Dracula
By Bram Stoker
Jonathan Harker, a newly qualified English solicitor, visits Count Dracula at his castle in the Carpathian Mountains to help the Count purchase a house near London. Ignoring the Count’s warning, Harker wanders the castle at night and encounters three vampire women; Dracula rescues Harker and gives the women a small child bound inside a bag. Harker awakens in bed; soon after, Dracula leaves the castle, abandoning him to the women. Harker escapes and ends up delirious in a Budapest hospital. Dracula takes a ship called the Demeter to England with boxes of earth from his castle.
The captain’s log narrates the crew’s disappearance until he alone remains, bound to the helm to maintain the course. An animal resembling a large dog is seen leaping ashore when the ship runs aground at Whitby. Lucy Westenra’s letter to her best friend, Harker’s fiancée Mina Murray, describes her marriage proposals from Dr John Seward, Quincey Morris, and Arthur Holmwood. Lucy accepts Holmwood’s, but all remain friends. Mina joins Lucy on holiday in Whitby. Lucy begins sleepwalking. After his ship lands there, Dracula stalks Lucy. Mina receives a letter about her missing fiancé’s illness and goes to Budapest to nurse him. Lucy becomes very ill. Seward’s old teacher, Professor Abraham Van Helsing, determines the nature of Lucy’s condition but refuses to disclose it. He diagnoses her with acute blood loss. Van Helsing places garlic flowers around her room and makes her a necklace of them. Lucy’s mother removes the garlic flowers, not knowing they repel vampires.
While Seward and Van Helsing are absent, Lucy and her mother are terrified by a wolf, and Mrs. Westenra dies of a heart attack; Lucy dies shortly thereafter. After her burial, newspapers report children being stalked in the night by a “blower lady” (beautiful lady), and Van Helsing deduces it is Lucy. The four go to her tomb and see that she is a vampire. They stake her heart, behead her, and fill her mouth with garlic. Jonathan Harker and now-wife Mina have returned, joining the campaign against Dracula. Everyone stays at Dr Seward’s asylum as the men begin to hunt Dracula. Van Helsing reveals that vampires can only rest on earth from their homeland. Dracula communicates with Seward’s patient, Renfield, an insane man who eats vermin to absorb their life force. After Dracula learns of the group’s plot against him, he uses Renfield to enter the asylum. He secretly attacks Mina three times, drinking her blood each time and forcing Mina to drink his blood on the final visit. She is cursed to become a vampire after her death unless Dracula is killed. As the men find Dracula’s properties, they discover many earth boxes. The vampire hunters open each box and seal wafers of sacramental bread inside them, rendering them useless to Dracula. They attempt to trap the Count in his Piccadilly house, but he escapes. They learn that Dracula is fleeing to his castle in Transylvania with his last box. Mina has a faint psychic connection to Dracula, which Van Helsing exploits via hypnosis to track Dracula’s movements. Guided by Mina, they pursue him. In Galatz, Romania, the hunters split up. Van Helsing and Mina go to Dracula’s castle, where the professor destroys the vampire women. Jonathan Harker and Arthur Holmwood follow Dracula’s boat on the river, while Quincey Morris and John Seward parallel them on land.
The hunters converge and attack it after Dracula’s box is finally loaded onto a wagon by Romani men. After routing the Romani, Harker decapitates Dracula as Quincey stabs him in the heart. Dracula crumbles to dust, freeing Mina from her vampiric curse. Quincey is mortally wounded in the fight against the Romani. He dies from his wounds, at peace with the knowledge that Mina is saved. A note by Jonathan Harker seven years later states that the Harkers have a son named Quincey.
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Bram Stoker
Abraham Stoker (8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912) was an Irish author who wrote the 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula.
Biography
During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Sir Henry Irving and business manager of the West End’s Lyceum Theatre, which Irving owned. In his early years, Stoker worked as a theatre critic for an Irish newspaper and wrote stories and commentaries. He also enjoyed travelling, particularly to Cruden Bay in Scotland, where he wrote two novels. During another visit to the English coastal town of Whitby, Stoker drew inspiration for writing Dracula. He died on 20 April 1912 due to locomotor ataxia and was cremated in north London.
Since his death, his magnum opus Dracula has become one of the best-known works in English literature, and the novel has been adapted for numerous films, short stories, and plays. Stoker was born on 8 November 1847 at 15 Marino Crescent, Clontarf, on the north side of Dublin, Ireland. The park adjacent to the house is now known as Bram Stoker Park. His parents were Abraham Stoker (1799–1876) from Dublin and Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley (1818–1901), who was raised in County Sligo. Stoker was the third of seven children, the eldest of whom was Sir Thornley Stoker, 1st Bt. Abraham and Charlotte were members of the Church of Ireland Parish of Clontarf and attended the parish church with their children, who were baptized there. Abraham was a senior civil servant.
Stoker was bedridden with an unknown illness until he started school at the age of seven, when he made a complete recovery. Of this time, Stoker wrote, “I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness allowed many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years.” He was privately educated at Bective House School, run by the Reverend (William Woods). After his recovery, he grew up without further serious illnesses, excelling as an athlete at Trinity College, Dublin, which he attended from 1864 to 1870. He graduated with a BA in 1870 and paid to receive his MA in 1875. Though he later in life recalled graduating “with honours in mathematics”, this appears to have been a mistake. He was named a University Athlete, participating in multiple sports, including playing rugby for Dublin University. He was auditor of the College Historical Society (the Hist) and president of the University Philosophical Society (he remains the only student in Trinity’s history to hold both positions), where his first paper was on Sensationalism in Fiction and Society.
Bram Stoker
