Dracula

Summary

Dracula is told through journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams and newspaper cuttings assembled by its characters. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to arrange the purchase of a London property, Carfax, for Count Dracula. In the castle he gradually realises he is a prisoner, sees the Count crawl head-first down the castle wall, is nearly seduced by three vampire women, and discovers Dracula lying gorged in a coffin. Dracula leaves for England with boxes of earth. The ship Demeter runs aground at Whitby in a storm with its crew vanished and its dead captain lashed to the wheel, and a great dog leaps ashore. In Whitby, Harker's fiancée Mina Murray is staying with her friend Lucy Westenra, who has three suitors: the asylum superintendent Dr John Seward, the American Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood, whom she accepts. Lucy sleepwalks, and Mina finds her on a churchyard bench with a dark figure bending over her. Lucy sickens, growing pale and anaemic with two small wounds on her throat. Seward calls in his old teacher, the Dutch physician and scholar Abraham Van Helsing, who gives Lucy a series of blood transfusions from Arthur, Seward, himself and Quincey, and surrounds her with garlic, but she dies. Meanwhile Seward observes his patient Renfield, who eats flies, spiders and birds to absorb their life and who seems to sense the Count's approach. Mina travels to Budapest, where Jonathan has been nursed through a brain fever, and they marry. After Lucy's death children are attacked on Hampstead Heath by a 'bloofer lady'; Van Helsing leads Arthur, Seward and Quincey to her tomb, where Arthur drives a stake through the undead Lucy's heart. Mina collects and types the documents, and the group realises Dracula is in London. They sterilise his boxes of earth with consecrated Host, but Dracula attacks Mina, forcing her to drink his blood from his breast, and a burn from a Host scars her forehead. Renfield, who has tried to protect Mina, is mortally injured by the Count. Under hypnosis Mina, now psychically linked to Dracula, reports his movements as he flees by sea to Transylvania. The hunters pursue him by train and boat; at sunset before his castle Jonathan and Quincey cut his throat and stab his heart, and he crumbles to dust. Quincey dies of a wound, Mina's scar vanishes, and a closing note seven years later records the birth of the Harkers' son, named after all the band but called Quincey.

Top Lessons

• Modern method against ancient evil

  The heroes defeat Dracula by pooling records, typing, phonographs, telegrams and medical science alongside folklore. The novel shows knowledge-sharing as power, while suggesting that science alone cannot explain everything.

• Anxieties about the body and contagion

  Vampirism spreads through blood, corrupts the healthy and comes from abroad. The novel channels late-Victorian fears of infection, degeneration and foreign invasion.

• Gender and desire

  Lucy's transformation into a sensual predator and Mina's 'new woman' competence reveal anxieties about female sexuality and independence. The men's violent cure of Lucy can be read as an act of control.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

A novel saturated with late-Victorian medicine. Dr Seward runs a private lunatic asylum, keeps case notes by phonograph and treats Renfield, whose 'zoophagous' mania is described in the language of contemporary alienists. Seward also self-medicates with chloral hydrate after Lucy rejects him and worries about forming a habit, a striking glimpse of a common sedative of the period. Van Helsing's treatment of Lucy with four direct transfusions, years before Landsteiner's discovery of blood groups (1901), reflects the experimental state of transfusion medicine; modern readers often note that incompatible transfusions would themselves have endangered her. Lucy's sleepwalking, Jonathan's 'brain fever' in Budapest nursed by nuns, Van Helsing's references to Charcot and hypnotism, Mina's hypnotic trances, Renfield's head injury and the attempted trephining, and the invocation of Lombroso and Nordau's degeneration theory to define Dracula's 'criminal' brain all make the book a rich source.

• Ch. 5–6, 8–9 (Seward's diary)

  Seward's observations of Renfield: flies, spiders, sparrows, and his classification as a zoophagous maniac; Renfield's escape attempts toward Carfax.

• Ch. 8 (Seward's diary)

  Sleepless and dejected, Seward considers taking chloral hydrate and resolves not to let it become a habit.

• Ch. 6–8 (Mina's journal)

  Lucy's sleepwalking in Whitby and the night Mina finds her on the churchyard bench.

• Ch. 8–9

  Sister Agatha writes from Budapest that Jonathan has been suffering from a violent brain fever.

• Ch. 10–12

  Van Helsing performs successive blood transfusions on Lucy from Arthur, Seward, himself and Quincey, and treats her with garlic and opiates.

• Ch. 14

  Van Helsing invokes Charcot and hypnotism to persuade Seward to open his mind to the inexplicable.

• Ch. 21

  Renfield is found with a broken back and depressed skull fracture; Van Helsing operates (trephining) to relieve pressure so that he can speak before he dies.

• Ch. 23–26

  Van Helsing hypnotises Mina at sunrise and sunset to track Dracula through her psychic link.

• Ch. 25

  Mina and Van Helsing describe Dracula as a criminal type in the terms of Nordau and Lombroso.