219) and that “the stake we play for is life and death” (p. 386), almost all of Dracula’s humor is concentrated in the character of Renfield, Dr. Seward’s bizarre mental patient who, the reader comes to understand, is the vampire’s victim and unwilling acolyte. Renfield’s diet of insects inevitably provokes laughter, however grudging, and Dr. Seward’s deadpan manner of recording his patient’s oddities only compounds the effect:

When I went into the room, I told the man that a lady would like to see him; to which he simply answered: ‘Why?’

‘She is going through the house, and wants to see everyone in it,’ I answered. ‘Oh, very well,’ he said; ‘let her come in, by all means; but just wait a minute till I tidy up the place.’ His method of tidying was peculiar: he simply swallowed all the flies and spiders in the boxes before I could stop him. It was quite evident that he feared, or was jealous of, some interference. When he had got through his disgusting task, he said cheerfully: ‘Let the lady come in,’ and sat down on the edge of his bed with his head down, but with his eyelids raised so that he could see her as she entered (p. 248).

The contrast between this maniacal behavior and the charming, erudite conversation of what we must accept as the “real” Renfield— ‘Lord Godalming, I had the honour of seconding your father at the Windham; I grieve to know, by your holding the title, that he is no more....’ (p. 260)—makes the madman’s odd condition funnier and, in a stroke of true originality, more poignant as well.

But Stoker’s descriptive gifts are not limited to the grotesque and the macabre; in Dracula he also paints prose landscapes of exquisite and fearsome beauty. The attentive reader will notice that the appearances of the vampire are preceded by sunsets, often almost painfully resplendent ones: “Before the sun dipped below the black mass of Kettleness, standing boldly athwart the western sky, its downward way was marked by myriad clouds of every sunset-colour—flame, purple, pink, green, violet, and all the tints of gold; with here and there masses not large, but of seemingly absolute blackness, in all sorts of shapes, as well outlined as colossal silhouettes” (p. 85).

Even Dracula’s manifestations out of frightening night-time fog are made mesmerizingly lovely:

Everything is grey—except the green grass, which seems like emerald amongst it; grey earthy rock; grey clouds, tinged with the sunburst at the far edge, hang over the grey sea, into which the sand-points stretch like grey fingers. The sea is tumbling in over the shallows and the sandy flats with a roar, muffled in the sea-mists drifting inland. The horizon is lost in a grey mist. All is vastness; the clouds are piled up like giant rocks, and there is a ‘brool’ over the sea that sounds like some presage of doom (p. 82).

Stoker uses a very finely tuned version of the “pathetic fallacy”—that is, the trick of making the natural world reflect the emotional world of his story—to achieve his effects, and it is this as much as anything that has given Count Dracula the indefinable attractiveness he retains in spite of all his horror: Morally and physically ugly as he is, he is so consistently associated with a very real, tangible, even violent beauty that the beauty ends up in some manner becoming part of him. Stoker’s painterly eye, his ability to see divinity even in “the wonderful smoky beauty of a sunset over London, with its lurid lights and inky shadows and all the marvellous tints that come on foul clouds even as on foul water” (p. 129) remind us that

Dracula’s creator inhabited the world not only of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper, but also of James Whistler and Claude Monet: He was a thrill-master, but he was also an aesthete.

 

Bram Stoker was not primarily a writer. Writing was a sideline for him, a source of extra income and a creative outlet. Dracula was his only truly successful book and the only one that is still widely read today. However, he led an active life at the cultural and artistic vortex of London, and its story affords some interesting insights into Dracula.

Abraham Stoker (Bram was originally a nickname) was born in Ireland in 1847, only a year after the great potato blight that killed millions of Irishmen and sent many more to America in search of a better life. He came from a Protestant, Tory, solidly middle-class family; his father was a civil servant in the parliamentary section at Dublin Castle, the seat of the British government in Ireland, and it was expected that young Bram would probably follow him into government service. A sickly child, he eventually developed into a large, powerful man and a successful athlete. At Trinity College he excelled in debating, and began to fantasize about a career as an actor. His family did not consider this an option; instead, as planned, he began work at Dublin Castle as a clerk in the Registrar of Petty Sessions. He nurtured his love of the theater, however, by taking unpaid work as a drama critic for the Dublin Evening Mail, a conservative newspaper that was Unionist and anti-Catholic.

Stoker was prone to hero-worship. One of his first idols was Walt Whitman, whose revolutionary poetry celebrated democracy, comradeship, and love between men; his “Calamus” poems, most famously, came close to being specifically homosexual manifestos. Stoker wrote the older man emotional, revealing letters: “How sweet a thing it is for a strong healthy man with a woman’s eyes and a child’s wishes to feel that he can speak so to a man who can be if he wishes father, and brother and wife to his soul” (Belford, p. 43). Whitman responded warmly from across the Atlantic.