Who Is Dracula's Father?

by John Sutherland

  The London lawyer (Aaronson, until he becomes the gentile, Exeter-based, Hawkins) has a ‘shrewd, skeptical sister’. She never materialises. The deal is clinched by a ‘Letter to Aaronson from Count ______ [the name Dracula had not yet been hit on] Styria asking to come or send trustworthy law[yer] who does not speak German’.

  It is a highly odd instruction for a client with, himself, imperfect English to make. At this stage, one notes, Stoker intended to follow Le Fanu’s Carmilla and set his novel in Styria, German-speaking Austria, as it now is. Why, then, insist on a lawyer unable speak the native tongue? It would surely be vital to negotiating any legal conveyancing, money exchange, and the transmission of funds Harker has been sent out specifically to execute.

  The first answer that comes to mind is because the Count does not want the proto-Harker capable of asking questions en route about grisly doings in and around his castle. Jonathan, despite losing a handsome commission, might think a client who lives on human blood and abducts babies in sacks a somewhat undesirable customer for the firm of Hawkins and Harker. In the published text, with the setting transposed to Transylvania, the point is made that Harker simply does not understand the dire warnings he gets at the way-stage inn from the innkeeper and his wife. But since they are now talking Romanian, his knowledge of German is neither here nor there.

  Jonathan’s limited German, then, can be seen as largely a hangover from the expunged Styria setting, retained because it continued to serve a purpose to the author. Stoker himself did not speak German and, given his pressing theatrical duties, he did not have time to lard his narrative with the Germanic touches and colouring his narrative would need if his hero, and the Count, were speaking that language.

  * Stoker recalls the Jewish Chronicle’s protest at the 1889 production of Pettit and Sims’s London Day by Day at the Adelphi, for its ‘hideous caricature’ of Jews.

  Why Whitby?

  Dracula and his creator have been commemorated in a number of places: in Jack Straw’s Castle, the majestic pub off Hampstead Heath, for example, where the vampire hunters gather their strength before breaking open Lucy’s tomb and doing worse things.

  Romania has built up a thriving tourist industry. But it has had its hiccups getting there. The communist government, in the 1980s, banned Draculite tourism and any use of the word for commercial purposes. Stoker’s vampire was regarded, not unreasonably, as a symbol of decadent, blood-sucking capitalism. Nothing for a proud nation to glorify.

  Estimates reckon there are 70,000 Romanian workers currently (early 1917 as I write) in London. In my experience they weary very quickly of ‘the Dracula conversation’. Who can blame them?

  After the fall of communism the Dracula industry reasserted itself in Romania. In 2000 the Romanian government made it official, projecting a multi-million dollar Dracula Park. Blood-flavoured shakes were again on the menu. Conferences and world festivals are held in what used to be Transylvania. Hotels were positively encouraged to Draculise themselves and their services.

  Far away, the other thriving resort which has made a fortune out of its Dracula associations is the northern town of Whitby, which today offers attractions such as ‘The Dracula Experience’, the Bram Stoker International Film Festival, and Whitby Goth Weekend.

  There was a vast library about vampirism, even in the 1890s, which Stoker didn’t read. He relied, centrally, on a few standby books for background. He had no first-hand acquaintance of his novel’s foreign setting. Far-flung as many of the Lyceum tours were (five to the US, for example) the company never ventured into Transylvania.

  But Stoker thought deeply, for many years, about the book he was writing. As has been said, first ideas began to stir in his mind, one suspects, in the mid- to late 1880s, with Henry Irving’s barnstorming performance of Mephisto in Faust; Gerard’s 1885 essay on Transylvanian folklore which, plausibly, Stoker came across; and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which Stoker must have read when it came out in 1886, pointing to new possibilities for gothic fiction. I have sometimes thought that in the far distance of Stoker’s mind he meditated a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde plot centred on Dr Seward and Mr Renfield. One can fantasise how it might go. I don’t think any novelist has.

  The breakthrough event in the creation of Dracula was Whitby, July–August 1890. Stoker holidayed there, with his family – Florence and son Noel – after a disappointing Lyceum tour in Scotland. Some rest and recuperation were needed.

  Stoker had time that summer to explore the town. There is history in every flagstone and brick. He listened to the talk of locals, whose Yorkshire patois, unchanged since the middle ages, delighted him. Stoker had a wonderful ear. In Whitby’s public library he came across what would be the novel’s seminal text, William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820). A hard read, one might think from the title. But on this occasion, inspirational. Wilkinson and Whitby together formulated what would be the framework and the founding idea of Dracula.

  Walking the town, as one likes to fantasise, Stoker hit on the idea of the young heroines, former school friends, meeting up for a reunion holiday in Whitby. They are both on the brink of the great change in their lives. Mina (Murray) has left school teaching to unleash her ‘man’s brain’ as a New Woman typewriter girl. Lucy, the avatar of traditional maidenhood, has received, aged nineteen, three eminently eligible proposals of marriage. Which shall she accept? The doctor, the Lord, or the American adventurer? Lucky Lucy.

  Not lucky for long. Also in on the Whitby party is the uninvited guest from Transylvania. There are plausible reasons for Dracula choosing to make his entry to England in this port. Invaders, since the Danes in the 9th century, have arrived on Whitby’s shores to do their worst. The town’s ancient ruins tell the stories in crumbling stone.

  The town’s inhabitants recalled something relatively recent – the wreck of the Russian schooner, the Dmitri of Narva, in October 1885. The vessel foundered on Whitby harbour’s notoriously tricky sand bar, in a terrible storm. The whole crew drowned.

  Photographs were taken by Frank Meadow Sutcliffe. They were sold for years after as postcards and Stoker would have seen them. Stoker surely heard the local myth that wrongly claimed the ship had a cargo of coffins, which washed up, along with sailors’ corpses, for days after the storm subsided. In fact the Dmitri was carrying a cargo of silver sand – near enough to Dracula’s 50 boxes of sacred dirt.

  The Russian ship’s dramatic end, as preserved and embellished in local lore, gave Stoker valuable plot machinery. In the novel the Dmitri becomes the Demeter, from Varna. Why Whitby? Had Dracula come to one of Britain’s main ports of entry – Dover or Southampton, for example – there would have been customs and immigration officials, curious to see his papers (if he assumed human form for the occasion), asking awkward questions about why a count would need 50 large boxes of Romanian dirt.

  Dracula’s solution is ingenious. If he arrives in a wrecked Russian vessel and leaps on shore as a large dog there will be no questions asked of him. He has done the necessary research on Whitby. A mad dog running through the streets of Dover would be shot in no time. The Contagious Diseases (Animals) Act had been introduced, as a preventive against rabies (particularly from abroad). It would have been a humiliating end for Count Dracula, lineal descendant of Attila the Hun.

  Whitby imposed no such barriers. Dracula can hide (and feed), four-legged, in the local woods until the arrangements he has made for the transport of his all-important boxes are put in train via the Great Western Railway.

  From photographs and letters (written in script he can understand) he knows about the delectable Mina, which makes Whitby all the more desirable. Stoker does not describe the last voyage of the Demeter in detail, but the reader can reconstruct Dracula’s plan. It’s smart.

  He kills the crew, one by one. They do not examine what is in the boxes; they are too frightened. Their bodies are thrown overboard. Dracula can create a micr
oclimate – the Devil taught him how to do this in the Scholasticon (see ‘How Dead Is Dracula?’, page 9) – and the ship is forced to battle through neverending fog and storm.

  The captain, the last surviving human on board, true to his command, lashes himself to the wheel and leaves a log-book record of what has happened – insofar as he has understood it. Dracula lets him survive until the boat is wrecked. Why? Because were he gone, by the laws of salvage the boat and its cargo would belong to whoever next boarded it. That would not be good for the all-important boxes. Horrible thought: they might just be emptied out and dumped on Whitby Sands.

  It all fit. One can almost see where Stoker assembled some of the key components. A bench on the cliff path, atop the 199 steps to St Mary’s Church, which the mad dog Dracula bounds up, is inscribed with the words: ‘The view from this spot inspired Bram Stoker’. Quite likely so.

  Stoker put down quantities of notes about Whitby, its dialect, and the Dmitri wreck. His sense of narrative was always tactically fluid. He must, I suspect, have toyed with the idea of setting the whole of his novel, or at least all the English chapters, in Whitby.

  But like Irving, he always went big. ‘Dracula destroys Whitby’ would have been small. But the coastal town supplies a useful springboard; even if, for some readers, there is too much of gabby Mr Swales.

  What is the point of R.M. Renfield?

  It is a question pondered by many readers, all adaptors of Dracula, and vegans. The majority of us are meat eaters, consumers of things that were once, like us, alive and kicking. But few would follow the ‘zoophagous’ Renfield’s diet. The ‘fly-eater’ (as Stoker bluntly called the madman in his notes) graduates to death’s head moths, to spiders, to sparrows (munched raw, with feathers). In prospect are bird-eating kittens if the asylum is willing to serve them up. Alive. How long, wonders Dr Seward, before his patient graduates to live human meat? The very idea – and the temptation to give Renfield his head – draws Seward into strange waters:

  What would have been [Renfield’s] later steps? It would almost be worth while to complete the experiment. It might be done if there were only a sufficient cause. Men sneered at vivisection, and yet look at its results to-day! Why not advance science in its most difficult and vital aspect – the knowledge of the brain? Had I even the secret of one such mind – did I hold the key to the fancy of even one lunatic – I might advance my own branch of science to a pitch compared with which Burdon-Sanderson’s physiology or Ferrier’s brain-knowledge would be as nothing. If only there were a sufficient cause! I must not think too much of this, or I may be tempted; a good cause might turn the scale with me, for may not I too be of an exceptional brain, congenitally?*

  Renfield, for Seward, is an object of clinical study as much as a patient requiring care. He is man experimentally eating his way upward through various species, creating his own evolutionary narrative. One can see, in embryo, a different novel from that which Stoker eventually published.

  This is all very interesting. But it does not answer the question of why Stoker gave so much space to the zoophagite character in a novel about vampirism. And nowhere in that space is it explained how Renfield and Dracula become personally acquainted – if, indeed, in the flesh they ever do, until Dracula drops by the asylum to kill his slave.

  That Renfield was in Stoker’s mind from his first conception of the novel, in summer 1890, is demonstrable. His first page of 1890 notes has, as its fifth and six items:

  Mad Doctor – loves girl

  Mad patient – theory of perpetual life

  The editors of Stoker’s notes speculate that at the primal stage, Jack Seward and Renfield may have been conceived as the same character. If so, the idea was dropped in subsequent composition. Renfield’s big endeavour is ‘perpetual life’, which he somehow knows the vampire has achieved. Renfield wants it and will destroy life to get it. At present that means insect and arachnid life and one luckless bird.

  What, substantially, do we know about Renfield’s background? He is orphanic – although someone must be paying the bills at Seward’s private asylum. We know his initials, ‘R.M.’, but not his Christian names (if, at this stage of life, he is still Christian). The name Renfield itself in Stoker’s notes was a late addition to the narrative, alternating with ‘Renfold’. In Carmilla (see page 43), ‘Bertha Rheinfeldt’ is one of Carmilla’s historic victims. But, the echo of the names apart, the connection tells us only what we already knew. Stoker knew, liked and was indebted to Le Fanu’s novel.

  Renfield’s CV is murky. This is how Dr Seward profiles him in his medical notes:

  R. M. Renfield, aetat 59. Sanguine temperament, great physical strength, morbidly excitable, periods of gloom, ending in some fixed idea which I cannot make out. I presume that the sanguine temperament itself and the disturbing influence end in a mentallyaccomplished finish, a possibly dangerous man, probably dangerous if unselfish.

  Renfield, it surprises one to know, is elderly: he is routinely played younger on screen. That he is ‘sanguine’ has passing interest. It means, in terms of the humoristic theory of medicine (long outdated in 1890) that ‘blood’ predominates in his character. The sanguine person is social, talkative, exuberant. When blood is spilled on the floor, from Seward’s arm which Renfield has cut in a maniac moment, he laps it up. Thereafter he seems to know everything Seward knows. He owns him.

  Renfield is clever, well bred and well educated. That point is made, as a coup de théâtre, late in the narrative, when Renfield ceases being a raving lunatic and metamorphoses into a highly rational being. And in his last appearances in the narrative he is not merely ‘rational’ he is positively intellectual, capable of high-table graces and good conversation.

  Seward, who has not previously witnessed this side of Renfield, is amazed when his patient first meets Mina, with an explosion of courtesy, erudition and compliment:

  ‘You will, of course, understand, Mrs Harker, that when a man is so loved and honoured as our host is, everything regarding him is of interest in our little community. Dr Seward is loved not only by his household and his friends, but even by his patients, who, being some of them hardly in mental equilibrium, are apt to distort causes and effects. Since I myself have been an inmate of a lunatic asylum, I cannot but notice that the sophistic tendencies of some of its inmates lean towards the errors of non causa and ignoratio elenchi.’† I [Dr Seward] positively opened my eyes at this new development. Here was my own pet lunatic – the most pronounced of his type that I had ever met with – talking elemental philosophy, and with the manner of a polished gentleman.

  He is a very well-read gentleman. His elemental philosophy, so called, has a strong tincture of Ernst Haeckel, whose motto was ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ (one passes, in life, through the stages of human evolution). Renfield’s harping on the master/slave image, with reference to his relationship with Dracula, indicates at least a passing knowledge of Hegel’s best-known image. We may presume education at a good university and, plausibly, a period of study in Germany. And a life-changing vacation in Transylvania?

  In his pre-asylum days Renfield was not merely known to Arthur’s father, Lord Godalming, but intimate with the nobleman. As he airily discloses, on meeting Mina and Arthur, in his cell:

  ‘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. He was a man loved and honoured by all who knew him; and in his youth was, I have heard, the inventor of a burnt rum punch, much patronised on Derby night.’

  The Windham was a London club, founded in the early 19th century. The first rule for members was to be aware that the club existed ‘to secure a convenient and agreeable place of meeting for a society of gentlemen, all connected with each other by a common bond of literary or personal acquaintance’. Renfield supposedly had the ‘honour’ of jointly proposing this knight of the realm for membership. (As is noted elsewhere – see pages 123–4 – Henry Irving was one of th
e Windham’s most distinguished members. So, too, club correspondence confirms, was Bram Stoker, who acted as secretary.)

  The Derby Day allusion – a racing meet famed for Derby Night high jinks – hints that Renfield, in his day, may have been one of the wilder men about town, fuelled by a generous intake of burnt rum punch, whatever that may be. In more serious mood he is well up with politics: capable of discussing the recent Monroe doctrine with Quincey, soon to be tested in the Spanish American war.

  The most pressing puzzle is whether Renfield has made Dracula’s acquaintance before the Count comes to England to take up residence in the ominous ruin Carfax, which ‘abuts’ the asylum. Is that abutment a coincidence? If so, it’s remarkably coincidental. Did Dracula plan this contingency? A ‘slave’ might be very useful to him – ‘a stranger in a strange land’, as he calls himself (there is always an interesting touch of poetry in Dracula’s speech). But, given the choice, one would not choose a slave in a straitjacket locked up in an asylum.

  Renfield claims that the flies he eats are sent by Dracula. Are they somehow bearers of messages? Whatever, Renfield knows, instinctually, when Dracula arrives in England on 19 August. Harker overhears him say, as he sniffs round his cell:

  ‘I am here to do Your bidding, Master. I am Your slave, and You will reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshipped You long and afar off. Now that You are near, I await Your commands, and You will not pass me by, will You, dear Master, in Your distribution of good things?’‡

  Does Dracula, when he is Renfield’s next-door neighbour, meet up regularly with his ‘slave’ by mist, bat or rat? Their relationship is mysterious beyond the one fact that a relationship of some significant kind has been forged.