He also placed the story of Jonathan Harker's visit to Transylvania in the present – 1893. A few years later, this would develop into the vogue for invasion-threat thrillers, notably HG Wells's The War of the Worlds (1897) and Erskine Childers's classic, The Riddle of the Sands (1903), both of which I have reluctantly had to exclude from a deeper consideration in this series.ĭracula marries many genre archetypes Stoker followed the example of Frankenstein (and also the work of Wilkie Collins), to narrate his story through a collage of diary entries, letters, newspaper cuttings etc.

While Victorians celebrated the empire on which the sun would never set with successive jubilees (golden, 1887, and diamond, 1897), many readers fretted over foreign (increasingly German) threats to the harmony of English life. Among the contemporary anxieties reflected in Stoker's tale was a fear about the future. He was writing in a sultry fin-de-siècle literary culture obsessed with crime, ghost, and horror stories, all steeped in exotic sensation and jeopardy, from Rider Haggard's She (1886) to Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (also 1886) to Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray ( No 27 in this series), and possibly including the Yellow Book of Aubrey Beardsley. The idea of the vampire as a silver-tongued aristocrat, like Count Dracula, is mirrored in Irving's thespian mannerisms, and his fascination with theatrical villains. Just as Mary was partly motivated by Byron and her husband, the poet Shelley, so Bram Stoker, the business manager for the Lyceum theatre, was inspired by his devoted service to the great Shakespearean actor Henry Irving. Like Mary Shelley's tale of the supernatural, the vampire tale of Dracula – partly derived from John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) and Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1871), about a lesbian vampire – may also have begun with a bad dream.

A t the far end of the 19th century, in the age of Jack the Ripper, and 80 years after Frankenstein ( No 8 in this series), Dracula is a classic of Gothic horror by an Irish contemporary of Oscar Wilde who wrote popular fiction to boost his income.

Original dracula book