I was fortunate enough to attend the recording of the story in London, and to be able to confess in person the extent of the crush I’d had on Jacqueline for the best part of twenty-five years. Even in her seventh decade, and recovering from cancer, she was splendidly glamorous, and marvelous company. I don’t think I’d ever met an actress of the old school before, all “Darling!” and theatrical anecdotes, and I was distinctly overwhelmed. I took her to dinner at Hakkasan off Tottenham Court Road, and it remains one of my most cherished memories. She now lives on an animal sanctuary in South Africa. In fact, I’ve just dropped her an e-mail between writing that last sentence and starting this one. She’s a link to my earliest affection for the supernatural, and if nothing else comes of this odd little essay, it has at least led me to get in touch with her once again. (Her reply has just come through, and begins “Darling Heart!” God, she’s a star.)
Since we’re on the subject of Dracula, it would be churlish to continue without making some reference to its creator, Bram Stoker. I’ve only recently noticed that on No. 30 Kildare Street—across from the stop where I occasionally catch a bus home4—is a plaque celebrating the fact that Stoker once lived there, which I hadn’t realized, as most of the focus on Stoker in Dublin tends to revolve around his birthplace in Clontarf. The plaque on No. 30 was, as I subsequently learned, erected by the Bram Stoker Society, which was formed in 1980 around the corner in Trinity College, Dublin, which was Stoker’s alma mater—he graduated in 1870 with honors in science—and, indeed, my own.
A word about the Bram Stoker Society: when I was studying at Trinity, which was from 1988 to 1992, the Bram Stoker Society was quite notorious for the depth of its devotion to the great man, to the extent that if you were taking the college air, and inadvertently confessed to a modest affection for Stoker’s work, there was a genuine fear that members of the Bram Stoker Society would descend like birds of prey and spirit you away to some dark room where you would be forced to watch endless Hammer reruns until you clawed your eyes from your head. Even to mention in passing that your grandfather was a stoker on a ship raised the possibility of having a symposium spontaneously organized around you.
In their defense, the members of the Bram Stoker Society were engaged in a fairly thankless task. At that time, Trinity College—and possibly Dublin city as a whole—was happy to trumpet its connections to former alumni such as Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett, whose work could safely be regarded as literature. (Actually, the university’s English Department wasn’t even very keen on allowing students to study writers who weren’t already dead and buried, and therefore unlikely to tarnish their legacy by producing a late period work promoting pederasty or white supremacy.) Stoker, by contrast, was a whole different kettle of slightly wrong-smelling fish. If Trinity College had an attic, his legacy would have been stored there. It is to the credit of the Bram Stoker Society that its members persevered in the face of a general lack of enthusiasm for the promotion of Stoker’s literary works, even if they did make some folk a bit nervous in the process.
Stoker’s writing career is problematical, though. To borrow a baseball metaphor, he knocked the ball out of the park with his fifth novel, Dracula (1897). Unfortunately, to extend the metaphor, it was his only ball, and he never really managed to find it again. He subsequently tried to capitalize on the boom in Egyptology with The Jewel of Seven Stars (1902) and, um, the boom in stories about women who are secretly giant serpents with The Lair of the White Worm (1911), but I recall both as being fairly joyless reading experiences, although The Lair of the White Worm at least has the merit of being completely bonkers whereas The Jewel of Seven Stars is just dull. As for The Lady of the Shroud (1909), in which the titular heroine feigns vampirism for reasons which were not entirely clear to me when I read the novel, and probably weren’t entirely clear to Stoker either, the less said the better.
This is not to say that Stoker’s post-Dracula career is entirely without interest. Nineteen fourteen saw the posthumous publication of Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories, which collected a number of Stoker’s best works of short fiction, including “The Judge’s House” (1891), “The Squaw” (1893), and “Dracula’s Guest” itself, which was deleted from an early draft of Dracula, and was probably originally written as the novel’s opening chapter.
But Stoker can be forgiven a lot simply for the creation of Dracula, and the book has aged well. It uses the structure of the epistolary novel—a form that somehow managed to survive the exquisite tedium of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and his later Clarissa (1748), a book so long that even starting it is to laugh in the face of one’s own inevitable mortality, but adapts it to include newspaper cuttings, and Dr. Seward’s recordings to his phonograph, which, even now, give it a curious modernity, and suggest a fragmentary approach that resonates with some of the literary experiments of the next century.
Francis Ford Coppola, in his unfairly maligned 1992 film version of the novel, captures this sense of technological development by referencing the early days of cinema. Unfortunately, no amount of innovation or directorial experimentation can save Coppola’s Dracula from two deeply awful acting performances. The second-worst comes from Keanu Reeves, who has never more justified the generally unfair epithet “Canoe Reeves,” and less inhabits the role than has it whittled out of him. But he is put in the ha’penny place by Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing who, over the space of two hours, produces more ham than a slaughterhouse, and appears to be preparing for his bewildering effort in Legends of the Fall two years later, in which, as Colonel William Ludlow, he gives the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just cause to come around to his house and reclaim the Oscar that he previously won for The Silence of the Lambs.5
If we were to pinpoint a flaw in Stoker’s novel, it would be that the early chapters are so wonderful that the middle and later sections pale somewhat by comparison. The novel is at its best when dealing with Jonathan Harker’s arrival in Transylvania, and his early experiences in Dracula’s castle, including his first meeting with the Count, and his later glimpse of Dracula crawling headfirst down the sheer wall of his castle as he sets off to hunt. There then follows Harker’s seduction by three female vampires, which is interrupted by the return of Dracula, who throws them an infant in a sack upon which to feed. Finally, with Chapter 7, we have the high point of the novel: the wreck of the Demeter, the Russian vessel carrying Dracula to England.
The searchlight followed her, and a shudder ran through all who saw her, for lashed to the helm was a corpse, with drooping head, which swung horribly to and fro at each motion of the ship.6
Stoker then decides to push Dracula largely into the wings for much of what follows, leaving us for company the lunatic entomophage Renfield; Harker’s distressed fiancée, Mina Murray; the faux Europeanisms of Van Helsing, and an increasingly peaked Lucy Westenra. Dracula without Dracula is a lot less fun than Dracula with Dracula, and these sections drag a bit, before a race back to Transylvania for the grand finale, which Stoker had originally intended to conclude with Dracula falling into a volcano, although sanity subsequently prevailed.
Interestingly, a similar problem exists in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), but since Shelley was only nineteen when she commenced writing it, and it was her first attempt at a novel, a little leeway should be permitted. (In 2014, I was fortunate enough to see Shelley’s original manuscript of Frankenstein as part of a British Library exhibition entitled Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, and what was most striking about it was that it seemed to have been written in a school jotter, and resembled a student’s English essay homework.)
To read Shelley’s novel, even two centuries later, is to be amazed at the depths of this young woman’s imagination. Contemporary critics had never encountered anything like it before, and struggled to put it in perspective. The reviewer in The British Critic acknowledged that the writing had power “but this power is so abused and perverted, that we should almo
st prefer imbecility . . . we must protest against the waking dreams of horror excited by the unnatural stimulants of this later school; and we feel ourselves as much harassed, after rising from the perusal of these three spirit-wearying volumes, as if we had been over-dosed with laudanum, or hag-ridden by the night-mare.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was kinder, being impressed with “the author’s original genius and happy power of expression,” although the reviewer remained under the misapprehension that the author was male, since the book was first published anonymously.
Frankenstein opens brilliantly, as the Walton expedition sails farther and farther north until it becomes trapped in ice, whereupon Victor Frankenstein is discovered on an ice floe, and begins to tell Robert Walton his tale, which Walton in turn recounts to his sister in England. Frankenstein, like Dracula, is mostly written in epistolary form—a hallmark of English gothic fiction is its use of letters, documents, or fake historical records as a means of encouraging readers to suspend disbelief—but what is most striking is how little of the book is familiar to first-time readers. So much of the imagery associated with Frankenstein and his creation comes to us not from Mary Shelley, but from cinema. Shelley doesn’t even inform us of how Victor Frankenstein animates the creature. We’re led to assume that electricity plays some part, if only because Frankenstein tells of seeing an oak tree destroyed by lightning when he was a boy and the impression made upon him by the demonstration of such power, but that’s all we get. There is no great creation scene, no lightning striking a rod and coursing through the monster’s frame, no cries of “It’s alive!” All of that comes from James Whale’s 1931 film. Shelley, instead, gives us this, from Chapter II:
It was on a dreary night in November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
It’s dramatic in its way, but far more understated than its cinematic equivalents—and there have been many screen efforts to depict the monster’s birth. We don’t even learn how Frankenstein came by the necessary body parts to form his creature, and its appearance is very different from the iconic form of Boris Karloff, complete with flattened head and bolts through the neck. Shelley’s monster is eight feet tall, but:
His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath: his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.
He is also, as we soon learn, superhuman, gifted not only with incredible strength but great speed and agility, too, which enable him to flee after he has been rejected by his creator. Then there is his intelligence, which is where the novel takes a bit of an odd turn in its second volume. Frankenstein travels to the Swiss Alps, where he meets his creation again. We learn that the creature has spent many months hidden in a lean-to adjoining a cottage, and through listening to its inhabitants, and reading stolen books, has learned how to speak.
Leaving aside the fact that nobody appears to have spotted the eight-foot-tall monster living in the shed, the creature’s linguistic advances are pretty remarkable. Unfortunately, he turns out to be a Chatty Cathy, and once he gets started there’s no shutting him up as he tells Frankenstein of his many happy hours of shed-dwelling. The novel itself also veers into more conventional territory, as the monster regales his creator with a tale of star-crossed lovers and perfidious Turks, before at last getting down to the main business of the evening, his desire that Frankenstein should create a mate for him, at which point the novel gets interesting all over again in a sexually peculiar way, and reminds us that, yes, it is being written by a precociously gifted teenage girl—a teenage girl, what’s more, who was already pregnant with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s first child at the age of sixteen or seventeen, Shelley having left his own pregnant wife, Harriet, for Mary and fled with her to France.
Although that child died shortly after birth, Mary quickly conceived another, despite Shelley’s attempts to pimp her to his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Then, still unmarried but calling herself Mrs. Shelley instead of Mary Godwin, she ended up at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland in the company of Shelley, Lord Byron—who himself had fled England to avoid an array of financial and sexual scandals, including an affair with his half sister, Augusta Leigh, leaving behind a wife and at least one child—and Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori, who would later write “The Vampyre.” With each invited by Byron to create a ghost story, Mary, unable to sleep one night, and desperate to meet the poet’s challenge, came up with the idea for Frankenstein in the course of a “waking dream,” even if the manuscript clearly shows that her lover made editorial suggestions and changes further along the path to publication.
Percy Shelley drowned in 1822—although by then his attentions had progressed from Mary to Jane Williams: he and Byron were fickle in their affections, to say the least—and his remains were burned on the beach at Viareggio with Byron in attendance. A year after Mary Shelley’s death in 1851, her box-desk was found to contain, among other items, a silk parcel containing some of Shelley’s ashes and the remains of his heart.
Frankenstein connects with a later piece of English gothic, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), through science and dreams. Like Shelley’s novel, Stevenson’s “shilling shocker,” or “crawler,” was at least partly conceived as the consequence of a nightmare. One night in 1885, Stevenson’s wife, Fanny,7 was startled by her husband’s cries, and woke him, as a dutiful wife would. Stevenson was none too happy at his dream being interrupted, as she had just pulled him out of the story’s first scene of transformation. Stevenson, though, was made of stern stuff, and the first draft of the tale is reputed to have taken him no longer than three days to write.
Scientifically, Frankenstein is indebted to the flourishing study of medicine, and in particular the fascination with the inner workings of the human body that would ultimately lead to the practice of “burking,” the commission of murders in order to secure bodies for the dissection tables. Burking takes its name from William Burke who, with his accomplice William Hare, killed sixteen people in the vicinity of Edinburgh in 1828 and sold the corpses to Dr. Robert Knox for dissection. Burke was hanged for his crimes, while Hare was released after turning King’s evidence, after which little is known about him. Burke was publicly dissected following his execution, and his skeleton is now displayed in the Anatomy Museum of the University of Edinburgh Medical School.
Stevenson’s novel, meanwhile, takes its cue from a neo-Darwinian theory of degeneration: that civilization contains within itself the seeds of its own decay. While examining the duality of man it suggests that, having evolved from primitive beings, their violent atavistic urges remain part of our makeup, waiting for a catalyst to cause them to emerge. It was a tenet of the earliest works of criminal anthropology, among them those of Cesare Lombroso, who took the view that “the germs of moral insanity and criminality are found normally in mankind in the first stages of his existence.”
Although Stevenson also nods to the epistolary tradition by using letters to impart knowledge to the reader, they’re simply part of a larger narrative. What struck me most forcibly when rereading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was how slowly the nature of the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde is made apparent. We are by now familiar with the basic thrust of the story—scientist experiments with a potion to unleash his inner primitive
in order to separate it from his higher being:
If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.
But a contemporary reader approaching the story for the first time would have done so with little or no idea of what linked Jekyll to Hyde, and it’s really only in “Henry Jekyll’s First Statement of the Case,” which closes the book, that the truth is revealed. The rest is given to us in flashes, and accounts from a number of narrators and witnesses, each of whom can, of necessity, supply only an incomplete version of events. It’s a classic slow reveal.
In 1888, Jekyll and Hyde found their way to the London stage, and the performances at the Lyceum Theatre coincided with the Whitechapel murders of prostitutes committed between August and November of that year, five of which were attributed to the killer known as Jack the Ripper. Suddenly Stevenson’s work took on a chilling relevance, with an editorial in the Pall Mall Gazette noting that “There certainly appears to be a tolerably realistic impersonification of Mr. Hyde at large in Whitechapel.”
While it was initially assumed that someone capable of committing crimes of such barbarity had to be of a coarse and impoverished nature8—“we should not be surprised if the murderer in the present case should not be slum bred,” the editorial harrumphed—it didn’t take long for the flaws in that reasoning to be questioned, with the Pall Mall Gazette backpedaling furiously just a few days later, suggesting helpfully that “The Marquis de Sade, who died in a lunatic asylum at the age of seventy-four . . . was an amiable-looking gentleman, and, so, possibly enough, may be the Whitechapel murderer.”
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