Who Is Dracula's Father?

by John Sutherland

  25 May: Morris writes to Holmwood (an old friend on hunting expeditions), congratulating him. All three men still love Lucy.

  25 July–3 August: The story jumps forward to 25 July and Whitby where Mina and Lucy are spending a holiday together. They have not met since schooldays. Mina befriends a talkative local, Mr Swales. She is worried about not having heard any news from Jonathan.

  5 June: Seward describes his strange patient, R.M. Renfield.

  3–8 August: A terrible summer storm wrecks a Russian schooner, the Demeter, in Whitby Harbour. All on board are dead, the captain’s corpse lashed to the wheel. Mysteriously, an ‘immense dog’ leaps from the wreck to hide itself in the woods behind the town. The captain’s log records having left Varna on 6 July. One by one the crew have been killed in a fog surrounding the ship. The vessel’s cargo is wooden boxes of soil.

  8–11 August: Mina’s journal. Lucy is having mysteriously restless nights’ sleep, and sleepwalks. There are small wounds on her neck. A large bat is seen. Mr Swales dies of a broken neck.

  17 August: Business correspondence. Boxes, recovered from the Demeter, are to be dispatched by railway to London, King’s Cross. (There will be one sinister sleeper in the luggage van.)

  18 August: Mina’s journal. Lucy seems to be recovering. Her nights are now drugged. And so are those of her mother, who has been sleeping in Lucy’s bedroom.

  19 August: Mina, still in Whitby, receives the joyous news that Jonathan lives, and is being treated in a hospice in Budapest. He has walked hundreds of miles. He remembers nothing of his escape. Mina sets off to Budapest, arriving 24 August. He gives her his diary to read. Later she will transcribe it to form the first part of the narrative. They marry, on her arrival, in a quiet ceremony.

  19 August: Dr Seward notes in his diary that Renfield is strangely disturbed. (He senses the presence of Dracula in nearby Carfax, we suspect.)

  24 August: Now in Hillingham, alongside Hampstead Heath, Lucy starts a journal noting that she and her mother are again sleeping badly. Something scrapes against her bedroom window at night.

  31 August: Arthur writes to his friend Seward, telling him that the woman they both love, Lucy, looks ‘awful’. Something is mysteriously wrong with her.

  1 September: Arthur’s father, Lord Godalming, is very ill; Arthur must leave Lucy’s side to go to him.

  2–3 September: Seward writes to Holmwood, still with his dying father, saying that there is nothing organically wrong with Lucy, but she is acutely anaemic. Dangerously so. He has written to an old teacher, Abraham Van Helsing, who might help him. Seward once saved his life. Seward notes continued excitement in his ‘zoophagous patient’, Renfield.

  5–6 September: Seward notes ‘terrible change for the worse’ in Lucy. He telegrams Van Helsing to come at once, and informs Holmwood by letter. Van Helsing arrives from Holland on 7 September and immediately prescribes a blood transfusion. Arthur donates. Van Helsing notes a suspicious wound on Lucy’s throat.

  10 September: Van Helsing protects Lucy’s bedroom with garlic and holy paste. Her mother will nurse her at night.

  11 September: Lucy describes her going to bed in her diary, ending ‘Good night everybody’.

  17 September: in her diary Lucy notes improvement. The garlic is working. Renfield cuts Seward’s arm and laps up the blood from the floor. A wolf, in Dracula’s thrall, escapes from London Zoo and breaks Lucy’s window (enabling Dracula to enter). Mrs Westenra dies of fright. Mina sends Lucy a letter (which Lucy will be too weak to open when it arrives). She and Jonathan are back in England.

  18 September: Seward arrives at Hillingham to discover a crisis in Lucy’s condition. Morris appears, sent by Holmwood. He donates blood – her fourth transfusion (Seward and Van Helsing also having donated in the intervening days). Mr Hawkins dies, leaving Jonathan in charge of the Exeter firm.

  20 September: Renfield attacks the coach which he mysteriously knows is moving his master from Carfax to London. Lucy has died, as has Holmwood’s father. Arthur is now Lord Godalming and he is free to claim Lucy in Hillingham. She expires, a vampire. Arthur cannot even – as Van Helsing warns – kiss her farewell.

  21 September: The funeral and burial of Lucy and her mother. Van Helsing tells Seward that Lucy’s corpse, once interred, must be de-vampirised.

  22 September: Arthur and Quincey P. Morris renew their friendship. Mina and the convalescent Jonathan travel to Exeter for Mr Hawkins’s funeral.

  23 September: Jonathan catches sight of Dracula in Hyde Park. He has ‘grown young’.

  25 September: The Westminster Gazette reports children being mysteriously abducted and injured at night on Hampstead Heath by a ‘bloofer lady’.

  23–24 September: Mina’s Journal. Jonathan continues to recover. Van Helsing writes to warn her that something terrible must be done. She telegrams him to come immediately. She has read Jonathan’s journal.

  25 September: In her journal Mina records meeting Van Helsing. He reads Jonathan’s diary. All is becoming clear.

  26 September: Jonathan is strong enough to take up his diary again. He and Van Helsing discuss the Count. In his phonograph diary Seward records conversations with the Dutchman and the mysterious business of the children on Hampstead Heath. ‘They were made by Miss Lucy,’ Van Helsing says. Action must be taken. Van Helsing and Seward go to Lucy’s tomb by night and open the coffin at St John-at-Hampstead graveyard. It is empty. They save a child from her vampire clutches.

  27 September: The two men repeat the visit. The tomb is now again occupied by Lucy: ‘radiantly beautiful’ – from the blood of local children. Van Helsing stands watch at the graveyard.

  28 September: Arthur, Quincey, Seward and Van Helsing make a night-time expedition to the graveyard. Lucy is roaming. When she returns, Arthur is persuaded to drive a stake through her heart; whereupon she is again pure Lucy Westenra (albeit dead).

  29–30 September: Seward allows Mina to hear his diary cylinders. She will type them out, making carbon copies. The four men and she are now united in their aim to hunt down Dracula. Or is he hunting them? Seward now realises that the estate next door has been the vampire’s lair and that Renfield has some close connection with Dracula. Jonathan goes to London to track ‘Count de Ville’s’ lodgings in the city.

  30 September: Mina’s journal. She finishes her copying and consoles the distraught Holmwood. She meets Renfield, who behaves with extraordinary courtesy. He seems to fall in love with her. In Seward’s office, Van Helsing explains what vampires really are.

  1 October: Seward’s journal. Renfield implores that he be released from the asylum. His mood is volatile and fearful. Harker describes a raid on Carfax. The Count is not there. Jonathan notices that Mina is looking strangely pale. Mina’s diary records her feeling weak. Something seems to have been trying to get into her bedroom. Jonathan leaves her at home. He is making progress, as his diary records, in tracking down Dracula in London.

  2 October: Seward posts a guard on Renfield’s room. On the following day, 3 October, he is found mortally injured. Van Helsing is called and manages to question him. He explains, at length, how Dracula took control of him and has been visiting him as a mist. The men go to Mina’s room and see Dracula. He has been drinking her blood, and forcing her to drink his. He escapes Quincey, who goes out to look for him in the woods.

  3 October: Harker’s journal. Renfield’s burial. The vampire hunters mobilise. Van Helsing puts a crucifix on Mina’s forehead. It scorches and leaves a terrible scar.

  3–4 October: Seward’s diary. Dracula has escaped Morris in London. Van Helsing hypnotises Mina. Via her mental link with the vampire they discover that, with only one box of earth left, Dracula intends to embark to some port in Europe; thence, presumably, to the safety of his castle. Van Helsing leaves a message on Seward’s phonograph that he will try to catch Dracula before the sun goes down. He fails.

  5 October: Mina appoints herself the recorder of what is to come. They track down the vessel on
which Dracula has left, the Czarina Catherine. Jonathan discovers that his wife is subject to the Count’s will.

  11 October: Seward describes the contact between Mina and Dracula: she is free of the Count’s influence only at sunrise and sunset. The men are resolved to save her – or, if not her, her soul.

  15–27 October: the party board a cross-channel train as the first step of their pursuit. Under hypnosis, Mina describes Dracula on his sea voyage – but where to? Harker and Seward record events: Seward longs for his phonograph. They wait in the port of Varna.

  28–30 October: Dracula’s port of entry has been located. But is Dracula using Mina to mislead them? It is not at Varna he arrives, but at Galatz. They go there but Dracula has again eluded them. They have a council of war. Despite her condition Mina is faithfully recording everything. She is protected by sleeping in a ‘holy circle’, fashioned by Van Helsing.

  31 October–4 November: They have reached Bistritz and are closing in on Dracula, the last stage by horse.

  6 November: Mina’s journal. They finally engage Dracula and his gypsy guard at sunset. Mina and Van Helsing are observing from a safe distance. In the nick of time, the men kill Dracula. Morris, who deals the vampire a fatal blow, is mortally injured. Dracula dissolves into dust. The scar disappears from Mina’s brow.

  1900: Jonathan pens an epilogue. He and Mina have a child, Quincey. They have made a summer trip to Transylvania. Godalming is ‘happily married’, as is Seward. Van Helsing lives on.

  What happened in Munich?

  Munich is mentioned only once in the published novel – in the opening sentence, which could have been discharged, rat-a-tat from Quincey’s Maxim machine gun.

  3 May. Bistritz. – Left Munich at 8.35 P.M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late.

  Quincey’s Maxim gun was erased from the printed text.

  Also erased, one can plausibly speculate, was what looks, to the thoughtful eye, like a substantial prequel to the published Dracula, set in Munich.

  The Munich prelude would have tied up some hanging threads in the narrative as published. But in the interests of pace, Stoker decided to let the threads hang and get on with the story. There remain nonetheless wisps of plot-thought in the surviving notes which enable one plausibly to construct what that prequel to Jonathan’s departure from Munich might have been.

  In large outline, it seems that: (a) Harker was conceived as having been in the Bavarian city as a tourist in transit enjoying a stopover for three or four days; (b) Dracula was coincidentally, or by design, in Munich at the same time. Tourism was not in prospect. Perhaps he was in this German financial centre because of his need for ready cash in a negotiable currency, as I surmise elsewhere (see page 164). Something more complex, that is, than could be achieved by local Bistritz bureaux de change, if indeed there were such things.

  The surviving memoranda enable one to put some flesh on this lost Munich episode. It is, incidentally, set in freezing snowy winter, not May. Stoker made that seasonal change to early summer presumably to fit in with the eve of St George’s Day, 4 May.

  What one can reasonably reconstruct from the tantalisingly brief surviving notes is as follows. There was, the first note records, a telegram from Dracula to Hawkins, in Exeter, to start for Munich. Dracula expected his ‘good friend’ Hawkins to come himself.

  The urgency of a telegram could suggest that Dracula himself was in the German city, or expecting to be there imminently. Again, it is hard to imagine him sending telegrams from any convenient postal office in the environs of Castle Dracula.

  For what is called in the notes ‘Chapter 2’ there is some elaboration. What Dracula now sends is a letter, not a telegram. The letter contains instructions that Harker, Hawkins’s substitute, should stay at Munich’s Auracher Hof[f] hotel, and await instructions. The hotel, a first-rate establishment, still exists. Over the next few days Harker, awaiting further instruction, entertains himself with a visit to the Pinnacothek [sic.; i.e. ‘picture’] gallery and a night at the opera. There he sees The Flying Dutchman, by Richard Wagner, whose cursed, immortal hero has clear connections with his future host.*

  Of even more prophetic significance to Harker, however, is the city’s ‘waiting house’ or Leichenhaus (literally, ‘corpse house’) – a public mortuary. Munich had an unusual burial law. Anyone dying within city limits was obliged to lie, in public view, in the Leichenhaus alongside the municipal cemetery for three days. The aim was ostensibly to prevent premature burial – a 19th-century phobia. The Catholic superstition about not sleeping under the same roof as a dead person was another factor. As a commentator notes:

  Müncheners regard going to the Deadhouse on holidays as a standard recreation, and always recommend it to visitors with a weird sort of pride. They go through life perfectly unconcerned over the prospect that some day they, too, will be taken there to lie in lowly state for three days before the clods of the grave close over them.†

  The bodies were laid out on display, in open coffins, covered by cloth. The coffins were surrounded by flowers to obliterate any stench of decomposition. The temperature in the corpse house was kept warm, to speed up decomposition as proof of death.

  In the house of the dead Harker sees an old man laid out on a bier. On a visit the next day he overhears some conversation. The old man’s body has mysteriously disappeared. Where? Who would steal such a thing?

  ‘Harker has seen the corpse but does not take part in discussion’. The face on that corpse will, later, be significant to him when he meets Dracula. They are one and the same. He returns to the Auruch to wait. In the morning he receives a wire (‘letter’ is crossed out in the notes) from Transylvania. He is to make haste and travel on to Bistritz and there remain until he is collected.

  One can put the parts together like so much narrative Lego. Dracula was in Munich on some unspecified necessary business. He, of course, is the old man who disappears from the corpse house. It has been convenient to him (given that the ground is consecrated) to use the place as his hostelry. He came and went to Munich by coffin, handled by his loyal gypsy crew.

  The distance between Munich and Bistritz is 800 miles. The larger part of Dracula’s encoffined journey would have been undertaken in the luggage wagons of trains. He will arrive at his castle shortly before Jonathan. At that point, the published novel takes off, with Jonathan leaving Munich.

  In terms of narrative tactics the erasure of the Munich prequel was wise. It would have been cumbersome and Stoker’s novel was turning out to be too long. But the dropping of the episode probably nagged at Stoker. He knew Germany, and Munich, from Henry Irving’s 1882 tour to the country, which he had managed. He did not know Transylvania. He must have felt a certain guilt – as if he were, somehow, fooling his readers and borrowing too much from Emily Gerard.

  The dropped Munich episode left a puzzling relic. In 1914 Florence Stoker, in a makeweight collection of Bram’s short ‘weird’ stories, included a piece entitled Dracula’s Guest.

  It is clearly disconnected notes rather than a short story and may have been fleshed out for publication by another hand than Stoker’s. Florence added in her preface the explanation:

  To his original list of stories in this book, I have added an hitherto unpublished episode from Dracula. It was originally excised owing to the length of the book, and may prove of interest to the many readers of what is considered my husband’s most remarkable work.

  Indeed it does prove of interest, with reference to both the published novel and the unpublished Munich episode. ‘Dracula’s Guest’ occupies the first place in the volume.

  A young unnamed Englishman stops over in Munich en route to Transylvania at the Quatre Saisons Hotel. It is Walpurgisnacht in Germany. April 30th. All hell will be let loose. The hero does not speak German and has not the faintest idea of what this sinister night holds for him.

  Relishing the ‘early summer’ air, he goes for an after
noon drive in a carriage. Ignoring the hotel manager’s instruction that he must be back before nightfall, he decides to go on a moonlight ramble. By foot. Inadvisable. His driver, Johann, who has been consulting his watch every few minutes, gallops off at twilight in a spirit of every man for himself. The maddened horses are of the same view. Leave the mad Englishman to the witches.

  The hero takes in the views touristically as the sun goes down. But the temperature suddenly drops as well. He hears a wolf howl. Then a veritable blizzard begins to blow:

  As I looked there came a cold shiver in the air, and the snow began to fall. I thought of the miles and miles of bleak country I had passed, and then hurried on to seek the shelter of the wood in front. Darker and darker grew the sky, and faster and heavier fell the snow, till the earth before and around me was a glistening white carpet the further edge of which was lost in misty vagueness.

  The odd gleam of moonlight penetrates the swirling black clouds. The narrator-hero discovers he is in a graveyard. There is a chorus of wolf howls. He sees a large tomb and approaches it for shelter:

  Then while the flood of moonlight still fell on the marble tomb, the storm gave further evidence of renewing, as though it was returning on its track. Impelled by some sort of fascination, I approached the sepulchre to see what it was, and why such a thing stood alone in such a place. I walked around it, and read, over the Doric door, in German:

  COUNTESS DOLINGEN OF GRATZ

  IN STYRIA SOUGHT AND FOUND DEATH

  1801

  On the top of the tomb, seemingly driven through the solid marble – for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone – was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the back I saw, graven in great Russian letters:

  ‘The dead travel fast.’

  The hero has no idea what it means.

  Stoker’s first intention was to set his narrative, like Le Fanu’s lesbian-vampire fable Carmilla, in Styria (Austria). A connection of some kind between the woman interred here and the heroines – one vampire, one victim in Le Fanu’s novel – is suggested.‡ No more than that. Suicides and vampires were customarily staked in their graves – less flamboyantly than my lady Dolingen. ‘The dead travel fast’, a quote from Gottfried Bürger’s poem ‘Lenore’, with its vampire theme, is echoed by one of the passengers in the coach which drops off Jonathan Harker at the Borgo Pass in Dracula. What is implied by the Countess seeking and finding death is not spelled out. An unwritten novel lies in the inscription.