Dracula
Literary Gothic in Special Collections
Brontë family manuscripts in Special Collections
Oscar Wilde in Special Collections
Twentieth century gothic: Dennis Wheatley & Sophie Hannah
Emily Ennis, PhD Student in the School of English at the University of Leeds, introduces Dracula:
Dracula, written in 1897 is by far the most famous of Bram Stoker’s texts.
The character of Dracula has himself become a cultural icon, particularly in film and television. This may be due, in part, to the sensationalist and theatrical nature of the novel itself. From 1896 to 1897 a very early film produced by Georges Méliès called Le Manoir du diable was shown in London. The two-minute film included what is considered to be the first filmic representation of the figure of the vampire and contains many vampire tropes visible in both Stoker’s novel and later film representations, such as shape-shifting, control over women, and vulnerability to religious artefacts.
At the time, Bram Stoker was working in London as a manager at the Lyceum theatre, meaning that he almost certainly saw Méliès’s film and positioned the novel Dracula in relation to it.
Alongside cinema, the novel has distinct preoccupations with new forms of technology, such as the typewriter and the phonograph. Aligning these newer technologies with the more ancient aspects of the Gothic allows Stoker to position the fear of the undead in contemporary technologically-advanced culture.
Many critics have also made the comparison between the character of Dracula and Jack the Ripper, whose murders were infamous at the time of the novel’s publication. However, the mythology behind the novel remains inherently and historically Gothic. The novel makes reference to Vlad the Impaler and other Eastern European folklore, which gives the opening of the novel in particular a distinctly eerie setting. Whitby Abbey, also mentioned in the novel, is surrounded by myths and ghosts of premature burial. However, more recently critics have begun to look at Irish folklore, which Stoker took particular interest in while growing up in Ireland. As a sickly child his mother would often tell him stories of ghosts and the undead, and these themes reappear significantly in Dracula.
Perhaps most significantly, critics have suggested that Dracula owes much of its style and content to his Irish predecessor Sheridan Le Fanu, whose vampire story Carmilla predates Dracula and was published in 1871 to 1872.
