) and Article 52 of the Treaty of Berlin allowed British vessels of war to sail to Galatz (Holland 303),75 but especially because the British were in charge of all the works on the river.

Major John Stokes (British Commissioner between 1856 and 1871) had led the engineer corps of the Anglo-Turkish Contingent in the Crimean War. He recommended that one of his captains, Charles Hartley, become Chief Engineer of the ECD. More engineers, surveyors, and sappers also came from England (Hartley 110-111) and for the remainder of the Commission’s existence the Britons formed the majority of the personnel. Neither

Stokes nor Hartley asked the other Commissioners for permission or advice. Instead, they end, southern Bessarabia was reattached to Moldavia in the peace treaty), and the two British representatives (Lord Russell and Count Westmorland) accepted that the riparian states would be the members of a permanent commission, on condition that another, temporary, commission (formed by the European Powers) deal with regulating the fair navigation on the Danube’s maritime sector, including all necessary works at the mouth of the river. 74 These were the only ones residing in Galatz and also serving as consuls. The ECD was nominally run by a board of seven members (eight after 1879, when a Romanian delegate was included) who only met twice a year (Rossetti and Rey 66-67). 75 Jonathan Harker is once terrified by Dracula’s eyes, “with all their blaze of basilisk horror.” Another name for basilisk, as Auerbach/Skal and Leatherdale observe, is cockatrice. Coincidentally, HMS Cockatrice was a British man-of-war stationed at Sulina from 1860 to 1885. In 1883, when Romania was trying to boycott the British trade on the Danube because the Treaty of London had extended the powers of the ECD from Galaţi to Brăila, The Cockatrice was sent up the river as a show of force (Hartley 483).

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communicated directly with the Foreign Office in London when they asked for workers

(110) or when they requested approval of the technical works on the river (157). Although he did not have administrative duties, Chief Engineer Charles Augustus Hartley (1825-

1915) was Britain’s main instrument in keeping a tight grip on the ECD: first because the

Commission’s existence depended on his regular reports stating the need for more work on the river; and second, simply because he remained in his position as Chief Engineer for more than half a century (1858-1910).76

Starting with the late 1850s, Galaţi became known as “the seat of the all-powerful

Danube Commission” (Powell 359). From its beginnings in 1856 and until 1948, the

European Commission of the Danube remained a powerful organization, praised by enterprising financiers and idealist radicals alike as an early example of international cooperation (for example, Leonard Woolf, who lauded its functions in his 1916

International Government, published for the Fabian Society with a preface by Bernard

Shaw), disparaged by journalists and experts in international law (for example, Armand

Lévy and André de Saint-Clair) for its encroachment on Romania’s territory. As late as

1930 an American observer offers a cold description of the ECD’s status:

Without territorial possessions, it is nevertheless a distinct international entity

possessing sovereignty over the broad waters of the Danube . . . the power to

borrow money, to maintain a treasury by assessing and collecting dues, to issue

regulations which have effect of law and to enforce its ordinances by adequate

penalties. These entirely discretionary functions need the sanction of no group of

nations, and there is no appeal from the edicts of the commission. It displays its own

76 Hartley’s first job of opening up the Sulina branch of the Danube for big cargo ships was a great success in 1861 and soon after, in 1862, he was knighted by Queen Victoria (Hartley 166).

155 insignia and flag. The World Court in an advisory opinion declared that “the

European Commission exercises its functions in complete independence of the

territorial authorities.” . . . It falls short of being a bona fide member of the family of

nations because its existence is largely de facto and not de jure. It is safe to predict

that the need for protecting the integrity of the commission will some day compel

the powers to lift it out of the twilight of statehood and accord it membership in the

League of Nations. (Blackburn 1154)

As soon as Charles Hartley’s first works at the Sulina mouth opened the Danube for the larger ships, the Commission started to enforce taxes and exact fines. As a measure against inflation, the ECD had its own currency, that is, the French gold franc. The ECD patrol ships, under the leadership of its Inspector of Navigation, policed the river from Sulina to

Brăila, and its navigation laws were being applied on the entire river and its tributaries.

The only editor who mentions the ECD is Clive Leatherdale, who comments on the fact that Lord Godalming is going to meet the British vice-consul in the city: “Navigation of the Danube was a major concern among the European powers, necessitating an international committee to sit at Galatz. British interests were handled by a Consul-General, whose name in 1893 was Percy Sanderson. If Arthur found the vice-consul uncooperative, he might find himself seeking an interview with Mr Sanderson in person” (470 n. 20). The right term is “commission,” but Leatherdale might be talking of the Executive Committee made of the British, French and Austrian commissioners. However, Great Britain did not have a consul-general in Galaţi, but only a consul, as is indicated in the novel. Unlike

Leatherdale, McNally and Florescu write that “A British vice consulate was established at

Galatz in the early 1840s and eventually a full consulate, because of the rising importance of British trade on the Danube” (258 n. 353). Consul Percy Sanderson was also the British

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Commissioner in the ECD and, if the posse led by Van Helsing arrived in Galaţi in late

1893 (as most editors suggest) they probably missed him, as he had to go back to London and from there to the U.S.A., where he took charge of his new mission, that of Consul-

General for the states of New York, Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

The new Commissioner, lieutenant-colonel Trotter, only arrived in Galaţi the following year, in 1894 (Rossetti and Rey 80-81). In her journal, Mina Harker writes specifically that

Godalming “went to see the Vice-Consul,” as if he knew that Sanderson was not in Galaţi, only to add a few lines later that “The Consul is away, and the Vice-Consul sick” (Dracula

388).

Bram Stoker was aware of the British presence in Galaţi and of the role played there by the European Commission of the Danube, even if the latter is not explicitly mentioned in

Dracula. Stoker knew, for example, that London shipping companies had branches in

Galaţi. In the novel, the firm of Hapgood is represented in Galaţi by its agents, “Messrs

Mackenzie & Steinkoff” (Dracula 388). One of the editors wonders how Captain Donelson

“came to be master of a Russian vessel. The text is unclear; the Czarina Catherine may even be British-registered” (Leatherdale 471 n. 24). The text indicates, in fact, quite clearly, that the ship is British because the vampire hunters need permission from the London company’s agents to go on board the vessel.

The Count’s lackey Petrof Skinski was paid with an English bank note, which he

“cashed for gold at the Danube International Bank” (Dracula 390). In Galaţi, the

Commission had its own bank (Rossetti and Rey 88) and on the territory it administered the preferred currency was the gold French franc (179-180). After Skinski is killed and

Dracula’s trail gets cold, Mina concludes that the Count could not have fled on land because “there are, or there might be, customs and octroi officers to pass” (Dracula 392).

157 Instead, by remaining on water for a longer time, “The customs and the octroi . . . have been avoided” (393). The only way Dracula could avoid the customs was by staying on waters controlled by the ECD, rather than stepping on Romanian territory. The Danube

Navigation Act, debated on 16 August 1858, had given in to British demands, and all ships could thereafter freely navigate the Danube, all its distributaries in the Delta, as well as all its tributaries, as long as they were navigable (Ardeleanu, “La Grande Bretagne et Ses

Efforts” 715). When Stoker’s vampire hunters go up the Siret in a “steam launch,” they are actually travelling in waters governed by the European Commission of the Danube.

Tellingly, when they leave a tributary of the Danube to go up a different river, they are very much aware that they have crossed a frontier: “at Fundu, where the Bistritza runs into the

Sereth, we got a Roumanian flag which we now fly conspicuously” (Dracula 399).

Unlike other places in what Harker describes as “the East,” Galaţi is an oasis of civilisation. Despite the presence here of some of Dracula’s helpers (Hildesheim, Skinski, the Slovaks), Galaţi is the only place where the travellers feel at home. Their hotel rooms had been booked via telegraph and Jonathan Harker actually calls the hotel “home”

(Dracula 391). The people (all British) are benevolent and sympathetic. The clerk that

Godalming meets at the consulate “was very obliging, and offered to do anything in his power” (388) to help him. Messrs Mackenzie and Steinkoff “were more than kind and courteous” (388) with Drs Seward and Van Helsing. Even Captain Donelson is well- meaning and amicable and tells them everything he knows, without asking for any gratuities. One editor’s conclusion about the absence of terrifying scenery in the trip from

Varna through Romania is that the author was less interested in finding out about the places: “Whereas Stoker filled in the background detail of Transylvania by reference to variously named source works, he appears to have done little or no research on Bulgaria

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and Romania. These chapters in consequence lack local colour” (Leatherdale 459-460 n.

81). In reality, George Stoker had been stationed in the region, which means that his brother had access to enough information (and this explains the presence of the city of

Varna in the novel). It is more likely that, like his contemporaries, Stoker saw it as a territory that had been made safe for the Western traveller by the British presence there.

From Varna to Galaţi one would get fairly quickly in a ship, but the vampire hunters do not venture on the Black Sea. Rather, they embark upon a sinuous railway journey, from

Varna to Ruse, Giurgiu, Bucharest, Buzău, Brăila, and Galaţi – only Bucharest is mentioned in the novel, but this was the only possible way in the 1890s (McNally and

Florescu 256 n. 350). What Stoker could have known is that the railway route from Varna to Galaţi was the work of British engineers and of British money. The Varna-Ruse line had been built by a British company led by William Gladstone (a cousin of the politician) and

H. Wollaston Blake (Jensen and Rosegger 119). This is the line that George Stoker used in

1876, when he was going to Constantinople to sign up with the Turkish army. From Ruse, the traveller had to cross the Danube to Giurgiu, in Romania, and take the train on the very first Romanian railroad, from Giurgiu to Bucharest, built in 1869 by J. Trevor Barkley, backed financially by John Staniforth from Sheffield (117-118). The line that went north from Bucharest was conceded to the Ofenheim Syndicate, which, despite the German name, had three English investors (Charles of Romania 130) and, in turn, they ceded the southern half, Bucharest-Galaţi, to a Prussian-British consortium led by Bethel Strousberg

(131). Stoker could have heard about some of these British engineers. We know at least that he was interested in their presence abroad. In his Dublin diary, he mentions “great engineer[s] – like Lesseps or Hawkshaw” (The Lost Journal 113), as well as a graduate of

159 Trinity College named “Hugh Carlile” (83) (or Carlisle), who was a railway engineer in the

Russian Empire.

The most famous Briton with whom the city of Galaţi can be associated (and could have been associated by Stoker) is Charles George Gordon (1833-1885), one of Lytton

Stratchey’s four “eminent Victorians.” Gordon’s death in Khartoum and the belated relief expedition may have been inspirational in Stoker’s creations in Dracula (Cain, Jr. 142-143) and The Jewel of the Seven Stars (Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse 173-175). In his

Personal Reminiscences, Stoker mentions several officers who had gone to Sudan in search of Gordon and who were later celebrated in the Beefsteak Room: General Sir Owen Lanyon

(I, 315), Admiral Lord Charles Beresford (I, 316), Major General Sir Hector Macdonald (I,

322) and Field Marshall Garret Joseph Wolseley (I, 321), commander-in-chief of the Relief

Expedition.77 Gordon first stayed in Galaţi in 1856-1857 as member of the Boundary

Commission, which surveyed and established the 200 miles that were the new frontier between Russia and Moldavia at the end of the Crimean War. In 1871, he returned to Galaţi as Great Britain’s second Commissioner of the Danube, a position in which he served until

1873. Gordon travelled widely through Moldavia, from Iaşi to Galaţi and southern

Bessarabia, where, as he recounts in his letters, some knowledge of German was very helpful (as it would be for Jonathan Harker). In the 1850s, he met the Moldavian prince, hunted wolves and foxes, admired the abundant land and noticed the “swarming” Jews, “an evil-looking lot” and “the leeches of this country” (qtd. in Tappe 571). Gordon’s letters from the Galaţi period were published to great acclaim in 1884, and the Victorian reader could find in them a description of the Carpathians, of a voyage down the Siret (in Dracula,

77 Gordon’s death in 1885 was a big shock for British society and “few, if any, will ever forget that ‘Black Thursday’ the fifth of February, when the news of the fall of Khartoum and the slaughter of Gordon was announced” (Axon 6).

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Harker and Godalming travel upstream on this river) and of wolves “which are very bold in this country” (Gordon 134).

5.2 Learning about Romania

One cannot know for sure how much Bram Stoker read in the six or more years while he was writing Dracula. His Notes, which already show an impressive range of interest and tireless research, are not complete. Although this is cursorily admitted by the editors of Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula,78 it should be stressed that many of the remaining documents date strictly from 1890, the year when Stoker visited Whitby, read

William Wilkinson’s Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia and inquired into the wreck of the Russian schooner Dimitry. The two editors, Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller, have tried to arrange the Notes chronologically, after dividing them into “Handwritten Notes on the Plot,” “Handwritten Research Notes” and “Typed Research

Notes.” The first category starts with several notes dating to early 1890 and continues with a long synopsis of the events of the novel, also from 1890, which the author intended to organise into books and chapters; an outline of the plot from February 1892; three

“memos” jotted down on a single sheet of paper in 1895-1896; and two pages written on the stationery of a hotel in Philadelphia, where Stoker stayed both in 1894 and in 1896.

The research notes, instead, seem to date mostly from 1890, whereas the research done by Stoker in the following six years is missing from the documents preserved at the

Rosenbach Museum and Library. Thus, apart from a few quotations about necromancy

78 They write that “some additional pages may have been lost” (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 9).

161 taken down from a book by seventeenth-century scholar Thomas Browne (which could have been read at a later date), all the “Handwritten Research Notes” are from before and during Stoker’s 1890 stay in Whitby: quotes from Emily Gerard’s “Transylvanian

Superstitions”; Sabine Baring-Gould’s 1865 The Book of Were-Wolves; Robert H. Scott’s

1887 Fishery Barometer Manual; notes on the Whitby dialect; on the 1885 wreck of a

Russian ship off Whitby; a Whitby diary with drawings; a summary of Transylvanian history based on his first readings (present in the “Typed Research Notes” category); and a list of books to read. Apart from yet another series of quotes from Thomas Browne, the

“Typed Research Notes” include Whitby tombstone inscriptions; the official names of wind degrees; quotes from Magyarland (1881); Andrew Crosse’s Round about the Carpathians

(1878); E.C. Johnson’s On the Track of the Crescent (1885); Isabella Bird’s The Golden

Chersonese (1883); Charles Boner’s Transylvania: Its Products and Its People (1865); and

William Wilkinson’s Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820).

Wilkinson’s book, read by Stoker in the spring of 1890 at Whitby, is the next to last (just before the notes on the Whitby tombstones and the degrees of wind, also taken most likely at Whitby). This shows that we have little or no information about anything that Stoker may have read on any topics related to Dracula in the years 1891-1896.

Not all editors give an explicit opinion on the extent of Stoker’s research for

Dracula. When they do not, their annotations and supplementary material show them convinced on the one hand that Stoker’s fact-finding work was impressive and on the other that he was not interested in knowing too much about Romania, Transylvania and the historical Dracula. When they do, their views can be sweeping or contradictory. They might write, for example, like Auerbach and Skal, that “Stoker learned most of what he knew about Eastern European history and legend in the British Museum” (Auerbach and

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Skal 9 n. 6), and that he Stoker “seems to have limited his library research on Tepes to a single volume by William Wilkinson” (331). Relying on Harry Ludlam’s biography, the editor of the first Annotated Dracula writes that the chapters on Transylvania “took Bram many hours of research among books and maps in the British Museum” (Wolf 1975, 3 n.

9). However, despite being convinced that Stoker read about the historical Dracula

“following a lead provided him by a Hungarian friend, Arminius Vambery” (Wolf xiii), this editor also thinks that the writer found most of what he needed in Emily Gerard’s book, which “is crammed with information about [Romanians’] history and folkways” (xiii).

What the editors (with the exception of McNally/Florescu and, in a less clear manner, Wolf) contest, explicitly or implicitly, is that Bram Stoker did any research on the historical Dracula after finding his name in an old book. As one editor puts it: “No one disputes that Stoker lifted the name from the Wallachian voivode. That much is clear from

Stoker’s papers. It is the idea that Stoker read up on the Impaler, beyond the references found in one of his listed sources – William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of

Wallachia and Moldavia – that is hard to accept” (Leatherdale 11). When it comes to other kinds of reading that Stoker may have done, the editors are more accepting. Thus, they admire “the staggering range of Bram Stoker’s knowledge and awareness – not only of vampires and the occult, but of the mores, the science, the art, of his own England”

(Auerbach and Skal xiii); and they are ready to accept and insert in their editions material that is not mentioned in the writer’s working notes. Riquelme published in his edition the article on “Vampire” from the ninth edition (1888) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica because “Stoker would have had access to [it] in the British Library while he was writing

Dracula” (Riquelme 375). He also inserts a fragment from Richard Burton’s vampire story

Vikram because “Stoker, who knew and admired Burton, would have been aware that

163 Vikram was republished . . . when Stoker had just begun work on Dracula” (372). Elizabeth

Miller justifies the inclusion with the same argument (Sense & Nonsense 23). She also admits that many vampire characteristics present in the novel do not “appear in Stoker’s listed source-texts” (24), although it is evident that Stoker must have read Polidori’s The

Vampyre, James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampyre and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla.

In the interview with Jane Stoddard published in the British Weekly (1 July 1897),

Stoker said that he had “always been interested in the vampire legend” and that “the knowledge of vampire superstitions shown in Dracula was gathered from a great deal of miscellaneous reading” (Byron 486). If this is true, he could have started his research for

Dracula before 1890, which is suggested by one of the editors of the novel (Ellmann xiii), while the editors of the working notes admit that Stoker may have read at least Emily

Gerard’s essay on “Transylvanian Superstitions” before 1890 (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller

121 n. 253). This is also what Florence Stoker seems to intimate in her Preface to

Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Tales, published in 1914: “Had my husband lived longer, he might have seen fit to revise this work, which is mainly from the earlier years of his strenuous life” (qtd. in Miller, Sense & Nonsense 109). The phrase is ambiguous and one cannot know how Florence saw the stages of her husband’s life. However, “the earlier years of his strenuous life” could refer either to the beginning of Stoker’s work with the Lyceum

Theatre (the early 1880s) or even to his life before Florence (the 1870s).

What seems certain, though, is that there are sufficient indications that Stoker had knowledge and interest in both vampire stories and Romanian circumstances from an early point in his career (that is to say, the 1870s, when he was close to Sheridan Le Fanu and his brother George was on the Lower Danube) and that this interest continued and broadened in the 1890s while he was working on Dracula. Leslie Klinger, the first editor to use

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Stoker’s manuscript for the novel, notices once that the writer kept looking for sources.

When the vampire Count speaks of the “Hungarian yoke” thrown off by some of his ancestors after 1526 (Dracula 61), the author has inserted a last-minute correction: “The

Manuscript refers to an ‘Austrian yoke,’ altered in the published text to ‘Hungarian’ – again suggestive of research by Stoker” (Klinger 70-71 n. 32). Because Quincey Morris says, “I understand that the Count comes from a wolf country” (Dracula 365), other editors suggest that the author may have read up on the ancient kingdom of Dacia:

An interesting remark, indicating Stoker may have done some reading on early

Romanian Dacian history which is mentioned in the books of Wilkinson and

Samuelson. The old standard of the Dacian people who inhabited Romania before

the Roman conquest was a dragon with a wolf’s head. The standard was made of tin

and gave a frightening noise when fluttering in the wind. The wolf had acquired the

prestige of a god in pagan Dacia. Some linquistic [sic] experts believe that the very

word “Dacian” meant “wolfman” in the Dacian language, which has not survived.

(McNally and Florescu 244 n. 333)

The link between the phrase “wolf country” and the Dacians seems improbable; after all,

Morris is talking about wolf-hunting in Romania, which Stoker could have read about in

General Gordon’s letters, Andrew Crosse’s Round about the Carpathians or Emily

Gerard’s The Land beyond the Forest – but not in her “Transylvanian Superstitions” and certainly not in An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, whose author writes that Romanian wolves are “of the most timid nature” (Wilkinson 128).

However, Stoker’s working notes show him curious to understand the entire history of Romanians (from Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania) beginning with their ancestors, the Dacians. On top of his note from Wilkinson’s Account, he typed: “Ancient

165 Kingdom of Dacia = Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania and Temesvar – finally conquered by Romans” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 246-247). Although this was taken from Wilkinson (2),

Stoker did not write down the page; the sentence stands alone and seems to be one of his usual “memos” to himself. On a handwritten note, Stoker tried to make sense of the history of the territories inhabited by Romanians. He first made a column of all the centuries from the Roman conquest down to his own time (from the first century AD to the nineteenth) and then added events and historical circumstances. Most of these concern Transylvania, but some speak of Wallachia or, more generally, of Dacia (before the separation of the three principalities). There are corrections, marginal notes and sentences added subsequently. This note, too, is introduced by a memo: “Wallachs descendants of Dacians”

(Bram Stoker’s Notes 170).79 Despite suggestions from editors and other commentators that

Stoker neither knew nor was interested in Romanian history, the note shows his efforts to understand it, century after century, with the sources that were available to him.

Stoker’s list of Romanian centuries is actually a rehearsal for Count Dracula’s narrative of his own ancestors. The list follows the arrival of Goths, Huns, Avars, Gepidae,

Bulgars; the settlement of the Szeklers and of the Magyars; the clashes between

Wallachians and Turks. It mentions the Honfoglalas (Hungarian conquest of fatherland) and it speaks of the battles of Kosovo and Mohacs. Thus, from an early stage in the development of the plot of Dracula, the writer was carefully trying to understand the biography of his quasi-immortal protagonist. Nevertheless, there is no direct evidence that

79 Or, rather, “Wallachs descendants of Dacians – Saxons.” The last word seems to be connected to the rest by a simple dash, probably marking Stoker’s wish to remember some kind of importance that the Saxons were supposed to have in the novel. The editors of the Notes, however, transcribe “Dacians and Saxons” (171). This is, in fact, an unlikely reading suggesting that Romanians are a mixture of ancient Dacians and medieval Saxons. The information for Stoker’s list of centuries comes, as the editors suggest, “from various sources” (171 n. 292), more exactly from Wilkinson, Crosse, Johnson and Mazuchelli. However, none of these authors suggest such an ascendancy for Romanians.

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Stoker tried to find out more on the life and deeds of the so-called Vlad the Impaler, which is why many commentators today insist that the medieval Romanian ruler and the vampire

Count have little in common except the name: “Examination of Stoker’s novel and research notes suggests he knew little about the historical Dracula, other than the brief, muddled paragraphs in Wilkinson, and this all-important footnote: ‘Dracula in the Wallachian languages means Devil’” (Leatherdale 12). Or, as Elizabeth Miller has put it, in an essay calling on Dracula specialists to forget about the Impaler connection: “Are we to believe that [Stoker] knew about Vlad’s bloodthirsty activities but decided to discard such a history for his villainous Count in favour of the meager pickings gleaned from Wilkinson?”

(Miller, “Filing for Divorce” 175).80 However, some of his research such as the list of the centuries of Romanian history show that Stoker had sufficient motivation to try to find out more. He also would have had the necessary sources to do so.

To be able to take into account the books that mention Vlad the Impaler as possible inspiration for Stoker’s eponymous character in Dracula, one need only apply Arthur

Friedman’s principle mentioned earlier that an editor should list as sources such works which the author may or may not have known even if there is no proof that he did and even if the works are obscure, provided that they are in sufficient number and that they were recent enough when the author started writing. The first work that deserves such mention is

James Samuelson’s Roumania: Past and Present (1882). Major E.C. Johnson quotes from it in his On the Track of the Crescent and Stoker duly wrote down the name of the author and the title. It is “a fleeting reference” (Leatherdale, Origins 88) and there is no way to

80 Yet, the opposite seems equally odd and even disturbing: that all Stoker knew about the historical Dracula was what he had read in Wilkinson (the voivode battled the Turks and had a nickname that could mean brave, cruel or cunning), and still he made him a vampire. In this light, the idea that Stoker actually knew the legends of the bloodthirsty Vlad seems a valid enough hypothesis.

167 know if the author of Dracula ever opened Samuelson’s book. However, if he did, he would have found this portrait of the historical Dracula:

the Turks were so much afraid of Hunniades that they are said to have given him the

name of “the Devil”; but the same designation, as well as that of the Impaler, has

also been bestowed upon Vlad, a voivode of Wallachia, who was probably the ally

of Hunniades, and who, if one-tenth of what has been related of him be true, has a

much better claim to the title. He is represented to have been one of the most

atrocious and cruel tyrants who ever disgraced even those dark ages. One day he

massacred 500 boyards who were dissatisfied with his rule. The torture of men,

women, and children, seems to have been his delight. Certain Turkish envoys, when

admitted into his presence, refused to remove their turbans, whereupon he had them

nailed to their heads. He burned 400 missionaries and impaled 500 gipsies to secure

their property. In order to strike terror into Mohammed II he crossed over into

Bulgaria, defeated the Turks, and brought back with him 25,000 prisoners, men,

women, and children, whom he is said to have impaled upon a large plain called

Praelatu. (Samuelson, Roumania 170)

The author includes a footnote which explains: “He was universally named the Impaler in consequence of a practice which is well known to our readers through the so-called

Bulgarian atrocities. A sharpened pole was forced into the body of the victim, and the other end was then driven into the earth, the unfortunate man, woman, or child being left to writhe in agony until relieved by death” (170 n. 1). Following Samuelson’s suggestion, it seems quite possible that the “Bulgarian atrocities” reminded some among the informed contemporaries in Britain and elsewhere of the medieval Romanian ruler.

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A second possible source for the historical Dracula is William Beatty Kingston’s book A Wanderer’s Notes (1888). “Beatty Kingston (the war correspondent of the Daily

Telegraph)” (Stoker, Personal Reminiscences I, 358) was present at one of Stoker’s many dinners with Richard Burton. He was actually a good friend of Henry Irving’s: he dedicated to the actor his book Music and Manners: Personal Reminiscences and Sketches of

Character (1887), in which there is a long chapter on the music and on the manner of

Romanians – including a brief mention of the historical Dracula as “Vlad the Cruel”

(Beatty Kingston, Music and Manners 117). He was also the special envoy of the Daily

Telegraph to Bucharest several times between 1865 and 1885; he knew personally both

Prince Cuza (1859-1866) and King Charles I of Romania (1866-1914) as well as many

Romanian politicians; he even learned some of the language of the country and was able to have a simple conversation in Romanian; and he dedicated his book Monarchs I Have Met

(1887) to Elisabeth, Queen of Romania. Perhaps he wrote more – and more frequently – on

Romanian matters than any other Victorian.

A Wanderer’s Notes contains several legends surrounding the historical Dracula, although the author confuses Vlad with Radu the Handsome and he calls the former Vlad the Ferocious and the latter “the Devil” (not entirely inaccurate, since Radu himself was a

Dracula, while Vlad is usually known in Romania as “Ţepeş”). This passage includes some exploits that are several times mentioned in Stoker’s novel:

No sooner were [the Sultan’s] emissaries fairly within the boundaries of Hospodar

Vlad’s Principality than he caused them to be arrested, and their hands and feet to

be cut off; after which they were impaled in front of his palace. Having performed

this highly characteristic feat, he assembled all the armed forces at his disposition,

crossed the Danube, and ravaged the Turkish provinces on its right bank with fire

169 and sword, burning all the towns and villages, and putting man, woman, and child to

death. The Turkish officers, soldiers, and officials whom he captured, he had

carefully impaled and set up, planted on the long poles transfixing their bodies,

along the bank of the Danube, pour encourager les autres. The Sultan, in his turn,

invaded Wallachia with an enormous army and drove Vlad into the hills, where the

latter offered a long and desperate resistance to the Turkish forces; and it was during

this war that he exercised his rights as an independent sovereign by appealing to the

Hungarians for aid against the invader, and offering them his alliance against the

Turk. This proceeding on the part of Vlad served as precedent to his successors.

(Beatty Kingston, A Wanderer’s Notes II, 29-30)

Another possible source is Edwin Lawrence Godkin (1831-1902), an Irishman who had settled in America and was, in the 1880s and 1890s, editor-in-chief of the New York

Evening Post. Godkin is mentioned in Stoker’s Personal Reminiscences (I, 321) and was a contributor to Knowles’s The Nineteenth Century. Early in his career, before going to the

Crimea as a war correspondent, Godkin published The History of Hungary and the

Magyars (London: John Cassell, 1853), in which he speaks of Vlad Dracul, the Impaler’s father, the one first mentioned in Count Dracula’s speech about his ancestors. In 1444, before the battle of Varna, this Dracula tried to dissuade King Ladislas of Hungary from fighting the Turks:

Drakul, the waywode of Wallachia, whom he called upon to accompany him, with

his vassals, on seeing the royal forces, which did not amount to more than 20,000

men, presumed to remark that their numbers did not exceed the hunting retinue that

sometimes attended the sultan, and presented Ladislas with two horses of matchless

speed, as if to mark his evil foreboding of the event. But the king felt such implicit

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confidence in the skill and valour of Hunyadi, and the prayers and protection of the

church, that he scarce felt a pang of doubt or of remorse. (Godkin 111)

Another author who wrote about the historical Dracula in nineteenth-century Britain is James Henry Skene, British Consul in Aleppo between 1855 and 1877, brother of the better-known historian of Celtic Scotland William Forbes Skene. After several trips across the Romanian principalities (including Transylvania), Skene published The Frontier Land of the Christian and the Turk (two volumes, 1853-1854), in which he dedicated several pages to the “remarkable era of . . . the Hospodar, Vlad the Empaler, or, as he was called,

Dracul, the Devil” (II, 68-69). Skene is the first traveller through Romania who speaks of

Vlad being arrested and imprisoned, then freed so as to start again his wars with the

Ottomans in the 1470s. His final portrait of the warrior shows a sympathetic tone not unlike that expressed by Van Helsing:

When he took prisoners from the Turks, he had their feet flayed, rubbed with salt,

and licked by the rough tongues of goats. And with all this he was a remarkably

handsome man, with a mild expression of countenance and long soft hair; he was

possessed of undoubted bravery, and was of a comic humour withal; though, in

refinement of cruelty, he far surpassed Louis XI of France, John IV of Russia, and

even Caligula, Domitian, and Nero; for the most remarkable instances of his

barbarity are such as were never heard of elsewhere. (Skene II, 71)

In Dracula, Arminius informs Van Helsing that the Count has been “in life a most wonderful man,” which appears incongruous to some editors: “If this is meant to be a portrait of Vlad the Impaler, it is so fanciful that it raises doubts about whether Stoker and

Arminius Vambéry ever conversed about him . . . rather it points to Stoker’s almost total ignorance of Vlad the Impaler” (Leatherdale 414 n. 5). In fact, such a portrait is consistent

171 with the one provided by Skene or by James William Ozanne in Three Years in Roumania

(1878), in which all the legends about Vlad are again collected (Ozanne adds a few more).

The author says that “Vlad V, of Wallachia, surnamed ‘The Impaler,’ was a hero, but a cruel tyrant” (Ozanne 187) who “with consummate skill, utterly routed the Turkish army, which numbered 250,000 men, forcing it to retire in disorder towards the Danube” (188).

Although he speaks of Vlad’s atrocities, Ozanne qualifies them: “On the other hand, the country was kept by this regime in the most tranquil condition” (191). Mary Adelaide

Walker (1820-1904), another possible source for Dracula,81 rejects such excuses in

Untrodden Paths in Roumania (1888) and writes about “Vlad ‘the Impaler,’ a hideous distinction, that indicates but faintly the unimaginable cruelties with which he thought to awe and to arrest even the fierce and unscrupulous Ottoman invaders” (Walker 309). She notes that “it is truly remarked of this ruler, sometimes called also Vlad the Devil, that he established order by terror” (311), but rejects unnamed Romanian informants according to whom Vlad was a zealous Christian: “The mixture of devotion and devilry . . . cannot soften or extenuate his crimes” (312).

Finally, Bram Stoker could have found something about the historical Dracula in

Arminius Vambéry’s writings. McNally and Florescu have established that “a search through all of the professor’s published writings fails to reveal any comments on Vlad,

Dracula, or vampires” (In Search of Dracula 178), and their conclusion is quoted by other

81 Committed to the editorial tenet that only sources contemporary with the author may be used to explain obscure terms from the edited text, Leonard Wolf quotes Walker’s definition of a “boyar”: “Mrs. Walker in Untrodden Paths in Romania says: ‘The Boyards were created a distinct class of nobility in the fifteenth century, when Radu, Voïvode of Wallachia, endeavoured to model them in imitation of the offices of the Court of Byzantium. The title of Boyard, if now used, merely signifies a person of fortune and position’” (Wolf 28 n. 14). Although Stoker may have seen this definition, he certainly saw others. Walker confuses “boyars” (in Romanian, “boieri”), with a small group of boyars, called “dregători,” which formed the executive branch of government and had been modelled after the Byzantine courtiers. See my earlier comment in a prior chapter on this distinction.

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editors (Wolf 291 n. 22; Leatherdale 337 n. 65; Klinger 341 n. 41). While it is true that

Vambéry does not use the names of Vlad and Dracula, he does speak of Vlad Dracul, the first Dracula mentioned by the Count in the speech about his ancestors. In Hungary in

Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern Times (1887), Vambéry speaks of “the vayvode of

Wallachia [who] joined [Hunyadi] with about 10,000 men” (206) at the 1444 battle of

Varna and then of the 1448 battle of Kosovo in which again took part “the Wallachian vayvode” (211). These are brief mentions of only one of the Draculas, but they show that

Vambéry was knowledgeable about medieval Romania and that Stoker could have found more information about Dracula’s ancestors in the book of someone he admired.

The really contentious issue remains the suggestion made by Harry Ludlam in his

1964 biography of Stoker that Vambéry gave the writer the impulse to look into the story of

Vlad the Impaler also known as Dracula. Elizabeth Miller, who has rejected this idea several times on the grounds that there is no evidence in Stoker’s notes,82 insists that

“Ludlam does not identify sources (no footnotes, no bibliography) and the author revels in reconstructing conversations from anecdotal evidence gleaned from his primary source,

Stoker’s son Noel” (Sense & Nonsense 188). Some editors quote Ludlam’s (and Noel

Stoker’s) suggestion about Vambéry’s vital role in the shaping of Dracula without mentioning the biographer (McNally and Florescu 193-194 n. 274). Others quote him as saying that Vambéry “enlarged Stoker’s understanding of the historical Dracula” (Wolf 291 n. 22). Some accept the idea with caution: “presumably Vambéry introduced him to

Transylvanian history and legend” (Auerbach and Skal 212 n. 3). Others reject it

82 One of the reviewers of Leatherdale’s edition, who also speaks of Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow (ed. Elizabeth Miller), suggests that “Miller’s attempted demolition of [Vambéry] is not quite as conclusive as she seems to think” (Hopkins, Review of Leatherdale 270). In the “Introduction” to her edition of Stoker’s working notes, Miller takes the more moderate position that “the Notes neither prove nor disprove the rumour that the Hungarian professor Arminius Vambéry furnished Stoker with any information about Dracula or Transylvania” (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 4)

173 completely: “What is not reasonable to assume is that the real Arminius gave Stoker real information about the historical Dracula” (Leatherdale 337 n. 65). Clive Leatherdale later mixed up Vambéry with the novel’s character Arminius, insisting that the Hungarian cannot be accepted as a reliable source because he describes Dracula with “wholesome epithets, not wicked ones. Vlad Dracula enjoyed few apologists so generous as Arminius, which serves to confirm that he could have known little or nothing about him” (337 n. 67).

Yet, just as the other possible sources mentioned above do, Arminius (Vambéry) could have drawn a semi-sympathetic portrait of the medieval warrior.

Evidence that Stoker at least read what Vambéry had written about Transylvania and Romania can be found in the novel. In one of his first conversations with Jonathan

Harker, the Count speaks of a battle in which Wallachians, mentioned simply as “patriots,” waited for the Hungarians and Austrians “on the rocks above the passes, that they might sweep destruction on them with their artificial avalanches” (Dracula 52). The reference here is to the 1330 battle of Posada between the Wallachian ruler Basarab I (the founder of the principality) and the Hungarian king Charles Robert of Anjou. McNally and Florescu write that “Charles Robert of Anjou, king of Hungary, penetrated Romanian soil as far as the pass of Posada in November of 1330. He was caught there in the narrow passage by the armies of Prince Basarab of Wallachia who had boulders hurled upon the Hungarians” (63 n. 60). Auerbach and Skal repeat the information about the Romanians “hurling boulders down upon [Anjou’s] army” but misread the phrase “Romanian soil” and speak of

“Hungary invad[ing] Romania” (27 n. 6). Klinger, too, thinks the king of Hungary “invaded

Roumania [sic]” rather than Wallachia and also writes that “the invaders were crushed by boulders hurled down on them” (53 n. 47). None of the editors make any suggestions about

Stoker’s possible sources for the brief description of the battle.

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The reason must be that the battle is not mentioned in any of Stoker’s recorded sources. The books about Transylvania and Hungary from which we know that Stoker took notes are travelogues and general descriptions of geographical, economic and ethnographic circumstances and do not dwell long on historical matters. The only survey of Romanian history, Wilkinson’s Account, simply states that “from the commencement of the 14th century, [Wallachia’s and Moldavia’s] independency was acknowledged by Hungary”

(Wilkinson 15). In fact, the battle is absent from all English-language books on Romania,

Transylvania or Hungary that Stoker could have read – with only two exceptions.83 The first is E.L. Godkin’s 1853 History of Hungary:

Despairing of being able to contend against the king in the open field, Bessarab

resorted to stratagem. Decoying the Magyar army into a mountain pass by feigning

a retreat, he suddenly surrounded them on every side . . . he in the meantime

fortified the entrances to the defile, and crowned the heights with men-at-arms and

archers, ready to pour down showers of arrows, and roll heavy rocks upon the

Hungarian army at the word of their leader. When the Magyars became aware of the

full danger of their position, their consternation was great. . . . Their only hope lay

in forcing the entrance of the gorge without delay; but long ere they reached it,

three-fourths of their number were buried beneath the missiles of their assailants.

(Godkin 71)

The other, more modern, version of the battle that Stoker could have known is in Arminius

Vambéry’s Hungary (1887):

83 This can be explained. The battle would have been deemed obscure (and certainly inglorious) by the Hungarian informants of travellers such as Boner, Paget, Johnson, Crosse, Mazuchelli, Gerard, and was little- known in Romania at the time. Wallachian chroniclers do not mention either Basarab or the battle and speak instead of a legendary Radu Negru (the Black). Skene, Ozanne and Walker (who had Romanian informants) all mention Radu Negru. Stoker could only have found it in historical surveys of Hungary.

175 Charles boldly advanced, with his spirited knights, over the impassable and

unfamiliar roads of Wallachia. . . . The Hungarian army was led astray by the

Wallachian guides, and in retreating found itself quite unexpectedly hemmed in

between steep and towering rocks from which there was no outlet. A shower of

stones descended on their heads; the Wallachians who occupied the heights sent

down dense volleys of rocks and arrows upon the doomed Hungarians. . . .

Wallachia maintained her independence. (Vambéry, Hungary 161)

Since there is no mention of the battle in Stoker’s working notes – not even in the handwritten list of centuries, it seems very likely that he continued to research Romanian history and that Vambéry’s writings provided sufficient data.

5.3 The Historical Dracula

Most of what Bram Stoker knew about Vlad Ţepeş’s life, exploits and lineage is contained in Count Dracula’s speech given to an astonished Jonathan Harker in the third chapter of the novel. This is, without a doubt, the most heavily annotated passage in

Dracula. As a rule, all editors consider the speech so incoherent that, rather than a narrative of the life of a medieval Romanian warrior, it could refer to nobody in particular. Their annotations usually indicate that the speech is too “murky” (Auerbach and Skal 34 n. 96) to be given any consideration; that it is “so vague and contradictory as to be worthless as an historical portrait” (Leatherdale 69 n. 46); and that “the only point of coincidence between

Count Dracula and Vlad the Impaler is their name” (Klinger 71 n. 36). Elizabeth Miller has

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given a very exact summary of these views in a book conceived for the use of Western tourists in Romania:

All that we are certain Stoker knew is this: that there was a voivode named Dracula:

that this Dracula crossed the Danube River and attacked the Turks; that he enjoyed a

brief success; that he was driven back into Wallachia, was defeated, and escaped

into Hungary; and that his brother replaced him as voivode. That’s it. There are no

further references to Vlad Dracula in Stoker’s Notes; nor is the voivode mentioned

anywhere in the remaining books and articles that Stoker listed as his sources for the

novel. Everything else about the connection between Count Dracula and Vlad is at

best speculation, or at worst fabrication. (Handbook 112-113)

Miller’s text also summarises Dracula’s speech, although it does not mention the curious last part about a successor of “a later age.” This is, in fact, what Count Dracula has to say about the historical Dracula:

When was redeemed that great shame of my nation, the shame of Cassova, when

the flags of the Wallach and the Magyar went down beneath the Crescent, who was

it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on

his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that his own unworthy

brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of

slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race

who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into

Turkeyland; who, when he was beaten back, came again, and again, and again,

though he had come alone from the bloody field where his troops being slaughtered,

since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph? (Dracula 60-61)

177 The speech is clearly a development of the notes which Stoker took from

Wilkinson’s account. He first wrote down the idea that “DRACULA in Wallachian language means DEVIL,” then he summarised the following from pages 18-19 of

Wilkinson’s book:

The Wallachians joined Hungarians in 1448 and made war on Turkey being

defeated at battle of Cassova in Bulgaria and finding it impossible to make stand

against the Turks submitted to annual tribute which they paid until 1460 when

Sultan Mahomet II being occupied in completing conquest of islands in Archipelago

gave opportunity of shaking off yoke. Their VOIVODE (DRACULA) crossed

Danube and attacked Turkish troops. Only momentary success. Mahomet drove him

back to Wallachia where pursued and defeated him. The VOIVODE escaped into

Hungary and the Sultan caused his brother Bladus received in his place. He made

treaty with Bladus binding Wallachians to perpetual tribute and laid the foundations

of that slavery not yet abolished. (1820) (Bram Stoker’s Notes 244-245)

The parenthesis added by Stoker at the end of the note shows that he was well aware of the political situation in Romania and felt the need to point out that the book had been published in 1820. Dracula’s speech follows William Wilkinson’s narrative84 quite faithfully up to a certain point. Wilkinson speaks of an attack on “few Turkish troops”; in

84 This is the original passage in Wilkinson’s account: “The Wallachians under this Voïvode [Dan] joined again the Hungarians in 1448, and made war on Turkey; but being totally defeated at the battle of Cossova, in Bulgaria, and finding it no longer possible to make any stand against the Turks, they submitted again to the annual tribute, which they paid until the year 1460, when the Sultan Mahomet II, being occupied in completing the conquest of the islands in the Archipelago, afforded them a new opportunity of shaking off the yoke. Their Voïvode, also named Dracula, did not remain satisfied with mere prudent measures of defence: with an army he crossed the Danube and attacked the few Turkish troops that were stationed in his neighbourhood; but this attempt, like those of his predecessors, was only attended with momentary success. Mahomet having turned his arms against him, drove him back to Wallachia, whither he pursued and defeated him. The Voïvode escaped into Hungary, and the Sultan caused his brother Bladus to be named in his place. He made a treaty with Bladus, by which he bound the Wallachians to perpetual tribute; and laid the foundations of that slavery, from which no efforts have yet had the power of extricating them with any lasting efficacy” (Wilkinson 18-19).

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his notes, Stoker drops “few,” then in the novel writes that the historical Dracula “beat the

Turk on his own ground,” that is, south of the Danube. The author might be trying to make the Count (assuming that he and his ancestor are one and the same) more formidable; or he could be altering his narrative to have it fit other, more impressive accounts of the exploits of the historical Dracula.

Wilkinson’s narrative is not only coherent, but quite accurate, although much too brief. He speaks first of the 1444 battle of Varna, where “Dracula’s son” (Wilkinson 17) shows up (this is, of course, not Vlad Ţepeş, but his older brother, Mircea II; quite tellingly,

Stoker skipped this part); then about the battle of “Cossova” (18), where a “Dan” (in fact

Vladislav II, son of Dan II, but fourteenth-century historians like the Byzantine

Chalkokondyles also called him Dan, after his father) takes part; then about the campaign south of the Danube of another Dracula (19) – here he adds the famous footnote in which the name of the hero is said to mean “the Devil”; and, finally, about this Dracula being replaced by his own treacherous brother (19). Dracula’s speech in the novel is actually simpler, as it starts with the “shame of Cassova” and continues with how this defeat was later redeemed by one “of his race” who crossed the Danube to battle the Turks on their own ground. The narrative again turns tragic with the treason of an “unworthy brother” that brought about the downfall of Dracula’s presumed ancestor. To this, the Count adds a descendant who, inspired by his ancestor, crossed again the river “in a later age.”

However, the editors insist that the speech is confusing and unreliable. For example, although by “the shame of Cassova” Dracula can only refer to the 1448 battle of Kosovo

Polje, since this is the one discussed by Wilkinson, Stoker’s principal (and, according to most editors, only) source for the speech, some editors (Auerbach and Skal 35 n. 5;

Leatherdale 67 n. 34) also mention the 1389 battle with the same name. Others – Leonard

179 Wolf (41 n. 19)85 and Klinger (68-69 n. 24) – even consider the latter as the actual fight hinted at by the Count. While it is true that the battles have the same name, they are sixty years apart, and, according to modern accounts, there were no Hungarians or Wallachians on the battlefield in 1389. More importantly, Wilkinson makes absolutely no mention of the first battle of 1389, and understandably so, since it concerns Serbia, not Wallachia.

Dracula’s speech appears thus convoluted and arcane, which is reinforced by the way in which the clearest reference to the historical Dracula has been annotated.

When the Count speaks of his ancestor’s incursion into Ottoman territory, some editors accept it as a reference to Vlad Ţepeş’s “attack in Bulgaria in 1462” (McNally and

Florescu 67 n. 87), “a ruthless campaign of slaughter” (Luckhurst 370), while others insist that “this incident remains historically murky” (Auerbach and Skal 34 n. 6). Many editors simply suggest that, although Count Dracula clearly states that he is talking of “a Dracula indeed,” he is in fact talking about John Hunyadi, voivode of Transylvania and regent of

Hungary, who died in 1456 while defending Belgrade, and who was not related to the historical Dracula. Wolf writes that the event mentioned in the Count’s speech refers to

Hunyadi’s “victory over the Turks at Nándorfehérvár in 1456 [which] stemmed the eastern threat to Europe for a hundred years and earned him the nickname ‘Turk-beater’” (41 n.

21). Leatherdale makes the same choice and insists that, “Although he identifies the voivode as a Dracula, he does not say which Dracula. Janos Hunyadi, for example, also

85 Perhaps because he is quoting from Short History of the Near East (1922) by W.S. Davis, Wolf’s narrative is fraught with pro-Turkish rhetoric. Implausibly, the Turks appear “outnumbered”; they were “better disciplined and led”; the Christians (Serbians) are mentioned as their “foes”; Sultan Murad was killed, “but not in battle”; the Serbian national hero Miloš Obilić appears only as a “nobleman named Milosh,” so as to diminish his importance; it is the Westerners who ultimately stopped the Turks, although it is not said when; and Hunyadi led a “revolt,” as if Hungary had been under Turkish domination. This idea of the “revolt” is a topos of many Victorian and post-Victorian commentators, who see the battles against the Turks as clashes between Orientals, rather than Christian crusades. The “revolt” is associated not only with countries that were in some sort of dependent relationship with the Ottomans, but even with countries that were fully independent and even empires in their own right, like Hunyadi’s Hungary.

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defeated the Turks, at Nándorfehérvár in 1456” (68 n. 37).86 Leatherdale seems convinced that Hunyadi was one of the Draculas, whereas Klinger, who also writes that “Dracula probably refers here to János Hunyadi” (69 n. 26), later confesses his puzzlement:

“Dracula’s meaning here is somewhat unclear, does he claim a familial relationship with

Hunyadi, a national hero? Or, as is more likely, is he using the term ‘Dracula’ in its literal sense: a dragon, a devil, a person of cunning and courage?” (69 n. 27). Such meaning, suggested by Wilkinson, is never used in the novel. The Count makes it clear that he is talking of an actual ancestor, a Dracula “of my own race.” Moreover, there is no mention of

Hunyadi in the novel and not even in Wilkinson’s account.

Ţepeş’s replacement by his own brother, Radu the Handsome, who made a treaty with the Sultan, “by which he bound the Wallachians to perpetual tribute and laid the foundations of that slavery” (Wilkinson 19) is also clearly mentioned in Dracula’s speech.

McNally and Florescu tell the story of this brother, left as a hostage at the sultan’s court when Ţepeş’s father made peace with the Turks, and who had been “won over by Murad the Second and later Mohammed the Conqueror because of his effeminate nature and good looks” (McNally and Florescu 67 n. 88), although such an account is not mentioned in

Wilkinson or in the novel. Auerbach and Skal offer a similar story, also with the emphasis on the possible amorous relationship between Radu and the Sultan, although in their version the hostage teen becomes the predator rather than the prey: “In 1444, the Turks captured both Vlad Tepes and his brother Radu. The seductive Radu became politically and sexually entangled in the Ottoman court. As the Turkish candidate to the Wallachian throne, he fought and displaced his patriotic (if sadistic) brother Vlad” (Auerbach and Skal

86 Wolf is actually quoting from Gabriel Ronay’s 1972 The Truth about Dracula, whose author uses the Hungarian name for Belgrade: Nándorfehérvár. Both Wolf and Leatherdale forget to translate it and most English-language readers would have a hard time figuring out what city was defended by Hunyadi in 1456.

181 35 n. 8). Wolf goes one step further and sides with the invading Turks, writing that Radu became ruler of Wallachia in 1462, when “Vlad the Impaler was finally driven from power” (Wolf 41 n. 27). Klinger turns Vlad’s nickname into a family name for both brothers but, instead of realising that his speculation about Hunyadi as the real Dracula does not quite hold water, prefers to claim that the Count’s speech is confusing: “Dracula appears to refer here to Radu Ţepeş . . . . However, this contradicts the identification of the

Voivode who ‘crossed the Danube’ as Hunyadi and confirms that the ‘history’ given here is a hodgepodge of misremembered ‘facts’” (Klinger 70 n. 28).

However, the most puzzling episode in Dracula’s account is that of the last ancestor,

“that other of his race . . . in a later age.” He is more difficult to identify because the Count no longer seems to follow Wilkinson’s tight narrative. Most editors do not annotate this part of the speech. Others simply state their perplexity: “Cryptic, to say the least”

(Auerbach and Skal 35 n. 9); “It is anyone’s guess who Stoker has in mind here”

(Leatherdale 68 n. 40). Leonard Wolf seems confused about the chronology of events when he suggests (following Gabriel Ronay) that this ancestor is “Vlad III Dracul, who distinguished himself in the battle of Varna in 1444” (Wolf 42 n. 23), in other words Vlad

Ţepeş’s father. This is impossible not only if the previous Dracula is to be understood as

Vlad Ţepeş, but even if one were to follow Wolf in identifying him with John Hunyadi.

The latter died in 1456, nine years after ordering the death of Vlad Dracul. Another proponent of Hunyadi, Leslie Klinger notices the anachronism but again blames the

Count’s lack of clarity: “this makes nonsense of Dracula’s ‘later age’ remark” (Klinger 70 n. 29). A solution suggested both by Klinger and by Auerbach/Skal is “Dracula himself,” as inferred by Mina Harker. However, Mina simply acknowledges the fact that the Count has

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been many “Draculas” during the past few centuries, which can include all the Draculas mentioned in the speech, rather than only the one of “a later age.”

The solution to this problem can actually be found in Stoker’s working notes. After taking down much of the information about Dracula from Wilkinson’s account, Stoker skipped the provisions of the treaty between Radu and the Sultan and the general situation of the principality in the century that followed (Wilkinson 19-24). The Account mentions no other ruler after this, until “1593, when an individual of the name of Michael was elected to the Voïvodate. He no sooner held the reins of government than he determined to deliver his country from the Turkish yoke, and restore it to independency” (24). Wilkinson then provides a detailed narrative (24-28) of Michael the Brave’s campaign against the

Turks, until “the Sultan was finally compelled to relinquish his claims” (26), as well as his battles for Transylvania, which he gained, lost, and regained in the last three years of his reign. Stoker only wrote briefly about Michael and seemed to be more and more interested about Transylvania: “1600. After abdication of Sigismund of Transylvania, this principality became tributary to Emperor Rodolphus who appointed Michael VOIVODE.

Transylvanians revolted & wished to recall Sigismund but were defeated by Austrians and whole province subjugated” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 246-247). However, he read the entire account about Michael the Brave and, while finding information about anti-Turkish campaigns, he was interested to note the closer and closer ties forged with Transylvania by

Dracula’s descendants. The next note he took down from Wilkinson’s Account is about

“Constantine Brancovano Bessarabba of Wallachia. . . . Emperor Leopold made him Prince of Roman Empire and gave him landed estates in Transylvania” (246-247).

The notes taken from Wilkinson’s account suggest that Stoker was trying to establish the family tree of the historical Dracula and of his character, who (from the point

183 of view of the family trees) are one and the same person. He was also trying to understand how the Wallachian ruler came to have Transylvanian descendants. When he first published an excerpt from Wilkinson in his critical study of the novel, Leatherdale stopped at the passage about Radu the Handsome (Origins 96). Evidently, Stoker did not stop there. He read about Michael the Brave, who was the grandson of Vlad the Monk, Ţepeş’s half- brother, and thus a member of the Dracula branch of the Basarab dynasty, and of a later ruler of the same dynasty (Brancovano died in 1714). Michael the Brave is the perfect candidate for the Dracula of “a later age.” He went further and farther than Vlad Ţepeş, because he obtained (albeit briefly) full independence and union of all three Romanian

Principalities, and because in his anti-Ottoman campaign he got only 15 miles away from

Constantinople, which, as the Count says, is very much “in Turkeyland.”

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Chapter 6 Dracula, the Other

All editors note the existence of a relationship between Count Dracula, Bram

Stoker’s creation, and Vlad Ţepeş, the historical Dracula, although how far the author went with his research and how much he wanted the two characters to be similar remain a matter of contention. Nevertheless, what the novel’s editors do not ask is: why did Stoker choose the medieval ruler as a model for his villain in the first place? Leatherdale’s suggestion that he was simply seduced by Wilkinson’s footnote about the meaning of the name “Dracula”87 is contradicted by the fact that several characters in the novel (Arminius, Van Helsing and

Mina) insist that the vampire Count had “indeed . . . been that Voivode” (Dracula 280).

Stoker also provides a detailed back-story for his fictional character, who appears at the same time as a Szekler and as a kind of berserker, in whose veins probably flows, as

Thomas McLean puts it in the title of his recent essay, the “blood of many races.”

However, many facets of Dracula’s past remain mysterious since the editors identify them in notes of recovery, where explanatory notes would have been necessary. For example, the annotators state who Thor and Wodin are, while the reader might be curious to know why they are mentioned in Dracula’s historical and mythological speech given at Harker’s request.

In fact, “even a ‘note of recovery’ . . . will often require fuller treatment than we might suppose. . . . What the reader wishes to know, in other words, is the author’s use of

87 This idea has been used by later editors who believe that “the only point of coincidence between Count Dracula and Vlad the Impaler is their name” (Klinger 71 n. 36).

185 an allusion, why he chose to make the reference and how it works in the text” (Battestin 10; emphasis mine). All the details that make up both Dracula’s past and his traits of character remain utterly enigmatic unless the annotator tries to go beyond the text of the novel and looks at other writings by Stoker, as well as at events and situations to which he might allude. Before deciding that a reference to a historical or contemporary character or to a geographical location is haphazard, the annotator should verify if there is a reason behind their presence in the text, otherwise a novel like Dracula appears to contain too many coincidences and random choices. In all critical editions of the novel, there is no good explanation as to why the Count introduces himself as a Szekler rather than a Romanian,

Hungarian, German or simply Transylvanian; why he lands at Whitby, in North Yorkshire, so far from his recently acquired estate in Purfleet, close to London; or even why he is insistently described as having been “indeed . . . that Voivode Dracula.”

6.1 The Contemporary Dracula

Without a doubt, the most extraordinary coincidence (of which most if not all editors would not have been aware) is that Vlad Ţepeş’s bloodline, which had become mostly Szekler over the centuries, was about to secure a prominent place in British society by the time Bram Stoker was ready to start his work on Dracula. HRH Charles, Prince of

Wales, divulged in the 2011 documentary Wild Carpathia88 that his family was descended from Vlad the Impaler. In 1989, McNally and Florescu, who had done some research only

“in the Cluj archives,” wrote briefly in their book Dracula, Prince of Many Faces about

88 The information was spread by the Associated Press before the release of the film.

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Ţepeş’s two “Hungarian” sons (issued, that is, from his second marriage to Ilona Szilágyi) and concluded that “the male Hungarian Dracula line dies out by the end of the sixteenth century . . . [and the] female Dracula line continued until the seventeenth century” (193-

194). This conclusion was adopted by Elizabeth Miller and other commentators of the novel, although it is unclear (it does not state unambiguously the end of the female line) and does not seem based on extensive research. It now appears, on the contrary, that the

Hungarian or, rather, Szekler “female line” leads all the way to today’s Heir Apparent.89

One of the female scions of the historical Dracula was Countess Claudine Rhédey von Kis-Rhéde (1812-1841), of a prominent Szekler family: she was the daughter of Count

László Rhédey von Kis-Rhéde, a direct descendant of Ferenc (Francis) Rhédey, prince of

Transylvania between 1657 and 1658. Countess Claudine married Alexander, Duke of

Württemberg, but their son Francis (Franz) (1837-1900) could not inherit his father’s title because his parents’ marriage had been morganatic. Instead, he was born as Count von

Hohenstein and was later created Duke of Teck in 1863, after a successful military career

(he had been aide-de-camp to the commander-in-chief of the Austrian army during the battle of Solferino). In 1866, he married Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge (1833-

1897), known as “Fat Mary,” Queen Victoria’s cousin, and later became Prince of Teck.

The marriage was thought by many a misalliance, because the groom was virtually penniless and because his mother’s much too distant connection with royalty did not allow him to be considered ebenbürtig (of equal birth) for such a match. However, Queen

Victoria thought these views “very absurd” (qtd. in Pope-Hennessy 37), and, like many others, admired the prince’s good looks. Francis “was tall, well-built, and elegant. His profile was much admired, he had a fine high forehead, beautiful eyes . . . . His hair was of

89 For a genealogy of the historical Dracula, see Lelia Mihail, “Vlad Ţepeş.”

187 so true a black that a lady in Vienna once said of him: ‘his hair is not black it is dark blue’”

(Pope-Hennessy 37). In a letter to her eldest child, Victoria, Crown Princess of Prussia, the

Queen explained:

I do wish one c[ou]ld find some more black eyed P[rin]ces or P[rin]cesses for our

Children! – I can’t help thinking what dear Papa said – that it was in fact a blessing

when there was some little imperfection in the pure Royal descent & that some fresh

blood was infused. In P[rin]ce Teck’s case this is a very good thing. . . . For this

constant fair hair & blue eyes makes the blood so lymphatic . . . darling Papa – often

with vehemence said: ‘We must have some strong dark blood.’ (qtd. in Pope-

Hennessy 38; emphasis in original)

Although a German aristocrat, Francis of Teck never hid his Hungarian/Szekler roots and was often seen driving out of the residence at White Lodge, in Richmond Park (where the

Tecks lived after 1885), as his daughter noted in an 1886 letter, “with 4 Hungarian horses, driven by a Hungarian coachman, [and] fast” (qtd. in Pope-Hennessy 179).

The dark presence of Francis of Teck in the high society of London and his association with the royal family was both intriguing and fascinating to the Victorians.

Compared to other suggested models for Count Dracula,90 the Duke of Teck, a “man of striking good looks but volatile temperament” (Rose 28), had many characteristics that would make him a much better candidate: he was a direct descendant of the historical

Dracula; he had a Szekler mother and a German father; he was a foreigner and an intruder

90 The most widely accepted is Henry Irving. However, Leonard Wolf is probably right to protest: “I object to such a reading on the ground of common sense. If Dracula is meant to represent Irving, why are neither Irving nor Stoker, who spent some twenty-seven years in each other’s company, ever on record – Stoker for saying spiteful things about his employer, or Irving for hearing or sensing them? And why, after the publication of the novel, did not some so-called friend, seeing Irving maligned in it, call his attention to the unflattering portrait. No one did. Not Ellen Terry, nor – a more likely candidate to have spotted Stoker’s ‘vengeance’ – Eliza Aria, Irving’s mistress during his final years. Not a single journalist. No Punch satirist. No one” (The Connoisseur 144).

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in the high society of London that Stoker also frequented. Born a count, like Dracula,

Francis of Teck had to use again his original title of Count of Hohenstein in the mid-1880s, when he was living incognito in Europe, trying to hide from his creditors (Rose 31).

Although born in Vienna, the Duke hailed from Styria, where his two sisters lived all their lives and where Stoker had initially planned to send Jonathan Harker, according to his working notes to Dracula. His daughter, the future Queen Mary, spent many of her holidays in Styria, in the castle of Schloss-Reinthal, “turreted, ochre-coloured . . . within an easy distance of Graz” (Pope-Hennessy 23), where her aunt Amelie lived, and in the neighbouring Schweizerhaus, with her other aunt, Princess Claudine von Teck (83). Sabine

Baring-Gould, whose works on werewolves were an important source for Dracula, is one of the many fascinated with the Tecks’ birthplace. In 1911, he published a book on The

Land of Teck and Its Neighbourhood that he had long researched. Much of the volume is dedicated to chilling stories of medieval ancestors, Gothic castles and small-scale military conflicts.

Francis of Teck and his family may have already been used as models in earlier works of fiction. In Emily Gerard’s 1886 The Waters of Hercules, set on the border between Transylvania and Wallachia, the main character is a young Hungarian lady of doubtful aristocratic origin with the unusual title of Countess of Draskócs, who gets married to the German Adalbert Mohr. Considerably more similarities can be found in

Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, which is set in Styria. One of the editors of Stoker’s novel asks, “Could Mircalla/Carmilla and Dracula have been related?” (Klinger 15 n. 17) and other commentators have suggested that Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire story could have been

189 influential in the shaping of Dracula. However, the 1872 Carmilla,91 published only a few years after Mary Adelaide’s marriage into the Teck family, includes other similarities between its two main characters (Carmilla and the narrator) and the Teck female line. The narrator has never been to England but knows the language of her father, an Englishman in the service of Austria (a mere conceit which allows the story to be told in English and be published exactly as it has been “found”). Her mother, instead, “was of an old Hungarian family” (Le Fanu 101), the Karnsteins, just like Carmilla. Surprisingly, “[h]er home lay in the direction of the west” (Le Fanu 91) rather than east, that is, not towards Hungary, but rather towards southern Bavaria and the land of Teck. While complementing them with the happy outcome of the marriage between Jonathan and Mina, Stoker made use of the same topoi of the eerie Central-European locale (a castle or, in Gerard’s novel, a cave) and the sinister physical and/or marital union.

In fact, “[t]he regeneration narrative, often paired with a parallel and cautionary story of degeneracy, was hardly unique to Stoker” (Glover 134). Usually, the regeneration narrative involved an Englishman refreshing the bloodline of a Central European royal family, as is the case with most Ruritanian romances, including Anthony Hope’s The

Prisoner of Zenda. An interesting case is that of A Crowned Queen by Hilda Gregg (1868-

1933), who published as Sydney C. Grier. The novel appeared in 1898 and is the same kind of political romance set in an imaginary country (here called Thracia). The Englishman marries the local queen, but his efforts are often thwarted by the Thracian Prime Minister, who bears the name of Drakovics. Although Bulgaria’s history may have inspired the plot of the novel, “Grier’s Thracians seem in character closer to Romanians” (Goldsworthy 62).

Stoker used a similar plot and a similar regeneration narrative in The Lady of the Shroud

91 It was first serialised in 1871.

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(1909). The reverse – that is, the regeneration of British blood – was also possible; however, it involved an Anglo-American marriage. This is only hinted at in Dracula, where the Texan Quincey Morris offers the Harkers his blood and a name for their child, but it is the major theme of Stoker’s Lady Athlyne (1908), in which the British aristocrat marries an

American woman. The title of the eponymous character is markedly similar with that of the first suitor of Francis of Teck’s daughter Mary: Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and

Avondale, Earl of Athlone. Lord Athlyne in Stoker’s novel is also, in fact, an earl: Earl

Athlyne. Even more conspicuously, one of the Earl of Athlyne’s family names is Westenra, just like Lucy’s in Dracula. The fact that Athlyne/Athlone is also a Westenra seems to be a later confirmation on Stoker’s part that Lucy, although only a Westenra, is supposed to represent the royal family, whose blood was infected through the marriage with (a)

Dracula.

In the spring of 1890, around the time when Bram Stoker’s notes for Dracula begin,

Francis and Mary Adelaide’s daughter Mary (Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline

Claudine Agnes), known in her youth as Princess May, was 23 years old and she was set to marry Albert Victor (Prince Eddy), the eldest son of the Prince of Wales and second in line to inherit the crown (“Our London Correspondence” 5). Just like in 1866, at the marriage between Francis and Mary Adelaide, many in the royal family were displeased (Pope-

Hennessy 213-219). Even the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) and his wife (Queen

Alexandra) were less than willing to accept the princess as daughter-in-law. On 30 August

1890, Arthur Balfour, the future prime minister (at the time Chief Secretary for Ireland) wrote to the then prime minister Lord Salisbury that “[t]he Teck girl they won’t have because they hate Teck and because the vision of Princess May haunting Marlborough

House makes the Prince of Wales ill” (qtd. in Egremont 103). However, Queen Victoria

191 saw Princess May as the best choice for a future queen of England and her will prevailed, so in 1891 the two became engaged. Prince Eddy (also Earl Athlone) died six weeks later in an influenza epidemic and Princess May was betrothed to the younger brother George,

Duke of York, whom she married on 6 July, 1893. As one contemporary puts it, “The thing was a public scandal, and no man of any character would have submitted to it” (qtd. in

Legge, More about King Edward 162).

Dracula is certainly not a roman à clef, but Stoker had “a tendency to be literal rather than literary” (Frayling, “Mr Stoker’s Holiday” 196) and he was well informed about the betrothals, not only because they were discussed in both the public and the private spheres, but because he was frequently close to at least one of the characters involved in the marriage drama of the time: Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, Mary of Teck’s mother. She was a frequenter of the London stage, never missing a premiere, and was unofficially regarded as an astute drama critic (Cooke 212-213). Henry Irving, who also knew her well, wrote that

she seemed to understand to a remarkable degree both the aim of the actor and the

method of the art. It was always a delight to play to her, and a privilege to listen to

her comments, when one might be so favoured. Indeed, I cannot but think that

Nature had bestowed on her, as one of her many powers and graces, a histrionic gift

of no mean order. (qtd. in Cooke 213)

On 13 November 1881, Mary Adelaide wrote in her diary about having both Henry Irving and his fellow star actress Ellen Terry over to her house: “We were sixteen at dinner, and afterwards we told ghost stories till towards midnight” (Cooke 117). The party “broke up a few days later” (117). The Tecks were such good friends of the Lyceum that once they celebrated Princess May’s birthday in the Beefsteak Room above the theatre. Bram Stoker

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remembers that it was a “charming night. . . . In honour of the occasion the whole decorations of room and table were of pink and white May, with the birthday cake to suit.

Before the Princess was an exquisite little set of Shakespeare specially bound in white vellum by Zaehnsdorf, with markers of blush-rose silk” (Personal Reminiscences I, 311).

At Disraeli’s suggestion, the Tecks were considered in the 1880s as possible Viceroy and

Vicereine of Ireland. The appointment never came, likely because of the couple’s poverty – they lacked the “means to support the dignity of proconsular life in Dublin Castle” (Rose

30) – but such a possibility would have seemed remarkably interesting for someone like

Bram Stoker.

In his memoir of Henry Irving, Stoker mentions a certain “colonel Fitzgeorge” being celebrated in the Beefsteak Room, probably for his participation in the Egypt campaign of 1882-1883 (Personal Reminiscences I, 323). Fitzgeorge was Princess May’s cousin and one of the three sons of Prince George, Duke of Cambridge (1819-1904), Mary

Adelaide’s older brother. In contravention of the Royal Marriages Act, the Duke had married Sarah (known as Louisa) Fairbrother, an actress formerly with the Lyceum Theatre and that is why their three sons bore the last name of Fitzgeorge and did not inherit any titles. When Stoker’s father-in-law, James Balcombe, was garrisoned in Dublin in 1850, his regiment was inspected by the Duke of Cambridge, who was Commander of the Dublin

District (Warre 106). The Duke was also Balcombe’s division commander during the siege of Sevastopol and later in Malta, after which he became General Commander in Chief of the British Army (a position he filled for 39 years). One of Stoker’s biographers considers that “Colonel Balcombe, with five unmarried daughters, must have appreciated the security of Stoker’s position as Inspector of Petty Sessions” (Belford 86). In reality, Stoker had already resigned in November 1878 and got married in December. When his wedding took

193 place, Stoker was manager of the Lyceum, not government clerk. If Balcombe really appreciated his son-in-law, it may have been because his former commander-in-chief had also married into the Lyceum family.

Noel Stoker, the writer’s only child, disclosed to Harry Ludlam that Arminius

Vambéry had given the author of Dracula all the necessary information on the Romanian medieval ruler. This suggestion has repeatedly been rejected by later commentators

(including most editors), since the information in the novel appears to have originated in

Wilkinson’s Account and possibly other written sources. However, Vambéry could have been a useful informer both as an insider knowledgeable in all things Transylvanian and as a close friend of the Prince of Wales. He was often portrayed thus, most notably in Edward

Legge’s monograph King Edward in His True Colours (1913), in which the Hungarian was invited to sign a chapter, entitled “Professor Vambéry Speaks.” The future king was opposed at the time to the Teck misalliance, and Vambéry could have provided details about Princess May’s Transylvanian and Wallachian roots.

However, Mary Adelaide, Irving and Vambéry are far from being the only people who could have connected Stoker to the story of the Tecks. In an essay about the novel’s

“in-jokes,” Bernard Davies lists a series of relatives and friends of Stoker for whom the novelist included special allusions: to James Harker (who worked at the Lyceum), to

Anthony Hope (Hawkins) of The Prisoner of Zenda fame, to all of his brothers, who lived near the London addresses and worked at the hospitals that are named in the novel, but especially to a certain “philanthropist, Angela, Baroness Burdett-Coutts. She became the richest woman in England . . . and . . . she seems to have found Bram Stoker, with his boyish sense of fun, more relaxing company than Irving” (Davies 133). Indeed, Stoker mentions her and his friendship with her several times in his Personal Reminiscences (he

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remembers, for example, that when Irving died and people wanted to pay their respects to the body, the actor’s house being too small, they took him to the Baroness’s). As they were so close, it was perhaps inevitable that she would appear somehow in the novel: “Stoker inserted several little sallies into Dracula for her benefit. . . But his most outrageous leg- pull was to make her, as chief shareholder in Coutts and Company’s Bank, Count Dracula’s banker” (Davies 134).

Yet, this is not just a simple “leg-pull,” because the Baroness was indeed, if not

Dracula’s banker, at least a banker for the Draculas. Both Mary Adelaide (Cooke II, 305) and her daughter, Princess May (Pope-Hennessy 336), called Angela Burdett-Coutts “our dear Baroness.” She was a very close friend (59), who helped the Tecks financially (232) and once put a house at their disposal (159). As their banker and a close friend, “Baroness

Burdett-Coutts could be relied on to come forward in a crisis” (59), because their debts tended to accumulate, due to Mary Adelaide’s “lavish standard of hospitality,” and there was often “a handsome and impressive overdraft at Coutts’s bank” (59). Baroness Burdett-

Coutts “added her royal friends to the long list of charitable causes on which she spent her immense banking fortune; she lent them £50,000, with scant hope of ever seeing it again”

(Rose 31). The Baroness’s presence both in the lives of the Tecks and in Dracula suggests that Stoker may indeed have modelled his main character and the novel’s plot on the social- climbing lives of the descendants of the historical Dracula in England. The only missing ingredient is that Count Dracula, unlike Francis of Teck, does not have a daughter.

195 6.2 Dracula’s Daughter and the Finnish Connection

The Icelandic version of Dracula, published in 1901 under the title Makt Myrkranna

(“Powers of Darkness”) as a novel by Bram Stoker translated by Valdimar Ásmundsson,92 has been regarded until recently as an abridgement of the original, notable mainly for

Stoker’s preface (dated August 1898). However, in an essay published in the February 2014 issue of Letter from Castle Dracula (the bulletin of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula),

Hans Corneel de Roos has endeavoured the first close comparison between the English original and the Icelandic “translation.” His essay (“Makt Myrkranna: Mother of All

Dracula Modifications?”) shows that there are significant differences between the two versions and convincingly argues that Stoker was aware of them and must have sanctioned them. Apart from more general considerations regarding Bram Stoker’s legal, editorial and authorial experience,93 the writer’s acknowledgement of the differences seems evident because Makt Myrkranna includes plot developments that are consistent with the early drafts of Dracula (present in Bram Stoker’s Notes) which only Stoker could have known: the vampire hunters include a detective; Dr Seward goes mad; Harker’s boss Hawkins is a developed character; Castle Dracula has a housekeeper who is a deaf and mute woman; the castle has a secret, blood-coloured room; there is a dinner party where the Count shows up as the last guest.

The adventures in Transylvania make up almost eighty percent of the Icelandic version (Mina’s trip in search of Harker also takes her all the way to Bistritz; Sister Agatha

92 Ásmundsson (1852-1902) was a journalist, translator and writer. As Hans Corneel de Roos has shown, the Icelandic version was first serialised in Ásmundsson’s weekly magazine Fjallkonan between 13 January 1900 and 20 March 1901. 93 Stoker was not only a theatre manager and a barrister who had designed his own contract with Constable & Co., but also a co-director of the “English Library” collection of the Heinemann publishing house who had negotiated book rights with various authors. He was well aware of plagiarism and copyright issues.

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becomes a richer character; the Harkers stay in Vienna and consult a neurologist because of

Jonathan’s failing memory). The remaining twenty percent are quite different from the original. Most of the events in the British part of Dracula are omitted. Instead of a single encounter with three vampire women in the castle, Harker repeatedly meets a single blonde vampire girl to whom he feels himself dangerously drawn. The Count appears much more often and introduces himself in society as “Baron Székély” and, as such, he entertains Lucy and Mina in Whitby as well as various high-ranking guests at his restored Carfax estate.

Among these guests there are foreign dignitaries such as Prince Koromesz (the Austrian

Ambassador), Countess Ida Varkony (his wife), Margravine Caroma Rubiano (medium and fortune-teller) and Madame Saint-Amand (wife of the French Ambassador), all involved in a political and financial conspiracy led by Dracula himself. The Count appears as “an aristocratic gentleman openly moving around in the highest circles” (de Roos 13). He also cancels his escape from London and is thus captured and eliminated in England, at his

Carfax estate. Van Helsing is the one who kills him by stabbing him in the heart with a dagger. Quincey Morris takes the blame but is acquitted after a brief trial.

An important divergence from the 1897 plot is that Count Dracula has a daughter

“who played with the hearts of powerful rulers ‘like a child plays with grapes, before it sucks out the liquid’” (de Roos 12). Although some occurrences in the Icelandic version remain just as obscure as those in the English original, it seems that Countess Ida Varkony and Dracula’s daughter are one and the same. The Count identifies himself as a Szekler and descendant of Huns, but instead of the historical speech about anti-Ottoman campaigns, he shows Harker the gallery of portraits of his ancestors, who all seem to be the same person.

Instead of Gipsies, Harker encounters in the castle a large group of men and women, looking primitive and monkey-like, who are involved with the Count in what appear to be

197 Satanic rituals (de Roos 16); the Gipsies, instead, show up in Whitby. Arthur Holmwood has a sister (Mary), who, against her family’s warnings, has married a Romanian (Prince

Koromesz’s assistant). If some details of the plot make this version very close to ideas that

Stoker had drafted in 1890, others appear to be later developments that never found their way into the 1897 novel: just like Francis of Teck, Count Dracula has a daughter who tries to sneak into London high society; and theories of degeneration are made more explicit by the presence of the primitive Transylvanian acolytes.

The curious existence of such a developed version of the novel, which Stoker accepted and to which he seems to have contributed details from his working notes, may have something to do with the very fact that it is an Icelandic edition. Iceland is mentioned only once in the novel, but it appears in a crucial part of Dracula’s speech about his “race.”

Although mysterious, its presence can be explained in connection with nineteenth-century theories of the ascendancy of Hungarians and Szeklers that were being promoted by scholars like Arminius Vambéry and Max Müller. The editors of Dracula insist on

Arminius Vambéry’s fame as an Orientalist, which is indisputable. However, he was also known as an authority on Hungary and East-Central Europe. When he first came to

England, in 1864, following his Central-Asian trip, Vambéry also delighted his companions with stories of his native land. Richard Burton’s wife remembers that, in 1864, Vambéry stayed several days at Lord Houghton’s Yorkshire house, Fryston Hall, where, instead of recounting his journeys, he told the audience “Hungarian tales” (Isabel Burton I, 348).

Vambéry had many opportunities to talk about Transylvania and its aristocratic families with the future Edward VII both in Hungary and in England. In 1885, the Prince of Wales

“spent nearly a fortnight at Budapest” and Vambéry “met him frequently” (Vambéry,

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“Professor Vambéry Speaks” 385). Most of their meetings, however, took place in London and at Sandringham. Sir Richard Holmes, the librarian at Windsor Castle, remembers

one evening when Professor Vambéry, the great authority on Eastern Europe, and

an old friend of mine, was visiting [King Edward] at Windsor. His Majesty sent for

me to join them, and for an hour or two they discussed the problems of that region. I

listened, and, as I listened, I marvelled that the King should be able to hold his own

in talk with a world-wide authority upon his own particular subject. (Legge, More

about King Edward 156)

Thus, in Holmes’s recollections, the author of Hungary in Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern

Times appears as a universally recognised authority on places like Hungary, Transylvania and Romania rather than Bukhara and Samarkand. Moreover, King Edward also appears as deeply interested and knowledgeable.

A fervent Turkophile and Magyarophile, Vambéry was doubly motivated to dislike

Vlad the Impaler, a controversial enemy of Mathias Corvinus (the great hero of Vambéry’s

1887 Hungary) and an iconic anti-Ottoman warrior. In the mid-1850s, as McNally and

Florescu explain, “Vambéry became private secretary to Faud [sic] Mehmed Pasha, a

Turkish politician who was in charge of the occupation troops in Wallachia after the 1848 uprising – one reason why he was well versed in Romanian affairs” (McNally and Florescu

193 n. 274). In the nineteenth century, few people would have appeared as more inimical to

Romanian national interests than Fuad Pasha. Mehmed Fuad Pasha (1814-1869) commanded the Ottoman army that quelled the Wallachian Revolution of 1848 following a battle in Bucharest on 13 September that year. The leaders of the revolution were forced into exile but were allowed to return after the Crimean War. Thereafter, they were at the forefront of all the major political changes of the nation: the 1859 union with Moldavia, the

199 1877 Proclamation of Independence, the 1881 proclamation of the Kingdom of Romania.94

Vambéry’s association with the Ottoman leader (Fuad became Grand Vizier in 1861) as well as his high opinion of the “Turkish character” in general show him ready to resent any enemy of the Porte. In fact, if he detested Russia and the tsarist government, “that frightful instrument of tyranny, that pool of all imaginable slander and abuse, that disgrace to humanity” (Vambéry, Story of My Struggles 66), the Hungarian put himself in the service of the Ottoman government. He even managed to befriend the sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-

1909) who “valued the services of one of the few Europeans [i.e., Vambéry] to defend publicly his handling of the Armenians” (Hamilton 89), while at the same time being “in the irregular employ of the British Foreign Office” (81) as something midway between a

“spy” (Leatherdale 337 n. 65) and a “government adviser” (Luckhurst 385).

Although a famous orientalist, Vambéry’s interest in the East was indirect. He remained all his life a firm believer in the idea that Hungarians and Turks, together with

Tartars, Finns and others, belonged to the Turanian or Ural-Altaic race and language family. He went to Central Asia to look for Altaic skulls and because it was “the supposed cradle of the Ural-Altaians at the time of the great migration to Europe” (Vambéry, Story of

My Struggles 150) and he “hoped to find in Central Asia a few rays of light to guide [him] through the dark regions of primitive Hungarian history” (152). As he explains, “The mysterious origin of the Magyar nation and language, which to this day has not yet been explained, was a subject which ever since I began my linguistic studies had particularly interested me” (150). In 1861, the Hungarian Academy sponsored his trip “on condition that [he] went into the interior of Asia to investigate the relationships of the Magyar

94 Many “48ers” were still alive in the early 1890s (the last one to hold the position of prime minister was Ion C. Brătianu in 1888).

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language” (154). Apart from his celebrated English-language travelogues, the trip also provided material for a series of books and articles arguing in favour of a Turkish affinity of the Hungarian language. In the 1870s and 1880s, in Hungary, Arminius Vambéry was one of the two chief adversaries in the so-called “Ugric-Turkish war” (Lafferton 717) over the origin of the Hungarian language, the other being the comparative linguist and ethnographer Pál Hunfalvy (1810-1891), who supported the idea of the Finno-Ugric origin.

The authors of The Folk-Tales of the Magyars, published in 1889 under the direction of Rev. W. Henry Jones and Lewis L. Kropf and consulted by the author of

Dracula (Bram Stoker’s Notes 172-173), dedicate their volume to Arminius Vambéry and side with his work “which received so favourable a reception at the hands of the whole learned world [and which] defends . . . a Turco-Tartar descent” (Jones and Kropf xiii) of

Hungarians and Szeklers. Whereas Hunfalvy, Vambéry’s rival, “destroyed several national myths rooted in romantic historiography, such as the Hunnish-Magyar affinity, or the

Hunnish descent of the Szeklers in Transylvania” (Lafferton 717), in his definitive word on the subject Vambéry claims that the Hungarian language is closest to Turkish, whereas the

Hungarians as a nation (including the Szeklers) are a mixture of Altaic nations, mostly

Turkish,95 but also Finnish and Mongolian. He writes, in fact, of “the three principal branches of the Uralo-Altaic race – namely, the Mongolians in the east, the Finn-Ugrians in the north, and the Turks in the south” (Vambéry, Hungary 32). In the second half of the nineteenth century, Vambéry was one of the two most important proponents of a Turanian

95 As one commentator explains, “Behind the attack on the Finno-Ugric origin lay nationalist pride: the image of famous warrior ancestors, whom the whole civilised Western world had feared, was certainly more appealing to the public than the idea of ‘fish-smelling relatives.’ Hence the public interest in the imaginary affiliation with the splendid eastern Turks born for ruling, and also the governmental support of Asian expeditions” (Lafferton 717).

201 race and family of languages. The other was Max Müller, who first suggested it to the

Western world in Lectures on the Science of Language (1862).

In one of his typed research notes, Stoker took information from Nina Mazuchelli’s

Magyarland and wrote the following:

p. 45 Max Muller traces Magyars to Ural Mountains stretching up to Arctic Ocean.

Close affinity of language to idiom of Finnish race east of Volga. Says Magyars are

4th branch of Finnish stock viz. the Ugric – in 4th century were called Ugrogs. (see

Max Muller’s Science of Language). (Mem wehr wolf legend trough Fins). (Bram

Stoker’s Notes 201)

The most interesting part of the note is Stoker’s handwritten memo96 added after the somewhat disordered ideas taken from Mazuchelli (it looks as if Müller had mentioned

“Ugrogs,” but the term belongs to the author of Magyarland). It has little to do with the book from which Stoker was taking notes and which does not mention werewolves. In

Dracula, the memo turns into a sentence in which the Count explains the behaviour of his

Szekler ancestors: “Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Woden gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, ay, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that the werewolves themselves had come” (Dracula 59-60). The

Finnish connection remains implicit and the reader cannot easily understand the link between Szeklers and Iceland. The editors provide again notes of recovery, defining the terms “Ugric,” “Thor,” “Woden” and “Berserkers,” but do not explain further.

96 The editors transcribe “werewolf” and “Finns” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 202).

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In reality, Stoker knew that Magyar tribes (Hungarians and Skeklers) were related to the Finns (are “of Finnish stock,” as he writes)97 and he also knew of a direct connection between Finns and Berserkers. He took down several ideas from Sabine Baring-Gould’s

1865 The Book of Were-Wolves, including the apparent confusion “werewolf or berserkir”98

(Bram Stoker’s Notes 129). As the quote from Dracula shows, Stoker was aware of the difference between the two. He also knew that the Berserkers were a Norse legend and he associated it with the Vikings, who are implicitly referenced in Dracula’s account.99

However, Baring-Gould also associates Berserkers with Finns, writing that “Finns, Lapps, and Russians are held in particular aversion [by Swedes], because the Swedes believe that they have power to change people into wild beasts” (Baring-Gould 109). He also mentions that in the Icelandic Vatnsdæla Saga “there is a curious account of three Finns, who were shut up in a hut for three nights, and ordered by Ingimund, a Norwegian chief, to visit

Iceland. . . . Their bodies became rigid, and they sent their souls [on] the errand” (29).

Although Stoker did not take down these particular passages, he must have seen them (the last quote he took is from page 115) and probably remembered them when he planned to use Finns as the link between Szeklers (related to Finns, and so to Berserkers) and werewolves (similar to Berserkers).

Another trace of the implicit Finnish connection is the name of Professor Van

Helsing. McNally and Florescu suggest that it is “derived from the Danish name for

97 Stoker could also have found a lot of information on the subject in William Spottiswoode’s A Tarantasse Journey through Eastern Russia (1857), a title that he took down (Bram Stoker’s Notes 175). The editors of the Notes explain that “We do not know if Stoker used any information from this hitherto unidentified source, but it does contain a map that shows three rivers – the Bistritza, the Sereth and the Pruth – which are mentioned in the final chapters of Dracula” (175 n. 297). Spottiswoode states in his preface that he based his account of the nations encountered both on his own observations and on the writings of Max Müller, whom he mentions again in the chapter about the Finno-Ugric tribes from Siberia. 98 Baring-Gould uses the plural form “Berserkir,” but Stoker does not seem to notice it here. 99 The sentence is ambiguous and “their Berserkers” could mean both “of the Ugric tribe” and “of Thor and Woden.” Since Stoker knew very well, at least from Baring-Gould’s book, that Berserkers were a Norse legend, it seems fair to assume that the possessive “their” refers to the Nordic gods.

203 Hamlet’s famed castle Elsinore – Helsingor” (In Search 1994, 147). Elizabeth Miller thinks that “it may come from Dr Hesselius, the fictional narrator of Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a

Glass Darkly” or from that of “Van Helmont, an ancient alchemist mentioned in T. J.

Pettigrew’s On Superstitions Connected with the History and Nature of Medicine and

Surgery (21), one of Stoker’s source-texts” (Sense & Nonsense 73). However, Van

Helsing’s name seems much more closely related to Sweden and Finland. In Dutch anthroponomy, the particle “van” indicates the place of origin. Hälsingland, also known in

English as Helsingia, is a province in central Sweden (Osborne I, 212). A native of the region is called Helsing, Hellsing or Hälsing. The people of Helsingia emigrated to present- day Finland in the Middle Ages and founded the city of Helsinki. Although considered by the editors of Dracula as either Dutch or German, Van Helsing is likely to be a Dutchman of Swedish descent with roots in Finland.

Even if Stoker did not confuse people of Finno-Ugric descent with Icelanders, he probably believed that by making Dracula part-Szekler he was already making him a man of the North. Right after the abovementioned memo, he wrote: “HUNS under Attila came between 3rd and 4th centuries – a century or two later came the Avars also of Northern race. Then came Magyars under Arpad” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 201-202). He was taking notes from Magyarland, whose author believed that Hungarians “are the descendants of a

Finnish people, who, emigrating southwards through the passes of the Carpathians from their home in the far North, approached Hungary” (Mazuchelli I, 44), a country which was

“peopled . . . by three distinct and separate colonies of barbarians, whose birthplace was in the regions of the frozen North” (I, 45), that is, the Huns, the Avars, and the Magyars.

However, in the novel, Dracula is also directly associated with Norse mythology. Van

Helsing compares him with “berserker Icelanders” (Dracula 278), and the Count enters the

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body of a London Zoo wolf from Norway called Bersicker. Such an association may have originated in Stoker’s beliefs about the origins of Romanians.

As mentioned before, it is unclear if the author thought that Romanians were descendants of Dacians and Saxons (see Bram Stoker’s Notes 170-171), but he may have believed them to have Gothic blood. The land inhabited before the Roman conquest by

Dacians (also known as Getae) was subsequently invaded by Goths and their close relatives, the Gepids, who settled there for about three and a half centuries (this was duly noted by Stoker in his handwritten survey of Romanian history). The Goths converted to

Christianity under the local bishop Ulfilas and had their story told by Jordanes in the sixth century. Jordanes called his work Getica and suggested that the Goths and the Getae were the same people. Although he rejects the idea, Edward Gibbon in his famous History of the

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire generally preserves the confusion and speaks of

“Goths, or Getae” (Gibbon I, 281 n. 27). One of Stoker’s possible sources, James

Samuelson follows (and quotes) Gibbon to suggest that Dacians and Goths “blended into one great nation” (Roumania 136). E.C. Johnson, one of the sources that Stoker uses repeatedly, also relies on Gibbon and writes that the provinces that make up today’s

Romania were conquered by the Romans and remained “comparatively quiet, till they were surrendered to the fair-haired Scandinavians by [Emperor] Aurelian” (Johnson 105-106).

Nevertheless, in Dracula both the villain and the heroes are associated with

Vikings. Dr Seward appreciates Quincey Morris’s strength of character before Lucy’s death and writes in his diary that “he bore himself through it like a moral Viking” (Dracula 211).

Later, as Arthur Holmwood is about to drive a stake through Lucy’s heart, Seward notes that “he looked like a figure of Thor” (254). In Vampires, Mummies and Liberals (1996),

David Glover notices this and speaks of a “closely run antithesis in the novel” (Glover 73),

205 that between the “moral Viking” and the vampire Berserker. He also observes that this is the only time when Stoker associates the villain with Vikings. In other works, it is only the heroes who benefit from such an association:

For example, in The Man (1905) the “rough voyages” undertaken by Harold An

Wolf’s “forebears amongst northern seas, though they had been a thousand years

back, had left traces on his imagination, his blood, his nerves!” And a mid-Atlantic

storm is enough to reawaken “the old Berserker spirit” (The Man 279-80).

Similarly, in The Lady of the Shroud (1909), Rupert Sent Leger refers to “the

fighting instinct of my Viking forebears.” (Glover 74)

When he finally met his literary hero Walt Whitman in 1886, Stoker asked him to recount the death of Abraham Lincoln, and the poet did it by using old Scandinavian imagery: “it was a wild frenzy of grief and rage. It might have been that the old sagas had been enacted again when amongst the Vikings a Chief went to the Valhalla with a legion of spirits around him!” (Stoker, Personal Reminiscences II, 104). In the 1897 novel, Seward’s appreciation of Morris as “a moral Viking” serves as a pretext to introduce a comment about American racial superiority (and equality with the British): “If America can go on breeding men like that, she will be a power in the world indeed!” (Dracula 211). “Moral

Vikings” like Morris and Holmwood are set in marked distinction from the Count, since they “display a measure of self-control conspicuously absent among those bellicose peoples who have not yet evolved out of the past” (Glover 74). The antithesis between the “old”

Viking and the “new” Viking, one representing the terrors of the past, the other the evolved, civilised and entitled man of the present, is consistent with the original ideology of the Gothic novel.

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6.3 The Right Kind of Blood and the Wrong Kind of Marriage

British Gothic stories can often be ambiguous about the Viking past, which they sometimes incorporate as terrible evidence of the less civilised parts of either the human character or human history. As they belong to a pagan or a Catholic period, “the magic incantations and ghosts in Norse tradition were symbolic of mankind’s superstitious yoke over which Protestant reason had triumphed” (Rix 5). In Stoker’s interpretation of the

Nordic heritage, one can be either a “moral Viking” like the Anglo-Americans led by (a possibly Scandinavian) Van Helsing, or a Berserker like Count Dracula, confined to the primitivism of a “child brain” (Dracula 382). The Anglo-American marriage in Lady

Athlyne is a veritable “teutonic marital alliance,” while by “infecting [Lucy] . . . Dracula is not only colonising the West, but is also modifying its cultural identity by sapping its moral and physical energy” (Hughes, Beyond Dracula 142). Even when an Englishman reinvigorates East-Central-European blood in The Lady of the Shroud, his Balkanic bride bears the transparent name of Teuta. Considered together, Stoker’s Victorian and

Edwardian novels show him eager to put forward two antithetical narratives that probably reflected his worldview: a narrative of possible degeneration (in Britain) and a narrative of possible regeneration (elsewhere) through marriage.

The Dracula editors usually explain the antithesis as a clash of civilisations and insist on the role played by religion, despite the fact that Bram Stoker is manifestly vague about it. Religious and esoteric symbols and rituals are important in the novel, but there are no clear references, positive or negative, to denominations, other than Jonathan Harker’s acknowledgement of his being “an English Churchman” who has been taught “to regard

[the crucifix] as in some measure idolatrous” (Dracula 35). Words like “Catholic” or

207 “Protestant” do not appear in the novel; nor are there any priests or ministers, other than

“the chaplain of the English mission church” (140) in Budapest, who marries Jonathan and

Mina Harker. However, among the editors and other commentators, there is consensus about the novel’s anti-Catholic ideology, which would make Dracula sufficiently conventional in its propaganda. The Gothic novel had “to be set . . . in historically and culturally enemy territory, [often] Catholic – French, Spanish or Italian – marking

Catholicism as a spiritual orientalism in British Protestant imagination” (Duncan 24). Yet, unlike other Gothic creations, Count Dracula is never clearly associated with Catholicism; and his multiethnic origin does not link him to any one particular denomination.

Moreover, nowhere does Stoker say that Van Helsing is Catholic. Nevertheless, the editors of Dracula are in agreement with regards to both the Dutch Professor’s religious affiliation and the nature of the symbols and rituals that he uses in his fight against vampires. The first clue about Van Helsing’s Catholicism is “the little golden crucifix”

(Dracula 202) that he produces in the Westenra tomb. Even if Jonathan Harker, a known member of the Church of England, had protected himself with a similar crucifix in

Transylvania, this appears to at least one editor to be the first moment when “we learn of

Van Helsing being Catholic . . . the Dutch are a mostly Protestant nation. His Catholicism perhaps places Van Helsing from the Limburg region, which possesses a stronger Catholic identity” (Leatherdale 249 n. 20).100 The fact that Van Helsing’s wife lives in an insane asylum causes similar remarks: “Being Catholic, Van Helsing is unable to divorce her, even if he wanted to” (Leatherdale 263 n. 100); “Van Helsing, like Jane Eyre’s Rochester, has a

Bertha Rochester in his attic. . . . Van Helsing is . . . married to a madwoman whom, as a

100 In fact, in the late nineteenth century, Limburg and Noord Brabant were the only two Dutch provinces where Catholic religious services were tolerated. It seems unlikely that Van Helsing could have been a Professor at the University of Amsterdam if he were Catholic.

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Catholic, he cannot divorce” (Wolf 219 n. 26).101 Clive Leatherdale also insists that Van

Helsing is Catholic because, when he leaves Lucy’s tomb, “[h]e crosses himself, but the others, not being Catholic, do not” (Leatherdale 309 n. 67) and because he owns a missal.

Since the Professor reads from it in English, Leatherdale suggests he must have borrowed it, because “Van Helsing’s Catholic prayer book would be in Dutch” (347 n. 19). However, a missal can be any prayer book102 and the fact that this particular one is in English (or

Dutch) actually shows103 it is not Catholic.

The most important proof of Van Helsing’s Catholic affiliation appears to be the ritual killing of the undead Lucy, in which the Professor uses a host as a form of protection against vampires. The editors concur that the host is “[t]he Catholic communion wafer”

(Auerbach and Skal 187 n. 1), although they also admit that “the professor acts totally outside Church law” (Leatherdale 303 n. 22; see also Riquelme 217; Auerbach and Skal

187 n. 1; Wolf 255 n. 2).104 What really convinces the editors is the fact that Dr Seward refers to Van Helsing’s host as “the to him most sacred of things” (Dracula 248). As the phrase sets the Professor apart from his Anglo-American friends, the editors conclude that

Van Helsing “is the only Catholic in the group” (Leatherdale 303 n. 24) addressing “his non-Catholic audience” (Riquelme 217). However, Lutherans also believe in the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist and hold the host in the highest esteem; and they also use the sign of the cross as well as the crucifix (Book of Concord 374,

412, 618). Lutheranism is the established church in all Scandinavian countries and Van

101 Here, Wolf seems to forget that Rochester was not Catholic. Protestant Churches were not much more lenient on the subject of divorce. 102 English Churchman Jonathan Harker also uses the term when he notices in Transylvania “little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals” (Dracula 33). 103 The Roman Missal (Missale Romanum) was translated for the first time into English in 1970 and started being used in 1973. Therefore, if Van Helsing’s missal were, in fact, Catholic, it would be in Latin. 104 The fact that Van Helsing claims to have an “indulgence” for the blasphemous use of the host temporarily makes several of the editors doubt his Catholicism.

209 Helsing could have Swedish and/or Finnish roots. Moreover, Max Müller, Stoker’s likely model for Van Helsing, was Lutheran. His mother, Adelheide von Basedow, “was also deeply religious and the Lutheran religion played an important part in the life shared by

Müller and [her]” (Beckerlegge 179). Because he was Lutheran, Müller had “to convince his future wife’s [Georgina Grenfell] family of the soundness of both his financial prospects and his Christian beliefs” (182) and his academic career at Oxford suffered.

In Stoker’s novel, religion plays a major part, but Catholicism is not clearly depicted or identified as a feature of either the heroes or the villains. Nor are any anti-Catholic feelings made explicit. After fleeing Castle Dracula, Jonathan Harker finds shelter in what must be a Catholic hospital (the St Joseph and Ste Mary) in Budapest (Dracula 134) and

Sister Agatha, who informs Mina of her fiancé’s status, is a minor but sympathetic character. So is the woman in Bistriţa who presents Harker with a crucifix and entreats him to accept it for his mother’s sake. Stoker’s working notes contain absolutely no reference to

Catholicism. Instead, in one of the handwritten notes on the plot, dedicated to the vampire’s characteristics, Stoker wrote: “Memo (2) . . . attitude with regard to religion – only moved by relics older than own real date – xxx century” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 21). The century is unclear, and the editors explain: “It looks as if Stoker had not yet decided when, i.e., in what century, his vampire would be born” (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 21 n. 44). In the novel, the vampire hunters also are unsure until Van Helsing, with information provided by his friend Arminius, concludes that “He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land”

(Dracula 280). The Count’s birth is thus placed in the fifteenth century and Stoker’s note helps explain why Protestantism, founded in the sixteenth century, does not affect Dracula or his victims (Lucy, Mina, Renfield), while under his spell.

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If his religion is unclear (and probably irrelevant after so many centuries and after his occult apprenticeship in the School of Scholomance), Dracula’s “attitude with regard to religion” is obvious. He is immune to Protestant rationality, but vulnerable to religious symbols and rituals from the past, that is from the fifteenth century and before. Rather than a representative of the past because he belongs to Catholicism, like other Gothic characters,

Dracula is representative of Catholicism because he belongs to the past. For Dracula’s

Protestant enemies, as imagined by the Anglican Bram Stoker, Catholicism was first and foremost an unfortunate interruption of the development of the Christian Church in the

British Isles, from its Celtic origins until the Reformation. In the late nineteenth century,

“the standard Protestant line portray[ed] the Celtic Church as a proud and independent entity locked in conflict with Rome . . . a heroic remnant who bravely tried to resist alien

Continental ways” (Bradley 126).

Such a perspective on Church history was already common knowledge for Stoker’s precursors, the Dublin Huguenots Charles Maturin and Sheridan Le Fanu (Sage 41), and it was theorised by two Anglican historians of the Church: the Scot William Skene (brother of James Henry Skene, who wrote about Vlad the Impaler), author of Celtic Scotland: A

History of Ancient Alba (1876-1880), and the Englishman Sabine Baring-Gould (one of

Stoker’s major sources), in his fifteen-volume The Lives of Saints (1872-1877).

Nevertheless, it was “in Ireland that the battle between different denominations as to who represented the true Celtic Christian inheritance was fiercest” (Bradley 129). For Anglicans like Jonathan Harker and Bram Stoker, British Protestantism had its roots in the Celtic

Church, while Catholicism was an unnatural interruption and a foreign relic of the medieval past, uncivilised and superstitious.

211 One of the commentators of Dracula has noted that the Count’s arrival in Whitby, rather than anywhere else,105 may play “on the resonances of the Synod of Whitby, and its role in ensuring that the Christianisation of England took an invasive Roman – or

‘European’ – rather than a Celtic form” (Goldsworthy 91). All editors are in agreement that

Stoker chose Whitby because he had spent the summer of 1890 there, had admired the old abbey and had found out about the Russian schooner shipwrecked in the harbour in 1885. A single editor also mentions that “In 663-664, the Synod of Whitby was held at the abbey, to determine the future of the Northumbrian Church. . . . A majority of the attendees chose

Rome” (Klinger 121 n. 5). For many British Protestants who “sought to identify themselves with native traditions” (Bradley 135) and regarded Catholicism as a mere interruption, the

Synod of Whitby had come to symbolise the unfortunate turn of events that was only corrected by Henry VIII’s Reform in the sixteenth century.106 The Britons of the nineteenth century had three major scares that Catholicism might invade their islands and their Church again: the Oxford Movement (also known as Tractarianism) of the 1830s-1850s; the dogma of papal infallibility, introduced in the early 1870s, which generated Gladstone’s best- selling response The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance (1874); and the new “[s]ensitivity over matters of ritual in the 1890s” (Sage 48). In Dracula, the encroachment of such rituals and beliefs of the past upon Protestant modernity is a major source of fear.

105 In one of his early notes on the plot, the author has Dracula arrive in Dover (Bram Stoker’s Notes 19). 106 This view survived well into the twentieth century and is incorporated in Arnold Toynbee’s celebrated The Study of History. In “A General Introduction for My Work,” W. B. Yeats quotes from Toynbee and notes that the historian “describes the birth and decay of what he calls the Far Western Christian Culture; it lost at the Synod of Whitby its chance of mastering Europe” (Yeats 516). The author of Dracula owned The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics, one of Yeats’s early attempts to resurrect native Celtic traditions, with the inscription: “To Bram Stoker with the compliments and best regards of W.B. Yeats, Sept. 1893” (Stoker, Forgotten Writings 231).

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Van Helsing’s (and Max Müller’s) Lutheranism acts as an intermediary between the forward-looking Church of England of the heroes and Dracula, the monster of a bygone era.

Nevertheless, the editors of the novel insist that the vampire hunters have to resort to

Catholic weapons and that they even have a Catholic leader in Van Helsing. However,

Dracula’s enemies need to be spiritually different from the vampire Count. After all, even

Vambéry, the model for Van Helsing’s friend Arminius, was a Protestant convert. Born into a Jewish family and a fervent Zionist in his later life, Vambéry converted to Protestant

Christianity in 1865 so as to be admitted into the faculty of the University of Budapest.

Still, this could not happen without “the help of an imperial order straight from Austro-

Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, whom Vambéry personally petitioned in Vienna” and thereby he was “admitted into the Catholic university as the first ‘Protestant’ faculty member” (Mandler 2). Dracula needed to be utterly different from his pursuers, because he is “the antithesis of the trueborn Englishman . . . of the educated, well-travelled Anglo-

Saxon” (McLean 332). He is “otherness itself” (Halberstam 334), which becomes explicit in the novel when his criminal character and his underdeveloped “child-brain” (Dracula

382) can be explained through the writings of Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso.

In the late nineteenth century, “criminal anthropology constituted at once a political geography, a conjectural history of civilisation, [and] an evolutionary account of organisms and races” (Pick 141). As the editors of Dracula reveal, Cesare Lombroso was “the father of modern criminology. He felt that the born criminal is an abnormal mental throwback to his primitive ancestors. His description of the criminal type is similar to Van Helsing’s and

Harker’s portrayals of Dracula, especially the idea that Dracula has a child’s brain”

(McNally and Florescu 255 n. 348). His “L’uomo Delinqente [sic], or Criminal Man

(1875), was an influential anatomy of deviance in criminals, who, Lombroso claimed,

213 could be identified by their facial and racial characteristics” (Auerbach and Skal 296 n. 4).

Lombroso’s ideas are “closely followed” (Wolf 403 n. 25) in the novel, especially in the description Harker gives of the vampire Count. Equally authoritative at the time was Max

Nordau, also invoked by Van Helsing. Although, as McNally and Florescu explain, his famous book on Degeneration was supposed “to demonstrate the close relationship between genius and moral degeneracy” (255 n. 347), its most influential ideas was “that civilised man was degenerating intellectually as well as physically and that the modern era was one of decadence and confusion” (Riquelme 336).

Other editors go very far when they suggest that Nordau’s book “argued that the human race, especially the Anglo-Saxon, was deteriorating and was thus fated to endure cultural decay” (Auerbach and Skal 296 n. 3). In fact, Nordau speaks of “classes” in

Western Europe, rather than “the human race” and, although he dedicates a chapter to the

Pre-Raphaelites and mentions Oscar Wilde, his bêtes noires are the French modernists. He dedicated his book to Cesare Lombroso and offered a “therapeutics” for the “cultivated classes” of Europe who are threatened by “retrogression” (Nordau, Degeneration 555).

Degeneration, which was published in English in 1895 by Heinemann, the publisher for which Bram Stoker worked at the time, “was only the most notorious of a steady stream of texts propounding theories of cultural decline from the 1860s onwards” (Warwick 211).

One such proponent was Max Müller who, in an essay on “The Savage” published in 1885 by The Nineteenth Century, divided his subject into two categories: the “progressive savages,” which were all European nations at some point in their history – the term “applies to the Aryan race only” (Müller, “The Savage” 124); and “retrogressive savages,” which are the result of “gradual degeneracy” (119) and who “are dying out wherever they are brought in contact with European civilisation” (118). Count Dracula is such a

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“retrogressive savage,” a member of “a great and noble race” (Dracula 280) that has decayed over the centuries. His presence in London jeopardises the future of civilisation, unless civilisation itself is ready to fight back and make his kith and kin extinct.

Often seen as a more benevolent view of East Central Europe, The Lady of the

Shroud, Stoker’s novel set in the fictional Balkan state of the Blue Mountain, actually completes Max Müller’s theory on “retrogressive savages.” The novel’s hero, Rupert Sent

Leger, describes the Blue Mountaineers as “the most primitive people I have ever met – the most fixed to their own ideas, which belong to centuries back” (Lady of the Shroud 83).

Count Dracula is a representative of such a people, and suddenly cannot find his place among them and seeks his own regeneration narrative amidst London’s “teeming millions.”

Like Francis of Teck, who “was regarded in his adopted country as not only foreign but also, in a sense, stateless” (Rose 30), Dracula is a man without a country, because he feels out of place even in his native Transylvania, a “space [where] he remains profoundly unheimlich” (Ferguson 237). Unlike him, by marrying the heiress Teuta, the Englishman

Sent Leger is able to work on “build[ing] up . . . a new ‘nation’ – an ally of Britain” (The

Lady of the Shroud 328), which can benefit from Western ideas to become a local power.

This is consistent with the Oxford professor’s ideas that some of the modern primitives,

“though shaken by a sudden contact with the benefits and dangers of a higher civilisation, may regain their former health and vigour, and, from having been retrogressive savages, become once more progressive in the great struggle for existence” (Müller, “The Savage”

123).

Stoker owned the five volumes of Henry Hunter’s 1789 translation of Lavater’s

Essays on Physiognomy (Stoker, Forgotten Writings 237) and his Dublin diary shows him passionate about phrenology. While he knew Müller personally, he may have known

215 Nordau through their mutual friend Vambéry. Nordau first met Vambéry in 1875 and they remained good friends until the latter’s death in 1913. When Vambéry’s The Story of My

Struggles was reissued posthumously, it was introduced by Nordau’s preface, in which the latter tells the story of his friendship with the “revered man” (Nordau, “My Recollections of

Vambéry” xxi). Perhaps because ideas such as those of Nordau and Müller were current in the Late Victorian era, the editors of Dracula do not always insist on the obsolescence of theories about degeneracy and atavism. Leatherdale remains neutral and calls Nordau’s

Degeneration a “controversial book” (464 n. 113). Glennis Byron provides an excerpt from

Lombroso’s The Delinquent Man without suggesting that the book’s tenets might seem erroneous today. When Van Helsing mentions the two theorists, Byron simply notes: “Max

Nordau (1849-1923), German physician and journalist; Cesar Lombroso (1836-1909),

Italian criminologist. See Appendix F” (Byron 383 n. 1).107 Such annotations that rely exclusively on sources that would have been available to Stoker without any clarification as to their possible mistakes enhance the forms of othering present in Dracula and, when they also provide supplementary material contemporary with the novel, they can deepen the othering.

107 In “Appendix F,” Lombroso and Nordau are introduced as “scientists from diverse areas [who] contributed to the debate over society in crisis” (Byron 468).

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Part III Dracula, Transylvania and Romania

218

Chapter 7 Othering: Place

The reader of Dracula spends less than one third of the story outside England: the first four chapters are set in Transylvania; the last three are spent on the road through

Romania, back to the vampire’s lair. These seven chapters are the most extensively annotated, as they include references to places, people and customs unfamiliar to both the late-Victorian and the contemporary reader. Bram Stoker relied on nineteenth-century

British travel writers, who found in the “quaint[ness]” (Gephardt 293) of Transylvania and

Romania “an occasion for underscoring the alterity of the region” (295). In Dracula, Stoker preserves and enhances this alterity by turning the region into a land fit for vampires with the help of his readings. He reproduces almost word for word the passages that suit his creative project; he passes over the ones that do not; and he adds original ideas that sometimes clash with the information that these travelogues provide. In a fairly similar way, the novel’s annotators themselves contribute to the othering of Transylvania and

Romania in three distinct ways.

First, they use nineteenth-century British sources for two different reasons: to give the contemporary reader the same kind of knowledge that the Victorians had; and to show the actual provenance of the descriptions, since it has been established that Stoker never travelled to the region. This means that editors quote from or paraphrase both texts that the author of Dracula knew and read; and texts that he may or may not have known, but date largely from the same period. However, what they do not do is discuss the possibility that these sources could be misinformed. For example, the editors of Dracula provide ample

219 passages from some of Stoker’s well-known sources such as Emily Gerard or Sabine

Baring-Gould without mentioning the likelihood that their accounts are crude exaggerations, thereby perpetuating the idea that Transylvanian folklore is replete with vampire beliefs, and that Catholicism and Orthodoxy are mostly collections of superstitions.

Second, the editors often use modern sources, including modern reference books, to explain Romanian places, customs or historical facts. However, they never use any

Romanian source, old or new, even if some are available in English. Despite the fact that

Dracula is replete with information about Romania, scholarly editions of the novel contain no references to Romanian maps, atlases, geography and history books, or books of anthropology, ethnography or folklore. This causes many inaccuracies to occur in all critical editions of Dracula – all originating in the methodological (and political) fault of disregarding local sources, which Edward Said has expounded through his re-interpretation of Marx’s sentence: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (Said

21).108 Just like the Victorian travellers who inspired Stoker, the editors of the novel rely on

– often obsolete – encyclopaedia entries and on their own observations as tourists. Most of them have taken the “Dracula Tour” through Romania and make reference to their travel experience. Just like the Victorian travellers, they use in their annotations what has been reported before by other Westerners and sometimes mention conversations with Romanians who have accompanied them as guides on the voyage.109

108 Marx speaks of the political representation (or lack thereof) of mid-nineteenth century peasantry, but Said applies the formula to the discourse of Western Orientalists who do not use local scholarly sources (Said 20- 22). Gayatri Spivak offers another seminal interpretation of Marx’s passage (Spivak 276-280). 109 This is also true of the three Romanian specialists who are mentioned in the editions. Wolf acknowledges two researchers from the Cluj Agronomic Institute with whom he corresponded. They were consulted in one trivial matter: the existence (or inexistence) of the “Golden Mediasch” wine, as stated in Chapter 1. McNally and Florescu acknowledge the support of “Mihai Pop, professor emeritus and former director of the Folklore

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Third, they add information – from old and new sources – that has little bearing on the novel, but which supports its representation of Transylvania as the land of vampires.

Most of this information comes from two sources, Agnes Murgoçi (1926) and Montague

Summers (1928), that Stoker could not have known. Stoker took from Emily Gerard’s 1885 article on “Transylvanian Superstitions” a brief passage about vampire beliefs and imagined the rest. Both Murgoçi and Summers were vampire enthusiasts who looked for proof that Stoker’s account of Romanian vampires was well-founded. Many of the editors of Dracula profess a similarly enthusiastic adherence to the world represented by a late

Victorian work of fiction, which can explain why they support and enhance the representations provided by the novel. Sometimes they add representations of their own, such as this comment by one of the editors about the sojourn in Varna: “Dracula might not appear, but, according to Montague Summers, Bulgaria is vampire country” (Leatherdale

454 n. 41).

Despite the plethora of essays on Dracula that have been published over the last half a century, only a surprisingly small number110 discuss Stoker’s representation of

Transylvania and Romania. However, as one of the commentators of the novel has noticed,

“Most of Stoker’s fiction is acutely aware of the places where they are set, and I hope that someone will eventually address the importance of geography in Stoker’s fiction” (Senf 99 n. 45). In Dracula, what Stoker does not describe is just as important as what and how he describes. The Borgo Pass receives most of the attention from his narrators as well as from the editors of the novel. All the other places that appear in Dracula are either only

Institute in Bucharest” (McNally and Florescu 4), although Pop’s team only helped the two authors in gathering a couple of contemporary legends about the historical Dracula for a different book (McNally and Florescu, In Search, 79-81). No book or article written by a Romanian appears to have been consulted by any of the editors. 110 The first such essay is Walker and Wright’s “Locating Dracula: Contextualising the Geography of Transylvania” (1998), followed over the next decade by a few articles by Duncan Light and Marius Crişan.

221 mentioned by name or are described in terms of historical geography. The editors usually conform and explain them in similar fashion, but their choices are hardly consistent. Some places are described as they were before, during and after the events in the novel; others, only before and during or during and after; yet others as they were in only one of the possible moments. No editor makes of any one of these choices a habit and the reader is given a motley image of Transylvania and Romania.

7.1 The Lay of the Land

The historical provinces that make up present-day Romania are not easy to understand and even harder to explain without some visual aid. That is why editions of

Dracula in which terms like “Transylvania,” “Moldavia” or “Bukovina” are annotated would benefit from the presence of maps.111 Since most editors provide a description of the provinces at the time when the novel was written, at the time when the edition was published, and during the centuries that preceded the events narrated in Dracula, one map would have been necessary for each of the periods described. In reality, only three editions include maps. Wolf’s first edition, The Annotated Dracula (1975), has a map of Romania and Transylvania, presumably from the late Victorian era, since all the names are in

German. The source of the map is nowhere indicated in the volume. The names and boundaries of the major provinces are almost unintelligible and smaller provinces are not present. It is, in fact, a map “showing the Railway and Steamboat Communications and the chief roads” (Wolf 1975, 335). Many places that appear in the novel (Bistritz, Borgo Pass

111 See such maps on pages 226-227 of this dissertation.

222

or Galatz) are on this map, but they are overshadowed by roads and railways.112 Moreover, when he re-edited Stoker’s novel as The Essential Dracula (1993), Wolf did not include any maps.

McNally and Florescu also include a map of the region, said to be an “adaptation of

[a] Map of Transylvania Published in Vienna 1566” (30). The editors have worked into this medieval-looking map the location of Poenari (which they propose as the “real” Castle

Dracula) and other Wallachian places connected with the historical Dracula that are not mentioned in the novel. More importantly, their map has so many errors – probably inherited from the 1566 version – as to become completely useless: Bistrista (sic) is placed north of Buda, rather than east; Cluj is west of Buda, instead of east; the Borgo Pass is placed somewhere along the western frontier of Transylvania and, as such, far away from

Bukovina, to which it is supposed to lead; Braşov, Bran and Ţara Bârsei, all in southern

Transylvania, are placed in southern Moldavia; and although the names of all three major provinces – Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania – are indicated on the map, it is very hard to understand their sizes and boundaries. The only other edition that provides maps is

Leslie Klinger’s The New Annotated Dracula (2008). He reproduces a map of Bukovina from Charles Boner’s 1865 Transylvania: Its Products and Its People; a map of Moldavia from the 1896 Baedeker guide for Austria; and a modern map of the Carpathian Mountains from the now-discontinued Internet encyclopaedia Encarta. However, Klinger’s maps do not reveal the exact location of the Romanian provinces.

Simply put, “Transylvania is one of three regions that make up contemporary

Romania” (Light 28), together with Wallachia and Moldavia. Nevertheless, placing it in relation to the other two provinces can prove quite difficult. The first two editions of

112 The volume also includes similar maps of nineteenth-century London, England and Europe.

223 Dracula (both of which were entirely or partially prepared by scholars born in Romania) give divergent interpretations of the map. In one version, Transylvania is a “high plateau in modern north and central Romania” (Wolf 3 n. 12); in the other, it “comprises the Western portion of Romania” (McNally and Florescu 52 n. 10). Subsequent editors follow one or the other of the two representations: it is “in western Romania” (Auerbach and Skal 9 n. 7); or it is “located in the central part of modern Romania, high in the mountains” (Luckhurst

363). Other editors avoid the debate by stating simply that Transylvania is “a part of

Romania” (Byron 32 n. 1) or “a province of modern Romania” (Leatherdale 29 n. 16).

Both Wolf and McNally/Florescu are actually right, although their description of the map is incomplete: Transylvania is at the same time in the centre, north and west of present-day Romania. Put together, the three historical provinces give the map of Romania the aspect of an uneven circle.113 Each province constitutes roughly one third of the country’s land mass. To understand the positions they occupy on the map, it is sufficient to draw a circle and divide it into three equal sections. First, one should draw a radius from the centre of the circle straight up to the circumference; next, two more radii should be drawn so as to form three 120-degree angles. Just like the three sections of the circle, all three historical provinces of Romania occupy the centre. The northern part is occupied by both Moldavia (towards the east) and Transylvania (towards the west), with the latter also leaning southwestwardly. The southern section is Wallachia.114

113 For the purpose of this explanation, I consider the historical province of Moldavia in its entirety, as it was until the end of World War II, when more than half of its territory was annexed by the Soviet Union. Today, this territory forms the independent Republic of Moldova and small parts of Ukraine. 114 See diagram on the next page.

224

Transylvania Moldavia

Wallachia

History115 complicates this simple and harmonious picture and is responsible for the fact that the three names also designate smaller regions inside the bigger ones. The editors of Dracula can easily become confused by the many changes. The historical principality of

Moldavia (in Romanian, “Moldova”) lost its south-eastern corner, called Bessarabia (in

Romanian, “Basarabia”) in the sixteenth century. It was occupied by the Turks, then by the

Russians. In 1812, the entire eastern half of Moldavia (between the Prut and Dniester rivers) was occupied by the Russians, who transformed it into a governorate. This territory was attached to Bessarabia and this name was given to the whole newly created region. At

115 For a good historical account of these provinces up to the end of World War I, see R.W. Seton-Watson, History of Roumanians (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1934). For an updated version, see Vlad Georgescu, The Romanians: A History (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1991).

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Figure 7.1 The three historical provinces during the lifetime of Vlad the Impaler. Transylvania proper is in yellow (source: Vasile Pascu, Atlas Didactic de Istorie).

the end of the Crimean War, Russia was forced to restore Bessarabia proper (the three southernmost districts in the Tsarist governorate of Bessarabia) to Moldavia. The truncated principality of Moldavia united with Wallachia soon after the Crimean War, in 1859, and became thus part of a new state called Romania, which proclaimed its independence in

1877. However, at the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, the new Romanian state was forced to give

Bessarabia proper back to Russia in exchange for the province of Dobrudja (in Romanian,

“Dobrogea”), on the western shore of the Black Sea. The governorate of Bessarabia became again a part of Moldavia when it united with Romania in 1918, but it was annexed by

Soviet Russia in 1940 and 1944. Most of its territory became the independent Republic of

Moldova in 1991 – its northern part as well as most of Bessarabia proper, in the south, had been severed during Stalin’s regime and are now in Ukraine.

226

Figure 7.2 The historical provinces subdivided into smaller regions (source: Pascu, Atlas).

Figure 7.3 The provinces today. Transylvania proper is in blue (source: Romanian Ministry of Education).

227 Moldavia is mentioned only once in the novel: Harker notes that the district where

Dracula’s castle is situated “is in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains, one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe” (Dracula 32). If

“Harker errs here in describing Moldavia as a ‘state’” (Klinger 17 n. 21) – in fact, in describing all three provinces as “states” – he is right in locating the district in the east of

Transylvania, close to both Moldavia and Bukovina, as they were understood at the time from an Austro-Hungarian perspective.116 However, it is difficult to understand the exact position of Moldavia relative to Castle Dracula without a map. Only two editions of the novel give some coordinates: “Province of Romania located between the Carpathian mountains (west) the Dniester River (east) and Wallachia to the south” (McNally and

Florescu 53 n. 11); “Moldavia is situated between the Carpathians to the west, the Dniester

River to the east, and Wallachia to the south” (Klinger 17 n. 21). Klinger’s edition reproduces almost verbatim McNally/Florescu in delineating not the province of today or of Stoker’s time, but the historical principality of Moldavia, which reached the Dniester

River (in Romanian, “Nistru”) from the mid-fourteenth to the early nineteenth century.

Both editions provide maps that contradict this representation; the province is smaller on

Klinger’s maps and the Moldavian rivers bear no names on the medieval sketch displayed in McNally/Florescu.

The confusion seems to be caused by the desire to incorporate details of historical geography. One editor is entirely ahistorical and describes Moldavia simply as “Province of

Romania” (Byron 32 n. 2). McNally/Florescu remain idiosyncratic in their attempt to create

116 It would be more accurate to say that the castle is in the east of an Austro-Hungarian province (Transylvania), close to Romania (Moldavia) and to another Austro-Hungarian province (Bukovina).

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a parallel narrative about the medieval ruler Vlad Ţepeş. The boundaries they provide for the historical principality fit perfectly their description of a fifteenth-century Moldavia:

“Dracula lived in Moldavia at the court of his kinsman Prince Bogdan at Suceava, and was given a classic Renaissance education by monks from a neighbouring monastery” (McNally and Florescu 53 n. 11). No further information is given about Moldavia in Victorian times or in the 1970s, when they produced the edition of the novel. All the other editors try to define Moldavia as it was in Stoker’s time; to compare late-nineteenth century Moldavia with the present situation; or to concentrate the entire history of the province in a few lines.

Leatherdale is the only one who makes a comparison between the 1890s and the 1990s:

“Moldavia was, in 1893, and is today a part of Romania. Its eastern portions, however, were annexed by the Soviet Union after World War II. Today they constitute the independent state of Moldova” (29 n. 18). He, too, starts by mentioning the historical principality, which makes both sentences inexact: Russia first annexed the eastern part of

Moldavia as early as 1812, which means that the province was fragmented not only today, but also in 1893; and the Soviet Union further divided the seized territory, the north and south of which are today not in the Republic of Moldova, but in Ukraine.

Two editions portray Moldavia solely as it was in the late nineteenth century. One is quite correct in saying that, around the time that Stoker wrote Dracula, “Moldavia was a province of Romania, which had become a kingdom in 1881” (Auerbach and Skal 10 n.

8).117 The other is surprisingly off the mark: “A district of Romania from 1861 to 1940, covering 13,000 square miles. Its capital was Kishinev” (Wolf 3 n. 13). Based on the area provided and the name of the capital (the Russian version of the name Chişinău), Wolf

117 More accurate would have been to say that Harker refers to a part of the historical principality of Moldavia, which formed a province of Romania at the time.

229 clearly refers not to the historical principality, to the Romanian province of the 1890s, to the Romanian province of the 1990s, to the governorate of Bessarabia as it was in Stoker’s time, or even to the present-day Republic of Moldova. His note describes the Soviet

Socialist Republic of Moldova as it was in 1975, when he published the first annotated edition of Dracula and Russian was one of the two official languages of the country. He only changed one thing between 1975 and 1993: in the first version, the note ended with the words “See map, p. 335” (Wolf 1975, 3 n. 11). No maps are provided in the 1993 edition, but the one included in 1975 clearly shows that “Kisinew” (the map is German) was not in

Romania at the time when the novel was written (see Wolf 1975, 335). Even the years provided suggest that Wolf refers to the eastern part of Moldavia, which belonged to

Romania only between the two world wars (1918-1940) and then between 1941 and 1944.

However, there were no frontier changes in 1861.118 Also, the territory is too large to be called a “district.” Nevertheless, another editor – who does not annotate “Moldavia,” but one of its rivers – seems to follow Wolf when he writes that “[t]he Pruth formed the eastern boundary of Romania, separating the district of Moldavia from Russia” (Riquelme 346).

The two most recent editors concentrate several centuries of the history of Moldavia in a few lines: “A former principality, Moldavia, together with Wallachia, was part of the

Kingdom of Romania, which gained its independence in 1878, after publication of the

Boner and Crosse books on which Harker apparently relied for his information. Its chief town was Jassy, not far from the Pruth River” (Klinger 17 n. 21); “Moldavia was an independent state, which combined with Wallachia to form the basis of modern Romania in

118 Wolf may have remembered the year 1861 because that is the year when the union between the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (realised in 1859) was recognised by the Western powers and Turkey. The territory he describes, with Chişinău as its capital, was not part of this unifying effort. One should note that Harker correctly uses the term “district” for a smaller subdivision of a “state” like Transylvania or Moldavia.

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1859. The territory is now divided between Romania and the Republic of Moldova”

(Luckhurst 363). Both editors gloss over the fact that Moldavia as part of Romania does not cover the same territory as the historical province – and this is all the more contradictory in

Klinger’s note which, as stated above, also gives Moldavia’s boundaries as being the

Carpathians, Wallachia and the Dniester River. Both offer reasons for Stoker’s mistake of calling Moldavia a “state” in an 1897 novel. Luckhurst very generously calls Moldavia before 1859 “an independent state,” although it was only autonomous and although almost four decades separate its union with Wallachia from the publication of Dracula. Klinger uses the fact that both Boner’s and Crosse’s books were written before Romanian independence as justification,119 although other major sources for the novel (E.P. Johnson,

Emily Gerard, Mazuchelli) were published after the Treaty of Berlin and although a new country called Romania had already existed since 1859. Perhaps more importantly,

Klinger’s 2008 edition calls Moldavia’s capital “Jassy” (in Romanian Iaşi). The city is not mentioned in Dracula and the only reason why a twenty-first-century editor would want to call it “Jassy,” as it would have appeared on an Austro-Hungarian map, is to keep the reader anchored in the novel’s German-sounding toponymy even while he is reading the annotations.

Another “state” mentioned by Harker is Bukovina (in Romanian, “Bucovina”). The name appears eight times in the novel – after all, “the Borgo Pass leads from [Bistritz] into

Bukovina” (Dracula 34) – including once in the last chapter, because the vampire-hunters have to go through this territory on their way to Castle Dracula. Bukovina is in fact just another part of the historical principality of Moldavia. It was seized by the Austrians in

119 Charles Boner’s Transylvania: Its Products and Its People (1865). Andrew Crosse’s Round about the Carpathians was published in 1878, but it narrates a trip taken in 1875 and it only mentions that, at the time the manuscript was ready, “the Russo-Turkish war began” (Crosse 209).

231 1774 (the annexation was made official in January 1775) and held until 1918. The

Austrians gave it its name, since for Moldavians it had never been a distinct province.120

The territory reunited with Romania after World War I, but the Soviet Union seized the northern half of the former Austro-Hungarian province in 1944 and this is now a region in

Ukraine. Again, the editors of the novel had to choose to describe Bukovina before, during and after the time of Dracula. Only one edition gives a description of “before” and

“during”:

In 1775 the Hapsburg emperors obtained part of northwest Moldavia together with

Suceava, the ancient capital, from the Turks who technically violated the treaty

stipulations (they did not have the legal right to cede Romanian territory). The

Austrian authorities baptised the district “Bukovina,” meaning “beechnut country”

because of the many beechnut trees in the area. In 1790 Bukovina was reunited121

with Galicia up to 1849. Then it was reconstituted into an autonomous duchy

(which was its status when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula) and administered by an

Austrian governor who resided in the capital of the new province, Gernauti [sic]

(Czernowitz). (McNally and Florescu 53 n. 11)

Despite the fact that they stopped their narrative at the time when Stoker wrote the vampire novel, McNally and Florescu are the only twentieth-century editors of Dracula who mention the fact that Bukovina is an old Romanian land.

120 Historically, Moldavia was divided into the Upper Country (Ţara de Sus) and the Lower Country (Ţara de Jos). The territory seized by Austria in 1774 was the northeastern quarter of the Upper Country. In 1812, Russia (and in 1944 the Soviet Union) seized the eastern half of both the Upper Country and the Lower Country. 121 The word “reunited” seems out of place here. It is possible that this note was abridged from a longer one. Bukovina was united with Galicia between 1786 (rather than 1790) and 1849, and later briefly reunited in 1860-1861.

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The other twentieth-century editors choose to speak of Bukovina during and after the 1890s and their notes – all too brief for a territory covered by the vampire-hunters in the entire last week of the events narrated in Dracula – both omit the fact that only the southern part of the territory is now in Romania, and give the impression that Romania has seized

Bukovina from the Austrian Empire, not vice versa: “A former possession of Austria now a province in northeast Romania, covering an area of 14,031 square miles” (Wolf 3 n. 14);122

“In the 1890s, Bukovina was an autonomous duchy within the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it too [like Moldavia] is now part of Romania” (Auerbach and Skal 10 n. 8); “Former possession of Austria, now a part of Romania” (Byron 32 n. 3). One other editor from the

1990s speaks only of the time when Dracula is set: “Bukovina, wedged to the north of

Transylvania and Moldavia, was in 1893 an autonomous duchy administered by an

Austrian governor” (Leatherdale 29 n. 10). Unlike Moldavia, which is presented to the reader of Leatherdale’s edition with a complete narrative about the way it was before, during and after the events in the novel, Bukovina seems to belong solely to the universe of

Dracula, and the reader has no inkling of the subsequent fate of this autonomous duchy.123

The editions published in the twenty-first century (with the exception of Riquelme, who does not provide annotation for either Moldavia or Bukovina) have tried to give a more exact representation of the territory by summarising its entire history. The most accurate is that of Luckhurst, who writes that “Bukovina (‘the land of the beech’) was part of Moldavia but annexed to the Austrian Habsburg Empire in 1775. This territory is now

122 This is clearly a typo. The 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica gives 4,035 square miles (IV, 771). More modern estimates give 4,031 or 4,032. 123 Both Auerbach/Skal and Leatherdale seem to have borrowed this slightly misleading term from McNally/Florescu. In reality, Bukovina was a province of the crown, nominally a duchy, but the title of duke belonged to the Austrian emperor.

233 divided between Romania and the Ukraine” (363-364). Klinger provides more details that include several errors:

The Bukovina, as the 1896 Austria “Baedeker” calls it, was severed from Moldavia

and annexed to Austria in 1786. A hilly, wooded region, it had a population at the

time of Dracula of about 600,000, consisting of Ruthenians, Roumanians, Hermans,

Poles, and Armenians. Gernauti [sic] (Czernowitz) was its capital, from which it

was administered by an Austrian governor, and German was its principal language.

(Klinger 17 n. 22)

The annexation year is 1775 (although the occupation started in 1774), but Klinger may have confused it with the year when Bukovina was incorporated into Galicia, which is 1786

(Magocsi 420). The population could have been rounded up to 650,000 – the 1890 Austrian census gives 646,591 inhabitants (Special-Orts-Repertorium 42). By “Hermans,” Klinger obviously means Germans. However, he forgets the Jews, who were more than 60 percent of the German-speaking population (42). Finally, he seems to have taken the name of the capital from McNally/Florescu, without noticing the mistake: the Romanian name is not

“Gernauti,” but Cernăuţi.

Transylvania, the first “state” mentioned by Jonathan Harker, also has a complicated geography. As one of the commentators of the novel has noticed, “Today, the term

[Transylvania] is sometimes used to embrace not only the original principality but also the regions of Maramures [in Romanian, Maramureş], Crisana [in Romanian, Crişana] and the

Banat – an area of some 39,000 square miles with a population of seven million” (Miller,

Sense & Nonsense 118-119). The original principality of Transylvania, founded in the twelfth century, is completely surrounded by the Carpathians, whereas Crişana and Banat begin on the western slopes of the mountains and spread westward across a plain; and

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Maramureş is a mountainous region in the Northern Carpathians.124 There are several reasons why the name of Transylvania is sometimes applied today to all four provinces.

First, while the original principality of Transylvania is now preserved entirely within

Romania’s frontiers, all the other three historical provinces were cut in half after World

War I: Crişana was divided between Romania and Hungary; Banat between Romania and

Serbia; and Maramureş between Romania and Czechoslovakia, although the northern half was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1944 and is now in Ukraine. Second, the three smaller provinces were, at one time or another, in total or in part, incorporated into the principality of Transylvania: Maramureş from the twelfth century until 1711; and parts of Crişana and

Banat between the mid-sixteenth and the late-seventeenth centuries. Third, with the possible exception of Banat – sometimes called the Banat of Temesvar (after its capital, in

Romanian “Timişoara”) – they never enjoyed Transylvania’s level of autonomy and, for a long while, were simply regarded as part of Hungary.125

It is quite possible, therefore, for the term “Transylvania” to be used in a stricter or larger sense in Romanian historical discourse; when necessary, the term “Transylvania proper” is used for the original principality. This is how a Romanian historian settled in

Britain and writing in English describes the Hungarian military campaigns eastwards: “St.

Stephen’s expedition into Transylvania had been more in the nature of a small crusade than of a war of conquest; the Hungarians do not seem to have penetrated into Transylvania proper before the victory of St. Ladislas over the Cumans in 1070; they had up to that time occupied the districts between the Tisza and the western Transylvanian mountains” (Ghyka

124 After going full circle around the Transylvanian plateau, the Carpathians stretch in a wide straight line across Maramureş all the way into Slovakia. 125 A good account of these historical changes can be found in the two sources mentioned above: Seton- Watson (1934) and Georgescu (1991).

235 37; emphases mine). In one sentence, the historian refers to all four provinces as

“Transylvania,” then distinguishes between the principality (“Transylvania proper”) and the other lands identified as “districts” (they were quickly organised into counties) between the

Tisza River and the Western Carpathians.126 When a major political organisation of

Romanians was formed in 1880 in the Kingdom of Hungary of the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy, it was called “the national party of Roumanians in Transylvania, Hungary and the Banate” (Ghyka 95). Both Transylvania and Banat were individualised in the name, whereas Crişana and Maramureş were simply referred to as “Hungary.”

Bram Stoker was aware of at least some of these distinctions. In one of his working notes he shows signs of a desire to understand the lay of the land in which he was about to set his tale: “Ancient Kingdom of Dacia = Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania and

Temesvar – finally conquered by Romans” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 246-247). This is placed at the top of a typewritten page of quotes taken from Wilkinson’s Account, between the note about the Voivode Dracula (19) and a note about the Voivode Michael the Brave (26).

Stoker had these notes typed, but the anonymous typist did not always understand his longhand. The sentence appears as: “Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania and,” after which

“Temesvar” is handwritten. Although the note is unsourced, Stoker clearly tried to reproduce this sentence from the beginning of the Account: “It is sufficiently ascertained that these two provinces [Wallachia and Moldavia], joined to those of Transylvania and

Temesvar, composed the kingdom of Dacia, finally conquered by the Romans” (Wilkinson

2).

126 The same historian makes a similar distinction between Wallachia and Wallachia proper, that is without present-day Oltenia, sometimes known as Little Wallachia: “The kneze Litovoi became a Voivode in 1251; his voivodate was on the right bank of the Olt; on the left bank, in Wallachia proper, was the voivodate of Seneslas” (Ghyka 58; emphasis mine).

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Two editions of Dracula introduce the distinction between the stricter and larger sense of the name “Transylvania,” but without escaping its ambiguity. One edition first delimits “Transylvania” with the boundaries of Transylvania proper: “The name is derived from chronicles of the first Hungarian historians who saw the Carpathian mountains as a vast forested range, as they settled the Transylvanian plateau during the tenth century”

(McNally and Florescu 52 n. 10). Then it describes the Carpathians as a range of mountains which “separates Transylvania proper from the other two Romanian provinces – Wallachia to the south and Moldavia to the East” (McNally and Florescu 52 n. 9). The formula “the other two Romanian provinces” excludes the provinces located west of Transylvania proper, from which they were also separated by the Carpathians. Another edition borrows the description but tries to correct it: the Carpathians are a “mountain range separating

Transylvania proper from other Romanian provinces: Moldavia to the east and Wallachia to the south” (Auerbach and Skal 9 n. 5). By writing “other” instead of “the other two,”

Auerbach and Skal try to be more accurate than their source (McNally and Florescu).

However, by providing only Moldavia and Wallachia as examples, their edition remains ambiguous about the territories west of the Carpathians.

The confusion in the first of these editions is enhanced by the way Transylvania, described as just the plateau surrounded by mountains (in other words, Transylvania proper), is also sized up as “approximately 43% of the territory” of Romania (McNally and

Florescu 52 n. 10) – this is repeated in the other edition: “about 43 percent of the territory”

(Auerbach and Skal 9 n. 7). The surface indicated clearly refers not just to Transylvania proper, but also to Maramureş, Crişana and Banat. The confusion between the stricter and the larger sense of the name slips in unexpected places. One of the editors writes “Oravicza,

Transylvania” (Klinger 23 n. 42) even though he is paraphrasing one of Stoker’s sources,

237 who, in fact, says “Oravicza in the Banat” (Crosse 4). A better understanding of the differences between Transylvania proper and the neighbouring western provinces is not without its merit. Although he does not describe it, Jonathan Harker travels through Crişana for most of his trip from Buda-Pesth to Klausenburg. In Dracula: The Connoisseur’s Guide

(1997), Leonard Wolf introduces a map of Romania, erroneously called Transylvania, and in which the names of cities and rivers are confusingly multilingual, some in English, some in Hungarian, others in Romanian, plus a bilingual (German/English) name for the main river – “Donau (Danube)” (viii). However, the rivers and the mountains (perfectly round) are well drawn and the location of the historical provinces is well indicated: Moldavia in the east, Wallachia in the south, Transylvania proper in the middle, with the three western provinces ranged (a little too tidily) one beneath the other: Maramureş in the north, Crişana in the centre, Banat in the south.

As with other provinces, Transylvania’s history is variously described by the editors of Dracula. Some point to the way it was in Stoker’s time and today – and again this can give the impression that Romania has simply annexed a Hungarian territory: “A region in eastern Europe, now part of Romania but at the time Dracula was written a part of

Hungary” (Riquelme 27); “In Stoker’s time it was a province of Hungary; now it is a part of Romania” (Byron 32 n. 1). Other editors begin with ancient history and show how

Transylvania was a part of Roman Dacia, later overrun by migratory tribes and conquered by Hungarians; how it became a Turkish dominion, then an Austrian province, and finally part of Romania: “After World War I, Transylvania became Romanian” (Auerbach and

Skal 9 n. 7); “Not until after World War I was Transylvania reconstituted as a province of modern Romania” (Leatherdale 29 n. 16); “now part of Romania” (Riquelme 27). From these accounts, it is unclear why Transylvania ended up being Romanian, as nothing in its

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history appears to connect it with Romanians. Even more ambiguous are the inconclusive accounts of editors who stop their narrative at the time of the events in Dracula, without mentioning anything about the future of the province: “Originally part of Roman Dacia,

Transylvania became part of Hungary in the eleventh century. . . . Transylvania remained a semi-independent principality under the Turks until the beginning of the eighteenth century. In Stoker’s day it was a Hungarian province” (Wolf 3 n. 12); “Transylvania belonged to the Roman province of Dacia until the eleventh century, when it became a part of Hungary. Conquered by the Turks in the fifteenth century, it was a semiautonomous principality until annexed to Austria in 1713” (Klinger 15 n. 17).127

One editor leaves out both the medieval and the Victorian parts of the account and focuses only on ancient history and the contemporary situation: “Transylvania (‘beyond the forest’) is located in the central part of modern Romania, high in the mountains, but formed the core territory of the ancient kingdom of Dacia” (Luckhurst 363). Only one edition makes it clear that Transylvania has a Romanian past, which explains its being part of

Romania today: “After the Roman withdrawal in the fourth century, Transylvania became

‘the cradle of the Romanian race’. . . . The region became Romanian as a result of World

War I in accordance with the Wilsonian principle of self-determination” (McNally/Florescu

52-53 n. 10). Historical geography complicates simple geographical descriptions and sometimes the older disposition of boundaries can replace contemporary ones – as is the case with one of the editors, who uses the simple present to describe Transylvania as an autonomous region between two countries: “it lies between Hungary on the west and

127 Klinger seems to borrow the dates from Wolf but, by simplifying the narrative, he exaggerates the length of the Roman occupation in Dacia; it ended in the third, not the eleventh century. Also, the principality was abolished by the Austrians in 1711 (not 1713); however, the Turkish occupation had officially ended in 1699 (Treaty of Karlowitz). Finally, the Turks did not occupy Transylvania in the fifteenth, but the sixteenth century.

239 Roumania on the east” (Klinger 17 n. 20). Based on the spelling “Roumania” and the location of the province, the editor seems to be describing nineteenth-century Transylvania; however, this is contradicted by the verb tense.

7.2 Landscapes

Another geographical ambiguity has to do with the Carpathian mountains, which are a crucial setting element in Dracula. The Carpathians are usually described as a long range covering a large part of East-Central Europe, but the name is also used in reference only to the mountains that surround Transylvania. On the map, the former appears as a broken line, comparable with the letter “V” or with a semicircle, whereas the latter form a closed, almost circular, chain in the middle of the Carpathian mountain system. The Encyclopaedia

Britannica, which Stoker could have consulted, calls the whole range “Carpathians” and gives the name “Transylvanian Mountains” for that part of the range where the beginning and the end of the novel are set. “Transylvanian Mountains” is an exonym that neither

Romanian nor Hungarian authors use. Arminius Vambéry, who gives a detailed description of the groups and subgroups of the Carpathian range, calls the mountains of Transylvania

“Southeastern Carpathians” (Vambéry, Hungary 4). In fact, neither Stoker nor his sources ever use the term “Transylvanian Mountains” even when they speak specifically of the mountains in Transylvania. However, the existence of such a term and of a specially assigned encyclopaedia entry shows that the Romanian Carpathians can and are often viewed as a range apart. As David Turnock shows, although the Carpathians cover areas in

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several countries, they are most frequently associated with Romania or, in Stoker’s time, with Transylvania and Romania.128

Most of the editors of Dracula define the Carpathians as a long range of European mountains: “A mountain range extending 800 miles from northeast Czechoslovakia to northern Romania” (Wolf 2 n. 9); “Mountain range extending from Czechoslavakia [sic] to

Romania” (Byron 31 n. 5)129; “A major mountain system of Central Europe that links the

Alps with the Balkan Mountains” (Riquelme 27); “Second only to the Alps as the greatest mountain range of central Europe, the Carpathians extend . . . over a distance of 880 miles”

(Klinger 13-14 n. 13); “eastern central European mountain range” (Luckhurst 363). These annotations are misleading or at least indeterminate, as the Carpathians in the novel are actually the “Transylvanian Mountains.” They are first mentioned by Harker when he is in

Klausenburg, well inside Transylvania (Dracula 31), shortly before placing Castle Dracula

“in the midst of the Carpathian mountains” (32). Although Harker would have seen mountains before on his trip from Vienna, it is in Bistritz that he is greeted in a letter from

Count Dracula with the formula “Welcome to the Carpathians” (34). In his working notes,

Stoker wrote simply “Carpathians” every time he mentioned the mountains of

Transylvania, with two exceptions: he took from Mazuchelli’s Magyarland the formula

“Northern Carpathians” about the mountains in present-day Ukraine (Bram Stoker’s Notes

200-201) but never used the passage; and he transcribed Andrew Crosse’s observation

128 See David Turnock, “Settlement History and Sustainability in the Carpathians in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Review of Historical Geography and Toponomastics 1: 1 (2006), 31-60.Turnock explains that, although the Carpathians are in six countries today, they cover a small and peripheral area in Poland and Ukraine and are quite insignificant in Hungary and the Czech Republic. By contrast, the landscape of Slovakia and Romania is dominated by the Carpathians, but only in the latter country are the mountains held to be symbolically crucial and “the basis of the Romanian state” (Turnock 34). 129 As she often does, Byron summarises Wolf. Czechoslovakia no longer existed in 1998, when Byron’s edition was first published (the mistake persists in the 2000 reissue) and it had just dissolved (1 January 1993) when Wolf’s second edition (1993) was published. Instead, Byron is right to correct Wolf’s formula “northern Romania” and write simply “Romania.”

241 about “weeping birch trees in Southern Carpathians” (210-211) but, in the novel, he transferred them from Banat (Crosse 108) to the Borgo Pass (Dracula 38).

Stoker’s sources, in general, also use the term “Carpathians” to speak exclusively of the mountains in Transylvania and Romania. William Wilkinson (1820) uses it to describe the border separating the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia from “the Austrian dominions” (Wilkinson 72). Due to the particularity of their subjects, Charles Boner, author of Transylvania: Its Products and Its People (1865), and Emily Gerard, author of The Land beyond the Forest (1888), speak exclusively of the mountains of Transylvania every time they mention the Carpathians. In Round about the Carpathians (1878), Andrew Crosse confines his movements to the mountains that circle Transylvania; the only time he steps out of Transylvania proper, into Maramureş, he drops the term “Carpathians” and prefers to speak of “the Marmaros Mountains” (Crosse 346). When he describes the “Southern

Carpathians” (108), he clearly means the southern part of the mountains of Transylvania. In his voyage recounted in On the Track of the Crescent (1885), E.C. Johnson mentions the presence of the Carpathians north of Debrecen, in today’s Hungary (Johnson 169) and glimpses “the Gallician Carpathians” (269). When he enters Transylvania, he speaks of “the

Transylvanian Carpathians” (194), which he later calls simply Carpathians. The only traveller read by Stoker who describes the whole range is the mountaineer Nina Mazuchelli, in Magyarland (1881). Although a “fellow of the Carpathian Society” exploring the range,

Mazuchelli rarely uses the name of the mountains. She calls the mountains of Transylvania alternatively “the Eastern Carpathians” (I, 61), “the South-Eastern Carpathians” (I, 368) and “the Southern Carpathians” (II, 96). However, Stoker did not take down (Bram

Stoker’s Notes 201-205) any description of the mountains from her book, but mainly observations about Szeklers and Slovaks.

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Two editions include the mountains of Transylvania in their definitions of the

Carpathians, but they remain ambiguous because their notes begin with a description of the whole range and then transition abruptly to the second meaning of the term. McNally and

Florescu write that “The heavily forested Carpathian mountains form a V-shaped mountain range, which is connected to the Slovakian foothills in the north and the Dynaric Alps of

Yugoslavia to the south. In essence, this range of mountains with few peaks reaching eight thousand feet, separates Transylvania proper from the other two Romanian provinces –

Wallachia to the south and Moldavia to the east” (McNally and Florescu 52 n. 9). Here, the transition between the more general to the more particular meaning is expressed through the formula “in essence” and the note is somewhat comprehensible. However, when another edition summarises it, the transition disappears: “A heavily forested, V-shaped range separating Transylvania proper from other Romanian provinces: Moldavia to the east and Wallachia to the south” (Auerbach and Skal 9 n. 5). Here, the V-shaped range130 no longer goes from Slovakia to Serbia, but appears to be entirely situated within Romania.

Unlike Auerbach/Skal, Leatherdale refers to the whole range when he describes the

Carpathians as a “Horseshoe-shaped mountain range with the ‘open end’ to the west. . . .

The highest peak is Gerlachovka in Slovakia” (Leatherdale 28 n. 13). However, since the note is supposed to explain the Carpathians present in Dracula, and Stoker only names and describes the mountains of Transylvania, this can be just as confusing. From the note in

Auerbach/Skal, the reader could understand that the Romanian Carpathians are V-shaped, from Leatherdale’s that they have the form of a horseshoe; from both, that they have an

“open end.” Leatherdale clearly took the idea about the shape of the mountains from

130 The shape of the whole range can be likened to that of the letter, but one arm of the “V” is much longer than the other. The “Transylvanian Mountains,” on the other hand, are described alternatively as circular or quadrilateral (trapezoidal).

243 Jonathan Harker, who announces that he is going among the Szeklers, descendents of the

Huns: “when the Magyars conquered the country in the eleventh century they found the

Huns settled in it. I read that every superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians” (Dracula 32). Stoker borrowed this information from Round about the

Carpathians, whose author writes that “the Magyars . . . found the Szeklers already in possession of part of the vast Carpathian horseshoe – that part known to us as the

Transylvanian frontier of Moldavia” (Crosse 205). Stoker evidently liked the image of the horseshoe, associated by Crosse with the whole range, but dismissed the fact that the traveller located Szeklers in “a part” of it.131

Figure 7.4 Map of Romania with the Carpathian Mountains (source: Romanian Ministry of Education).

131 Elizabeth Miller quotes Stoker’s Notes to suggest that the author used the phrase “specifically for ‘that part known as the Transylvanian frontier of Moldavia’” (Sense & Nonsense 45 n. 26). However, she truncates the note, which speaks of a “part of the vast Carpathian horse-shoe” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 214-215). Neither Crosse nor Stoker sees the Transylvanian frontier of Moldavia (which is a fairly straight line) as horseshoe- shaped. Miller probably confuses here Crosse’s phrase with the so-called Curvature Carpathians, accurately described by the traveller on the same page: “the chain of the Carpathians takes a bend” (Crosse 205).

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The mountains of Transylvania do not have an open end but are, on the contrary, a closed chain, usually called an “arc” by contemporary scholars: “Transylvania is an upland plateau lying within an arc of the Carpathian Mountains” (Light 28). According to the

Encyclopaedia Britannica available to the original readers of Dracula, the “Transylvanian

Mountains” are a “mountain system which surrounds the Transylvanian highland or plateau on all four sides” (XXVII, 211). Another sentence, stating that the “Transylvania quadrilateral . . . possess[es] many low and easy passes toward the Hungarian plain”

(XXVII, 212), may give the impression of a westward opening. For the reader of the

McNally/Florescu, Auerbach/Skal and Leatherdale editions, this impression may be enhanced by the fact that Harker says nothing of his trip from Budapest to Klausenburg.

However, Stoker could have known from his sources that there is no real “open end” westward and that, soon after crossing the river Tisza, Harker would have seen “the commencement of the Transylvanian Carpathians” (Johnson 194); “Coming from the

Hungarian plains, the entrance into Transylvania is very striking, as the train dashes along narrow winding valleys . . . and above, the cliffs are piled up so high” (Gerard, The Land beyond the Forest I, 30). Other sources consulted by Stoker describe Transylvania as

“locked in all sides by the Carpathian mountains” (Boner 93), which “enclose the territory .

. . in an almost quadrangular shape” (Vambéry, Hungary 4).

McNally and Florescu incorrectly explain that “The term Transylvanian Alps is also commonly used” as a name for the Romanian Carpathians (McNally and Florescu 52 n. 9).

In reality, the term is only used for the southern branch that borders Transylvania and

Wallachia.132 The same editors also speak of “some of the most scenic alpine views of the

132 In Romanian, they are called “Carpaţii Meridionali.” The term “Transylvanian Alps” was made current by the French geographer Emmanuel de Martonne (1873-1955), who described them in his Recherches sur

245 Carpathians: forested ranges, rocky formations, and mountain lakes” (52 n. 9), but they describe the area surrounding Castle Poenari (in the Transylvanian Alps), which they propose as the “real” Castle Dracula, placed by Stoker in the north-eastern part of the

Romanian Carpathians. Another editor replies to McNally/Florescu and, very likely, to

Stoker’s descriptions of the mountains around the Borgo Pass, when he insists that the

Carpathians “are scenic rather than spectacular, with slopes covered by forests of oak, beech, fir and pine” (Leatherdale 28 n. 13). When confronted by a an American reporter from the Cincinnati Tribune who revealed that he had never been to Transylvania, Stoker replied that “Trees are trees, mountains are, generally speaking, mountains, no matter in what country you find them, and one description fits all” (Belford 220).133 However, all his sources describe the Carpathians as spectacular; and the passages he took down in his working notes indicate that one of the reasons that he chose to set Dracula in the mountains of Transylvania was that he found their “savage grandeur” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 230-231) fit for his vampire tale.

In Dracula there are almost forty descriptive passages about nature and the countryside in Transylvania and Romania: only one is about the Transylvanian plateau, in

Chapter 1 of the novel (in Jonathan Harker’s journal); two are about north-western

Moldavia, in Chapter 26 (in Jonathan Harker’s journal and Mina Harker’s journal, respectively); and no fewer than thirty-five are about the Borgo Pass and the surrounding area – in Chapters 1-3 (Jonathan Harker’s journal) and Chapter 27 (in Mina Harker’s l’Evolution morphologique des Alpes de Transylvanie (Karpates méridionales), Paris: Delagrave, 1906. Mazuchelli uses it ambiguously in her Magyarland (1881). Leatherdale also mentions the term, but it is unclear if he refers to the southern branch of the Romanian Carpathians or to the whole mountainous system of Romania: “The Carpathians [understood as a Central European range] are sub-divided into several constituent ranges, among them the Transylvanian Alps” (Leatherdale 28 n. 13). 133 Stoker’s reaction is similar to that of Bernard Shaw after Bulgarian protests against his play Arms and the Man: “Shaw’s efforts to achieve a quasi-realistic, ‘authentic’ setting contradict his oft-repeated claims about the irrelevance of the locale for this particular play and its concerns” (Goldsworthy 125).

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journal and Van Helsing’s memorandum). This is the only description included by Jonathan

Harker in his account of the railway trip from Klausenburg to Bistritz:

All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of

every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such

as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed

from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods. It

takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear.

(Dracula 33)

Wolf (5 n. 25), Leatherdale (30 n. 35) and Klinger (19-20 n. 34) comment on the exaggerated length of the trip; only Leatherdale and Klinger comment on the human presence in the region; and only Leatherdale discusses the action of rivers.

Leatherdale insists that “Hilltop towns are generally found in warmer climates, such as Italy or Spain, not in mountainous regions such as the Carpathians, which are snowbound in winter. Citadels are another matter, and may be strategically sited as high as is practicable” (Leatherdale 30 n. 36). Klinger disagrees, because “The grade approaching the Borgo Pass is gentle, and hillsides rolling” (Klinger 20 n. 35), which would make the presence of towns possible. However, Harker is on the road between Klausenburg and

Bistritz, not yet close to the Borgo Pass. The Transylvanian plateau is used for agriculture and Stoker would have found in his sources that “The ridges of the hills, and the sides, when not too steep, form excellent arable land” (Boner 348) and many villages are situated

“upon the hills” (280). “Citadels” are not typical to Transylvania; instead, villagers who lived on top of hills or among the mountains usually built “peasant-fortresses” (Mazuchelli

II, 46) and “fortress-churches” (Crosse 171-173). The latter drew Stoker’s attention and he took note of their existence (Bram Stoker’s Notes 214-215).

247 Leatherdale, the only editor who comments on the action of rivers on the

Transylvanian scenery, believes that here “Stoker’s landscape exists in his mind and is shaped by scripture. Water is a cleansing agent. Strength of water is a symbol of God’s power” (Leatherdale 31 n. 37). He also discusses the passage in his “Introduction,” where he sees it as containing in a nutshell Stoker’s Christian message: “this is not so much a face-value description as a reference to the cleansing power of water, theologically speaking, as the narrator crosses the threshold between Christian West and pagan East”

(Leatherdale 10). However, the passage probably comes from a description of Boner’s trip through the Transylvanian Plain (the author uses the Hungarian name “Mezőség”), that is, precisely between Klausenburg and Bistritz. The traveller saw rivers not bordered by trees, as “the earth on the steep hillsides is washed away by the flood of water that pours down them, leaving only the stiffer clay behind, or a stony soil” (Boner 322). This sentence is not present among Stoker’s working notes; yet, the novelist uses not only the image but also some of its vocabulary (“stony”; “flood”; “steep hillsides” became “margin” of “steep hills”) and, unless he committed the passage to memory, this shows that Stoker took from his sources more information than it has been preserved in the Notes.

Stoker does this quite often: he combines information from two or several sources or at least from two or several passages in the same source – and not all the information can be traced back to his working notes. To describe the Borgo Pass, Stoker could rely on a single eyewitness testimony: that of Charles Boner, from whom the novelist took down observations about the surrounding area and the condition of the roads (Bram Stoker’s

Notes 242-243). Stoker had a fairly accurate idea about the location of the pass and he complemented Boner’s description with passages from Crosse and Johnson, both of whom travelled close to Borgo but approached it from the south, while Harker comes from the

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west, through a different yet nearby territory. He also added information from Wilkinson, who had never stepped inside Transylvania, but whose Account includes descriptions of mountain passes on the other side of the Carpathians, in Wallachia and Moldavia. On the road to Borgo Pass, Harker notices that “the falling sunset threw into strange relief the ghost-like clouds which among the Carpathians seem to wind ceaselessly through the valleys” (Dracula 39). This seems to be inspired by the following sentence: “It is curious to notice sometimes in the higher Carpathians how the clouds march continuously through the winding valleys” (Crosse 271). Stoker took it down entirely and placed it between quotation marks (Bram Stoker’s Notes 216-217). Three editions offer the quote as source:

McNally/Florescu (61 n. 43); Leatherdale (39 n. 110); and Klinger (33 n. 79). The notes are insufficient, however, as they do not explain why in the novel the clouds are “ghost-like.”

What appears to be Stoker’s addition is in fact gathered from a different place in the same source: the phrase “grim phantom-haunted clouds” (Crosse 223), which was also taken down by the novelist (Bram Stoker’s Notes 214-215).

On the road to Borgo Pass, Harker notices “everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom – apple, plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I could see the green grass under the trees spangled with the fallen petals” (Dracula 37). Only one edition annotates this sentence and reminds the reader of the darker days ahead: “This springtime landscape is in sharp contrast to the wintry heights to which Jonathan is being borne” (Wolf 11 n. 43). Yet,

Stoker probably still fills in the scenery with passages taken from his sources, one of which notices “the wild cherry and pear . . . in full bloom, whilst plum-trees of immense size growing by the road-side, shower their petals on us as we pass” (Mazuchelli II, 33). The tableau described here is somewhere in Banat, but Stoker often deliberately misplaces such descriptions, opportunistically taking whatever he needs to compile his own fictional

249 travelogue. He obviously intended the last chapter of the novel to be read as “a Tourist’s

Tale” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 30-31); a “Traveller’s Story [in] Transylvania” (76-77); the

“story of a traveller” (80-81); and again “A Tourist’s Tale” (82-83).

The provisional title of the last chapter, whether it is a tale or a story, referring to a traveller or a tourist, is conspicuous when compared to other titles like “Arrival at Whitby,”

“Mina’s Marriage,” “Council of War” and “The Professor Speaks” (Bram Stoker’s Notes

76-77).134 It appears that Stoker did not simply intend to narrate a journey to Transylvania

(or else he would have noted “Trip to Transylvania” or something similar); his plan was to imitate the style of a travelogue. One commentator has noticed that “the novel participates in more than one genre. Stoker maps his story not simply onto the Gothic but also onto a second, equally popular late-Victorian form, the travel narrative” (Arata, Fictions of Loss

112). What has remained overlooked, however, is the fact that Stoker very likely tries to imitate the style of the travellers he has read. One important thing that is common to all of these authors is that they borrow information from each other, going so far as to plagiarise.

The editors of Dracula have noticed that Stoker does the same thing and often reproduces almost verbatim sentences from Boner, Crosse, Mazuchelli, Johnson or Gerard. What should be added is that this only happens in Harker’s original trip through Transylvania.

The style of the “traveller’s story” that Stoker wishes to impose on the first chapters of the novel could also mean quasi-plagiarising. The novelist was aware that it was common practice among travellers; so he deliberately has Harker do the same thing and never tries to hide it.

134 Very probably, these are not provisional titles but simple reminders about the main plot element of each chapter; but this does not change the fact that words identifying the last chapter stand out.

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This also means that much more than has been identified as quasi-plagiarising in the first chapters could have its source in the texts that Stoker read in the 1890s or before. The editors who try to find the origin of the descriptions in Harker’s journal on the road to

Borgo Pass – McNally/Florescu, Leatherdale and Klinger (Wolf does it, too, but without

Stoker’s notes he cannot find them) – put to use the author’s working notes and discover them especially in Boner, Johnson and Crosse. Stoker clearly chose to illustrate the journey with details from Boner since he was the only one who had travelled in the Borgo Pass; and from Johnson and Crosse, because they had come very close to it and described the nearby area. However, if a passage borrowed from a traveller is not to be found in Stoker’s working notes, it is also not signalled as a source in the editors’ annotations. For example, when Harker describes a “pine-clad rock” (Dracula 43) in the vicinity of the Count’s castle, he probably uses an image from Magyarland, describing a Romanian monastery high up in the Carpathians, surrounded by “pine-clad mountains” (Mazuchelli II, 155). Harker notices how “the snowy mountain-top still held the sunset, and seemed to glow out with a delicate cool pink” (Dracula 38), a phrase likely borrowed from another source, which describes

“snow-draped summits [that] displayed every shade of pink” (Johnson 262). Sometimes, in one sentence, Stoker seems to take one word from a source, then a phrase from another. He read his sources more carefully than is apparent from his notes; identifying the origin of the information he provides in the novel means showing the reader what Stoker knew.

251 7.3 Cityscapes

Three cities during Harker’s first trip seem to be worth discussing in the text of the novel, in the editors’ annotations or in both; and three more during his second: Budapest,

Klausenburg, Bistritz, Varna, Bucharest and Galatz. To Jonathan Harker, Budapest “seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse [he] got of it from the train and the little [he] could walk through the streets” (Dracula 31). One editor does not agree with this statement: “We may conclude that Harker had not been to Paris previously, for otherwise he surely would have commented on the City of Light, a much more impressive sight than Buda-Pesth”

(Klinger 11 n. 6). Although no descriptions of Budapest have survived in Stoker’s working notes, several of his sources praise its beauty – “one of the finest capitals in Europe”

(Crosse 257); “one of the most beautiful capitals in the world” (Mazuchelli I, 125) – and he could have been inspired above all by the phrase “this most wonderful, and romantic of cities” (Johnson 162-163). From what he read in Johnson’s account, only details of a meal in Pest survive (Bram Stoker’s Notes 232-233), but that does not mean he did not remember more or, very likely, that he had another, earlier, set of working notes. After all, nothing about the Széchenyi Bridge exists in the notes, yet Harker speaks about it in the first lines of Dracula.

Harker notices “the most Western of splendid bridges” (Dracula 31), a rather surprising formula, possibly inspired by one of Stoker’s sources, who describes it as “the most splendid suspension bridge the world yet boasts” (Mazuchelli I, 4). The fact that

Stoker added “Western” suggests he knew that the bridge had been built by “English engineers” (Luckhurst 363), “William Tierney Clark and Adam Clark” (Klinger 12 n. 8).

Two of Stoker’s sources mention this, although they misspell the name of the main builder:

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“It is a grand monument of English enterprise and skill, having been built by Mr. Tierney

Clarke” (Johnson 166), “a triumph of engineering skill accomplished by an Englishman,

Mr. Tierney Clarke” (Mazuchelli I, 127). All the editors, along with Stoker’s sources, say that the bridge was completed in 1849 (this is confirmed by modern encyclopaedias), with the exception of Wolf and Byron, the latter summarising as usual the former: “Count

Széchenyi’s great bridge over the Danube linking Buda and Best took nearly twenty years to build, from 1854 to 1873, and was considered a marvel in its day” (Wolf 1 n. 5); ‘Count

Széchenyi’s bridge linking Buda and Pest was completed in 1873” (Byron 31 n. 3). Wolf and Byron135 may have been misled by the fact that Buda and Pest became Budapest in

1873, when the bridge no longer linked two cities, but two parts of the same city.

If he has no time in Budapest, Harker conveniently arrives “after nightfall”

(Dracula 31) in Klausenburg and “on the dark side of twilight” (33) in Bistritz. From his experiences in the former, we only find out that he spent the night in the Hotel Royal

(Stoker spells “Royale”) and that “There was a dog howling all night under [his] window”

(33), hindering his sleep. Harker calls the city “Klausenburgh,” whereas Sister Agatha, in the letter to Mina, calls it more appropriately “Klausenburg” (134). Nothing else is said about the capital of Transylvania and, consequently, little else is reported in the annotations. The editors usually note simply the city’s “contemporary,” that is, Romanian name of “Cluj” (Byron 31 n. 4; Leatherdale 28 n. 10; Luckhurst 363) or add the population it had at the end of the nineteenth century (Wolf 2 n. 6). McNally and Florescu describe the city as it was in the times of King Mathias Corvinus and Vlad Ţepeş, in the second half of the fifteenth century (McNally and Florescu 51 n. 7). Klinger offers a quote from the 1896

135 They are not alone. At least one edition (2010) of the Frommer’s travel guide to Budapest and the Best of Hungary gives 1873 as the year when the construction of the bridge ended.

253 Baedeker for Austria, Southern Germany and Hungary, according to which, “this was a town of 33,000 inhabitants, ‘very animated in winter’ and ‘the headquarters of the numerous noblesse of Transylvania’” (Klinger 13 n. 10). This sentence alone adds a quantum of local colour to a city that is not properly described in Dracula. However, it has little bearing on the novel, since Jonathan Harker does not visit it in winter and does not meet with any nobles. Instead, it gives the reader the impression that the capital of

Transylvania is a winter resort. Klinger could have chosen many other things from the guide, for example the previous sentence, which reports that the city has a “university established in 1872” (Baedeker 404).

The information about Klausenburg being fashionable in winter is repeated by several of Stoker’s sources: Boner (123), Crosse (294-295), Johnson (296), Gerard (The

Land beyond the Forest I, 31), but this does not appear in the novelist’s working notes.

Instead, he wrote down from Johnson that in “‘Kolozsvar’ = ‘Klausenburg’ six gulden for drive 12d” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 232-233), which he never used. He may have wished to have Harker hitch a drive in downtown Klausenburg, although six gulden was probably much more than twelve pence. In fact, Johnson paid that amount for a trip from Dej to Cluj

(60 kilometres in six hours). Stoker also noted: “In Szamos. 25,000 Magyars and Szekely.

Houses of German character. Mathias Hunyadi born here – large Squares and wide streets”

(232-233). In the original, the city is said to be “situated in a valley by the [River] Szamos”

(Johnson 295) – so again Stoker’s abridgement was confusing, which may explain why he did not use this. The information about Corvinus is on the next page in Johnson’s account, along with the description of the city’s “old houses [which] are all of German character”

(296). The original version of Stoker’s last note appears as such: “I was sorry that I could not make a longer stay in Koloszvár, for it is a very fine town, with large squares and wide

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streets, and I should have liked to visit its museum, library and churches” (297). Harker has supper, sleeps, has breakfast and leaves. He has no time and perhaps no desire to take in the sights as he is travelling on business.

About Bistritz, Harker first writes that it is a “post town . . . a fairly well-known place” (Dracula 32), then, when he gets there, notices that it shows marks of “a very stormy existence” (34), of which he names a seventeenth-century siege and more recent fires. Five editions (Wolf 6 n. 28; McNally and Florescu 56 n. 22; Leatherdale 31 n. 43;

Klinger 21 n. 40; Luckhurst 364) confirm all these facts with references from Boner and the

1896 Baedeker, while the place itself remains faceless. Boner identifies it as a Saxon city

(Boner 102), although he notes that the majority on the city council are Romanians (379); he sees a wolf on the outskirts (142) and bears in the vicinity (149). None of these has made its way into the novel. Yet, there existed a brief description, which Stoker dropped at the last moment. In the letter he left for Harker at the hotel, Dracula advised him to “[s]leep well tonight” (Dracula 34). Klinger indicates that “The Manuscript contains the following, which does not appear in the published narrative: ‘and in the morning see something of the beautiful bastioned town, Bistritz.’ Stoker evidently deleted this unexpected tour-guide advice from Dracula as inconsistent with the dark picture he intended to paint in the narrative” (Klinger 23 n. 45). However, Harker enters unawares into the land of vampires and there is nothing dark about the places he sees before Borgo. The image of the beautiful bastioned town, which Stoker may have taken from a travel guide describing the “walls and towers, with which it is still surrounded” (Baedeker 407), would have contrasted not with a dark picture, but with the deliberate absence of descriptions.

Nothing is said in the novel about Varna, in eastern Bulgaria; the reader only learns that it has a “port” (Dracula 378) and a British Consulate and the vampire hunters stay at a

255 hotel called “Odessus” (374). Very little is also said by the editors: “Varna is Bulgaria’s chief port on the Black Sea. At the time of Stoker’s writing it was an unprotected harbour”

(McNally and Florescu 256 n. 350); “A major city on the Black Sea” (Auerbach and Skal

275 n. 4); “Bulgarian port on the Black Sea from where the Demeter sailed. It has a cosmopolitan population” (Leatherdale 434 n. 23); “Its population was a mixture of Greeks,

Bulgarians, Turks, Jews, and gypsies” (Wolf 375 n. 6). Of Stoker’s sources, only Johnson mentions briefly both the harbour and the railway station in Varna and there is nothing about the city in the author’s working notes. However, Stoker could easily have asked his younger brother George for a description. The absence of any words on the Bulgarian city in the novel is undoubtedly the most conspicuous, since the novelist had direct access to information and especially because his heroes spend no less than two weeks (15-29

October) in Varna.

When the posse led by Van Helsing arrives in Bucharest, on the other hand, the vampire hunters do not have any time to spare. The capital of Romania is merely the place where they change trains in order to get to Galatz. The brief mention of the city in the novel

– “at Bucharest, we are three hours late” (Dracula 386) – appears in Dr Seward’s diary.

Most of the annotations are brief (or absent, in Byron and Luckhurst): “Bucharest is the capital of Romania, then and now” (Leatherdale 468 n. 10); “The capital of Romania”

(Riquelme 333); “The capital of Romania; a large and lively city” (Auerbach and Skal 299 n. 2). Klinger (462 n. 2) discusses only the tardiness of the train, while McNally/Florescu

(257 n. 351) add that the name of the city was first mentioned in a document issued by Vlad

Ţepeş. The only editor who gives a lengthy note on Bucharest is Wolf:

At the end of the nineteenth century, when Seward and his companions were in

Bucharest, it had a population of 250,000 people. The ninth edition of the

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Encyclopaedia Britannica says of the city that it had picturesque churches and many

trees. Bucharest’s streets were irregular, poorly paved, or not paved at all. In

summer public transportation was by means of 500 droshkis; in winter a similar

number of sledges took their place. Our travellers would have been pleased to know

that an English company had recently built Bucharest’s first tramway system. Count

Dracula, for his part, was no doubt pleased to know that more than 20,000

Transylvanians held civil service positions in Bucharest. Ironically enough, for our

delayed travellers, the word ‘Bucharest’ means ‘city of joy.’” (Wolf 409 n. 2)

The editor probably chose the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published between 1875 and 1889, because it was the most recent version available to Stoker and to his readers. However, since no information about Bucharest is provided in the novel, and its readers probably did not know very much about the Romanian capital, this cannot function as a note of recovery.

Instead, Wolf’s annotation contributes to the othering of the place by providing obsolete information from an edition of the encyclopaedia with data from the mid-1870s, instead of the eleventh edition, whose information is from around the turn of the century, closer in time to Dracula’s year of publication. First, the editor summarises the following passage from the ninth edition:

The number of its cupolas and minarets,136 and the profusion of acacia, poplar, and

other trees that fill the numerous spaces of unoccupied ground, give it a picturesque

136 This is obviously a mistake. There were no minarets in Bucharest. None of the travellers, including Stoker’s sources, mentions minarets. In fact, although the article later enumerates “116 Greek churches . . . [a Catholic] parish-church in the centre of the town and several chapels . . . Lutheran and Calvinistic churches . . . ten synagogues” (IV, 414), no mosques are mentioned. The treaty between Radu the Handsome and Mohamed the Conqueror included a clause respected until the end of the Ottoman suzerainty: “no Turkish mosque shall ever exit on any part of the Wallachian territory” (Wilkinson 22). The first Bucharest mosque

257 appearance from a distance. The arrangement of its streets is very irregular, and in

many districts it cannot be said that there are streets at all. In general the roadways

are either unpaved or only laid with rough blocks of different sizes. A few streets,

indeed (and notably the Podo Mogochoi, which is the most important), have been

paved with Aberdeen granite. The city is lighted with gas produced from English

coal. (EB9 IV, 414)

Some of the information is obviously from before 1878, when the most important street in

Bucharest was renamed Calea Victoriei (Victory Road), in honour of the military success against Turkey. This was the first street illuminated by electric light, beginning on 27 May

1882 (Cebuc 11). The details about irregular, unpaved streets seem to be about half a century older.137 When Wilkinson was staying in Bucharest, its streets were paved with wooden boards – that is why many were called bridges. Stone paving was inaugurated only in 1824 (Cebuc 14). Until 1870, stones (granite) were imported from Scotland; afterwards, they were brought from local sources and new paving methods were introduced: asphalt, stones inserted in concrete foundations, but also wooden cubes after a so-called “Morris method”138 (Cebuc 16). In the eleventh edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wolf could have found that “the city is modern. . . . From the accession of Prince Charles, in 1866, a gradual reform began. The river was enclosed between stone embankments; sewerage and pure water were supplied, gas and electric light installed . . . the principal thoroughfares . . .

was built three decades after Romanian independence, in 1906 (King Charles I’s forty-year jubilee), as a gesture of generosity towards the declining Ottoman Empire. 137 Ion Ghica, mentioned before, grew up in Bucharest in the 1820s and, in his Letters to V. Alecsandri, speaks of the absence of streets in the areas inhabited by aristocrats, who held domains rather than houses in the middle of the city. He also relates the radical changes introduced during the Russian occupation of Bucharest (1828-1834), when P.D. Kisseleff, the military governor, started cutting through the city with wide boulevards. 138 Known in the United States as “Nicolson pavement.” One of Charles Dickens’s frequent collaborators to Household Words noticed them in St. Petersburg: “the hexagonal wooden pavement with which, in London, we are all acquainted” (Sala 169-170).

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were paved with granite or wood” (EB11 IV, 717). Stoker read a similar account in Johnson

(115-116), who visited the city in 1881 and saw rapid changes.

Wolf then summarises the following sentence from the ninth edition of the

Encyclopaedia Britannica: “Public locomotion is facilitated by about 500 droshkas in summer and as many sledges in winter; and a tramway has recently been laid down by an

English company” (EB9 IV, 414). The “droshka” (the Romanian term at the time was, in fact, “birjă”) was in steep decline throughout the second half of the nineteenth century

(Cebuc 71-74) and by the time Stoker published Dracula it had almost completely been replaced by omnibuses and horse-driven tramways, introduced in 1871 by a British company.139 These were still in use more than twenty years later, but in the late 1890s they were being replaced by “electric tramways” (EB11 IV, 717), introduced in 1894 by a joint

Belgian-British venture (Cebuc 127). When he wrote about 20,000 Transylvanians “who held civil service positions,” Wolf very likely misread the following passage: “Division into classes and nationalities is a marked feature of the whole Bucharest population. . . .

There are about 20,000 Transylvanians who fill subordinate positions” (EB9 IV, 414). The eleventh edition gives “53,056 aliens, mostly Austro-Hungarian subjects” (EB11 IV, 717) with no mention of positions, social or otherwise. The ninth edition also speaks of

Bucharest, “or, as it is called by the inhabitants, Bucuresci (that is, according to their own etymology, City of Joy)” (EB9 IV, 414). According to the eleventh edition of

Encyclopaedia Britannica, “the meaning of Bucharest is much disputed” (EB11 IV, 718), but “Bucharest is often called ‘The Paris of the East’” (IV, 717). The meaning of “city of joy” is also mentioned in one of Stoker’s sources (Johnson 115), although another source

139 The principal investor was Harry Hubert de Merve Slade (Cebuc 103), third baronet, of a prestigious military family. His niece, Madeleine, became famous as Mirabehn, devotee of Gandhi.

259 reproduces the Romanian consensus that the name means simply “the lands belonging to

Bucur” (Wilkinson 86).

The last city in which the characters in Dracula spend some time is Galatz (in

Romanian, “Galaţi”), the seat of the European Commission of the Danube, located upstream from the place where the river splits into a massive delta. For the first editors, however, Galatz is “a Romanian Black Sea port” (McNally and Florescu 252 n. 342); “a

Romanian Black Sea port” (Wolf 398 n. 15); “a Romanian port on the Black Sea”

(Auerbach and Skal 292 n. 8); “Romanian Black Sea port” (Byron 378 n. 1). Only the more recent ones correct this (Leatherdale 458 n. 75; Riquelme 332; Klinger 452 n. 30;

Luckhurst 389) and place it on the Danube. The most recent, in fact, writes that “Galati is a city on the River Danube, now in Moldavia” (Luckhurst 389), although the city has always been in Moldavia.140 Wolf is again the only editor who provides more information on the city, and his mistake is surprising, as he relies, once again, on the Encyclopaedia

Britannica. The ninth edition, which he used for his note on Bucharest, does not have an article on Galatz, so Wolf takes his information from the eleventh edition, which says that the city is “on the left bank of the river Danube” (EB11 11, 396), not on the Black Sea. The anonymous author of the article also notices that,

towards the close of the 19th century . . . the city improved rapidly. Embankments

and fine quays were constructed among the Danube; electric tramways were opened

in the main streets, which were lighted by gas or electricity, and pure water was

supplied. The higher, or north-western part of the city, which is the more open and

comfortable, contains many of the chief buildings. These include the prefecture,

140 Due to its location well within the boundaries of the province, Galaţi has escaped Turkish and Russian occupation and has never been involved in frontier changes, as Luckhurst’s formula suggests.

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consulate, prison, barracks, civil and military hospitals and the offices of the

international commission for the control of the Danube. . . . But the main

importance of the city is commercial. Galatz is the chief Moldavian port of entry,

approached by three waterways, the Danube, Sereth and Pruth, down which there is

a continual volume of traffic, except in mid-winter; and by the railways which

intersect all the richest portions of the country. . . . The shipping trade is largely in

foreign hands, the principal owners being British. (EB11 11, 396)

Wolf summarises this as follows: “Our band of murderers would have found that the main thoroughfares were paved, and the streets lighted with gas, and the quays with electricity.

Among other signs of progress, Galatz boasted a fine prison” (Wolf 398 n. 15). The encyclopaedia speaks of the streets being lighted “with gas or electricity,” but Wolf moves the electricity to the quays and keeps the gas for the streets. From the list of “chief buildings,” Wolf retains only the prison, although the encyclopaedia does not say if it was

“fine” or if the city was proud of it. The editor’s intention here is probably that of giving the city an aura of nefariousness, while adding a caustic remark about the prison as a “sign of progress.” Otherwise, the information remains unjustified, since there are no prisons in the novel and the vampire hunters would not be interested in incarcerating Dracula. More useful information, such as the presence of British traders, is not employed by any of the editors, although Stoker was well aware of it and has Harker, Seward and Van Helsing visit the agents of the London trading company that operated the Czarina Catherine.

The sparse comments on cities and landscapes follows Stoker’s practice of not describing any of these places. This is noticed in two editions, but only for the second trip, as an incongruity in relation to the beginning of the novel. Although no details are given in the novel about what Harker could have seen in Budapest (apart from the bridge),

261 Klausenburg or Bistritz and although only the area around the Borgo Pass is described in the beginning of the novel, set in an Austrian-Hungarian dominion, Auerbach and Skal write that “most of this return journey . . . is a modernised contrast to Jonathan’s eerie introduction to Romania at the beginning” (299 n. 2). Similarly, when Van Helsing asks

“When does the next train start for Galatz?” (Dracula 379), one of the editors comments:

“Van Helsing reflects Stoker’s ignorance of eastern Europe. Whereas Stoker filled in the background detail of Transylvania by reference to variously named source works, he appears to have done little or no research on Bulgaria and Romania. These [last] chapters in consequence lack local colour” (Leatherdale 459-460 n. 81). In reality, Stoker was well informed about both Bulgaria and Romania; as recounted in Chapter 4, his brother had spent two years in the former and he read about the latter in several of his sources, especially in Johnson, who has much to say about Bucharest in 1881. He knew all about the

British presence in Galatz and he takes his travellers on a sinuous itinerary back to

Transylvania, proving that he studied places, roads and timetables. The absence of descriptions is therefore deliberate and part of a larger strategy of presenting the people and the places encountered by his travellers as belonging to a distinct world, remote both in space and in time.

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Chapter 8 Othering: Time

From the first pages of the novel, Jonathan Harker’s meticulous diary entries signal the fact that the reader will follow not just an English solicitor’s trip to Transylvania, but rather an anthropologist’s. In Dracula, Time becomes an important component of the journey as Harker discovers the land beyond the forest to be the land beyond Time. One of the editors has noticed that “Stoker was obsessed by time, and in Dracula he uses it to good effect to put his larger theme of Life-in-Death into sharp relief” (Wolf 1 n. 4). Dracula’s country bears a striking resemblance to the vampire Count. On the one hand, the way it is presented in the novel, it has a violent history that has kept it out of touch with the progress of the civilised world. Indeed, “Jonathan Harker discovers a country that is still the victim of its own history, in which the inhabitants are terrified of and terrorised by the barbarian elements in their midst” (Glover 40). On the other hand, by being on the fringes of humankind, Transylvania belongs with all the distant peripheries in which many late

Victorian colonial novels are set and which remain “in some form of time-warp . . . such unexplored strange areas are essentially timeless and without history (in that they are

‘barbarous’ and tribal, and as such outside the historical timescale of civilisation)”

(Leerssen 292). Like the vampire who is both dead and alive, the distinction of Stoker’s

Transylvania comes from being at the same time a land of history and a land without history.

263 Before Stoker’s novel, such a representation of Transylvania already existed in the accounts of travellers that inspired him. Faced with the unknown land and its people, the travellers, the novelist (or, rather, his narrators – especially Jonathan Harker), but also the editors of the novel find themselves in a position that is very similar to that of the anthropologist. As Johannes Fabian has shown in Time and the Other: How Anthropology

Makes its Object (1983), there is a contradiction inherent to the discipline: anthropological knowledge is produced by intersubjective communication between anthropologists and their interlocutors; however, in the traditional ethnographic representation, the dialogical realities of the process are suppressed. The “others” do not appear as partners in a cultural exchange, but as the remote and peculiarly different group. Distance, both spatial and temporal, is the most important factor in constructing the Other. The anthropologist and his readers are placed in a privileged time frame, while the very objects of the anthropological study are temporally relegated. Fabian calls this practice “allochrony”; the most common method of time-relegation he names “denial of coevalness” (Fabian 31), the latter being a term by which he understands both contemporaneity and simultaneity.141 Following his sources, the author of Dracula insists on the temporal alterity of the “remote” lands he describes. The novel’s editors practice the same allochronic discourse when they confirm or even enhance Stoker’s late Victorian representations.

141 Fabian uses it to translate the phenomenological category of Gleichzeitigkeit (31), which denotes contemporaneity and synchronicity.

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8.1 The Time of the Other

In late Victorian colonial novels, “the unexplored regions turn out not to be simply timeless, but rather ‘othertimely’ or allochronic” (Leerssen 293). In Dracula, the

“othertimeliness” is first suggested by the imprecision of the railway communication and by the different calendar used by the superstitious locals. The novel’s editors often intervene not to deny, but to enhance such a representation: they confirm it either by merely providing its source or by not offering any kind of annotation; or they reinforce it by adding to the allochronic discourse of the novel. In fact, Dracula begins with such discourse: “3

May. Bistritz. – Left Munich at 8:35 p.m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. . . . I feared to go very far from the [Buda-Pesth] station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible” (Dracula 31). These are the first sentences recorded in Harker’s journal and they subtly suggest the beginning of an adventure during which the narrator will find himself lost not only in space but also in time.

Two of the editors explain that one of “Stoker’s duties as business manager of

Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre” (Leatherdale 27 n. 4) was to be “conversant with train schedules” (McNally and Florescu 50 n. 5) and that the use of real railway timetables heightens the realism of the account. Another editor suggests that “it is possible that Harker was confused about the local time. Standardisation of time was a new phenomenon. . . . The

1896 Austria ‘Baedeker’ advises that Vienna local time is five minutes in advance of central Europe time, which is observed by the railways” (Klinger 11-12 n. 7). However,

Stoker planned Harker’s trip with the exact times of departures and arrivals as early as 1892

(Bram Stoker’s Notes 84-85) and earlier editions of the Baedeker do not speak of the

265 Viennese allochrony. Klinger enhances the illusion of temporal difference with information not included in the novel or in the author’s working notes. In his previous annotation, he also uses Stoker’s handwritten note about Harker’s itinerary to retrace the narrator’s steps from London to Paris, then Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Buda-Pesth, Klausenburg, and

Bistritz (Klinger 11 n. 6). Yet, he does not notice an interesting reminder that Stoker wrote to himself: “Leave Paris” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 84-85). In the novel, no place west of

Munich is mentioned in reference to Harker’s trip to Transylvania; by not mentioning familiar names, Stoker enhances the reader’s estrangement.

Leaving Klausenburg early in the morning, Harker and his fellow travellers need considerable patience: they “dawdle” all day long and only get to Bistritz “on the dark side of twilight” (Dracula 33). In his notes, Stoker scheduled the trip to last twelve hours (Bram

Stoker’s Notes 84-85) probably not only to suggest that the railroad trip was longer than normal, but also because he wanted Harker to meet Dracula (disguised as a carriage driver) late at night and to travel through the Borgo Pass at midnight on St George’s Day. The novel’s first editor begins by indicating the regular duration of the trip: “The journey from

Klausenberg [sic] to Bistrita, a distance of seventy-four miles, took four and three-quarter hours. . . . The slow speed of the train was not unusual. Austrian trains seldom went faster than twenty-five miles per hour” (Wolf 4 n. 23). Then, he calculates the journey’s length in the novel and finds that “Even at the slow speed noted, that would mean a twelve-hour journey or nearly eight hours late!” (Wolf 5 n. 25). Despite the exclamation point, he does not deny the possibility that the train could actually be that slow. McNally/Florescu offer the same figure for the regular speed and duration of the trip, without commenting on the unusual length: “From Klausenburgh to Bistritz is a distance of some seventy-four miles.

The train took four and three-quarter hours to cover that distance. In Stoker’s day Austrian

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trains seldom went faster than twenty-five miles per hour” (55 n. 16). Both editions are wrong to speak of Austrian trains. Transylvania was part of the Hungarian railway system, which was different from the Austrian, and which is discussed in detail by Boner (601-

605), a source that Stoker knew well.142

Another editor mentions the concordance between the author’s working notes and the novel: “It is 75 miles from Klausenburgh to Bistritz, yet according to Stoker’s notes

Harker does not reach Bistritz till 8 p.m., a journey of twelve hours. Harker shortly confirms his arrival on ‘the dark side of twilight’” (Leatherdale 30 n. 32). He also calculates the velocity: “Stoker’s times suggest an average train speed of six or seven miles per hour” (Leatherdale 30 n. 35), again without denying the possibility that the train could have moved so slowly. Only one editor finds it unrealistic: “The 1896 Austria ‘Baedeker’ indicates that the journey from Klausenburg to Bistritz is only 74 miles and should take 4 ¾ hours by rail. Although the guidebook warns that trains in Austria do not generally travel faster than 25 miles per hour, the length of this journey seems excessive” (Klinger 19-20 n.

34).143 The other editors clearly took the information about speeds and the regular duration of the trip from the same guidebook. However, as stated before, Stoker probably based his account on an earlier version. The 1887 Baedeker for Southern Germany and Austria, including Hungary and Transylvania does not mention the speed of Austrian trains and, more importantly, states that the journey from Klausenburg to Bistritz was supposed to last

“7 hrs.” (Baedeker 406). Either this information was wrong and later Baedekers updated it, or the railway communications improved. In any case, it seems likely that Stoker used this

142 Boner witnessed all the preparations after the transfer of power from Austria to Hungary. There were no Hungarian railways yet when he published his account in 1865. 143 Klinger also adds that “This is the first of many geographical lacunae that suggest the region has been fictionalised rather than actually observed” (20 n. 34). This is not, however, an observation about Stoker’s “othering” of Transylvania, but part of Klinger’s overarching editorial conceit of viewing the events in Dracula as “real”: he repeatedly suggests that Stoker tries to conceal the real location of Castle Dracula.

267 figure and calculated a delay of five hours, rather than eight, as Wolf, McNally/Florescu,

Leatherdale and Klinger suggest.

The train is late when Harker departs from Klausenburg: “after rushing to the station at 7:30 I had to sit in the carriage for more than an hour before we began to move. It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?” (Dracula 33). One editor explains that “Stoker chastises other nations for their inability to run trains on time, a popular yardstick by which to measure progress and civilisation. The idea may have been implanted by Jules Verne’s Around the World in

Eighty Days” (Leatherdale 30 n. 33). Then, he refutes the narrator’s implication: “Harker’s jest is misplaced. Chinese railways of the time were engineered by Western companies and were well-managed. Under communist rule they are admirably punctual” (Leatherdale 30 n.

34). Another editor does the same: “The limited Chinese railroad lines that were constructed in the nineteenth century (the first was not built until 1876) were largely financed and built by foreign concessionaires; the two main Manchurian lines, the Chinese

Eastern Railway and the South Manchurian Railway, were Russian ventures with little

Chinese participation, and the Shantung railway from Kiaochow to Tsinan was a German- financed and –operated line” (Klinger 19 n. 33). Neither editor says anything about

Transylvanian railways, although they are the primary target of Harker’s imputation. They could have mentioned, for instance, that they were started by the famous London contractors, Waring Brothers and Eckersley (who built the St Pancras station in London), then taken over by the Hungarian government, with British engineers and even rails imported from Britain (Rosegger and Jensen 439-441).

Three editions (McNally and Florescu 55 n. 17; Leatherdale 30 n. 33; Klinger 19 n.

32) suggest that Stoker got the idea about the unreliability of Transylvanian trains from

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Emily Gerard’s book The Land beyond the Forest, in which she wrote that “The railway communications are very badly managed” (Gerard, The Land beyond the Forest I, 30).144

No other source that may have inspired the author of Dracula is provided by any of the editors. However, out of all of Stoker’s sources that talk about railway trips (Crosse,

Mazuchelli, Johnson and Gerard; the Transylvanian railways were still being projected when Boner travelled in the region), Emily Gerard is without a doubt the least edifying. In her 1888 book, Gerard complains only once about railway communications. This occurs in a passage from which McNally/Florescu, Leatherdale and Klinger quote, out of context, the beginning of the first sentence. In it, Gerard actually describes a voyage by train from

Lemberg (today Lviv; at the time, in Galicia) to Klausenburg; only the last part of the trip took her through Transylvania and she did not use the Hungarian Railways that, in the novel, carry Harker from Klausenburg to Bistritz.

It seems more likely that Stoker was inspired by any or all of the other three travellers. He may, in fact, have drawn inspiration from any account of a railway trip going eastwards on the continent and comparing the speed of the trains and the pace of life with those in Britain. Deploring their slowness was a feature of all “Victorian narratives of travel in Eastern Europe” (Arata, Fictions of Loss 121). The slow, laggard rhythm of the trains is a major topos in these travelogues, part of the larger theme of the “othertimeliness” of the people. A contemporary expert study of the British Railways (London: Cassell, 1893) by J.

Pearson Pattinson also starts with a comparison between the trains at home and those in the rest of Europe. Pattinson discusses speed, punctuality, frequency, fares, and

144 First McNally/Florescu, then Leatherdale (the latter may borrow this from the former) give “p. 16” as the place in Gerard’s book where the citation exists. In 1888, the book had a British edition in two volumes (Blackwood) and an American edition in one volume (Harper). The page provided is consistent with the American edition. Here and elsewhere, I give the pages from the British version.

269 accommodation. He finds that Austro-Hungarian trains are relatively slow in the mountainous regions; that the faster trains have lower travel classes; and that “the fares are as low as (or lower than) any in Europe. . . . At present it is cheaper to travel second class on the Hungarian State lines than third on British railways” (Pattinson 5). Trains in Britain were faster and much more frequent than in other countries, with a record of forty-five trains daily between Liverpool and Manchester (7). The railway systems at the time were actually “utterly dissimilar” (10) between Britain and the continent, which explains the different advances of both sides.

Where Britain lagged behind, despite Harker’s complaint in the Klausenburg railway station, was in regards to punctuality. Pattinson tries to combat the general impression “that British railways, and particularly those in the Southern part of the island, pay but little attention to ensuring a punctual arrival for their trains” (Pattinson 9), yet has to admit “that punctuality on the Continent is rather in advance of what it is here, but not nearly so much as is generally supposed” (10). He goes on to explain that continental trains are differently timed so that they waste time in standby but make up for it between stations and that “their trains get a clear course on a road only moderately filled with trains, while ours have to run the gauntlet of numerous trains of all descriptions . . . and it is really very creditable to the British lines that they have approached so closely to the Continental systems while working under such disadvantages” (Pattinson 10). Many travellers, including those whose accounts Stoker read while working on Dracula, try to combat the same belief in the superior punctuality of non-British trains.

Andrew Crosse often admires the feats of engineering he encounters in Banat and

Transylvania (including railways) and notes that Transylvania “is fairly well off for iron roads” (Crosse 139) and that “The railway system has been enormously extended in this

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country during the last ten years” (339). His complaints, instead, are consistent with the differences explained by Pattinson: the trains are not late, but few and far between. Once, in

Banat, “there turned out to be no train till the evening. . . . If there is anything I hate, it is waiting the livelong day for a railway train” (4). Another time, in Hungary, “we stopped at some small station, for no particular reason . . . but looking out I saw the stokers, pokers, and engine-driver all calmly enjoying their pipes. . . . Some one or two people remarked that the officials in this part of the world were lazy fellows, but the passengers generally appeared in no great hurry” (342). Still, Crosse suggests that it is a matter of national temperament: “The Wallacks are the most dilatory people in the whole world” (283). He believes that “a change will come to all this substratum of humanity, but it takes time. Even the railways in these wilder parts have not exactly settled themselves down to the inexorable limits of ‘time tables’” (342).

Such observations were made by travellers even before the introduction of railways.

Charles Boner notes in his 1865 account Transylvania: Its Products and Its People: “in my life I never met such want of punctuality as here . . . in this country absolutely no one kept to time. For a person you had ordered punctually at seven to make his appearance at nine was not thought extraordinary. Punctuality is simply a thing unknown” (Boner 227; emphasis his). He later suggests that “There must be something in the air of Transylvania which prevents people from keeping time, for no one seems capable of doing so” (307).

E.C. Johnson, the author of On the Track of the Crescent (1885), also mentions the

Hungarian railway worker who has “breakfast, luncheon, dinner, pipe, and coffee, and has arranged all his family affairs” (Johnson 297), although the trains he takes are never late.

He waits one hour in Varna and the same amount of time in Budapest because of the poor frequency. Still, in Budapest, he notes that “The train arrived at five o’clock, or as near to

271 that hour as Hungarian punctuality will allow” (161). He finds several journeys too slow

(185), but when he misses a connection and loses his luggage, he thinks that “the train started, at a speed very unusual on Hungarian railways” (208). When he has found the link he needs, again he complains that “the guard made me hop out nimbly, as the train only stopped two minutes” (209). Apart from this subjective view of train speeds, Johnson’s account does not leave a lasting impression about the unreliability of Transylvanian railways.

By contrast, Nina Mazuchelli, the author of Magyarland (1881), is, together with

Crosse, very likely Stoker’s main source for railway travel. In the third chapter of her account, titled “A Caution to Snails,” she uses complaints, jokes and euphemisms, not unlike Harker in Klausenburg, to describe a Hungarian145 trip: “Our train was announced to leave at ten minutes to ten; but overdue, it did not arrive from Trieste until half-past eight o’clock, and how could any one be so unreasonable as to expect it to be got ready to start again in the short space of one hour and twenty minutes?” (Mazuchelli I, 31). She quickly draws conclusions about the natives’ notion of time: “No one thinks of hurrying himself in

Hungary, where everybody has plenty of time for everything . . . where persons take life easily” (I, 32). On the Hungarian plain, “the speed, as may be imagined, is not very alarming . . . scarcely exceeding ten miles an hour; besides which we linger at the various stations, time, as we have seen, being no object in this primitive country” (I, 32-33).

Otherwise, she notices that trains are punctual in the larger stations (I, 31) and the trains in which she travels are delayed on account of a robbery (II, 9) or to add more carriages for

145 She is actually in Pragerhof, Slovenia but, like other travellers, she makes use of a special rhetorical device: she rarely mentions the places in order to give the impression that the story is set in the middle of nowhere. The reader follows her over dozens of pages without any clear indication of her actual location.

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emigrants to America (II, 205-206). Once she almost misses the train (II, 40) because she is too busy trying to buy a Romanian traditional blouse worn by a young girl.

There are several conventions of an Eastern European travelogue, which the reader or the publisher probably expected to find, and which show up in several accounts. Like

Boner, Mazuchelli complains of the carriage she has ordered at six o’clock: “at half-past seven it came dashing under the old archway with ‘exemplary punctuality’ according as that substantive is understood in Hungary” (II, 135). Like Crosse and Johnson, she uses the image of the petty railway official who delays the train: “At the time specified the engine- driver, seated on a heap of sand outside the platform, was dozing over his pipe, and the guard leisurely finishing his breakfast in the inn kitchen” (I, 31). She repeats this later: “as soon as the engine-driver and guard have charged their pipes afresh, the heavy, lumbering machine slides out of the station, and we drag on again as though it were a matter of the most sublime indifference as to what time we arrive at the end of our journey – if we ever do” (I, 35-36).

In Stoker’s novel, the second trip to Transylvania, undertaken by the group of vampire hunters, includes a railway journey from Varna to Galatz. The travellers need to change trains in Bucharest where, according to Dr Seward’s diary, they are “three hours late” (Dracula 386). One editor remarks that “The novel opened with Harker bemoaning the unpunctuality of trains in the East and ends with Seward observing the same”

(Leatherdale 468 n. 11). Nevertheless, they manage to arrive in Galatz in a little over twenty-four hours, which means they could have made the trip in only twenty-one. This is contested in one of the editions of the novel: “The most direct train from Varna to Galatz would have been by way of Ruschuk, Giurgiu, Bucharest, Ploesti, Buzau, Braila, and

Galatz – a distance of over 200 miles, which would have taken several days in Stoker’s

273 time” (McNally and Florescu 256 n. 350). Another editor repeats this, although he reduces the number of days from “several” to only two: “The entire trip, a straight-line distance of

150 miles, took the hunters almost twenty-four hours, although McNally and Florescu (The

Essential Dracula) calculate that it should have taken them at least two days” (Klinger 462 n. 2). Neither McNally/Florescu nor Klinger provide a source for their suggestion that

Stoker should have at least doubled the duration of the trip between Varna and Galatz.

However, Stoker’s numbers are consistent with those provided by Johnson,146 the only one of his sources who made half of the trip (Varna-Bucharest) in 1881 in under twelve hours

(Johnson 99-110). Moreover, George Stoker also travelled between Varna and Ruschuk and could have offered his brother the necessary information. Doubling or tripling the duration of the trip to Galatz, as McNally/Florescu and Klinger do, contributes to the characters’ sense of alienation in a way not imagined by Bram Stoker.

One of the most confusing passages in the novel is the brief dialogue between

Jonathan Harker and the wife of the innkeeper in Bistritz: “‘Do you know what day it is?’ I answered that it was the fourth of May. She shook her head as she said again: ‘Oh, yes! I know that, I know that! but do you know what day it is?’ On my saying that I did not understand, she went on: ‘It is the eve of St George’s Day’” (Dracula 35). It is not an important passage; still, it is heavily annotated and it often resurfaces in commentaries on the novel. It is true that the woman’s voice forewarns the reader about the appearance of the mighty villain of the story when she asks Harker: “Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway? Do you know where you are going, and what you are going to?” (35). However, in light of the future

146 Pattinson does not provide an average speed for British trains, but he gives an average of 28 miles per hour for Austria and Hungary and 25.75 miles per hour for Romania (16).

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developments both in Transylvania and in London, it matters little that Harker meets

Dracula on St George’s Eve, when nothing of consequence occurs.147 The annotations in several editions focus on information taken from Emily Gerard, Montague Summers and others about Romanian superstitions and legends concerning Saint George, who is celebrated by all Christian denominations on 23 April. These editors (Wolf 7-8 n. 32;

Byron 35 n. 1; Luckhurst 364-365) either quote Gerard or place St George’s Day on 23

April without mentioning the fact that the dialogue in the novel occurs on 4 May.

The discrepancy in the novel is clearly an allusion to the twelve-day difference (in the late nineteenth century) between the Julian and the Gregorian calendars. Until the First

World War, Orthodox countries like Russia, Romania or Greece still followed the Julian calendar.148 However, Austria had switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1583 and Hungary

(although under Turkish rule at the time) in 1587 – exactly 165 years before England. In

Transylvania, Catholic and Protestant officials adopted the innovation between 1602 and

1611; and, after the annexation by the Habsburgs at the beginning of the eighteenth century, “the Gregorian calendar . . . became official to all religions” (Repciuc 84), including the Orthodox Church. As citizens of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Romanians in Transylvania used the Gregorian calendar in their daily life, while the Orthodox Church and its flock followed the Julian calendar for the religious feasts.149 This is why the peasants encountered by Harker celebrate St George’s Day on 5 May instead of 23 April.

147 A little later, when the woman implores Harker to wait a day or two, one editor rightly asks: “Why would waiting improve Harker’s chances of survival? Dracula certainly is not a creature of the forces of the eve of St. George’s Day” (Klinger 25 n. 50). 148 E.C. Johnson, for example, attends the coronation of King Charles I of Romania on 22 May 1881 (Johnson 111-124), although Romanians celebrated it on 10 May. More famously, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia is also known as the October Revolution, although it occurred on 7 November, according to the Gregorian calendar. The Churches in Romania and Greece switched to the Gregorian calendar after 1918, whereas the Russian Church did not. 149 This is still true today in Russia, Ukraine, Serbia and a few other places. The civic calendar is Gregorian, but the religious one is Julian, so that Christmas, for example, is celebrated on 7 January.

275 The innkeeper’s wife does not suggest that the day is 22 April; on the contrary, she acknowledges that it is, in fact, 4 May.

Stoker’s only source for the discrepancy is Emily Gerard’s 1885 article in

Nineteenth Century: “Perhaps the most important day in the year is St. George’s, the 23rd of April, (corresponds to our 5th of May), 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” (Gerard,

“Transylvanian Superstitions” 134). Gerard was probably confused150 by what she undeniably perceived as an anomaly, the fact that Romanian peasants believed St George’s

Day should be celebrated on 5 May rather than 23 April. Still, she never states unambiguously that Romanians in Transylvania followed the Julian calendar in their daily life. Stoker took note of the discrepancy: “St George’s Day 23 April (corresponds to our 5

May) eve of which is for witches Sabbath” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 120-121). He probably believed at first that Transylvanian Romanians (or even Transylvanians in general) followed the Julian calendar, because in an early note on the plot he planned to include two letters from Count Dracula to Harker’s employer, Peter Hawkins: one from 16 March,

“dated 4 March old style,” and one from 30 March, “18 old style” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 92-

93). However, he later changed his mind, probably because he found out that this was not true. The “old style” letters were not included in Dracula and the date is the same (4 May) for both Harker and the innkeeper’s wife.

Nevertheless, several editors seem to believe that Jonathan Harker’s time is twelve days ahead of that of the natives he meets in Transylvania. Those who address the anomaly

150 She seems even more confused in her 1888 book, The Land beyond the Forest, where she writes twice that St George’s Day is on “24th April (corresponding to our 6th of May)” (I, 335; II, 59).

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are McNally/Florescu, Leatherdale, Riquelme and Klinger. After quoting Gerard, the first editors state that “In the Romanian Orthodox calendar St. George’s day falls on April 23”

(McNally and Florescu 56 n. 24). The mention of a specific calendar seems intended to mark a temporal difference, especially as it comes after the quote from Gerard about “23

April (corresponding to our 5 May)”; yet, the date they provide for the feast is the same in both the Julian and the Gregorian calendars151 and it is not clear why the woman in Bistritz believes it is the eve of St George. Another editor explains that “The reason for the discrepancy is that in 1752 Britain switched from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar.

Russia and Greece did not switch till after World War I. Several countries affiliated with the Greek Orthodox Church still retain the old, Julian Calendar for the celebration of church feasts” (Leatherdale 33 n. 56). The information provided is correct, but it does not concern the people and the places described in Dracula.

Two of the more recent editors also address the calendar difference on the eve of St

George: “The evening before May 5 by the Eastern calendar and before April 23, by the

Western calendar, which was changed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582” (Riquelme 30); “The date Harker reckoned as 4 May (presumably using an English, Gregorian calendar) would have been denoted as 22 April on the Julian calendar, still in use in Transylvania at that time” (Klinger 25 n. 48). Riquelme seems to suggest that Romanians in Transylvania followed the Julian calendar, which is in fact made clearer by the political-geographical terms that the editor prefers: the Julian calendar becomes “Eastern” and the Gregorian becomes “Western.” As such, they seem to apply more objectively to people who live in

151 It is possible that, by “Romanian Orthodox calendar,” McNally/Florescu mean the calendar followed by the Romanian Church at the time when their edition was published (1979), when the Romanian calendar (both civic and religious) was already Gregorian. Even if this is the case, the fact that St George is celebrated twelve days earlier in Stoker’s Bistritz remains unexplained.

277 different parts of the world rather than to religious beliefs. Klinger is less ambiguous about this and clearly states that Transylvanians used the Julian calendar. The Gregorian calendar takes on the mark of ethnic difference and becomes the “English” calendar. When Stoker is imprecise in his attempt to induce the temporal relegation of his subjects, some of the editors intervene to render his discourse more unambiguously allochronic.

8.2 The Burden of History

Time and timekeeping in Dracula mark the encounter of two different worlds; or, as one commentator of the novel puts it, the “contrasting attitude towards time is supposed to be a differentia specifica between the East and the West” (Goldsworthy 79). One of the most memorable sentences in the novel, announcing the danger that lies ahead waiting for

Harker in Transylvania, refers to his crossing the bridge across the Danube in Budapest:

“The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most

Western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule” (Dracula 31). Harker indicates here that he changes worlds; not just the geographical world of the West and the East, but also the world of the present with one of the past. Conquered by the Turks in 1541, Budapest was freed in 1686, less than a century and half later, and more than two centuries before the events in Dracula. Stoker knew this from his sources (Crosse 194; Johnson 178); Vambéry also makes it clear in his country monograph (Hungary, 332). At the time of Harker’s journey, Hungary had long ceased its connection with the Ottoman empire, yet in the eyes of the Englishman Budapest still shows signs of “Turkish rule.”

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Three editions comment on Harker’s statement; only one gives the exact length of the “Turkish rule” and none denies the possibility that its signs were still visible right after crossing the bridge connecting Buda and Pest. The first of these editions explains that

“Transylvania passed from Turkish dominion to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1711”

(Auerbach and Skal 9 n. 4). The two editors obviously refer to the year when Transylvania, already liberated by Austria in 1699, ceased to be an autonomous principality and became a mere province of the Habsburgs. However, this annotation about Transylvania cannot explain Harker’s statement, which is made from a bridge in Budapest and is about the

“Turkish rule” in Hungary. Another editor recounts that, “Having conquered Hungary, the

Turkish westward advance was halted in Vienna in 1529. Ottoman rule presented Europe with an anti-Christian foe” (Leatherdale 28 n. 9). The reference here is to the 1529 unsuccessful Siege of Vienna, following the defeat of the Hungarian forces in 1526 at the

Battle of Mohács. The twin cities of Buda and Pest had not been conquered yet, but

Leatherdale’s note gives the impression that Turkish occupation began before the Siege of

Vienna. More importantly, just as Auerbach/Skal makes no reference to when the “Turkish dominion” (of Transylvania) started, Leatherdale does not say when (and if) the 145-year

“Ottoman rule” in Hungary ended.

The third edition that explains Harker’s statement is the only one that mentions the duration of the Turkish occupation of the Hungarian capital: “Buda was captured by Sultan

Süleyman in 1541, who garrisoned the town and established a vizier’s seat there. It remained under Turkish control for nearly 150 years, until the allied Germans (under

Charles of Lorraine and Lewis of Baden) expelled the Turks in 1686” (Klinger 13 n. 9).

The editor has the right dates, although he mixes up a “vizier” (a prime minister of the

Ottoman Empire) with a “pasha” (a provincial governor). Between 1541 and 1686, part of

279 Hungary, including the cities of Buda and Pest, was officially known as the Pashalik (or

Eyalet) of Budin. Klinger does not deny the possibility that Harker could see the signs of the distant “Turkish rule” just by crossing a bridge between two river banks, both of which, in fact, had been occupied by the Turks. Also, none of the editors discusses the likely inspiration for the passage. Since Stoker never visited the area, he relied on sources that make very similar observations: “wherever the observant traveller goes in Hungary, he is struck with two peculiarities: one consisting in the relics of Orientalism possessed by the people, as exhibited in their costume, manner of cooking food, and many other domestic habits, the other, in the resemblance their dwellings of to-day bear – in form and arrangement at any rate – to those of their Turanian ancestors” (Mazuchelli I, 81). Despite its Orientalism, Hungary is kept by this traveller within the limits of the civilised world, since she also writes that “Transylvania . . . now forms the border-land separating civilisation from barbarism” (II, 96).

Similarly, another source suggests that the Carpathians separate “civilisation on one side from barbarism on the other” (Boner 73) and that Romanians “have nothing to do with the West” (394). The frontier between the West and the East is placed by another traveller read by Stoker either in “Buda-Pest, with its magnificent river embankments . . . The

Magyar does everything with a degree of splendour that savours of the Oriental” (Crosse

257-258) or even closer to home: “Once past Vienna, your moorings are cut from the old familiar West; the costumes, the faces, the architecture, even the way of not doing things, have all a flavour of the East” (Crosse 2). The same sources, which are not mentioned by the editors of the novel, could have led Stoker to believe that the Turkish rule had ended shortly before Harker’s fictional trip eastwards: “The Hungarians are a manly, brave, and chivalrous race, but lately emerged from barbarism, for the Turks held the greater part of

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their country in possession until a comparatively recent date” (Mazuchelli I, 21). Both the travellers from whom he draws inspiration and Stoker himself inflate the turbulent history of the region they describe because they wish to underline its temporal distance.

In Dracula as well as in other late-Victorian novels set in “remote” places, the insistence on history has two distinct albeit related purposes: to show that that those places are remnants of a bygone era; and to prove that they owe their current underdeveloped state to their past. Its supernatural elements notwithstanding, “Horror fiction is, essentially, fantasy about history” (Sage 234). It is “a specialised form of the historical romance, perhaps, but it does not merely toy with ‘history,’ it inserts itself directly into a propaganda war” (68). Such fiction needs to convince the readers that they enter a world whose antiquity explains, rationalises even, the extravagant plot and cast of characters. It is a world that does not obey the scientific rules of modernity. That is why novels like Dracula need to be set in “places where a living past is to be encountered. In these areas, time has moved more slowly, or ‘time has stood still.’ Remnants of primeval history are to be observed in working condition” (Leerssen 293).

Both Stoker and his sources use at least three methods in their “propaganda war” (as

Sage puts it): they use history instead of geography to describe a place; they insist on the ubiquitous presence of the signs of the past; and they use antithetical comparisons between these remote places and England, identifying them as representatives of the past and of the future, respectively. The editors of Dracula often use the same methods in their explanatory notes. For example, on the road from Constantinople to Bucharest, E.C. Johnson, the author of On the Track of the Crescent, sails to Varna, whence he takes the train to the Romanian capital. In Varna, he describes the people in the railway station, speaks of the Bulgarian national character, of the Russian danger, and of the past and present state of the country

281 (Johnson 98-100). The train takes him then through the countryside and he recounts the history of Bulgaria (101-103). He relates the hassle of going through Romanian customs

(104) and then tells the history of Romania from its beginnings as Dacia until Charles I who was about to be crowned as king (105-108). Right after his last sentence about

Romania’s new monarch, he continues: “As soon as the train stopped, I seized my small things and bolted” (Johnson 108). There are no other ways of introducing the places to the readers; the countries are identified by their past and described through the personal experiences of the traveller.

Jonathan Harker arrives in Klausenburg “after nightfall” (Dracula 31). He sees the city the following morning but has nothing to say about it. Neither do the editors, with two exceptions. One edition starts by saying that the city “was built on the ruins of the old

Daco-Roman city of Napoca, hence its current name, Cluj-Napoca” (McNally and Florescu

51 n. 7) and continues with a historical account which does not go further than the end of the fifteenth century, when Vlad Ţepeş and Matthias Corvinus lived. The other edition summarises the first and describes the city as a “fortified town built on old Roman ruins. It is called Cluj in Romanian” (Luckhurst 363). The fact, fairly common all over Europe, that the second-largest city in Romania was first a Roman castrum becomes its defining element in such annotations. A modern location is described as archaic, either ancient or medieval or both. Archaisation awaits other places in some of the annotations. Varna is given the same defining medieval quality in two editions: “In the nineteenth century, Varna . . . was still a fortified town” (Wolf 375 n. 6); “15 years after liberation from the Turks, was still fortified” (Leatherdale 434 n. 23). Another edition emphasises the “Turkish rule,” although this is not mentioned in the novel: “A major port city on the Black Sea. The Turks ruled it

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between 1391 and 1878, when it was ceded to an independent Bulgaria” (Auerbach and

Skal 275 n. 4).

When he arrives in Bistritz, Jonathan Harker identifies it as “a very interesting old place” (Dracula 33). Several editions insist that nothing has changed and that even today it is “[s]till a lovely old town in Transylvania” (McNally and Florescu 56 n. 20); a “small medieval town on the Bistritza River” (Luckhurst 363), “surrounded with the ruins of ancient bastions and towers” (Wolf 3 n. 16). Harker adds that the city “has had a very stormy existence, and it certainly shows the marks of it. Fifty years ago a series of great fires took place, which made terrible havoc on five separate occasions. At the very beginning of the seventeenth century it underwent a siege of three weeks and lost 13,000 people, the casualties of war proper being assisted by famine and disease” (Dracula 34).

Some editors confirm this by invoking a fire in 1857 (Wolf 5 n. 26) and “many hostile attacks” (Luckhurst 363) mentioned in the 10th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the 1896 Baedeker, respectively. These are their own sources, not Stoker’s, since the writer could not have known the former and very likely used an earlier version of the latter. Just one editor mentions here Stoker’s real source, Charles Boner (Leatherdale 27 n. 2), but only in reference to the use of the German name “Bistritz.” Indeed, Boner speaks of “fearful calamities,” including a devastating siege in 1602, and of five great fires between 1836 and

1850. However, unlike Stoker and the editors of the novel, he insists that the city “has nothing of that medieval look which distinguishes Hermmanstadt [Sibiu] or Schässburg

[Sighişoara]; the streets are straight and broad, and nearly every building is of modern date, the place having suffered repeatedly by fire” (Boner 377). Stoker did not write this down;

283 he probably wished to say more about the city’s history under Turks152 rather than reveal anything about the contemporary features of the city. The novel’s editors enhance his view of “the Turkish rule,” the signs of which are visible everywhere east of Pest.

Transylvania often appears archaic because of the editors’ use of anachronisms.

Wolf and Klinger frequently cite John Paget’s 1839 account Hungary and Transylvania, as if nothing had changed in the six decades prior to the publication of Dracula. Klinger also writes that Transylvania “is called Erdély by the Magyars, and Ardealu by the Roumanians, both meaning ‘forest-land’” (Klinger 17 n. 20). The Romanian name of the province

(besides “Transilvania”) is “Ardeal,” not “Ardealu” – but it did appear with this spelling in old documents, usually with a Latin breve over the last letter, marking the fact that it was a short “u.” When Harker mentions the roads in Mittel Land, he adds that “Of old the

Hospadars would not repair them, lest the Turks should think that they were preparing to bring in foreign troops, and so hasten the war which was always really at loading point”

(Dracula 37). The information comes from Wilkinson (166) and the first two words show that Stoker was well aware that three quarters of a century had passed. The last clause is part of Stoker’s effort of presenting the region as the victim of military strife. The first editors of the novel correct Stoker’s misspelling and provide a definition of the most unusual term of the sentence: “Hospadars should read hospodar. In the Slavonic chancellery documents the title of Princess [sic] was often ‘Gospodar.’ Hospodar is a corruption of the title Gospodar (governor)” (McNally and Florescu 60 n. 34); “The rulers of Wallachia and Moldavia were called hospodars from the fifteenth century to 1866”

(Wolf 1993: 12 n. 44). This is repeated almost verbatim by subsequent editors (Auerbach

152 He also noted that “In war of 1564 between Transylvania [a Turkish dominion] and Austria, Bistritz had to furnish 3000 men armed with arquebuses. War contribution of that year was 30,000 florins and 200 horses” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 240-241).

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and Skal 1997: 14 n. 5; Byron 1998: 37; Leatherdale 1998: 37 n. 94; Riquelme 2002: 33).

Auerbach/Skal neglect to correct the term and leave it with Stoker’s misspelling, while

Riquelme quotes Wolf directly. Quite unexpectedly, the most recent of the editors turns all of Romania in Stoker’s time into an Austrian province: “A term of title used in Wallachia and Moldavia until annexed by the Austrian Empire in 1866” (Luckhurst 2011: 366).

None of these editors mentions that the misspelling is obviously a typo: in his working notes, Stoker wrote, correctly, that “Hospodars neglect to repair roads for fear of making Turks think they wish to facilitate entry of foreign troops” (Bram Stoker’s Notes

248-249). The editors, instead, insist that they held power from the Middle Ages until 1866.

Medieval documents of the Wallachian and Moldavian chancelleries were redacted in High

Church Slavonic and called the monarch almost always “gospodin” and very rarely

“gospodar” (Ilie 28-29). The term was discontinued in the mid-seventeenth century, when

Romanian became the language of official documents. The version “gospodar” reappeared in Russian accounts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when Russia frequently interfered in the affairs of the two principalities. From Russian, the term was borrowed into French and English as “hospodar” and referred specifically to the

Phanariotes, that is, the Greek-speaking rulers directly appointed by the Ottoman Porte.153

The two versions survived in the Romanian language as “gospodar” (with the feminine form “gospodină”), defined by the DEX as the head of a rural household (although the adjective, meaning “hardworking,” is more common). One of the editors is confused by the

Romanian definition and writes that “‘Hospodar’ or ‘Hospadar,’ as Harker would have it, is a corruption of gospodar, a common Roumanian word meaning ‘landholder’ or ‘lord’; here

153 Stoker’s source often speaks of the “Greek Hospodars” (Wilkinson 62, 73, 134). Of course, the term survived in foreign sources long after 1822, when the last of the Phanariotes were replaced by Romanian rulers.

285 it connotes the aristocracy” (Klinger 31 n. 73). The term does not denote, in fact, a “lord,” but rather a lowly farmer; the “title” or, rather, the appellation, is similar to the old English titles of “Goodman” and “Goodwife.”

One of the editors describes the Carpathian Mountains as extending “in a semicircle from Presburg on the Danube to Orsova on the same river” (Klinger 13-14 n. 13). The use of the present tense and of the Austrian name of Bratislava – in use only until 1918

(Moravčiková 174) – in the same sentence is a clear anachronism, quite unnecessary since

Stoker does not speak of Presburg in the novel. Similarly, when describing Moldavia, the same editor says that “Its chief town was Jassy” (Klinger 17 n. 21). The Romanian name is

“Iaşi” and the city is not mentioned in Dracula. The twenty-first-century editor probably calls it “Jassy,” as it would have appeared on an Austro-Hungarian map, in order to keep the reader anchored in the novel’s German-sounding toponymy even while he is reading the annotations. When Mina Harker writes in her journal that she and Van Helsing have

“arrived in Veresti” (Dracula 401), Wolf uses a 1922 edition of the German guide Stielers

Handatlas to write about “Veresci [...] some ninety miles” to the Borgo Pass (Wolf 420 n.

35). What might appear as a misspelling is, in fact, the old spelling of Romanian “Vereşti.”

Because Wolf’s map is too old, he uses a name that is more archaic than the one used a century earlier by Bram Stoker.

One editor notices that “Stoker continually emphasises the tribal and ethnic conflicts and violent history of the region” (Luckhurst 364). Sometimes, the editors of Dracula do the same, even when the author does not. When Harker recounts the murder of Skinsky in

Galatz, he adds: “Those we had been speaking with ran off to see the horror, the women crying out ‘This is the work of a Slovak!’” (Dracula 391). One of the editors explains that

“Local folk regard Slovak peasants as the lowest of the low, a sign of the ethnic tensions

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endemic in the Balkans and surrounding regions, and which explodes from time to time, most recently in the 1990s” (Leatherdale 475 n. 58). He probably bases the first part of this note on his own earlier conclusion that, because “the Slovaks were given some money by the Szgany” (Dracula 75), “A pecking order operates among Dracula’s minions. The

Szgany pay the Slovaks, who are clearly the foot-soldiers” (Leatherdale 89 n. 48). He then links a fictional inside-job murder (one Dracula minion kills another) at the end of the nineteenth century to the conflicts – one hundred years later – in former Yugoslavia, extended into “the Balkans and surrounding regions.”

When Harker finds himself “on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina” (Dracula 32), another edition explains that “The wild border country through which Jonathan travels teeters on the edge of fragile national independence”

(Auerbach and Skal 10 n. 8). The editors make the region appear politically unstable, rather than just geographically indeterminate, as it seems to be in Harker’s account.

Auerbach/Skal restate this idea later in the novel, when Van Helsing explains that the region surrounding Borgo Pass “is full of strangeness of the geologic and chemical world.

There are deep caverns and fissures that reach none know whither. There have been volcanoes, some of whose openings still send out waters of strange properties, and gases that kill or make to vivify” (Dracula 360). The two editors refute Van Helsing’s account as

“[o]ne of Stoker’s periodic attempts to identify vampires with the landscape of

Transylvania, ignoring the ease with which they adapt to England” (Auerbach and Skal 278 n. 8). Although they do not deny that this is an accurate description of Transylvanian scenery, they very likely wish to suggest that it is the history, and not the geography of the place, that produces vampires. The first time that Transylvania is mentioned in the novel, they give a summary of its history introduced by the following sentence: “In essence,

287 fittingly for vampires, the history of Transylvania is a history of whom it belongs to”

(Auerbach and Skal 1997: 9 n. 7).

Stoker’s motif of the turbulent past is also enhanced by the editors of the novel whenever they explain the novel strictly through the author’s working notes. Starting from a passage in Charles Boner’s Transylvania, Stoker describes the territory near the Borgo

Pass as “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” (Dracula 52). The editors take Stoker’s word for granted and do not compare with the source: “‘Near Prund is territory continuously fought for by

Wallachians and Saxons.’ Stoker extracted this from Boner’s book Transylvania, p. 419”

(McNally and Florescu 63 n. 59); “From Boner, p. 419” (Leatherdale 57 n. 91); “[Boner’s] description is: ‘Pass into Moldavia, scenery increases in picturesqueness – good road. Near

Prund is territory continuously fought for by Wallachians and Saxons’” (Klinger 21 n. 39);

“the Borgo Prund through the mountains begins east of Bistritz and as a border-zone was subject to repeated warring activity. All the information in this paragraph derives from

Charles Boner” (Luckhurst 364). The quotes are provided as Boner’s, when in fact they are from Stoker’s working notes. None of these annotations can be considered explanatory notes; they are, in fact, textual notes, since they use Stoker’s research (a veritable first draft of the first chapters of the novel) and not his sources.

If one reads Boner’s account, one can see that he describes the border zone as the scene not of wars, but of minor disputes over land among villagers:

In the neighbourhood of Prund lies a territory, the possession of which has

led to the most flagrant outrages. Commission after commission has been

appointed to decide peremptorily on the line of demarcation, and although

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the existing documents and the boundary marks all prove where it is –

indeed there was never any doubt about it – the Wallacks will not give way,

but come on their neighbour’s land, plough it for their own purposes, or

destroy the harvests which the Saxons have raised. (Boner 419-420)

There are no patriots, no invaders, and no Turks enriching the soil with their blood in

Boner’s account. Stoker managed to include in his version of the passage both motifs of his theme of the oppressive pressure of the past – the violent history and the orientalising

Turkish rule – announced in Jonathan Harker’s first journal entry. The editors of the novel contribute to this view of Transylvania154 by adding their own opinions about the turbulent past of the region, by citing sources that always confirm the version provided by the novelist, or simply by explaining Stoker through Stoker, rather than through his sources.

A related theme in Dracula is that of the conflict between a frozen past and an ever- marching modernity. Stoker’s sources often remark on the dichotomy between the backward surroundings and the “spirit of the nineteenth century” (Gerard, The Land beyond the Forest I, 3), noticeable even “in the wilder parts of Hungary. Just outside the railway station life and manners are what they were two centuries ago, and yet here are the grappling-irons of civilisation” (Crosse 342). Harker makes a similar observation soon after witnessing Count Dracula’s escapade down the walls of the castle: “It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (Dracula 67). This thought is triggered by his use of shorthand in correspondence and some editors note that

“‘It’ refers to his shorthand” (Wolf 49 n. 39); “This line comes as a jolt, implying that

154 So do some of the commentators of the novel: “This region, which ethnic Romanians consider the cradle of their modern nation, has endured a turbulent history” (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 119).

289 Western modernity – which shorthand represents – does not know all the answers”

(Leatherdale 77 n. 117). “Shorthand” is one of the first words of the novel and two editions try to identify the method used by the diarist: “As far as can be determined Stoker had

Harker use the Pitman method of shorthand that had only recently come into general use”

(Wolf 1 n. 2); “Various shorthand systems were employed in the nineteenth century; in

1837, the Pitman method came into general use. This method of speedwriting, in which geometric shapes replace words, is difficult to learn, but efficient to use” (Auerbach and

Skal 9 n. 1).

The fact that stenography is supposed to symbolise modernity is underlined again in the novel; when he sees a letter written in shorthand, Dracula suddenly feels angry at his own powerlessness: “here he caught sight of the strange symbols as he opened the envelope, and the dark look came into his face, and his eyes blazed wickedly” (Dracula

74). This sentence remains uncommented and the reader cannot find out if shorthand can really be a differentia specifica between Western modernity and Transylvanian backwardness at the end of the nineteenth century. Actually, in Romania, shorthand was at the time a British import: it was practiced after the Taylor system (named after Samuel

Taylor). The first course of stenography was given in 1848 by C.A. Rosetti, a future prominent politician (and husband of Englishwoman Marie Grant155). Starting with 1860, the Parliament in Bucharest used stenographers and the first treatise of shorthand (Taylor system) was published in 1861 by Elie Bosianu. In the meantime, Transylvanian

Romanians used a German system (Gabelsberger), preferred in the Austrian-Hungarian

Empire, which was adapted to the Romanian language in a book published in 1864 by

155 Known in Romania as Maria Rosetti (1819-1893). Revolutionary Romania – Grant’s portrait in Romanian folk costume by painter C.D. Rosenthal (1820-1851) – is the most famous national personification of Romania.

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Dimitrie Răcuciu (see Sfinţescu 207). Thus, although Dracula would have found Harker’s

“strange symbols” difficult to transcribe, they would hardly qualify as the quintessential example of Western modernity at the time that the novel takes place. More importantly, the fact that the editors of Dracula provide mere notes of recovery identifying for today’s readers the type of shorthand used by Harker without verifying the situation in

Transylvania and Romania justifies Stoker’s othering.

Stoker would have found many indications in his sources that Transylvania and

Romania were lands frozen in time: “Here motion, being abnormal, explains perhaps why

[progress] proved infecund and resultless” (Boner 104); “The traveller seems here to have been suddenly carried back to some remote period of the world’s history, everything is so heavy and so slow” (Mazuchelli I, 31-32). The historical period in which the region has frozen is either the generic “Middle Ages” (Mazuchelli I, 125), about “five hundred years” ago (Boner 223); or it is associated with a specific era from English history: “England in the 17th century” (Mazuchelli II, 147), “the reign of Mary” (Boner 404) or “England in the thirteenth century” (Crosse 197). Stoker intended to make a similar idea more explicit when

Harker, in Castle Dracula, notes that he “feared to see those weird sisters” (Dracula 80).

One editor observes that three female vampires “echo the three weird sisters in Macbeth”

(Leatherdale 96 n. 112). Klinger, who had access to the manuscript of the novel, notes that it “contains the following, which is omitted from the published narrative: ‘– how right was

Shakespeare, no one would believe that after three hundred years one should see in this fastness of Europe the counterpart of the witches of Macbeth’” (Klinger 96 n. 44).

It is worth mentioning that Stoker and his narrators, along with the author’s sources and many of the travellers of the era, have an ambivalent opinion about the perceived backwardness of the region. While constantly deploring the poor accommodations, they

291 avoid the best hotels; while they find transportation much too slow, they often look for coaches, carriages156 or horse-driven carts; if they find fault with the wilderness, they also appreciate “the pleasures of ‘roughing it’” (Crosse 291). For many of them, “traveller” was a term of distinction and they held in contempt the mere “tourists” who preferred safer routes and more comfortable hotels (Ford 57-60).157 One such traveller is Jonathan Harker, who revels in the fact that the inn where he has found shelter is not too cosy: “Count

Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country” (Dracula 34). Many of Stoker’s sources were equally eager to see the customs and the costumes158 and are afraid of “the silent march of – in this case misnamed

– ‘civilisation,’ which threatens ere long to obliterate all the distinctive external characteristics of nations and render every country alike” (Mazuchelli II, 59). They want to find the “old-world charm” and notice that, “[l]ike a subtle perfume evaporating under the rays of a burning sun, it is growing daily fainter and fainter, and all lovers of the past should hasten to collect this fleeting fragrance ere it be gone for ever” (Gerard, The Land beyond the Forest I, 6).

Dracula is the perfect example of Max Müller’s “retrogressive savage.” His intellect is “child-like” now, but he was great once. In Van Helsing’s words, “was he no common man; for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the ‘land beyond the forest.’ That mighty

156 Mazuchelli and her husband, for example, are begged by their guide to take the express train to Pest, but they prefer a peasant’s carriage (Mazuchelli I, 67-68). 157One of Stoker’s sources notes: “Although comparatively few English travellers come to Pest . . . we took care here, as we invariably do when ‘pilgriming’ abroad, to avoid hotels recommended by Murray or Bradshaw, preferring not only to mingle with the natives of the place rather than our own countrymen, but to fall in with the national customs as well” (Mazuchelli I, 189). 158After he describes the costume of a Romanian peasant, one of Stoker’s sources laments: “I much wished that I had been similarly accoutred” (Johnson 200).

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brain and that iron resolution went with him to his grave, and are even now arrayed against us. The Draculas, were, says Arminius, a great and noble race” (Dracula 280). In Stoker’s sources, the Saxons of Transylvania, who set up a system of self-government in the Middle

Ages, are another example: “Institutions are flourishing with us in the West – institutions that we Englishmen are proud of – which, centuries ago, were here looked on as a birthright when we had them not. And now those same have here passed away. Such are the mutations in this world’s history” (Boner 202). Although they appear backward to the contemporary travellers, “in not a few instances these people have anticipated by some centuries the liberal ideas of Western Europe in our own day” (Crosse 213). Civilisation is, however, once more within the reach of Transylvanians and of Dracula himself. The retrogressive savage may “become once more progressive” (Müller, “The Savage” 123), and the vampire Count may begin to evolve once again: “With the child-brain that was his to him he have long since conceive the idea of coming to a great city. . . . What more may he not do when the greater world of thought is open to him” (Dracula 361).

8.3 The Unbearable Lightness of Ahistoricity

Müller’s theory of the two types of primitivism makes it seem less paradoxical that the same country and the same people can appear burdened by a violent history and, at the same time, ahistorical. The defining element of the Szekler and the Romanian nations to

293 which Count Dracula belongs is the fact that they have roots in ancient history: the former are “descended from Attila and the Huns,” the latter are “descendants of the Dacians”

(Dracula 32). Both nations are deeply anchored in a time from before the fall of the

Western Roman Empire. Nothing else is said in the novel about the history of these nations, with the exception of the Count’s speech, which is more genealogical than historical, as it relates the story of the many Draculas. It also stops conveniently at the battle of Mohács in

1526, that is, at the beginning of the “Turkish rule,” while the Szeklers are reduced to the sole role of fierce warriors, carrying on the “endless duty of the frontier guard” (Dracula

60). In Stoker’s sources, the Szeklers are always identified as descendants of the Huns

(Boner 624; Crosse 206; Mazuchelli II, 164; Johnson 205; Gerard, The Land beyond the

Forest II, 143) and one author suggests that their very name means “at the frontier” or

“beyond” and, as such, it “does not imply a distinctive race, but merely those Hungarians who live beyond the forest – near the frontier, and cut off from the rest of their countrymen” (Gerard, The Land beyond the Forest II, 147).

As it is manifest in Dracula and its sources, history in Transylvania and Romania may be oppressive, but it is ancient history. Stoker, who, as mentioned above, was quite curious about Dacia and the Dacians, understood this quite well from the very first of his sources, which promises to recount “the struggles of two nations [Wallachia and Moldavia] between a strong remnant of Dacian barbarism and the influence of modern civilisation”

(Wilkinson iii). Although it summarises twenty centuries of Romanian history, Wilkinson’s

1820 Account emphasises the traces of old, pre-Roman traditions. Subsequent authors read by Stoker exacerbate them. Charles Boner, in Transylvania: Its Products and Its People

(1865), makes a distinction between Wallachians (natives of Romania) and “Wallacks,”

“the original dwellers in Transylvania” (Boner 66). He thinks the Wallacks are a mixture of

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Dacians and “Sclave and German races [although their] language received a Roman stamp”

(93). He sees them as “hordes . . . a wild uncultivated people, without a sense even of law or property” (100).159 To prove how primitive they are, he shows them full of wonderment before a simple screw: “It is to them what the thunder and lightning of fire-arms were to the savage who had never seen a European; an inexplicable contrivance calling forth their marvelling admiration. . . . It is a machine whose working he cannot fathom; it is in concrete form ‘the incomprehensible,’ and he stands in presence of it overwhelmed with a feeling of his incapacity” (521). Possibly inspired by such an observation, Stoker mentions that Harker and Godalming meet with other boats during their journey up the Siret River, sometimes at night: “The men were scared every time we turned our electric lamp on them, and fell on their knees and prayed” (Dracula 399). No editor comments on this, which upholds Stoker’s suggestion that the Moldavian boatmen have never seen electricity and, moreover, find it miraculous, possibly diabolic.160

To help his readers understand his ideas about Transylvanian Romanians, Boner compares them with nations more commonly associated with primitivism in the Victorian era. He describes their 1848 revolution as a revolt of vicious natives against civilised colonisers: “They took life, like the King of Dahomey, for the exquisite excitement it gave.

. . . The dread they inspired was as great as the sound of the Indian war-whoop would cause in some English settlement” (Boner 229). He insists that Romanians ought to forget their pastoral ways and become an agricultural people: “We find that by wise measures such change has been effected among the Caffres, and they have acquired habits of industry

159 He repeats this: “The Wallack population . . . a wild horde” (Boner 228); “the wild hordes of Wallacks” (230). 160 These boatmen and raftsmen traded between Galaţi and Bucovina. Wolf could have annotated the passage, since he is the only one who mentions that the Galaţi harbour was lighted with electricity (398 n. 15).

295 unknown to them before. . . . If such a conversion could be brought about with those South

African people, the Wallacks will surely allow the possibility of the same being done with them” (284). He also thinks that “[t]he Caffres in South Africa are as wasteful as the

Wallacks” (323) because the latter cut down too many trees.

In Boner’s view, such a nation could hardly have a Roman ascendancy and, while he accepts the Dacian ancestry of Romanians, he pokes fun at their Latin origin: “In their schools, so I was informed, the children are catechised thus: –‘Of whom are we descendants?’ – ‘Of Romulus.’ – ‘What were our progenitors?’ – ‘Demigods.’ – ‘Name some of our great forefathers.’ – ‘Virgil, Cicero, Livy,’ etc. etc. During the revolution, the

Wallack force was organised according to the Roman division of an army, with ‘phalanx’ and ‘tribunes,’ just as their ‘ancestors’ had” (Boner 66). A similar reaction of exasperation at the pretensions to Roman origins occurs in one of the editions of Dracula, even though it annotates Stoker’s passage about “the descendants of the Dacians” which says nothing of

Romans: “Dacia, whose area corresponds roughly to twentieth-century Romania, became a province of the Roman Empire under the Emperor Trajan in A.D. 105. As late as June

1995, a Romanian patriot boasted in a letter to the New York Times of his Roman inheritance, scrupulously differentiating Romanians from the ‘Romanay [sic] Gypsies’ who, in Dracula, prove to be treacherous allies of the vampire” (Auerbach and Skal 10 n.

3). The note explains neither the text nor the context of the novel, but a letter to the editor of a newspaper published one century after Dracula and entirely unrelated to Stoker’s novel161 – which is probably why the two editors try to connect it to the vampire Count in their last sentence.

161 The letter was published in the 17 June 1995 issue of the New York Times. The author, identified by Auerbach and Skal only as a “Romanian patriot,” was Justin Liuba, an American of Romanian origin, former

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Other sources used by Stoker are just as insistent about the primitivism of a population that cannot be related to the Romans: “With all their ignorance and lawlessness, it is curious that they pride themselves on being descendants of the ancient Romans, ignoring their ‘Dacian sires’” (Crosse 98). Romanians are found to “possess even yet the reflection of the Thracian blood of their ancestors” (Mazuchelli II, 145). Even their sheep show them anchored in a time before history; they are “never being driven. They follow the shepherd as in ancient scripture times” (I, 315). They are ontologically identical with the

Dacian ancestors of Classical Antiquity: “On Trajan’s Column in Rome is sculptured the history of this first compaign [sic] of the young and ambitious Emperor, and the forms, cast of features, and dress of the Dacians, as there minutely represented, correspond, strange as it may seem after the lapse of sixteen centuries, in almost every particular with those of the

Wallachs of the present day” (Mazuchelli II, 61-62). Yet another of Stoker’s sources confirms the uncanny but perfect similarity: “The Wallachs are assumed by most writers to be the descendants of the Dacians. Certainly their faces are strangely like those on Trajan’s column” (Johnson 107).

Emily Gerard is the only one of Stoker’s sources who accepts the Latinity of

Romanians as well as the fact that “Wallachian,” along with other versions of this term, is an exonym. She does this, however, not in “Transylvanian Superstitions,” but in The Land beyond the Forest, the book that Stoker may or may not have read. In it, she writes that

Director of Radio Free Europe. His was in fact a reply to a previous letter, by Hungarian-American engineer Bela Liptak (published by the same newspaper on 19 May 1995). Both letters are quite brief. Liptak stated two things: that the Daco-Roman origin of Romanians is a “farcical” theory; and that the Romanian Parliament had decreed that “Gypsies in Romania cannot call themselves Romany.” Liuba argued instead that the Roman origin is not theory, but historical fact; and that such a legislative decision is “understandable” to avoid confusions. He seems not to have verified this: no such “decree” existed at the time, nor does it exist today. In the Romanian language, the confusion between the name of Romania and the Romany people is less obvious, as the latter are called “Rom” (plural: “Romi”).

297 Wallack, or Wlach, by which name this people was generally designated [in

Transylvania] up to the year ’48, points equally to Roman extraction – Wallack

being but another version of the appellations Welsch, Welch, Wallon, &c., given by

Germans to all people native of Italy. It may, however, not be superfluous here to

mention, that at no period whatever did these people describe themselves otherwise

than as ‘Romans,’ Roumanians, and would have been as little likely to speak of

themselves as Wallacks as would be an American to call himself a Yankee, or a

Londoner to designate himself as a Cockney. (I, 216)

Gerard sees Romanians as “gradually emerging from barbarism into civilisation, [caught in a] struggle between past and future, between darkness and light, between superstition and science” (II, 181), while to others they seem frozen like prehistoric fossils: “as for time, they must have come into the world before it was talked about” (Crosse 181; emphasis his).

In his notes, Stoker mentions “Dacia” four times and “Dacians” another four times.

Like other Victorians, he probably needed this historical reference162 to help him understand the geographical location of the places he was writing about. In the novel, he only uses a single reference to Romanians as being descendants of the Dacians. Harker’s observation about the descendants of the Dacians and those of the Huns is made while in

Klausenburg, after his decision to give a rigorous characterisation of the place with notes taken before the trip at the British Museum in London: “I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina” (Dracula

32). However, he has nothing else to say about either Klausenburg or Transylvania, except the list of nationalities. The editors, instead, provide a history of the place, helping the

162 Curiously, the editors of Stoker’s notes include Dacia, together with the modern countries Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldavia, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia and Wallachia, in an index entry about “Eastern Europe” (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 325).

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reader to situate it in time. With the sole exception of Byron – who is very brief and writes simply that “In Stoker’s time, [Transylvania] was a province of Hungary; now it is a part of

Romania” (32 n. 1) – the other editors mention its ancient past, sometimes beginning before the Christian Era: “Once the centre of the pre-Roman Dacian state” (McNally and Florescu

52 n. 10); “The region has had a turbulent history. It formed the nucleus of the Dacian kingdom until incorporated by Rome in 106” (Riquelme 27). Sometimes the account starts with the Roman conquest: “Originally part of Roman Dacia” (Wolf 3 n. 12); “From the second to the fourth centuries, Dacia, as it then was, was incorporated into the Roman empire” (Auerbach and Skal 9 n. 7). The last edition quoted here identifies Transylvania with Dacia, rather than with a part of the ancient kingdom. Other editors seem to believe that the Roman province lasted well into the Middle Ages: “originally part of Dacia but was conquered by Hungarians (Magyars) in the 11th century” (Leatherdale 29 n. 16);

“Transylvania belonged to the Roman province of Dacia until the eleventh century, when it became part of Hungary” (Klinger 15 n. 17).

Most editors end their account in 1867, when the dual monarchy (Austrian-

Hungarian) was created and Transylvania became part of Hungary. However, Klinger ends his (inaccurately) in 1713, when Transylvania was “annexed to Austria” (15 n. 17). The most recent editor, instead of a longer story, simply identifies the province with its pre-

Roman past: “Transylvania (‘beyond the forest’) is located in the central part of modern

Romania, high in the mountains, but formed the core territory of the ancient kingdom of

Dacia” (Luckhurst 363). Without exception, the travellers through Transylvania and

Romania that Stoker read when he was working on Dracula also speak of Dacia and the

Dacians when they introduce the territories inhabited by Romanians to their readers, very likely because educated Westerners were better acquainted at the time with the history of

299 ancient Greece and Rome than with the recent history of the “other Europe.” Although he ended up by using a single phrase about the Dacian ancestry of Romanians, Stoker took down this information several times in his working notes.

There is little or no information in Stoker’s sources about contemporary Romanians

(and Szeklers) except for the constant association with their ancient forefathers, proving that nothing has changed for centuries or millennia. According to Johannes Fabian, anthropological allochronism is based on the evolutionary foundations of the discipline. In the nineteenth century, with the “discovery” of prehistory,163 populations previously identified as “savages” began to be seen as “survivals” of more or less ancient states of cultural development. This progressive view of human society meant that the Other was no longer seen as ontologically, but rather as historically, different. “Savages” from all corners of the world, including the “remote” places of Europe, were understood as belonging to an earlier stage of historical development. In individuals, this also translated into earlier stages of human evolution. Despite his cunning, Dracula’s “intellect is small” (Dracula 383) and

“his child-mind only saw so far” (384). His planned invasion of England is a sign of the momentousness and of the peril164 associated with the new-fashioned discovery of the

Other. At the same time, the study of these “survivals” seemed important in an era in which

– as Müller’s or Nordau’s notion of “retrogression” warned – evolution was understood together with its corollary, devolution, which threatened civilisations already advanced.165

163 Thanks especially to John Lubbock’s 1865 influential Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages (Daniel 48-49). Lubbock coined the terms “Palaeolithic” and “Neolithic” and proposed a Darwinian philosophy of history, later expanded in On the Origin of Civilisation (1870). 164 For more details, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration (1989), especially Part III: England (155-221). 165 A view that Tennyson summarises in “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” (1886): “Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good / And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.”

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Going in search of underdeveloped people and places causes the traveller to face the danger of getting lost out of time, in a world where the supernatural can easily usurp reality. The anonymous author of an article about travelling through the Carpathians, published in 1867 in The Saturday Review put together much of the same ideology that underlines the works of Boner, Crosse, Mazuchelli, Johnson, Gerard and Stoker when he

(or she) wrote that:

The inhabitants, those few whom the traveller meets, belong to strange outlandish

races, of whose speech and habits he knows nothing – Slovaks and other Slavic

tribes, Wallachians, and Szeklers.166 The mountains have had no history, have never

come forward on the theatre of the world, or become associated in our minds with

great men and great events, like the Alps and Pyrenees and Apennines. One hears

indeed of castles built by the Huns, and is told that here or here [sic] the Tartar

invaders poured across to ravage the plans and carry Christians into captivity; but

Huns and Tartars seem more than half mythical,167 and the only bit of living history

one gets is when some indignant patriot points out a pass through which the

Russians marched, in 1849, to crush the independence of Hungary. So it comes that

in traversing these forests one has a sense of loneliness and desolation, of the

majestic gloom of the wilderness, such as is hardly to be felt elsewhere on this side

of the Atlantic. We seem carried back into primitive Europe as we gaze over vast

tracts unchanged since the days when an adventurous trader brought down to the

Greek colonies on the Pontus those strange tales of savage tribes which Herodotus

records – tales of the gold-bedecked Agathyrsi, and the cannibal Androphagi, and

166 The author refers to the entire chain of the Carpathians, covering not only Romania, but also present-day Slovakia and southwestern Ukraine. 167 The mythical is timeless and non-evolving.

301 the Neurians,168 who turn themselves once a year into wolves. (“The Carpathians”

428-429)

The same traveller can be inspired to describe in the most minute details a landscape that he or she associates with historical and cultural facts, and have little to say about a place that brings nothing to his memory and imagination. The feeling of loneliness and desolation that prompts the traveller to notice nothing in such a landscape is perhaps best expressed in a page from John Ruskin’s diary. While at Champagnole (in the Jura mountains of eastern France, close to the border with Switzerland), on 19 April 1846, he realised the difference between the feelings evoked by the history-laden Alps and a place his memory could not associate with anything in particular: “it struck me how utterly different the impression of such a scene would be, if it were in a strange land, and in one without history; how dear to the feeling is the pine of Switzerland compared to that of

Canada . . . if that pine forest had been among the Alleghenys [sic], or if the stream had been Niagara, I should only have looked at them with intense melancholy and desire for home” (Ruskin I, 325). Jonathan Harker in Dracula, as well as the travellers whose works

Stoker read in preparation for the novel, also find themselves “in a strange land, and in one without history,” which makes for descriptions filled with desolation and even desperation.

They often see nothing and no one where a local would see plenitude.

Emily Gerard expresses Ruskin’s idea in very similar words. It is the lack of familiarity with Transylvania that makes her unable to relate with the people and the places and that ultimately breeds contempt:

168 The Neuri, as Herodotus (iv, 105) calls them, although the Greek historian reports the story of lycanthropy, then adds, “I do not believe this tale” (Herodotus 249).

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Not the mere distance which separates Transylvania from Western Europe gives to

it this feeling of strange isolation. Other countries as far or farther off are infinitely

more familiar even to those who have never visited them. We know all about

Turkey, and Greece is no more strange to us than Italy or Switzerland. But no one

ever comes to Transylvania in cold blood, unless it be some very rabid sportsman

eager for the embrace of a shaggy bear. (The Land beyond the Forest I, 3-4)

Another traveller read by Stoker expresses her desperation in alarming tones: “Pragerhof169 in its absence of human life and maddening isolation is just one of those places in which more than one day’s sojourn must end in suicide” (Mazuchelli I, 28-29). Complaining about the slowness of railway travelling in Hungary, she notes with dark humour that it has

“frequently been known to produce in the passenger – especially if he happen to have come from Western Europe – a species of temporary insanity; the particular form which the malady assumes causing the unfortunate sufferer to lose for the nonce all sense of his own individuality, and to imagine himself the ‘Wandering Jew,’ destined to go on to all time” (I,

33). Yet another traveller attributes the same feeling to the leiterwagen (a type of peasant’s cart often mentioned by Harker in Dracula), although the ultimate source is, of course, the place itself: “But to thoroughly realise the strange weariness which is engendered by these places, the traveller should charter a lieterwagen [sic], and drag his drowsy way along the parched and dusty road. Then he will feel that all around him slumbers in lethargic languor under the scorching summer sun; that he is a lost soul condemned à la Juif errant, to wander for eternity through a never-ending and unchanging landscape” (Johnson 185; emphasis his).

169 In present-day Slovenia, but at the time in Styria.

303 In Dracula, Stoker signals Harker’s isolation by explaining that he finds himself in

“one of the . . . least known portions of Europe [and] not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps” (Dracula 32). Transylvania is unknown and unknowable. One of the editors comments that “Stoker sites Harker’s destination as the back of beyond, where few foreigners ventured, and where anything might happen.

Transylvania is to Stoker what the ‘Lost World’ is to Arthur Conan Doyle” (Leatherdale 29 n. 20). Several editions explain briefly that the Ordnance Survey maps were military maps

(Wolf 3 n.15; Auerbach and Skal 10 n. 1; Riquelme 27). Klinger thinks they were started

“in 1791, in part to prepare for impending war with France” (17 n. 23), while Luckhurst states that “the Ordnance Survey began as surveys of terrain by the British military in

1746,170 following the Scottish rebellion. Geographical knowledge and mapping was seen as intrinsic to British modernity; Castle Dracula is thus off the map, in a pre-modern space”

(364). Luckhurst is the only one who sheds some light on Stoker’s intentions. However, none of the editors questions Harker’s statement about the absence of similar maps for the area east of Bistritz.

The idea that there were no accessible, detailed maps of Transylvania is part of

Stoker’s strategy of presenting the territory through which Harker advances as a sort of no- man’s-land. In reality, “[a]t the time Dracula was written, highly detailed maps of

Transylvania did exist” (de Roos, “Location of Castle” 6; emphasis his). Almost simultaneous with the British cartographic effort, the Austrian Surveys “were initiated by

Empress Maria-Theresa in May 1764 after the Austrian troops during the Seven Years’

170 They are both right: the survey began in 1746, but the actual work for a specific map to be made widely available began in 1791; see Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (London: Granta, 2010).

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War had suffered serious setbacks due to a lack of reliable maps” (6 n. 11). By the mid- nineteenth century several series of surveys had been conducted and all the territories of the

Austrian Empire had been mapped in detail, for census and for military purposes. Maps of

Transylvania of the same rigour and quality as those of the Ordnance Survey were available in many libraries of the empire and outside it.171 Stoker’s effort of othering Transylvania is supported by the fact that the existence of these maps is not mentioned in the editors’ annotations.

In fact, Stoker himself very likely used one or more of these Austrian maps, discovered in the library of the British Museum. When he traces the final voyage through places like Veresti, Fundu, and Strasba, up the Bistritza River and through the passes on the eastern slopes of the Carpathians, he uses sources better informed than the Baedeker.

McNally and Florescu admit that “it is clear that he [Stoker] had studied the geography of the Transylvanian, Bukovinan, Moldavian and Wallachian areas meticulously. He must have had access to a very detailed survey map, which no longer exists” (McNally and

Florescu 22-23). Even in this last part of the novel, however, Stoker is very careful to conceal any information about the area immediately surrounding Dracula’s castle, including the Borgo Pass. During the last stage of the trip, no other places are named, then no other places seem to exist. Van Helsing notes in his diary: “All yesterday we travel, ever getting closer to the mountains, and moving into a more and more wild and desert land”

(Dracula 406). The roads are suddenly very bad, it is unexpectedly cold, and Mina remarks the dreariness of their situation: “we were in a perfect desolation, and, so far as we could see through the snow-fall, there was not even the sign of a habitation” (413).

171 See de Roos, “Location of Castle” (8-21), where several of these maps are used and reproduced.

305 Van Helsing and Mina Harker, the two narrators of this last part of the journey, seem to have travelled back in time, all the way to an ancient period when the distinction between civilisation and barbarity was based on the axis South-North, rather than West-

East. Ever since Varna, they have been travelling north and, like in the old representations of the frozen lands of the barbarous Goths over the Danube, the vampire hunters can barely suffer the cold, even though it is only the end of October and the beginning of November and they have not yet reached the mountains. Jonathan first notices “the cold from the river seeming to rise up and strike us” (Dracula 398); he feels tired and sleepy because of the cold, then he imagines himself on a new kind of adventure: “I wish it wasn’t so cold. There are signs of snow coming; and if it falls heavy it will stop us. In such case we must get a sledge and go on, Russian fashion” (400).172 Still in central Moldavia, like her husband,

Mina complains that “It is very cold” (403) and Van Helsing that “It is cold, cold; so cold that the grey heavy sky is full of snow” (404).

More than just desolate, an unmapped territory is a place without history. The reference to the Ordnance Survey maps is meaningful when one considers that Stoker owned the entire Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, as revealed by the posthumous sale of his library (Stoker, Forgotten Writings 228). The Ordnance Survey maps were very detailed, including “stone circles, lynchets, barrows, megalithic tombs, hut circles, hill forts

– these things, the cultural fossils of prehistory which are part of our present-day cultural landscape – the dead, non-functional part of the landscape” (Daniel 161). In the absence of such a map, the traveller necessarily feels like Ruskin in a strange place without history.

The rocks and the hills, however handsome, remain meaningless. Even places bearing

172 This may have been inspired by one of the books Stoker mentions in his notes: William Spottiswoode’s A Tarantasse Journey through Eastern Russia.

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names seem hollow and insignificant. That is why, perhaps, one of the editors believes he has “traced the course of the Bistrita River north from Baku” (Wolf 423 n. 41) and also writes that “The Bistrita joins the Siret below Baku” (417 n. 28). The Romanian name of the city is “Bacău,” but the editor very likely misspelled the Germanised name “Bakeu”

(also used by Klinger) – as it would have appeared on old Austrian maps – and turned it into the capital of Azerbaijan.

The ideas and the vocabulary of the novel have permeated the discourse about it.

Critics often place the story in “the remote mountains of eastern Europe” (Bigelow 53), without raising the possibility that this is a misrepresentation inherited from Stoker and his sources. In his anthology of excerpts from these source texts, one of the editors borrows their imagery: “Surrounded on three sides by the rocky barrier of the Carpathians, and on its western approaches by one of Europe’s most impenetrable forests, it is little wonder that

‘Transylvania,’ when translated from the Latin, means ‘the land beyond the forest’”

(Leatherdale, Origins 108-109). There is, of course, no “impenetrable forest” to the west;

Harker comes to Transylvania from that direction and he does not mention a single tree before approaching Borgo Pass. Another editor describes the province as “chiefly a land of wheat fields, orchards, and vineyards, though sulphur, lead, timber, and iron were being exploited” (Wolf 3 n. 12). Transylvanian economy is thus reduced to agriculture and raw materials, the first of which is sulphur, commonly associated with hell and the devil. In reality, sulphur does not appear to have been exploited at all. Among Stoker’s sources, the author of Transylvania: Its Products and Its People notices it only as a possibility and deplores the locals’ lack of entrepreneurial skills while at the same time inviting British investors: “Here were a field for English enterprise!” (Boner 312). However, subsequent

307 travellers only speak of sulphur baths (Mazuchelli II, 37) or sulphur springs. Even Crosse, a chemist interested in local industry, only mentions sulphur in a cave (Crosse 225-228).

The reference to sulphur enhances the representation of Transylvania as a sinister and eerie place. So do frequent decoding of symbols, either over-interpretive or idiosyncratic. Where Stoker writes, “There were dark, rolling clouds overhead, and in the air the heavy, oppressive sense of thunder. It seemed as though the mountain range had separated two atmospheres, and that now we had got into the thunderous one” (Dracula

40), Wolf adds: “Stoker had been letting us know, a bit melodramatically, that Harker is passing from the civilised to the primordial; from the known to the unknown” (Wolf 14 n.

52), while Leatherdale writes that “The Borgo Pass separates two atmospheres, the good and the bad, west and east, the Christian and the pagan” (Leatherdale 40 n. 117). However, the passage is primarily descriptive and was likely inspired by one of Stoker’s sources, describing a “curious atmospheric effects produced by the coming storm. The clouds rolled up behind us in dense masses, throwing the near mountains into deep shadow, while the plain far beneath was flooded with bright sunshine” (Crosse 26). Leatherdale similarly comments when Harker crosses the bridge in Budapest: “Though still within the Austro-

Hungarian Empire, Harker senses he is leaving the known world and entering the unknown.

Good, the sun, and the Three Wise Men come from the East, but so does Evil, an echo of

Babylon” (28 n. 7). While Stoker is using the usual Gothic strategies of building tension, and probably furthering the otherness of the place, Leatherdale’s eschatological readings of

Harker’s eastward journey shepherd the reader on the way to the land of sorcery and obscurantism.

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Chapter 9 Othering: People

A closer look at Stoker’s sources shows that the travellers he was reading in preparation for the novel had exoticised and orientalised Transylvania both in the passages selected by the author of Dracula and elsewhere in their books. With rare exceptions, however, the annotations provided by the novel’s editors identify Stoker’s research notes as sources and even present them as quotations from the authors read by the novelist. Thus, they do not notice how the actual sources prepared Stoker for an orientalising look in

Dracula. Moreover, this means that they ultimately explain Stoker through Stoker, with uneven results, since the way in which the novelist summarised long passages was, at times, misleading for him and can often mislead the reader of the working notes today.

It seems fair to assume that, meticulous as he was in all his undertakings, Stoker read from his sources more than just the pasages preserved in his notes. When he read

Wilkinson’s Account, which has 294 pages with the appendices and 197 pages without,

Stoker started taking notes from page 18 and ended on page 234, well into “Appendix No.

5.” From Boner’s 627-page Transylvania, Its Products and Its People, he took notes beginning on page 66 and ending on page 419. From Johnson’s On the Track of the

Crescent (316 pages), he only started taking notes on page 105 (understandably, since the first hundred pages are set south of the Danube) and did not stop until page 295, when he went back and wrote down some more from pages 168-170. The notes taken from Crosse’s

375-page Round about the Carpathians are the most thorough, beginning on page 5 and

309 ending on page 373. From Mazuchelli’s Magyarland, Stoker started taking notes on page

45 and stopped on page 316, but they are all from the first volume (of 379 pages) and, since he used several passages from the second volume in the text of the novel, it is clear that at least some pages of his notes have not survived. To give a single example, Jonathan

Harker’s observation that the district where Castle Dracula is located “is in the extreme east of the country” (Dracula 32) remains unexplained by the editors173 because they have not considered the second volume of Magyarland, in which the traveller speaks of “Szeklers, a people occupying a large tract of country in the extreme east of Transylvania” (Mazuchelli

II, 164).

All the research notes on Transylvania and Romania, with the exception of those taken down from Gerard’s article on “Transylvanian Superstitions,” are typewritten, very likely by somebody else, probably a typist on the payroll of the Lyceum. Here and there are blanks filled out in longhand by Stoker, usually with the more obscure and foreign words, such as “boyars,” “hospodars” or “Galatz,” which an outsider would have ignored, but which Stoker himself knew and added to the typescript. This means that the original, handwritten research notes may have been more extensive and that, when the novelist had them typed, at a later date, he only selected the ones he thought he would include as such in the text of Dracula. Beginning with McNally/Florescu, all editors have noticed that Stoker used his sources almost verbatim. In fact, this is only partly true: he did not use his sources directly, but rather his research notes with ideas and partial quotes from the sources, including many re-workings of the original information and even mistakes and

173 With the exception of Leatherdale, who comments that “Evil comes from the East; extreme evil comes from the ‘extreme east’” (29 n. 17).

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misinterpretations on Stoker’s part. The parts of the books that were likely read but not included in these research notes can also be useful and should not be entirely neglected.

9.1 Exotic Transylvania

While travelling through the “Mittel Land,” Jonathan Harker notices “a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road” (Dracula 37). It seems an innocent enough sentence and it has not been annotated by any of the editors. Nevertheless, the ending (about the “blank gable end to the road”) seems quite mysterious. The surviving typewritten note is not very helpful – Stoker took it down from Crosse and simply wrote:

“p. 7. Houses (Hungarian) Separate. Blank gable to road” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 210-211).

This is, in fact, the first note he took from Crosse, after which he went back towards the beginning and summarised another passage from page 5, which means that something had caught his attention in the description of the houses. The whole passage in Round about the

Carpathians is certainly more revealing: “Hungarian towns look like overgrown villages that have never made up their minds seriously to become towns. The houses are mostly of one stor[e]y, standing each one alone, with the gable-end, blank and windowless, towards the road. This is probably a relic of Orientalism” (Crosse 7). While Stoker’s note is very pithy, the original source can turn a mysterious sentence into a meaningful one.

Stoker appears to have read Crosse’s book very carefully (thirty-seven notes from it have been typewritten) and he included a description of the “gable ends” in the novel

311 perhaps in part because the traveller mentions them three more times. First, he narrates a leisurely stroll back to the inn (he is in Oravicza, in Banat) and he notices “in the foreground quaint gable-ends mixed themselves up with the shadows and the trees” (Crosse

13). Stoker was usually unconcerned with regional differences and often transferred an observation about Banat or even Moldavia to north-eastern Transylvania. However, in this case, the traveller later suggested that “throughout the country [the cottages] are built with the gable-end to the road” (265). Finally, in an area very close to the Borgo Pass, when the traveller was completely alone and facing a snowstorm, he found shelter in an abandoned house: “Here then, in this dreary spot, with its gable-end to the road, and turning away from the prospect – and no wonder – stood the carcass of a cottage. My horse and I scrambled over the breach in the wall, where a garden never had smiled, and got into the roofless house” (270). Stoker probably also read Gerard’s 1888 book, where he could have noticed her description of Szekler houses which, with “their narrow gable-ends all turned towards the road, have something camp-like in their appearance, and have been aptly compared to a line of snowy tents ready to be folded together at the approach of an enemy” (Gerard, The

Land beyond the Forest II, 151). The fact that Stoker inserted such a minor detail about houses because they seemed to represent “a relic of Orientalism” is not too surprising. All the travellers he drew upon in his descriptions of Transylvania insist on the Orientalism of the province.

On his way to Dracula’s residence somewhere around the Borgo Pass, Harker exhibits nostalgia for the first time – he feels it again later, seven years after the events when the survivors “got to talking of the old time” (Dracula 419). As the coach is leaving the inn, the Englishman takes a mental picture of the place: “I shall never forget the last glimpse which I had of the inn-yard and its crowd of picturesque figures, all crossing

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themselves, as they stood around the wide archway, with its background of rich foliage of oleander and orange trees in green tubs clustered in the centre of the yard” (Dracula 37).

The presence of the orange trees in the middle of the town, even planted in tubs, is unlikely in north-eastern Transylvania, and is rather reminiscent of Levantine imagery. The passage is discussed in a single edition of the novel:

The oleander is a plant that arouses mixed feelings. For the Chinese it symbolises

beauty and grace. Because of its poisonous leaves, the Hindus call it ‘the horse

killer,’ and yet decorate their temples with it and bind wreaths of it on the brows of

their dead. In Christian lore it is a plant capable of producing health-giving miracles

under the auspices of St. Joseph. The orange is, of course, the golden apple that was

given to Hera on her wedding day by Gaea, the goddess of earth and fertility. It is

likely to have been the golden apple used by the crafty Hippomenes in escaping

Atalanta. Orange blossoms are still popular at weddings as a symbol of happiness

and fecundity. (Wolf 11 n. 41)

Wolf’s explanatory note first sends readers to more exotic China and India, then brings them home to “Christian lore,” although the trees are clearly used in Dracula for decorative purposes and not for “health-giving miracles.” The orange is placed in the context of Greek myths, but its presence so far north of Greece remains unexplained.

Stoker’s research notes show that the novelist based this description on a passage from Crosse’s Round about the Carpathians about a market day in Kronstadt (Sibiu), in southern Transylvania: “p. 202. Kronstadt. Picturesque inn-yard seen through wide arched doorway – open arcade surrounds it – oleander trees in green tubs in centre, long wagons four horses abreast, peasantry with snow-white sheepskins or embroidery, white leather coats lined with black fur, flat caps, peaked hats, drum-shaped hats for girls – matrons wear

313 close twisted white kerchiefs” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 214-215). The passage is, in fact, quite long (it ends not on the page indicated by Stoker, but on page 203), and it can help one understand how the author constructed his descriptions of people and places:

As far as the buildings are concerned, Kronstadt has much the air of an old-

fashioned German town. As you pass along the streets you get a peep now and then

of picturesque interior courtyards, seen through the wide-arched doorways. These

courts are mostly surrounded by an open arcade. Generally in the centre of each

[courtyard] is set a large green tub holding an oleander tree. This gives rather an

Oriental appearance to these interiors. The East and West are here mixed up

together most curiously. Amongst the fair-haired, blue-eyed Saxons are dusky

Armenians and black-ringleted Jews, wearing strange garments. By the way, the

merchants of these two races have ousted the Saxon trader from the field; commerce

is almost completely in their hands. The market-day at Kronstadt is a most curious

and interesting sight. The country-people come in, sitting in their long waggons

[sic], drawn by four horses abreast, they themselves dressed in cloaks of snow-white

sheepskins, or richly-embroidered white leather coats lined with black fur. The

head-gear too is very comely, and very dissimilar; for there are flat fur caps – like

an exaggerated Glengarry – and peaked hats, and drum-shaped hats for the girls,

while the close-twisted white kerchief denotes the matron. The Wallack maiden is

adorned by her dowry of coins hanging over head and shoulders, and with braids of

plaited black hair – mingled, I am afraid, with tow, if the truth must be spoken.

(Crosse 202-203)

Stoker was probably enticed by the traveller’s promise to show what a “German town” in Transylvania looked like at the time, as he probably remembered from a different

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source that Bistritz, where he actually places the scene, was also a “Saxon town” (Boner

349).174 Then, as he wrote about people’s “picturesque interior court-yards,” he likely visualised the scene through Jonathan Harker’s eyes, because he turned them into a single

“picturesque inn-yard,” as it is in the novel. He noted the wagons with four horses abreast, which were later used in the first chapter of Dracula and placed in the same area of northeast Transylvania. The coach that takes him from Bistritz to the Borgo Pass is pulled by

“four small horses, which ran abreast” (Dracula 37). The size of the horses seems quite unlikely for a coach carrying many passengers (speaking, as Harker notices, in various languages), whereas the four horses that pull the calèche sent by Dracula for a single passenger (Harker) are all “splendid animals” (40). Here, Stoker used another note taken down from Crosse: “p.5 Horses four abreast and small” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 210-211).

Interestingly, he had first taken down a note from Crosse’s page 7 (about the “blank gable to road”), then he went back to page 5 to look for horses. He seems to have forgotten that, in the respective passage, the traveller speaks not of a diligence, but of a peasant’s cart in

Banat pulled by “four horses abreast . . . the smallest horses I almost ever saw” (Crosse 5).

The other two things that interested Stoker in Crosse’s description “orientalise” the place and the people. The traveller speaks of “the East and West . . . mixed up together” in the population of the town; Stoker took down most of the details provided, and later summarised them as “picturesque figures, all crossing themselves.” There is no mention in

Crosse of the sign of the cross but, along with the “picturesqueness” of the faces, this plays in Dracula the same orientalising role as the traveller’s more detailed descriptions. The oleander trees are specifically said by Crosse to give “rather an Oriental appearance,”

174 This information from Boner does not survive in Stoker’s typewritten notes – but he certainly knew from Boner that there were Saxons in the area around the Borgo Pass (Bram Stoker’s Notes 242-243).

315 which may have appealed to Stoker’s pictorial sense.175 The traveller’s observation may have also persuaded the novelist to give the scene a Mediterranean touch and add “orange trees” in the yard of the Bistritz inn. Moreover, the writings of other travellers read by

Stoker could have contributed to the description. The author of Magyarland saw more than oleanders in a region traversed by Harker on his way to Klausenburg. When she approached a “Greek church” in a valley near Oradea (about halfway between Budapest and Klausenburg), she walked “by a pathway of trees and flowers growing in large tubs – oleanders, geraniums, roses, lilies, and a variety of other plants” (Mazuchelli II, 72). In a hotel in Kashau (present-day Košice, in Slovakia), Emily Gerard also noticed “the rigid leaves of the oleander trees in the balcony outside, doing their best to grow in tubs much too small for them” (The Land beyond the Forest II, 204). More importantly, while in

Sibiu, the city described in Crosse’s passage, Gerard purchased “a delicate little piece of fancy porcelain. . . . About ten inches high, it represents a miniature citron-tree with blossoms and fruit, growing in a gold-hooped tub of exactly the same shape as the wooden cases in which real orange-trees are often planted” (II, 213-214; emphasis mine). An old lady later recognised it as part of an old porcelain set, “pomegranates and citron-trees alternately, with which the table [at the Brukenthal Castle, in Sibiu] used to be decked out on the occasion of large dinner-parties” (II, 214). Although there are no surviving notes from Gerard’s 1888 travelogue, Stoker could have remembered this passage about “fancy porcelain” and memories of different places when he visualised the orange trees in Bistritz.

A much more elaborate transfer of meaning, location and usage operates in Stoker’s construction of the picturesque quality of Transylvanian food. The editors closely follow

175 The surviving research notes include some of Stoker’s drawings of Whitby, showing he wished to “see” the scenes from the novel.

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the author’s descriptions in the novel and his pithy research notes without questioning them and without noticing the differences between Dracula and Stoker’s sources. Jonathan

Harker has “dinner, or rather supper” (Dracula 31) and then breakfast (33) at the Hotel

Royale in Klausenburg and carefully notes the dishes. On the evening of 2 May, he has “a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem., get recipe for Mina.) I asked the waiter, and he said it was called ‘paprika hendl,’ and that, as it was a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians” (31). During the night that follows, he “did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink all the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty” (32-33).

The dish appears three times in Stoker’s research notes, but only once with a very brief recipe, taken from Johnson’s On the Track of the Crescent. In Eighteen-Bisang and

Miller’s edition of Bram Stoker’s Notes, this mention accompanied by a recipe appears last rather than first. The typewritten note includes only the Hungarian name and two ingredients: “p. 271 PAPRIKAS CZIRKE = chicken and cayenne pepper” (Bram Stoker’s

Notes 232-233).176 It is, however, this recipe that the novelist remembered when he had

Harker admire the meal and later suffer from thirst:

At dinner [in the house of a Count not far from Târgu-Mureş] the chief dish was, as

is usual in Hungary, Paprikás csirke. This is prepared by giving some ancient

chanticleer the “happy despatch,” cutting his remains into small pieces, and putting

them into water, in company with flour, cream, butter, and a great deal of paprika,

176 The editors transcribe “SZIRKE” (233). The word is handwritten and there is an obvious hesitation over the first letter, but it is also quite clear that the writer used a capital “C” (232).

317 or red pepper. This is a dish to dream of, though at first dreaming is out of the

question, for the “griff,” after his first taste of the delicious condiment, is usually

kept awake by a throat compared with which a lime-kiln in full blast would be

coolness itself. (Johnson 221)

Stoker seems a bit confused of the meaning of “paprika,” since he wrote down “cayenne pepper” although Johnson spoke of “red pepper.” However, the more exotic association also comes from Johnson. It appears that Stoker remembered it later, because he continued his notes from page 271 to page 295 of the travelogue, then he went back to page 168 to page 170 and took down the description of a fish dish “with red pepper (‘Paprika’)” (Bram

Stoker’s Notes 232-233), although this time Johnson spoke, in fact, of “the national Paprika

– a form of cayenne” (Johnson 169). There are at least three reasons to consider On the

Track of the Crescent as one of the first books on Transylvania read by Stoker: he is still hesitating about ingredients; he only took down the recipe from here; and the name of the dish appears in Hungarian, rather the German form used in the novel, which he took from later sources.

He must have encountered the dish again in the first volume of Magyarland and, as a sign of recognition and relief at discovering the German name, he simply wrote

“‘PAPRIKA HENDL’” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 200-201), without page number. These are in fact the first words reproduced from Mazuchelli’s travelogue. Clearly, Stoker already knew their meaning and wrote down a more preferable German version of the name of the dish.

Perhaps at an even later time, he also wrote briefly from Crosse’s Round about the

Carpathians about “p. 141 Maize variously cooked – water melons – paprika hendl and

‘gulyas’ (sort of Irish stew)” (212-213). This time the dish appears familiar and placed in the company of other, lesser known courses. The novel’s first editor (and the only one not

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to use Stoker’s notes) provides a recipe for paprika hendl from a twentieth-century cookbook (Marcia Colman Morton’s The Art of Viennese Cooking) and another from John

Paget’s 1839 travelogue, which Stoker probably did not know (Wolf 2 n. 8). Klinger repeats Paget’s recipe and he also inserts “a more modern . . . low-cholesterol version”

(Klinger 13 n. 12). McNally and Florescu identify the source of the recipe as Magyarland and invite the modern “visitor to Transylvania [to] order the Romanian version of that dish: chicken paprikash or tocana de pui (tokana dei pooee) today” (McNally and Florescu 52 n.

8). Leatherdale reproduces, without quoting, McNally and Florescu’s information about a

Romanian version, and indicates that the dish “is described in two of Stoker’s source books

– Magyarland and Crosse” (Leatherdale 28 n. 12). None of the editors mentions Johnson’s book, the only one from which Stoker’s typewritten notes include a brief recipe, very likely because the name of the dish appears in Hungarian and they did not associate it with the dish mentioned in the novel.

A more important detail that remains unnoticed is that Stoker exoticises

Klausenburg by having a rural recipe served at the “Hotel Royale” in the Transylvanian capital. The author of Magyarland, who mentions the dish three times, always avoids the big hotels (Mazuchelli I, 189). In fact, the first time she mentions “paprika hendl” she indicates that it is to be found “at small out-of-the-way inns” (I, 12). The second time, the dish appears more specifically at a “small fogado (inn) . . . [a] lonely fogado” (I, 18) in the small Slovenian town of Pragerhof, consisting of the railway station, the inn, and “three or four sheds” (I, 18). The third time she has “paprika hendl,” it is on the road to Debreczin, in northern Hungary, having stopped at “a tolerable inn [in a] mezőváros [i.e., town] . . . contain[ing] an exclusively agricultural population” (II, 172). Crosse also mentions it three times: first, in a private dwelling, in the Hatzeg Valley, his “first visit to a Hungarian house

319 . . . we had paprika hendl (chicken with red pepper), and gulyas, a sort of improved Irish stew” (Crosse 141); then, at a village inn, in the village of Büksad (Bixad), in Covasna

(224-225); finally, during a shooting party “in Baron Beust’s forests” (356), in the Tokay area, presumably in a hunting chalet.

Harker’s observation that he could get the dish “anywhere along the Carpathians” echoes Crosse’s insistence that “In all parts of the country where travellers are possible, the invariable reply to a demand for something to eat is the query, ‘Would the gentleman like paprika hendl?’ and he had better like it, for his chances are small of getting anything else”

(Crosse 224-225). At the Count’s dinner, quoted above, no fewer than six courses are served, but E.C. Johnson only names one. Over the many days that follow, he eats and wonders at the number of meals and courses; still, he fails to name another dish. In a paper presented in 1991 at the “Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery,” Andrew Dalby, the food historian and classicist, analysed the omnipresence of paprika hendl in British travelogues, some of which had been used by Stoker in Dracula, and suggested that

“travellers, even the most observant, do sometimes see – and eat – what earlier authors have told them to see and eat” (Dalby 74). In the period analysed, Dalby notices, British travel guides recommended the dish, whereas the French Guide-Joanne made no mention of paprika hendl.

The way travellers came to Hungary and Transylvania and, one after the other, rediscovered this dish is similar to the reaction generated by Byron’s 1810 poem “Maid of

Athens, Ere We Part,” in which he expressed his admiration for the young Teresa Macri. In the decades that followed, “British travellers would frequently make a point of reporting on her looks” (Goldsworthy 22). Her house had become a sort of pilgrimage site: the travellers went to see what somebody else had seen. The same thing, apparently, happened with food.

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Dalby came to the conclusion that the Western visitors to places like Hungary and

Transylvania liked to confirm, rather than discover: “the English travellers appear, on the whole, to have stuck to the one cooked dish that they knew the name for and that Murray [A

Handbook for Travellers in South Germany and Austria] had told them to expect. The name they gave it, by the way, was not incorrect (they might have spelt it Paprikahähnl), but rather Austrian dialect than standard German” (Dalby 73). In fact, the Murray guide calls it Paprikas Csirke in the original Hungarian and, although it is identified as a

“national dish,” it is mentioned specifically as a staple of “country inns” (A Handbook for

Travellers 531). About paprika, the Murray guide explains that “the taste for it marks the

Eastern origin and descent of the Magyars” (531), and this mark or exoticism and

Orientalism might account for the hold it had over British travellers.

A similar yet even more outlandish aliment mentioned in Stoker’s novel is “a sort of porridge of maize flour which they said was ‘mamaliga’” (Dracula 33). All of Stoker’s sources correctly indicate that mămăligă was a staple food of the Romanian peasantry and none places it in an urban environment. In today’s Romania, mămaligă can be had in a few peasant-style restaurants,177 but it seems highly unlikely that anyone would have encountered it in a hotel restaurant in a city controlled by Hungarians. In Stoker’s notes, it appears as a summary from E.C. Johnson: “P. 120: Favourite dish of peasant ‘Mamaliga’ – maize flour stirred in water and consistency of hasty pudding and eaten with salt” (Bram

Stoker’s Notes 222-223). The original is not much different: “The favourite dish of the

‘Terranu,’ or peasant, is ‘Mamaligă’ – maize flour stirred up in water to the consistency of hasty pudding, and eaten with salt” (Johnson 120). Here, the traveller describes a meal in

Romania, near Bucharest, and there is no comparison with porridge. Stoker may have taken

177 Despite its simplicity, it requires the use of a special cast-iron pot.

321 down another fragment which he did not have typed, or he simply remembered a passage in which the same traveller, now in Transylvania, pokes fun at fasting: “The diet of the

Wallach peasants – when they are allowed to eat anything – is very simple. It consists principally of a porridge, made of the meal of maize, like the polenta of Italy, and called

‘Mamaliga.’ Of this meal they also make a cake, which serves them as bread” (Johnson

251).

In his other sources, Stoker would have found that mămăligă is a foodstuff that replaces bread in the diet of the Romanian peasant: “All his field labour is confined to sowing a patch of maize, which supplies him abundantly with meal for his mamaliga; he has absolutely no wants, and can even do without bread” (Boner 283); “Their [The peasants’] ordinary food is composed of a kind of dough to which they give the name of mammalinga [sic], made of the flour of Indian wheat, sometimes mixed with milk”

(Wilkinson 158). The best informed is Emily Gerard: “The food of both children and adults chiefly consists of maize-corn flour, which, cooked with milk, forms a sort of porridge called Balmosch, or if boiled with water, becomes Mamaliga – first cousin to the polenta of the Italians. This latter preparation is eaten principally in Lent, when milk is prohibited altogether” (The Land beyond the Forest I, 243-244). The only one who seems to have tasted it is Andrew Crosse, whose Romanian guide once informs him “that he must return to his hut, for he had not breakfasted. Not to lose sight of him, I returned too. He then with

Oriental deliberation set about making a fire, and proceeded to cook his polenta of maize. I had got hungry again by this time, though I had breakfasted at Petroseny before starting, so

I partook of some of his mess, which was exceedingly good, much better than oatmeal porridge” (Crosse 163).

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Some of the editors of Dracula simply explain the meaning of the Romanian word, with no reference to Stoker’s source or to the fact that it is eaten exclusively in the peasants’ homes: “maize flour stirred in water” (Luckhurst 364); “A dish like the Italian polenta, simple boiled cornmeal” (Klinger 19 n. 30). One editor gives a “recipe for mamaliga” (Wolf 4 n. 21), which includes butter, sour cream and feta cheese.

McNally/Florescu present as a quote from Johnson’s On the Track of the Crescent what is in fact Stoker’s note, and they too give a recipe “with butter, cheese, sour cream, garnished with a poached or fried egg” (McNally and Florescu 54 n. 15). Such recipes give the food an air of slight sophistication and justify somewhat its presence on the table of the “Hotel

Royale.” However, there is no mention of such ingredients in Dracula; Harker appears to indicate that the mămăligă was used instead of bread for his paprika hendl, which is consistent with the way it is mentioned in Stoker’s sources.

Harker exaggerates again and exoticises his trip when he describes his meal at the

Bistritz inn: “lest who reads . . . may fancy that I dined too well before I left Bistritz, let me put down my dinner exactly. I dined on what they called ‘robber steak’ – bits of bacon, onion, and beef, seasoned with red pepper, and strung on sticks and roasted over the fire, in the simple style of the London cat’s-meat” (Dracula 36). Relying exclusively on Stoker’s working notes helps to enhance the author’s “othering” discourse. With the exception of

Luckhurst, the editors define “cat’s-meat” without noting the uncomplimentary comparison with Harker’s last supper in Bistritz. It is “cooked horse flesh, sold in the streets from a barrow” (Wolf 9 n. 36); “horse flesh” (Byron 36 n. 1; Leatherdale 35 n. 76); “horse flesh prepared by street dealers as food for domestic cats” (Riquelme 31); “little bits of meat on skewers for consumption by cats” (Klinger 27 n. 57). Auerbach and Skal do not mention the disdain, only the comparison, and extend to all the food consumed by Harker in

323 Transylvania: “Jonathan compares his meals to the horsemeat fed to animals in London”

(Auerbach and Skal 13 n. 9). The source (Andrew Crosse) is mentioned by a few of the editors: “‘Bits of beef, bacon and onion strung on stick, seasoned with paprika and salt, and roasted over a fire.’ Crosse, Round about the Carpathians, p. 84” (McNally and Florescu

58 n. 27); “This description of ‘robber steak’ is taken from Crosse, p. 84. Stoker perhaps plays upon the name, for Satan is a ‘robber’” (Leatherdale 35 n. 75); “Andrew Crosse reports an identical dish in his 1878 travelogue Round about the Carpathians, which appears among the sources listed in the Notes” (Klinger 27 n. 57); “in Notes, Stoker takes from A.F. Crosse’s Round about the Carpathians (1878) the detail that robber steak are

‘bits of beef bacon and onion strung on a stick, seasoned with paprika and salt, and roasted over a fire.’ ‘Cat’s meat’ is a disparaging tourist’s comment that equates the dish with the horseflesh sold for cat meat in Victorian London” (Luckhurst 365).

Despite the references to Crosse, none of the editors actually quotes the traveller, but Stoker’s note. In fact, the author of Round about the Carpathians mentions the “robber steak” five times and, unlike the disdainful Harker, he describes it as the best possible dish:

“The robber steak is capital . . . delicious” (Crosse 84-85); “excellent” (270); “I never enjoyed anything more” (361). More importantly, every time he has it, he is outdoors: first during a camping trip in Serbia (84-85); then while travelling with only a Wallack guide through the Southern Carpathians, from Petroşani to Sibiu: “an ascent over roughish ground all the way. Arriving at the summit, we made a noonday halt. A fire was soon burning, whereat our dinner of robber-steak was roasted” (165-166). The third time he was alone in the Eastern Carpathians, not far from the Borgo Pass, in a “roofless house,” close to a road to Moldavia: “It was with considerable difficulty that I found sticks enough for my kitchen fire. . . . The result of my trouble was a blazing fire, whereat I cooked an excellent robber-

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steak. I made myself some tea, and afterwards enjoyed – yes, actually enjoyed – my pipe”

(270). The fourth time he mentions it during the six weeks spent “most agreeably in the chateaux of some of the well-known Transylvanian nobles. For the time my wild rovings were over. The bivouac in the glorious forest and robber-steak cooked by the camp fire – the pleasures of ‘roughing it’ – were exchanged for the charms of society” (291). Finally, while bear hunting in northern Hungary, he describes “a good fire blazing, at which robber- steak was nicely cooked” (361). Even a full quote of Stoker’s summarising note would show that this food is not even supposed to be eaten at a table. The recipe taken down by the novelist and truncated by McNally/Florescu and Luckhurst continues with the mode of preparation: “lower end of stick being rolled backwards and forwards between palms as you hold it over the embers” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 210-211). Stoker knew very well that the “robber steak” was something one makes for himself in front of the fire, but chose to place it in the exotic kitchen of the Bistritz inn.

No other food in Stoker’s novel is more heavily annotated than “impletata,” described by Harker as “eggplant stuffed with forcemeat, a very excellent dish” (Dracula

33) that he has for breakfast in Klausenburg, along with “mamaliga” and “more paprika.”

The word178 comes from one of Stoker’s sources, E.P. Johnson’s 1885 travelogue On the

Track of the Crescent, which provides a very brief description: “Egg-plant (better known by its French name of ‘Aubergine’) stuffed with chopped meat, is also a national dish, and is called ‘Uă impletata’” (Johnson 120). Stoker wrote it down without the parenthesis and capitalised the name: “Egg plant stuffed with chopped meat is National dish and called

178 The editors do not insist on the strangeness of the word. Johnson probably heard “vinete umplute” (“stuffed eggpants” and turned it into something more musical – he does this often, for instance when he turns “Podul Mogoşoaiei” (an important street in Bucharest; today “Calea Victoriei,” i.e., “Victory Road”) into “Podoi Mogoshoi” (Johnson 115). Sanda Marin’s Carte de Bucate, the veritable “Bible” of Romanian cuisine (countless editions since 1936), contains three different recipes for “vinete umplute.” However, pace Johnson, it is not a “national dish.”

325 “UA IMPLETATA” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 222-223). Leonard Wolf, who never uses

Stoker’s working notes, guesses that “Stoker may mean patlagele impulute” (Wolf 4 n. 22), and gives cooking instructions from the washing of the eggplant all the way to the oven.

McNally and Florescu suggest that Johnson’s word is “a corruption of the word umplatura

[,] ‘filling’ in Romanian. In this case it is an eggplant dish; the modern visitor to

Transylvania would ask for vinete umplute pronounced veeneti oomploota)[,] ‘stuffed eggplants.’ We shall provide here the exact recipe that Harker would like to obtain”

(McNally and Florescu 54-55 n. 15). They, too, go to great lengths to explain how to chop the onions and how and when to add the spices.179

Another recipe, with breadcrumbs and butter, is provided by Leslie Klinger who makes no mention of Johnson or of Stoker’s note and who does not suggest a more accurate name for the dish. Instead, he proceeds to give a recipe to the fictional “impletata” (Klinger

19 n. 31). Two other editors (Leatherdale 30 n. 30; Luckhurst 364) note briefly that the name and the description comes from Johnson’s Track of the Crescent. None of the editors seems to have noticed that Stoker turned Johnson’s “chopped meat” into “forcemeat,” although two editions annotate this instead of “impletata” (Auerbach and Skal 10 n. 5;

Riquelme 28). Stoker may have remembered forcemeat from his days as a Dublin Castle clerk, because in his diary he mentions clerks cooking late meals in the office, even a dinner for eight that included “a roast turkey stuffed with forcemeat” (The Lost Journal

176-177). More importantly, Stoker must have been aware, when he took down the information about “impletata” from Johnson, that the dish he had Harker appreciate in the

179 This is not much of a guess on their part. Both Johnson and Stoker make it clear that it is an eggplant dish and that the eggplants are stuffed. Both editions have trouble with the Romanian words for “filling” (it is “umplutură” not “umplatura”) and “filled” (the feminine plural participle would be “umplute” not “impulute”). The Romanian word(s) for “eggplants” used to be “pătlăgele vinete,” but they are called simply “vinete” today, which indicates that the source for Wolf’s recipe must be older than McNally and Florescu’s.

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capital of Transylvania was found by his source during a folk celebration near Bucharest, on the occasion of the coronation of Charles I as King of Romania in May 1881. Johnson dined outdoors with Romanian peasants and had both “mamaliga” and “impletata.”

Thereafter, he travelled through Transylvania but he never once mentioned such a dish.

What may have drawn Stoker’s attention is the sentence immediately following the word

“impletata”: “Pilaff, good roasting, and capital sweets help to complete a cuisine quite

Oriental” (Johnson 120). Neither the desire to exoticise Transylvania, nor the fact that

“impletata” was discovered near Bucharest, in the Romanian Kingdom, has been noticed by the editors of Dracula, who too often rely on Stoker’s summarising notes.

9.2 The Whirlpool of Races

Count Dracula refers to Transylvania as “the whirlpool of European races” (Dracula

59), a formula annotated by a single editor, who explains “whirlpool” as “a loaded racial term in the late Victorian period, often referring to the poor areas of uncontrolled immigration, such as London’s East End” (Luckhurst 368). When they annotate “Leeds”

(in Chapter 6 of the novel), McNally and Florescu suggest that “Stoker was acquainted with the work of A.R.T. Colquhoun, a former counsul [sic] to the Romanian Principalities, who afterwards wrote a book entitled The Whirlpool of Europe” (McNally and Florescu 89 n.

138). This is an interesting suggestion (based on letters found in the collection of the Leeds

University library), especially since Colquhoun’s book (co-authored by his wife, Ethel) is

327 about a larger area in East Central Europe that includes Transylvania. However, the book was first published in 1907, which means that, if the two authors knew each other, they may have exchanged ideas and notions, but Stoker could not have borrowed the formula from the title of Colquhoun’s book.180 If he inherited it, as Luckhurst suggests, from general Victorian terminology, he certainly found many implications about racial amalgamation in Transylvania and Romania in all his known sources.

The oldest of the travellers used by Stoker indicates that “from long intercourse with foreign nations, their [the Romanians’] blood seems to have become a mixture of many”

(Wilkinson 158). Boner’s similar historical account of Transylvania claims that “when at last, threatened constantly by neighbouring barbarians, the conquerors [Romans] withdrew, they left behind them a people in whom admixture of race was, in varied wise, indubitably marked” (Boner 93). At Baziaş, the first Romanian town he visited, this traveller found “a strange admixture of different nationalities, and altogether it was a wild barbaric scene”

(10). In The Land beyond the Forest, Emily Gerard is “interested in the wild beauty of the country, the strange admixture of races by which it is peopled, and their curious and varied folk-lore” (I, v), while she suggests that “Transylvania [is] a vast storehouse of different nationalities” (I, 11-12). The author of Magyarland notices that, among “the many peculiarities which exist in this interesting country, there is not one that perhaps strikes the stranger so forcibly as the variety of races” (Mazuchelli I, 38). “What a hotch-potch of races, so to speak,” exclaims another traveller read by Stoker (Crosse 2); “The mixture of races in Hungary is a puzzle to any outsider” (46).

180 McNally and Florescu also seem to have mixed up Archibald Ross Colquhoun (1848-1914), author of The Whirlpool of Europe, who was only 11 years old when the Romanian Principalities became Romania, and Robert Gilmore Colquhoun (1803-1870), consul to Bucharest from 1835 to 1854.

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Stoker’s sources also warn that the presence of so many ethnicities in Transylvania means that “it is not easy to travel without some one who can speak at least three of four languages unfamiliar to civilised ears” (Mazuchelli I, 35); “Go where you will in this country, there is a Babel of tongues” (Crosse 357). Harker confirms when he hears “a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd; so I quietly got my polyglot dictionary from my bag and looked them out” (Dracula 36). In their edition of the novel, Auerbach and Skal suggest that “One dictionary definition [of the word “polyglot”], ‘a mixture or confusion of languages,’ anticipates the linguistic cacophony that threatens to overwhelm Dracula’s characters” (13 n. 1). When Harker indicates simply that “there are four distinct nationalities” (Dracula 32) in Transylvania, most editors (McNally and Florescu 54 n. 13; Wolf 3-4 n. 18; Leatherdale 29 n. 25; Klinger

17-18 n. 26; Luckhurst 364) refer to long quotes from the 1896 Austria Baedeker, Emily

Gerard’s The Land beyond the Forest and especially E.C. Johnson’s On the Track of the

Crescent. In his collection of excerpts from Stoker’s sources, Clive Leatherdale also gives his own opinion about the country’s population: “Transylvania was, and is, a hotch-potch of races and nationalities, a consequence of interminable wars and migrations” (Origins

97). Despite such “balkanisation,” Transylvania had – and has – three major communities,

Romanians, Hungarians (including the Szeklers) and Germans, along with a series of small minorities.

Like his sources, Stoker hesitates to give the largest community a single name and calls them, alternately, “Wallachs,” “Wallachians” and “Roumanians.” Christopher

Frayling has noticed that the novelist “did not take any notes” (“Mr Stoker’s Holiday” 192) on the many comparisons made by E.C. Johnson between this community and the Irish.

One cannot state, however, with absolute certainty that Stoker’s typewritten notes represent

329 all that he took down. On the contrary, despite Frayling’s suggestion that “we do not even know if he read those passages” (192), it seems obvious that he did. One of the surviving notes from Johnson states simply: “p. 249. Many crosses by roadside” (Bram Stoker’s

Notes 230-231), but the full passage makes an unambiguous comparison with the Irish:

The Wallach has many points of resemblance to our friend Paddy. He is grossly

superstitious, as the number of crosses by the roadside and on every eminence

testify; and, like his prototype, he lives in abject terror of his priest, of whose

powers he has the most exalted ideas. . . . He is, too, a lazy, pleasant, good-natured,

drunken, careless, improvident fellow; living like the grasshopper while the sun

shine, and “the divil may care for the morn.” (Johnson 249)

Stoker’s typewritten notes include a long series of summarising quotes from fifty-odd pages in Johnson’s travelogue that include several of these comparisons: “The fence around these [Wallachian] cottages was broken, and, altogether, reminded me very strongly of a cluster of cabins in the Emerald Isle” (Johnson 219); “There are other and darker shades in the Wallach character, and in these, alas! he much resembles his Hibernian prototype. He is much given to treacherous revenge, and is capable of the most awful atrocities when aroused” (251); “He further resembles the Irish peasant in his hospitality to pigs, and his simplicity” (250).

There are such associations in many of Stoker’s sources and the novelist could not have missed them. One of the travellers was convinced that “In the language of the

Wallacks (Roumains) there is a decided Celtic element; and this is natural; for their ancestors – those Romanised Dacians, who lived here after Trajan’s time, – were, there is no doubt, a Celtic tribe” (Boner 525). At a mine in eastern Transylvania, he found that the

Romanians were “very diligent, [an] effect of example and companionship with the

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Hungarian and Saxon miners; just as, in England, the Irishman is as steady a workman as those about him” (329). In Boner, there are intimations about superstitions and the power of the clergy: “Like the village priest in Ireland, the popes here determine the attitude a community is to take, or on what side votes are to be given; they are the leaders for evil as well as for good. And here, too, as in the Sister Island, where blind obedience is not yielded, the offender is denounced, and he and his children are threatened with a curse”

(Boner 369). It is also interesting, since Stoker made Count Dracula a Romanian and a

Szekler at the same time, that Johnson, who compares Romanians with Irishmen, describes

Szeklers as “a curious combination of the canny Scot and the imprudent Irishman. Like the former, they are plucky, industrious, and frugal. Like the latter, they are excitable, and, consequently, despondent under reverses” (Johnson 235). The passage is not to be found among Stoker’s typewritten notes, although they include information taken down from page 234 and 238.

One of the minorities mentioned in the novel seems problematic to several of the editors. In Bistritz, Jonathan Harker sees “Slovaks, who are more barbarian than the rest, with their big cowboy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shorts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails”

(Dracula 33). Two editions express doubts regarding their presence in north-eastern

Transylvania: “The chances that Harker might have met Slovaks in the Bistrita region seem slender: there are only a few Slovak villages representing less than .5% of the total population of Transylvania” (McNally and Florescu 55 n. 19); “census data from the late nineteenth century show that Slovaks were a tiny fraction of the Transylvanian population”

(Klinger 21 n. 37). However, they all indicate E.C. Johnson as the source: “Slovaks are defined by Johnson as Transylvanian peasants” (Leatherdale 31 n. 39); “Harker seems to

331 rely on Johnson’s somewhat distorted account” (Klinger 21 n. 37); “Slovaks

(Transylvanian peasants) . . . Johnson, On the Track of the Crescent” (McNally and

Florescu 55 n. 19). Luckhurst also refers the reader to “Stoker’s Notes on Johnson’s Track of the Crescent: ‘SLOVAKS (Transylvanian peasants)’” (Luckhurst 364). Nevertheless, the editors have not checked the passage in Johnson, only Stoker’s summarising note; they also did not check all the notes.

Stoker’s typewritten note from Johnson is very similar to part of the sentence in the novel: “SLOVAKS (Transylvanian peasants) white linen shirts, loose white trousers enormous broad leather belts – long straight hair about shoulders, heavy black moustaches, immense hats. Knee boots” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 230-231). However, this note does not say anything about the belts being “nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails,” as they appear in Harker’s description. Another note, taken from the first volume of

Mazuchelli’s Magyarland should also be considered: “p. 191. Rusniaks and Slovaks wear loose jacket, large trousers of coarse wool, once white – round waist enormous belts leather more than ½ inch thick 12 to 16 inches broad, studded with brass headed nails in various patterns. In these belts, they keep knives, scissors, tobacco pouch, light box etc.” (204-205).

More importantly, though, it is Stoker’s note that is distorted, not Johnson’s account. The migration of the Slovaks began in the second half of the eighteenth century and continued in the first half of the nineteenth century, and they settled especially in four regions of present-day Romania: the flat areas of Arad county and of the Banat; the forested areas of

Bihor and Sălaj counties, the flat areas and the mining areas of Satu-Mare and Maramureş counties, as well as in north-east Bucovina (see Štefanko 22). There were no Slovak villages in Transylvania proper and none of Stoker’s sources states the opposite.

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Boner and Gerard, the only ones whose accounts are limited to Transylvania proper, simply do not mention any Slovaks. Crosse sees them while hunting in the Tokay region, which is divided today between Hungary and Slovakia: “They were a wild-looking crew were those Slovacks [sic], with shaggy coats of black sheepskin, and in their hands the usual long staff with the axe at one end. Notwithstanding their uncouth appearance, later experience has shown me that the Slovacks, as a rule, are patient, hard-working people”

(Crosse 359-360). Mazuchelli, who travelled farther north in the Carpathians, simply places them in present-day Slovakia: “Near [the oxen] stand the Slovak drivers in large felt hats, shoes made of hide, and their legs bound with thongs of leather; formidable-looking men enough, with their large knives stack in their girdles, but in reality as harmless as mice”

(Mazuchelli I, 174). In the passage summarised by Stoker, Johnson speaks of “the wild- looking Slovaks . . . I was, however, assured that these apparently ferocious individuals are among the mildest of mankind. Excessive indulgence in vile brandy has, however, reduced their mental capacity below zero, and the ghostly counsel they get from their illiterate priests is not such as to make them less bigoted or superstitious than their Wallach neighbours, or to elevate their moral tone” (Johnson 243-244).181

However, unlike Stoker, the author of On the Track of the Crescent never identifies

Slovaks as “Transylvanian peasants.” At the railway station in Budapest, he first sees

“Slovachs [sic] from the Eastern Carpathians” (Johnson 182), which means they could have come from Bucovina, in the vicinity of the Borgo Pass, but not in Transylvania. He later speaks simply of “Slovak Raftmen” (Johnson 242-243) coming down the river from the

Eastern Carpathians and going, in all likelihood, to Galatz to sell their timber. Stoker places

181 This was a common view of Slavs in general with Johnson and other travellers used by Stoker. Johnson also states that “the Bulgar is intensely stupid, even for a Slav, and, like the rest of that race, very docile and good-natured, though ferocious in appearance” (100).

333 them in that Danubian port – information which may have come from the 1892 book The

Danube from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, written by his friend F.D. Millet, who also saw in Galatz “Slovac [sic] raftsmen in their skin-tight woollen trousers” (Millet 279). Both

Johnson’s and Millet’s Slovaks probably came from Bucovina. Stoker’s confusion did probably come from Johnson, who provides the drawing of a “Slovak Peasant” (244), even though the Slovaks he speaks of in that passage are not local peasants and are only seen “as they whirled past on the rapid river, on their way down from the Carpathians” (243). So, despite the editors’ complaint about Johnson’s mistake, it is Stoker who is at fault here, which could have been revealed if they had compared the research notes with the actual sources.

One notable discrepancy that should have warranted the editors’ exasperation is in the scene where the innkeeper’s wife warns Harker that it is the eve of St George’s Day and offers him a crucifix for protection (Dracula 35). The editors explain (many of them in minute detail, with long quotes from Emily Gerard and Montague Summers) both the alleged superstitions that Orthodox Romanians have about that day and how they used to follow the Julian calendar, which means that the eve of St George (23 April) fell on 5 May

(the calendar difference is discussed in the previous chapter of this study). Crucifixes, however, are used by Catholics, not by the Greek Orthodox; and if the woman is Catholic, then she should follow not the Julian, but the Gregorian calendar. It seems quite evident that Stoker made a mistake here. He clearly intended this character to be an Orthodox

Romanian who follows the Julian calendar and believes in the presence of evil spirits on the eve of St George. He took all the information from Emily Gerard’s article on

“Transylvanian Superstitions,” which attributes the beliefs about St George’s Eve to

Romanian peasants. Stoker understood this too well and in one interview he mistakenly

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spoke of Gerard as the author of “‘Essays on Roumanian Superstitions’” (Byron 487). The only inaccuracy is the presence of the crucifix.

The novel’s editors make the character either Orthodox or Catholic (or both) rather than correct the error. McNally and Florescu avoid mentioning the crucifix and explain instead that “the Romanian Orthodox church is traditionally very ritualistic and symbol oriented” and speak of “remarkable examples of peasant wood carving [which] are the twin or treble crosses one finds all over Romania” (McNally and Florescu 47 n. 25). A more recent editor transitions swiftly and inexplicably from Orthodoxy to Catholicism when he comments that “Harker is a Protestant, ill at ease with the rituals of the Orthodox Church.

Protestant fear of European Catholic ‘priestcraft’ and superstition is central to the rise of the

Gothic novel in England” (Luckhurst 365). Others suggest simply that the woman is

Catholic (Auerbach and Skal 13 n. 8; Leatherdale 34 n. 63; Riquelme 31) without any mention of the discrepancy. Klinger notices the significance of the crucifix and arrives at the same conclusion: “The woman’s slight knowledge of German and her gift of a cross suggest that she (and her husband) were Hungarian Catholics” (Klinger 25 n. 51). He does not explain, however, why Hungarian Catholics would follow the Orthodox calendar and would credit Romanian superstitions.

No crucifixes are mentioned in Stoker’s typewritten research notes, but his confusion very likely stems again from one of his sources. Towards the end of the first volume of Magyarland, Mazuchelli visits several Slovak communities in the northern

Carpathians. Her narrative covers, in fact, two different visits, one year apart, and she appears to be moving to and fro, and the reader can find it difficult to understand the time and the place of narration. While in Gallicia (in today’s Poland), the traveller visited

Neumarkt (today Nowy Targ), where she encountered “Rusniaks, here called Ruthenians, a

335 people speaking a dialect of the Russian, and belonging, like the Slovaks, to the Greek

Church” (Mazuchelli I, 262). Stoker took this down and had it typed: “p. 262. Rusniaks are called ‘Ruthenians’ in Gallacia [sic] (Poland) and are, like Slovaks, of Greek Church”

(Bram Stoker’s Notes 204-205).182 Later in the same volume, Mazuchelli inserts a description of Slovak houses, “full of dirt and discomfort. The room in which they live, adorned with crucifixes, grotesque coloured prints” (I, 317). Stoker’s last typewritten note is from page 316 of the first volume of Magyarland, but he may have seen this description and concluded that Orthodox Christians, such as the Slovaks, also use crucifixes. Here, however, Mazuchelli describes Slovaks from Altendorf (today, Spišská Stará Ves, in

Slovakia), “a long day’s journey” (I, 252; her emphasis) from the Gallician town where she had seen Orthodox Slovaks, in a region she had previously identified as “being divided between [German] Lutherans and [Slovak] Roman Catholics” (I, 242).

One of the most conspicuous examples of the editors’ reliance on Stoker’s research notes without verifying the actual sources is in another episode from the first chapter of the novel. In Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, Stoker found a description of more remote places in the “inner parts of the Carpathians”

(Wilkinson 165), which he used for the landscape surrounding Castle Dracula, although

Wilkinson’s account is about the eastern and southern slopes of the mountains, which are in

Wallachia and Moldavia, not in Transylvania. Stoker also noticed the following passage:

Few peasants inhabit this part of the country; during the summer they cut

down wood, and supply with it the inhabitants of the plains, who burn

182 Orthodox Slovaks are a rare occurrence, but Mazuchelli remembered it too well, because in her second volume, when she entered Transylvania and met Romanians, she writes that, “like the Slovaks, [they] belong chiefly to the Greek rite” (II, 70). No research notes covering the second volume of Magyarland have survived, although there are sufficient indications that Stoker read it; after all, this is the part about Transylvania.

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nothing else. The most stationary are attached to the post-houses, situated

here and there for the purpose of assisting the necessary communications

between the Austrian and Ottoman states. Their long residence in this

neighbourhood is generally marked by the glandular accretion, common to

the inhabitants of the Alps. (Wilkinson 166-167)

In his notes, Stoker wrote down simply “Inhabitants have goitre” (Bram Stoker’s Notes

248-249). In the novel, this became part of a sentence in Harker’s journal: “Here and there we passed Cszeks [sic] and Slovaks, all in picturesque attire, but I noticed that goitre was painfully prevalent” (Dracula 38).

Some of the editors define “goitre,” mentioning the enlargement of the thyroid gland and its association with iodine deficiency (Wolf 12 n. 47; Byron 38 n. 1; Lukhurst

366), without discussing Stoker’s source, the fact that Stoker attributes it to Czechs and

Slovaks, or its “prevalence.” Others quote Stoker’s pithy note and identify Wilkinson as the source (McNally and Florescu 60 n. 38) or quote the note and give a brief definition of goitre (Leatherdale 38 n. 101). Klinger writes that Wilkinson “noted the high prevalence of goitre among Transylvanians, and the condition has persisted, with data from the 1960s and

1970s showing over 60 percent of the adult population of the Carpathians suffering from the disease” (Klinger 33-34 n. 76). The editor does not provide a source for the “data” suggesting that 3 out of 5 inhabitants of the Carpathians suffered from goitre in the 1960s and 1970s; and in his observation about Wilkinson he clearly relies on Stoker’s statement in the novel rather than Wilkinson’s account, which says nothing of Transylvania, let alone

“goitre among Transylvanians.” In fact, Stoker’s source speaks about the mountainous passes in Wallachia and Moldavia, where the traveller notices “few peasants,” and only

337 “the most stationary” of these few, the ones “attached to the post-houses,” suffer from goitre.

Auerbach and Skal also go further than Stoker in their definition of goitre as a condition which “may cause brain damage” (15 n. 6), although there is no mention of such dangers in Dracula or in the editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that the author could have consulted.183 Moreover, two of Stoker’s brothers were physicians and both advised him while he was writing the novel (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 185), which means that he would have known if such a danger was part of the current understanding of goitre. Yet another proof that Stoker took notes from the second volumes of Magyarland is the following passage: “Several of these poor women [in the Roter Thurm Pass, today Pasul

Turnu Roşu, connecting southern Transylvania and Wallachia] I observed had goitre, that disease so prevalent in all mountainous districts” (Mazuchelli II, 141). Despite the note from Wilkinson, Stoker may have used the information from Mazuchelli, while turning her phrase about the disease being prevalent in the mountains in general into Harker’s suggestion that it was prevalent in the Borgo Prund area.

9.3 Nosferatu

On the subject of vampire beliefs in Transylvania and Romania (the Romanian sailors on both ships carrying Dracula also believe in vampires), Bram Stoker found only a

183 Nor do modern editions of the encyclopaedia.

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brief passage in Emily Gerard’s 1885 article on “Transylvanian Superstitions.” Everything else about vampires in Dracula comes from various other sources unrelated to the Count’s place of origin, including fiction, and from Stoker’s own imagination. To explain this information, the editors of the novel, from the earliest (Leonard Wolf) to the latest (Roger

Luckhurst) rely on two sources published much later than Dracula and which Stoker could not have known, but which support the idea expressed in Gerard’s article: Agnes Murgoçi’s essay “The Vampire in Roumania” (1926) and Montague Summers’s book The Vampire,

His Kith and Kin (1928). Both Murgoçi and Summers were vampire enthusiasts who looked for proof that Stoker’s account of Romanian vampires was well-founded.184

More recent authors such as Harry A. Senn, who has conducted field research in

Romania, and Duncan Light, who has consulted with Romanian folklorists, state that

Romanians do not believe in vampires, but only “in the existence of the magical powers

[of] the other world, the realm of fairies and of the dead” (Senn 50) and that the word

“vampire” itself “is almost unknown in Romania: the word entered Romanian from French in the nineteenth century and its use was largely confined to literary works. As for

Nosferatu, the word has never been encountered in over 200 years of recording Romanian folklore” (Light 29). The editors of Dracula prefer to think that “Stoker was acquainted with some Romanian superstitions” (McNally and Florescu 23), especially from Gerard’s essay, “a gold mine of information about what was then an obscure part of Europe [and]

Stoker had the good sense to use it well” (Wolf, The Connoisseur’s Guide 20-21). McNally saw himself as a “latter-day vampirologist” (A Clutch of Vampires 5) in line with Augustin

Calmet and Montague Summers. In his anthology of excerpts from Stoker’s sources,

184 Montague Summers studied vampire beliefs and the related apotropaic measures because he believed vampires were real. Agnes Murgoci (née Kelly) married leading Romanian mineralogist Gheorghe Murgoci- Munteanu (1872-1925). In 1926, she began publishing about Romania.

339 Leatherdale introduced fragments from Calmet’s eighteenth-century treatise on vampires, even though Stoker did not use it. From Herbert Mayo’s On the Truth Contained in

Popular Superstitions, the title of which appears only on a list of books that Stoker intended to read, Leatherdale inserted two rather long fragments (Origins 57-74 and 193-

204), in which there is no mention of Transylvania.185 Instead, there are no excerpts from

Charles Boner, Andrew Crosse and Nina Mazuchelli, whose books were used at times verbatim in Dracula.

In several instances, the editors do not provide a source for their statements about

Romanian vampire beliefs or they simply reproduce each other’s assertions: “In Romanian folklore the vampire and werewolf are often connected” (McNally and Florescu 62 n. 52) becomes two decades later “Werewolves and vampires are often allied in Romanian folklore” (Auerbach and Skal 14 n. 2), but it remains without a source. Another sentence from McNally/Florescu about the evil eye that, according to Romanian peasants, “can be caused by those who have intercourse with vampires, devils, and other evil spirits” (59 n.

31), is quoted without explanations by Luckhurst (366). However, the origin of most statements about Romanian vampire beliefs is to be found in the two texts from the 1920s mentioned above. Though much more copiously quoted (especially by Wolf and Klinger),

Summers made no original research on vampire beliefs in Romania; instead, he reproduced all the information provided by Murgoçi. This information, in turn, is largely fabrication, as

Murgoçi simply takes the fantastic creatures of Romanian folk beliefs (strigoi, moroi, pricolici, zmeu, vârcolac) and states that they are all various types of vampires.186

185 He also reissued Mayo’s book in 2003 (Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert Island Books). 186 A more detailed discussion of these creatures will follow later in this chapter.

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At least in matters concerning Transylvania and Romania, the editors of Dracula accept Stoker’s sources as accurate and well-informed. In fact, they generally believe that

“What distinguishes Dracula from the vampire fictions that preceded it, as well as from those that subsequently appeared, is the way in which folklore and authentic history merge to give Stoker’s tale the texture of something long known or naturally remembered” (Wolf xiii). After the text of the novel, Riquelme inserts “Contextual Illustrations and

Documents,” which include extracts from Major E.C. Johnson’s On the Track of the

Crescent, Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves and Emily Gerard’s The Land beyond the Forest, without shedding a doubt on their reliability. Other editors introduce

Emily Gerard as the author of “a popular Victorian travelogue” (Byron 439), “[p]robably the richest single source of folklore information for [Stoker], a fine travel book . . . which, in addition to giving him a lively and extraordinarily circumstantial account of daily life in

Transylvania circa 1888, is crammed with information about its history and folkways”

(Wolf xiii).

Gerard’s reliability is supported by the fact that she “was married to a Hungarian cavalry commander and lived for two years in Transylvania, giving her research a first- hand immediacy” (Auerbach and Skal 331). In fact, her husband, Mieczislas de Laszowski, was a Polish officer in the Austrian army (Gerard, The Land beyond the Forest II, 192), stationed in Transylvania between 1883 and 1885. Gerard spoke to her informants in

German, a language she spoke fluently – which hardly gives her “first-hand immediacy” in the matter of “Romanian Superstitions” – and instead tried to communicate with

Romanians “by pantomime” (I, 95). The extracts from her travelogue provided by

Auerbach/Skal (331-335) speak of primitive, superstitious peasants. In another edition,

Charles Boner is said to have “a keen eye for Transylvanian scenery, particularly the

341 human female variety” (Byron 444). In Byron’s edition, Sabine Baring-Gould is the last source quoted in a section called “Transylvania: History, Culture, and Folklore,” although his books (and the extracts provided) do not speak of Transylvania or Romania, but of werewolves and vampires that the author locates elsewhere in the world (Byron 448-450).

By presenting Baring-Gould as a source on Transylvania, however, Byron suggests that vampires are a staple of Romanian folklore.

This is, in fact, true of all the editors of Dracula. Although Stoker drew inspiration from a single paragraph in Emily Gerard’s article on “Transylvanian Superstitions,” in which she states that Romanians believe in “the vampire, or nosferatu” (Gerard,

“Transylvanian Superstitions” 142), an unusual term that perhaps should have been a warning signal, no editor contradicts either Stoker or Gerard when it comes to Romanian vampire beliefs. As for “nosferatu,” some editors prefer merely to report its source – “The word nosferatu comes from ‘Transylvanian Superstitions’” (Leatherdale 308 n. 62) – or even accept it as Romanian: “Vampire (Romanian) (Gerard)” (Riquelme 222); “A

Romanian word meaning ‘not dead’” (Wolf 261 n. 17). Others believe that Gerard simply

“misunderstood the actual Transylvanian word . . . a derivative of the Greek word nosophoros, meaning ‘plague carrier,’ . . . [or] a corrupted or misunderstood version of the

Romanian adjective ‘nesuferit’ from the Latin ‘not to suffer’” (Klinger 310 n. 24), or perhaps “a distortion of one of the Romanian words for devil, necuratru [sic], which also means ‘unclean’” (McNally and Florescu 178 n. 264). Finally, the most recent editor states all three possibilities (Luckhurst 384), including McNally and Florescu’s own misspelling – it should read “necuratu[l].” However, none of the editors suggests the possibility that

Gerard misunderstood not only the word (she misspells many other words), but its meaning.

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“Necuratul” (literally, “the unclean one”) is just a euphemism for the devil.

“Nesuferit” (i.e., “insufferable”), although more similar in form with “nosferatu,” is more urban and literary and seems unlikely on the lips of nineteenth-century Transylvanian peasants. The 1825 polyglot dictionary known as Lexiconul de la Buda (The Buda

Lexicon), edited by a group of Romanian intellectuals from Transylvania, does not include

“nesuferit.” A more likely source187 for “nosferatu” is another euphemism for the Devil:

“nefârtatu(l),” which in the 1860s – and especially in Transylvania188 – would have been spelled “nefêrtatu(l)” or “nefěrtatu(l).” In Gerard’s essay, the word stands out:

More decidedly evil, however, is the vampire, or nosferatu, in whom every

Roumenian peasant believes as firmly as he does in heaven or hell. There are two

sorts of vampires – living and dead. The living vampire is in general the illegitimate

offspring of two illegitimate persons, but even a flawless pedigree will not ensure

anyone against the intrusion of a vampire into his family vault, since every person

killed by a nosferatu becomes likewise a vampire after death, and will continue to

suck the blood of other innocent people till the spirit has been exorcised, either by

opening the grave of the person suspected and driving a stake through the corpse, or

firing a pistol shot into the coffin. (“Transylvanian Superstitions” 142)

187 This suggestion has already been made by Romanian anthropologist Şerban Anghelescu (see Navadaru). “Nefârtatu” (the final “– l” is dropped in spoken Romanian) is a made-up word, quite popular in folktales, which could be loosely translated as “the Un-brother” or “the Un-fellow.” Whereas the Romanian “frate,” plural “fraţi” means “brother/brothers,” the more archaic “fârtat,” plural “fârtaţi” usually means “brother/brethren.” 188 At the time, Romanian words were spelled slightly differently in Romania and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The reasons were political and religious: whereas in Orthodox Wallachia and Moldavia, Romanian had been written in the Cyrillic alphabet until 1860 (although many publications had gradually switched to the Latin alphabet in the previous decades), Romanian intellectuals from Transylvania had started using Latin letters in the eighteenth century. As no Orthodox was accepted in the universities of the Empire, these intellectuals were Greek-Catholics and did not feel bound by the same spelling tradition. For a history of the transition to the Latin alphabet, the polemics and the compromises, see Ştefan Cazimir, Alfabetul de tranziţie (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2006).

343 Until very recently, Gerard was considered the primary source for the unusual word and none of the editors could have known of the existence of an earlier text.

In a brief article entitled “Vindicating Gerard,” published in 2011 in the journal The

Borgo Post, independent researcher Anthony Hogg identified Wilhelm Schmidt, author of an article from 1865, expanded into a small book issued in 1866, as “a source predating

Gerard’s article by twenty years . . . Did Gerard obtain nosferatu from him? She does not list his article in citation or reference. Either way, even if another Pandora’s Box has been opened, we can now relieve Gerard of nosferatu’s origins” (Hogg 3). Hogg’s article was accompanied by an “Addendum” signed by Elizabeth Miller, the journal’s publisher:

This is fascinating stuff. I have always assumed that Emily Gerard misunderstood

what she heard while in Transylvania and transcribed a word incorrectly. (Indeed,

this is the position for which I argue in my book Dracula: Sense & Nonsense.)

Apparently this is not so! The word clearly predates Gerard. The likelihood that

both Gerard and Schmidt misheard the actual word and rendered it identically is

remote. It would appear that there was such a word after all, Romanian linguists

notwithstanding. It is quite possible that it was a localism that never made it into a

Romanian dictionary. (Miller, “Addendum” 3)

Elizabeth Miller’s slighting opinion of Romanian linguists notwithstanding, a cursory glance at the two texts immediately shows that, whereas Schmidt very probably misheard the word, Gerard did not. Rather, she simply plagiarised Schmidt: not only “nosferatu,” but also the Scholomance, used by Stoker as the Devil’s “school” attended by Dracula, as well as most of Gerard’s other misspellings come directly from Schmidt; even her footnotes are copied verbatim from the German.

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His book, Das Jahr und seine Tage in Meinung und Brauch der Romänen

Siebenbürgens was published in Sibiu, where Schmidt was a teacher at the local public high school (or KK Staatsgymnasium). The various spellings of Romanian words show that he took them from different sources: German, Hungarian, Romanian. Even taking into account the ways in which such words may have been spoken and spelled by mid-nineteenth- century Romanians in southern Transylvania (where Sibiu is) and other regions, the ways in which these words may have been pronounced and transcribed by non-Romanian informants, and the ways the German author may have heard them, the sheer number of misspellings suggests the author did not speak Romanian.189 Schmidt’s book is an exercise in comparative mythology and his main purpose is to prove that Transylvanian legends are similar to Slavic myths. Thus, although he attributes to Romanians the belief in the two types of vampires that Gerard borrowed from him verbatim, he calls “the Vampire – nosferatu . . . the most uncanny spawn of panslavic fantasy” (Schmidt 34). Interestingly, he does not speak of blood-sucking; his “nosferatu” is more of a shape-shifter, being able to turn into “a dog, a cat, a toad, a frog, a louse, a flea, a bug; in short, in any form he wishes”

(34).190 It is Gerard who added the information about blood-sucking, perhaps so as to make the “nosferatu” more easily associated with the common conception of the vampire.

It is very possible, in fact, for Schmidt to call “nosferatu,” this evil spirit with metamorphosing powers, a “vampire” only because the German language lacked an exact equivalent. Emily Gerard went forth and added the blood-sucking element for a more thorough identification with the figure of the vampire. In the late nineteenth and early

189 There is another reason to believe this: he writes “begiessen” (Schmidt 9), which is the Austrian version of “giessen” (“to pour”), uncharacteristic to Transylvanian Saxons, who came from Luxembourg and the Moselle River region and spoke a West Central dialect of German. He also uses it to translate the Romanian “a se uda,” which actually means “to get wet.” 190 In the original German: “der als Hund, Katze, Kröte, Frosch, Laus, Floh, Wanze, kurz in jeder Gestalt erscheinen Kann.”

345 twentieth century, such a semantic mutation occurs very often in German and English texts that translate or explain supernatural creatures from Romanian folk beliefs. If Agnes

Murgoçi went so far as to redefine them all as vampires, even though there was no blood- sucking involved, other authors simply use “vampire” and “werewolf” for lack of a better word. There are no real werewolves in Romanian folklore, and the “vârcolac,” which clearly comes from a Slavic word for “werewolf,” is generally understood as a supernatural being that can temporarily swallow the moon but that does not interfere with people. The authors of the polyglot dictionary mentioned above, who only give a definition when there is no equivalent in Latin, German or Hungarian, list it only as a plural word, “vercolaci,” with the following explanation: “simple folk say of these that they are some living creatures that eat the moon” (Lexiconul de la Buda 750), then translate it as “lunar eclipse” in the other three languages.

In Bistritz, Harker hears – and then checks in his own polyglot dictionary – the words “‘vrolok’ and ‘vlkoslak’ – both of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian for something that is either werewolf or vampire” (Dracula 36). The novelist here misspelled a word he had taken down correctly from Sabine Baring-Gould’s

The Book of Were-Wolves: “Among Bulgarians & Slovakians ww. is called vrkolak” (Bram

Stoker’s Notes 130-131). This is noticed by some of the editors (McNally and Florescu 58 n. 30; Leatherdale 36 n. 83; Luckhurst 365). Agnes Murgoçi, however, describes the

Romanian “vârcolac” as a “third type of vampire . . . which eats the sun and moon during eclipses” (Murgoçi 321) and identifies the plural form as “sometimes dead vampires, and sometimes animals which eat the moon” (322). Several pages later, she gives a longer account of these creatures, writing that, according to folk beliefs, “as the moon is really stronger than the vârcolaci, they are just able to bite it, but in the end the moon conquers”

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(336), and concludes that the word “is only exceptionally used to mean a vampire in

Roumania” (337). Two of the editors quote Montague Summers to say that the word means

“a third type of vampire” (Wolf 10-11 n. 39) or Summers and Agnes Murgoçi to say it is a

“dead” vampire (Klinger 29 n. 65). Emily Gerard makes no mention of the “vârcolaci” and her source defines them only as “rodents” (“Nagern”) (Schmidt 26), probably because they gnaw at the moon.

Another fantastic creature often associated with werewolves and vampires for lack of an exact equivalent is the Romanian “pricolici.” Schmidt defines the “Prikolitsch” as a werewolf, or “wehrwolf” (Schmidt 33), and Emily Gerard conforms: “First cousin to the vampire, the long-exploded were-wolf of the Germans is here to be found, lingering under the name of the Prikolitsch” (“Transylvanian Superstitions” 142).191 Stoker wrote down

“werewolf or prikolitsch” (Bram Stoker’s Notes 126-127), but did not use the word in the novel. Both Schmidt and Gerard correctly speak of the creature’s shape-shifting powers which, however, should not warrant its direct association with werewolves.192 The authors of the 1825 polyglot dictionary call it “preculiciu” or “precollici,” and define it simply as being able to transform into various animals; the authors provide a Latin explanation:

“vertumnus, proteus, qui se in diversa animalia trasnfigurare novit” (Lexiconul de la Buda

536). They were also able to run very fast, which is why, in a well-known fairy-tale (“Zâna

Zorilor”) written by Ioan Slavici, the main character and his horse are said to run as fast as the “pricolici do it at midnight.” The tale was translated in 1882 by German author Mite

Kremnitz (a long-time Romanian resident) in her anthology of Rumänische Märchen, in

191 She kept the sentence in her 1888 book, but it is slightly anglicised: there is no definite article and the first letter of the Romanian word is a lowercase. 192 Murgoçi goes further and calls them “dead vampires” (322), but she also writes that they are the same as the vârcolaci (335).

347 which the phrase appears as “um Mitternacht die Vampyre jagen” (Kremnitz 259). In an

English version of the anthology, adapted from the German three years later, the duo

“hurried as . . . vampires hunting at midnight” (Percival 210). Generally regarded as the greatest Romanian author of nineteenth-century Transylvania (although he was born in

Banat, not Transylvania proper), Slavici knew Emily Gerard, who calls him “One of the most enlightened Roumanian authors” (The Land beyond the Forest I, 215), but cites him only as a source for the Roman and Dacian origin of Romanians. Like many of his generation, he was deeply interested in folklore and certainly knew what a “pricolici” was.

A noted Germanophile, he was also a good friend of his translator Mite Kremnitz, and probably sanctioned her use of the word “vampire.”

If Slavici seems unconcerned about this association, he probably would have disliked Wilhelm Schmidt’s methods. The German-speaking author mentions all the notions and beliefs that Gerard borrows from him without any references to his sources.

Instead, in the middle and towards the end of his study, he inserts folkloric texts in two columns, in the original Romanian with a German translation, which gives the impression of authenticity. Apart from a few misspellings, these songs are genuine and Schmidt provides their sources: they were gathered by other German and Romanian folklorists.

However, they include none of the notions or the beliefs that he analyses in the first part of the essay. The first text is a ballad using the allegory of a deer hunt (very common in

Romanian folklore) to narrate a wedding (Schmidt 23-24); six shorter ones are incantations against illnesses – the last of which is against the evil eye (35-37). This last incantation includes the possibility of the evil eye originating with a male or a female “strigoi” – which

Schmidt defines as “Zauberer [sorcerer]” (27) – and casts a brief spell according to which the “strigoi” will meet with “iron and vinegar.”

348

The word strigoi, heard by Harker on his way to the Borgo Pass (Dracula 36) does not appear in English-language encyclopaedias – and several editors (Auerbach and Skal;

Byron; Riquelme) leave it unexplained. Other editors define it as “undead vampire”

(McNally and Florescu 58 n. 30); “vampires, dead and alive” (Wolf 10 n. 39); “male undead vampire” (Klinger 28 n. 63), even though Stoker himself defines the word as

“witch,” exactly as he found it in his sources. Both Wilkinson and Gerard define the strigoi not as vampires, but rather as “witch[es]” (Wilkinson 213) or as “restless spirits . . . not malicious, but their appearance bodes no good, and may be regarded as omens of sickness or misfortune” (Gerard, “Transylvanian Superstitions” 142). The sources used by the editors who define strigoi as vampires are again Montague Summers (quoted in Wolf’s note, but only as an authority on werewolves) and Summers’s own source, Agnes Murgoçi, both unknown to Stoker. Only the most recent editor of Dracula (Luckhurst 365) mentions

Wilkinson’s and Gerard’s less sinister definitions.

At the same time that the word strigoi is uttered in the novel, everyone in the crowd gathered in front the Bistritz inn makes the sign of the cross and points two fingers in

Jonathan Harker’s direction. A fellow coach passenger explains “that it was a charm or guard against the evil eye” (Dracula 36). This prompts Wolf to explain the difference between three basic gestures involving two fingers (mano fica, mano cornuta and mano pantea) that are supposed to thwart the evil eye (Wolf 10-11 n. 40). Here, Wolf uses, without mentioning, a late Victorian treatise on The Evil Eye published by Frederick

Thomas Elworthy in 1895. Later editors (Klinger 29 n. 68; Luckhurst 365-366) mention

Elworthy and quote from his book, but do not explain if there is a connection between his findings and Transylvanian superstitions. Meanwhile, another editor quotes Wolf directly and draws the conclusion that the gestures he mentions are “acknowledged in Romanian

349 folklore” (Leatherdale 36 n. 87). In reality, Elworthy takes all of his examples from ancient

Greece, China, Italy, Spain and England, and makes no mention of Transylvania, Romania,

Hungary, Russia or the Balkan nations.

As a rule, the editors of Dracula take Stoker’s message further and find new ways of vampirising Transylvania. The McNally/Florescu edition begins with a study of vampirism, “In Search of Vampires” (McNally and Florescu 9-15), taking the reader from ancient Indian myths to Stoker’s 1897 novel. The two editors often associate Romania and

Romanians with vampires. When Quincey Morris says, “I understand that the Count comes from a wolf country” (Dracula 365) and decides to bring Winchester rifles, the two editors see a connection with Dacians, the pre-Roman ancestors of modern Romanians, and suggest “that the very word ‘Dacian’ meant ‘wolfman’ in the Dacian language, which has not survived” (McNally and Florescu 244 n. 333). Another editor speaks here of

“werewolfism” (Klinger 437-438 n. 37), even though Morris wishes to hunt and refers to a similar experience in Tobolsk. When the characters in the novel have dinner in Varna, another editor observes: “Dracula might not appear, but, according to Montague Summers,

Bulgaria is vampire country” (Leatherdale 454 n. 41). Transylvania itself is further vampirised with the help of a reference to its history of barbarism and conflict: “In essence, fittingly for vampires, the history of Transylvania is a history of whom it belongs to”

(Auerbach and Skal 9 n. 7).

Auerbach and Skal’s vampirising effort may have been inspired by the passages from Stephen Arata’s 1990 essay “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of

Reverse Colonisation,” included in the “Criticism” section of their edition. Here, Arata argues that Dracula is a “narrative of reverse colonisation” founded on the Britons’ fear of being “deracinated.” He suggests that “nowhere else in the Europe of 1897 could provide a

350

more fertile vampiric breeding ground than the Count’s homeland” (qtd. in Auerbach and

Skal 463).193 He tries to connect vampires and empires by suggesting that, “As Van Helsing says, vampires follow ‘in [the] wake’ of imperial decay. Vampires are generated by racial enervation and the decline of empire, not vice versa. They are produced, in other words, by the very conditions many perceived as characterising late-Victorian Britain” (465).

However, with his imperfect grammar, Van Helsing actually says that the vampire (but here he seems to mean simply Count Dracula) “have follow the wake of the berserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar” (Dracula 278); in other words, the Dutchman only situates the origins of Dracula in the early Middle Ages. He also adds that the home of vampires is not Transylvania, but that they have been known everywhere and always, from ancient Greece to China. For a better understanding of Arata’s line of argument, one should look at a passage from Emily Gerard’s The Land beyond the Forest, which he quotes in support of his theory of “reverse colonisation.”

In her book (the passage does not appear in the 1885 article that Stoker undoubtedly read), Gerard writes from the point of view of the Hungarian Transylvanians that:

Few races possess in such a marked degree the blind and immovable sense

of nationality which characterises the Roumanians: they hardly ever mingle

with the surrounding races, far less adopt manners and customs foreign to

their own; and it is a remarkable fact that the seemingly stronger-minded and

more manly Hungarians are absolutely powerless to influence them even in

cases of inter-marriage. Thus the Hungarian woman who weds a Roumanian

husband will necessarily adopt the dress and manners of his people, and her

193 The following passages can also be found in Arata’s 1990 essay (Arata, “The Occidental Tourist” 627- 631) or, in a slightly modified version, in his 1996 book (Arata, Fictions of Loss 113-117).

351 children will be as good Roumanians as though they had no drop of Magyar

blood in their veins; while the Magyar who takes a Roumanian girl for his

wife will not only fail to convert her to his ideas, but himself, subdued by her

influence, will imperceptibly begin to lose his nationality. This is a fact well

known and much lamented by the Hungarians themselves, who live in

anticipated apprehension of seeing their people ultimately dissolving into

Roumanians. (Gerard, The Land beyond the Forest I, 304-305)

Arata does not take account that this is a common “apprehension” for all communities living in a multiethnic environment and that Romanians in Transylvania lived in a similar

“fear” of being assimilated by the dominant minority just as much as Hungarians dreaded assimilation by the underprivileged majority. He does not question Gerard’s paradoxical account of a community that “hardly ever mingled with the surrounding races” while at the same time threatened them with assimilation. He also does not query if Stoker actually knew Gerard’s book from 1888 – his notes only show that he read the 1885 article on

“Transylvanian Superstitions” which makes no mention of identity troubles.

Instead, he bases his whole concept of “reverse colonisation” in Dracula on the passage from Gerard’s book and suggests that the political threats to Britain “also operate independently of the Count’s vampirism, however, for the vampire was not considered alone in its ability to deracinate. Stoker learned from Emily Gerard that the Roumanians were themselves notable for the way they could ‘dissolve’ the identities of those they came in contact with” (Auerbach and Skal 466). Dracula’s “ability to deracinate could thus derive as easily from his Roumanian as from his vampiric nature. The ‘anticipated apprehension’ of deracination – of seeing Britons ‘ultimately dissolving into Roumanians’ or vampires or savages – is at the heart of the reverse colonisation narrative” (466). Arata agrees with

352

Stoker’s phrase about Transylvania as a “whirlpool of European races,” but warns the reader against the image of the melting-pot, while going further than the late-Victorian novelist and associating Dracula’s birthplace with anti-Armenian massacres perpetrated by

Ottomans:

but within that whirlpool racial interaction usually involved conflict, not

accommodation. Racial violence could in fact reach appalling proportions, as in the

wholesale massacres, widely reported by the British press, of Armenians by Turks

in 1894 and 1896, the years in which Dracula was being written. For Western

writers and readers, these characteristics – racial heterogeneity combined with racial

intolerance considered barbaric in its intensity – defined the area east and south of

the Danube, with the Carpathians at the imaginative centre of the turmoil. (464)

Arata’s essay is one of the first interpretations of Dracula as a text motivated by the fear of the “Other,” which explains why it remains one of the most quoted analyses of the novel, even though it finds that fear to be entirely justified. However, along with the many editions of Dracula, it shows how even the best intentions can sometimes pave to road to the endless validation of Bram Stoker’s representations of Transylvania and Romania.

353 Conclusion

In the introduction to her 1888 travelogue through Transylvania, Emily Gerard inserts a disclaimer that in some ways fits the scholarly editions of Dracula:

More than one error has doubtless crept unawares into this work; so in order to

place myself quite on the safe side with regard to stern critics, I had better hasten to

say that I decline to pledge my word for the veracity of anything contained in these

pages. I only lay claim to having used my eyes and ears to the best of my ability;

and where I have failed to see or hear aright, the fault must be set down to some

inherent colour-blindness, or radical defect in my tympanum. (The Land beyond the

Forest I, 9-10)

Many errors in the editions of Dracula are due, perhaps inevitably, to such bias; others originate in the decision not to use Romanian sources, even when they are available in

English; others yet are certainly not “unawares,” but come from a desire to add to the atmosphere of the novel and to confirm its premise. In “Dracula’s Guest,” included in the

McNally/Florescu edition as a “Prologue” to Stoker’s novel, Jonathan Harker visits the tomb of “Countess Dolingen of Graz, in Styria, [who] sought and found death, 1801” and notices that on top of it, “seemingly driven through the solid marble – for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone – was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the back I saw, graven in great Russian letters: ‘The dead travel fast’” (McNally and Florescu

40). The editors provide four explanatory notes, of which one suggests that the Countess was modelled after Le Fanu’s Carmilla, also a native of Styria, and another identifies

Bürger’s “Lenore” as the origin of the quote inscribed on the stake.

354

Another note explains the presence of the iron device to the audience: “The reader is accustomed to the wooden stake rather the iron one to hold a vampire in its grave.

However, in parts of Romania iron stakes, preferably heated red hot, are plunged into the suspected vampire grave, causing a kind of sizzling effect, from which the word nosferatu may be derived, according to some Romanian language specialists” (McNally and Florescu

40 n. 11). The editors do not name the “language specialists” behind this etymology194 and they do not repeat this claim when the word “nosferatu” actually appears in the novel; nor do they provide any source for the practice of plunging red-hot stakes into the hearts of suspected vampires in Romania. Instead, they include a photograph, with what appears to be a carved staff – made of wood, not iron – holding a vine or some other plant in the garden of an old church, with the caption: “Anti-vampire stake in Romanian graveyard”

(40). Rather than an obscure “Romanian graveyard,” however, the image represents one of the oldest Orthodox churches in Transylvania, situated in Strei (Hunedoara county), built in the early Middle Ages on the ruins of a Roman villa, and easily recognisable by Romanian readers as a major site from their country’s National Register of Historic Monuments.

The editors do not question the inscription on the stake, but suggest that “Stoker must be referring to letters in Cyrillic script, so it is safe to assume that the countess must have been an Orthodox Christian, rather than a Catholic or Protestant” (McNally and

Florescu 40 n. 12). Their suggestion implies not only that Harker can read the Cyrillic alphabet, but also that Countess Dolingen of Styria belonged to an Orthodox national church that used that script – very probably that she was Romanian (the Romanian church was still using it in 1801). Since images speak louder than words, McNally and Florescu often illustrate their volume with pictures that are taken from Romanian books of mass

194 They seem to refer to the Romanian verb “a sfârâi,” that is, “to sizzle.”

355 circulation. Apart from the church of Strei, mentioned above, and several pictures representing Vlad Ţepeş, they publish the photograph of a well-known and often reproduced mask used in the traditional folk theatre on New Year’s Eve as a symbol of the past winter, but they present it instead as a “ritual anti-vampire mask” (McNally and

Florescu 12). Similarly, one of the most famous and the most easily recognisable of all the

Roman statues preserved on Romanian territory – the statue of the Glykon Snake (dating from around 200 A.D.) – is introduced in the McNally/Florescu edition as “Rising Dragon

Snake, symbol of Dracula family” (231). The two editors ultimately re-purpose aspects of

Romanian history and culture and thereby support Bram Stoker’s project of re-purposing aspects of Romanian history and culture.

Another way of enhancing the process of othering carried out in Stoker’s novel can be found in the choice of annotations. When one editorial duo comments on the vampire’s reluctance to sup by explaining that “Nineteenth-century gentlefolk dined lavishly at midday and supped lightly in the evening” (Auerbach and Skal 23 n. 5), they use a note of recovery, introducing today’s readership to Victorian practices. On the other hand, when

Jonathan Harker hears two words, “one being Slovak and the other Servian for something that is either werewolf or vampire” (Dracula 36), the same editors use an explanatory note with the clear purpose of supporting the representation of Transylvania and Romania as the abode of vampires, rather than explaining the words heard by Harker. Without providing any source, they write simply that “Werewolves and vampires are often allied in Romanian folklore” (Auerbach and Skal 14 n. 2), thereby contributing to a general impression left by the novel, although this comes in a passage in which there is no mention of either

Romanians or their folklore.

356

The othering is also enhanced through the commentaries on the plot of the novel, whenever the editors consider that Stoker has forgotten to add vital details about the land of vampires. When Harker enumerates some of the books in Dracula’s library, including volumes that list names and addresses of people in England, one editor wonders if they are an indicator of the Count’s future plan, more exactly if they are a “menu” (Klinger 51 n.

39). Some of the editors make suggestions about the potential movements of characters, which are not mentioned in the novel. Leatherdale and Wolf, for example, follow closely

Harker’s trip from Bistritz to the Borgo Pass and add plot elements: “The peasants are out and about as dusk approaches on St George’s Eve. They will doubtless hurry home once their devotions are complete and secure their door with garlic” (Leatherdale 38 n. 102).

When several passengers offer Harker gifts, Leatherdale adds: “The passengers retain more of the same, for self-protection” (40 n. 115). Harker hears thunder, which the same editor thinks is “the first sample of Dracula’s powers” (Leatherdale 40 n. 117). When one of the passengers in the coach “turn[s] his face away, at the same time putting out his two fingers and crossing himself” (Dracula 41), Wolf wants to know: “Did he put out two fingers and make the sign against the evil eye (forefinger and little finger) and cross himself with the other hand? Or did he cross himself with two fingers? Those of the Eastern Orthodox rite cross themselves from right to left” (Wolf 15 n. 54). He forgets to mention that Orthodox

Christians cross themselves with three fingers, which invalidates his last suggestion.

Not all the plot deficiencies or inconsistencies are noticed and complemented. There remains a paradox that is never discussed by the editors of Dracula. At the beginning of the novel’s last chapter, as she approaches the Borgo Pass, Mina Harker sees human settlements and notes in her journal that “the people are brave, and strong, and simple, and seem full of nice qualities. They are very, very superstitious. In the first house where we

357 stopped, when the woman who served us saw the scar on my forehead, she crossed herself and put out two fingers towards me, to keep off the evil eye” (Dracula 402; emphasis in original). To the amateur anthropologist Emily Gerard, and even to Jonathan Harker at the beginning of the story, when he ignores the dark secrets of Castle Dracula, Romanian peasants who believe in evil spirits may appear superstitious and backward. On the contrary, to the vampire hunters at the end of the story, and especially to Mina Harker, whose brow bears the mark of her (pre)vampiric state, the same peasants should appear enlightened. They know the secrets and even have the means to fight the evil dwellers of

Castle Dracula. There are, however, no annotations in any edition commenting on this inconsistency. The editors reflect the manner of Captain Donelson of the Czarina Catherine whose Romanian sailors ask him to throw overboard the boxes where the vampire hides.

Donelson concludes “Man! But the supersteetion of foreigners is pairfectly rideeculous!”

(Dracula 389), even though he believes himself that “the Deil” must be involved. No editor challenges the characters’ consensus that Romanian peasants are superstitious, although

Dracula is a novel in which superstitions are real.

The absence of annotations can help support Stoker’s othering project just as much as the annotations themselves. Keeping silent before some of the details of Stoker’s fictional travelogue enhances the representation that Transylvania and Romania had “in the

British geographical imagination as a peripheral zone of barbarism and conflict”

(Hammond 602). The editors make no comment, for example, when Harker and Godalming travel up the river in a steam launch at night and from time to time encounter boats manned by Romanians who “were scared every time we turned our electric lamp on them, and fell on their knees and prayed” (Dracula 399). When Stoker writes that the Budapest nuns saw from Harker’s “violent demeanour that he was English” (Dracula 134), the editors quote

358

from Hamlet (Auerbach and Skal 95 n. 8) or note that “Harker speaks German, but lacked the presence of mind to do so. The locals took him for an English madman. The question is, what made Harker mad?” (Leatherdale 167 n. 145). A more important question concerns the fact that the locals are able to recognise Harker as English thanks only to his

“demeanour.” Other editors suggest later that the English are racially different – that Harker and Godalming appear to “any native Romanians [as] obvious foreigners” (Wolf 422 n. 40; emphasis mine) because they “do not look or behave like locals” (Leatherdale 486 n. 134; emphasis mine). This is consistent with the accounts of the British travellers read by

Stoker, who constantly meet people who “could hardly believe that a real [Englishman] could find his way [there]” (Johnson 307), where “not many strangers pass” (Crosse 9) and an Englishman, especially “a mad Englishman” (Gerard, The Land beyond the Forest II,

284), is always conspicuous and seems eccentric.

Stoker’s account of the historical Dracula is ambiguous: there is no mention of cruelty, while Arminius and Van Helsing admire his life and original character. The editors of the novel reconstruct the portrait of the medieval ruler without taking account of the opinion (available in English) of Romanian experts on Vlad Ţepeş who insist that the

German and Slavic tales of the Impaler’s cruel deeds are mostly slander. In fact, they often take the gruesomeness further. Wolf states that “Vlad Ţepeş . . . was one of Europe’s bloodiest tyrants” (Wolf xiv) and Leatherdale suggests that he represents “extreme evil”

(Leatherdale 29 n. 17). Wolf even believes that “The historical figure on whom Stoker based his Dracula, is infinitely fiercer [than the vampire Count]” (The Connoisseur 58).

Accepting the medieval poems and legends about Vlad as true supports Stoker’s narrative of Romanian vampirism. This is, for example, what Leonard Wolf does in his edition of

Dracula: “One thing must be granted to him – if it matters. Vlad Ţepeş was not a vampire.

359 That attribute was given him by Bram Stoker who, it seems to me, saw the proper metaphor lurking in the man. . . . Stoker invested Vlad Dracula with it for the sake of his fiction. In the circumstances, it hardly seems libellous” (Wolf xv). In the “Annotated Filmography” of their edition, McNally and Florescu summarise the recent Romanian film Vlad the Impaler

(1979): “A 35 mm three-hour spectacular based upon the life and times of Dracula. . . . The shooting in Romania in colour is truly spectacular and Stefan Sileanu, who plays Vlad and who bears a remarkable resemblance to the Impaler, has moments of greatness. The film, however, is too concerned with historical accuracy and apologetics” (McNally and Florescu

299).

None of the editors challenges the idea that Romanian folklore includes a belief in vampires. Internationally recognised as an expert on Dracula, Elizabeth Miller expressed the sentiments of many when she castigated a “widespread tendency among Romanians today (including Transylvanians) to deny the existence of vampire figures in their folk beliefs” (Sense & Nonsense 129).195 One commentator, more sympathetic to the vampire- denial mentioned by Miller, noted that “many countries might be unhappy at being regarded by the West as the home of vampires (which are unknown in Romanian folklore) and the supernatural” (Light 2). Still, the stress should probably be placed on Light’s parenthesis: Romanians are unhappy because vampires do not exist in their folklore, while they are constantly being told the opposite. It is, unfortunately, much more difficult to prove that something does not exist than it is to prove that something exists. However,

195 Miller also disagrees with Sabina Ispas, who claims that the vampire does not belong in Romanian folklore (Sense & Nonsense 147 n. 21), although Ispas, a member of the Romanian Academy and director of the Romanian Institute of Ethnography, has been a student of Romanian folklore for half a century. See especially her Cultură orală şi informaţie transculturală (2003) for differences between vampires and the Romanian “strigoi.” The latter are defined as “immaterial, pure energy” that punishes transgression against traditional rituals.

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Romanian folklore was abundantly collected in the nineteenth century and neither vampires nor creatures similar to vampires were found.

The best source for late-nineteenth-century customs and beliefs of the Romanian peasant is Simion Florea Marian’s Sărbătorile la Români (Romanian Holidays). Born in

1847, like Stoker, Marian was a clergyman from Bucovina. He graduated with a degree in theology from the University of Cernăuţi in 1875 and was the curate of several villages in the area crossed by the vampire hunters in Dracula, including Poiana Stampii, a village situated on the Moldavian side of the Borgo Pass. From 1885 until his death in 1907, he worked as a teacher in Suceava, the capital of Bucovina, and worked on his ethnographic masterpiece. He gathered the customs related in his work via three methods: he interviewed villagers from his own parishes, from the surrounding counties, and even from other regions, either in Austria-Hungary (Transylvania and Bucovina) or in the Kingdom of

Romania; he sent questionnaires to curates of rural churches and especially to village schoolteachers, asking them to report on local customs related to holidays, agricultural and pastoral activities, natural phenomena and life-course events; and he used earlier studies based on the two methods previously mentioned. All these are reported in his two-volume work in abundant endnotes. Marian and his correspondents entertained the very romantic idea that the village folk could do no wrong and that all their legends and superstitions represented “Romanian mythology” (Marian I, 3). Consequently, he did not let his own

Christian belief censure the customs reported.

Marian’s study follows the traditional calendar of Romanian peasants and includes a long chapter on Saint George and Saint George’s Eve (see Marian II, 254-313), which confirms many of the superstitions reported by Emily Gerard in her article and subsequent book. None, however, can be linked to vampires, but only to witches and spirits, especially

361 strigoi. The witches and the spirits, however malevolent, can be defeated and the whole point of the customs is to teach or to remind the villagers of the ways in which one can prevail over them. Incidentally, Marian, whose work was quickly recognised as an important contribution to Romanian culture, was very close to many of the great writers of the era, most of whom were deeply concerned about folklore and often drew inspiration from it. If today the association with vampires might seem demeaning, for many late- nineteenth-century Romanian writers (starting with Mihai Eminescu, a poet very attached to the tradition of German Romantic literature and philosophy, and who also found inspiration in folkloric supernatural themes), the vampire would have seemed exciting. The fact that there are no poems or tales about vampires in nineteenth-century Romania could be considered further proof that vampire beliefs did not exist either.

Although much was written by nineteenth-century British authors about remote places of Europe, these places remained virtually unknown to their fellow nationals. When

Charles Boner sent Charles Darwin a copy of his Transylvania, Its Products and Its People, the latter replied: “My Dear Sir, I am very much obliged for your extremely kind note and the really valuable present of your work on Transylvania. I do not think I ever read a word about that country, and I am ashamed to confess that I had to look at a map to be sure where it lay” (Kettle I, 77-78). Some of the editors of Dracula, as mentioned at the beginning of this study, were just as uninformed about Transylvania. Consequently, they visited the lands described by Stoker and found ways to narrate their journeys.

Following in the footsteps of Harker through Transylvania and the vampire hunters through Romania, the editors of Dracula often explain the novel with their own traveller’s accounts. The first scholarly edition of Dracula (Wolf 1975) is also the first to make use of the editor’s travel experience through the lands described in the novel. Throughout the

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volume, Wolf uses photographs taken by himself on his trip through Transylvania, thereby illustrating Stoker’s Victorian-era settings with their contemporary version; Stoker’s nineteenth-century Gipsies with 1970s Gipsies; the Romanian peasants in Stoker’s novel with his own photographs of Romanian peasants. The second scholarly edition promotes the Dracula Tours (McNally and Florescu 314-320) and reproduces Castle Bran on the back cover and “Whitby Harbour by Moonlight” on the endpapers. The editors give directions to

Castle Dracula, identified by them as Poenari, in the manner of a travel guide: “The castle can be reached from Bucharest by taking the highway to Pitesti – it is twenty-five miles north of Curtea de Arges on highway thirteen. Steps have been built reaching to the top.

The site is just as eerie as [Count] Dracula describes. If you start early in Bucharest you can return within a day – the drive back should take two or three hours” (McNally and Florescu

64 n. 69).

In the absence of any Romanian sources, some of the editors intersperse their editorial narrative with accounts of their own cultural and culinary adventures through twentieth and twenty-first-century Romania. Klinger explains that “Slivovitz is a Slavic

Balkan plum brandy. The Roumanian [sic] variety is known as ţuică and is made by both private and commercial distillers; traditionally, every meal begins with a shot of it. In order to research its efficacy, this editor consumed a great deal of ţuică on a recent trip to

Transylvania and can report that it staves off chills, even on hot May nights” (Klinger 36 n.

91). When Harker reports having heard “the churning sound of [the] tongue” (Dracula 70) of one of the three female vampire in Castle Dracula, one of the editors attempts to emulate her for the benefit of the reader: “I have tried, calmly as well as passionately, to reproduce this churning sound with my tongue but without success. It may be a noise that only a

363 passionate vampire can make” (Wolf 52 n. 49). Such dedication to the mission of explicating the novel is not, however, customary in the scholarly editions of Dracula.

The present research is grounded in discourse analysis and is informed by postcolonial theory and practice. The chief aim was to understand the origins of the discourse about Transylvania and Romania that informs the editorial annotations of the various editions of Bram Stoker’s vampire. It traced the origins of this discourse to nineteenth-century travellers and to the British involvment in the region. As shown in this dissertation, the circumstances in which Stoker wrote Dracula are more complex than previously thought. Understanding that the travellers’ writing was informed by the colonial entreprise at the mouth of the Danube is an aspect that was not previously considered and that informs the editors’ annotations. It is my hope that once the link between the novel and the complex British involvement in the region becomes known, the future editors of

Dracula will re-examine the politics of annotations and produce editions that will be sensitive to Romanians and to Romanian culture and history.

364

365

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______. Fictions of Loss in Victorian Fin de siècle. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.

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