Dracula

Published in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula stands within a vampire tradition older than the Count himself. European folklore had long imagined dangerous beings returning from the dead, while John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) had already brought vampires into literary fiction. Stoker gave that developing tradition a character and story that became central to its later popular life.

The story of Dracula

The novel begins with Jonathan Harker travelling to Transylvania to arrange a property purchase for Count Dracula. His apparently routine professional visit becomes an encounter with imprisonment and supernatural danger. When the threat reaches England, Lucy Westenra’s illness draws her friends and doctors into an investigation that their familiar explanations cannot resolve. Abraham Van Helsing joins the struggle, while Mina Harker gathers the records that allow the group to understand their experiences together.

Reading Dracula through its documents

Journals, letters, telegrams, newspaper reports and recorded observations carry the story. This documentary form places an ancient threat inside a world of train timetables, medical expertise and new communications. Reading the novel invites questions about who is believed, what counts as evidence and how people respond when their assumptions fail. It also offers a Gothic exploration of bodily vulnerability, intimacy, power and the fear of losing control.

The novel’s documents can be read as more than a device for suspense. An account written close to an event may contain uncertainty that a later explanation smooths away. As the records accumulate, the reader can notice the distance between what a character experiences and what the group eventually concludes. Dracula makes that process part of the reading experience: its supernatural danger is encountered through ordinary habits of observing, writing, remembering and comparing.

Dracula on screen

Dracula’s later history reaches well beyond the printed page, as the BFI’s history of vampire films illustrates. F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) adapted Stoker’s story without authorisation. Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (1931) helped establish the Count’s familiar screen presence, while Christopher Lee’s performance in Hammer’s Dracula (1958) offered another influential interpretation. Those portrayals show how adaptation changes a character’s appearance, manner and emotional meaning. Stoker’s threatening Count, the elegant screen seducer and the sympathetic vampires of later stories belong to an evolving tradition. Returning to the novel reveals one of its formative texts, before the accumulated imagery of later versions became familiar.