The churchyard, Swales means, has many empty coffins. Largely because Whitby sailors die at sea and their human remains have been committed to the waves. But their families must have something to grieve over. Hence the empty coffins and (as Swales sees it) needless funerary expense.
The inhabited or uninhabited grave is thematically central in Dracula. But what is a ‘balm-bowl’? Translated from Whitbyese it means chamber pot – literally, ‘ease bowl’.
Stoker must have chortled as he slipped the naughtiness in, as discreetly as the object itself under the Victorian bed.
Why is Dracula so interested in blue flames?
The novel opens with Jonathan Harker describing in his morning diary the biggest event in his life. His trip to Transylvania will, in the event, prove an even bigger event than the young man anticipates.
He arrives, fresh from a first-class train experience through strange landscapes (his client, Dracula, stints nothing in expenses, we may assume), a goggle-eyed tourist, a freshly bought Baedecker guide in hand, on his way to Transylvania.* The Carpathians loom. Sinister. No trains run there.
He packs away a good meal at the Golden Krone Hotel in Bistritz, leaving the next day on St George’s Eve. The date is a pleasant coincidence for a red-blooded Englishman. Mythologically the Transylvanian St George does what he does in all countries where he is celebrated. The saint in armour rescues an imprisoned maiden (representing civilisation) from a dragon’s cave (representing barbarism). And what does the word ‘Dracul’ mean in Romanian? Dragon. And ‘Dracula’? Son of Dragon. Thought-provoking.
St George is otherwise known as ‘Red Crosse’, rendered famous in the first book of Spenser’s The Fairy Queene. There is something of the Red Crosse Knight about Jonathan Harker. It goes along with a running Manichean subplot in Dracula, God versus the Devil, outcome, as ever, uncertain.
On the last leg of Jonathan’s journey, now deep in the heart of Skezely tribal territory, darkness is falling on St George’s Eve. Like the related German/Austrian Walpurgisnacht, it is a ‘Witches’ Sabbath’. Traditionally all hell is let loose on these nights.†
A mysterious driver (Dracula himself, we later learn) picks up an increasingly jittery Harker at a crossroads: a ‘carfax’. The coach drives round and round, going nowhere, until the stroke of midnight. Ominous hour. Dogs howl, wolves prowl, bats swarm, Harker shivers. Snow falls – in May? The driver leaves his vehicle to confront a bloodthirsty pack of wolves. They are obedient to the driver’s red-eyed glare, snuffing the dominant werewolf, and slink off. They know an alpha when they see one.
The bushy-bearded driver returns to his seat and his by now wholly petrified passenger, thinking desperately about return tickets to St Pancras station. It is too late. Then the calèche in which he is being driven stops yet again. Will this journey never end? The driver, it seems, wants to investigate something mysterious, which he has glimpsed. As a bamboozled Harker records in his next morning’s diary:
Suddenly, away on our left, I saw a faint flickering blue flame. The driver saw it at the same moment; he at once checked the horses, and, jumping to the ground, disappeared into the darkness. I did not know what to do, the less as the howling of the wolves grew closer; but while I wondered the driver suddenly appeared again, and without a word took his seat, and we resumed our journey. I think I must have fallen asleep and kept dreaming of the incident, for it seemed to be repeated endlessly, and now looking back, it is like a sort of awful nightmare. Once the flame appeared so near the road, that even in the darkness around us I could watch the driver’s motions. He went rapidly to where the blue flame arose – it must have been very faint, for it did not seem to illumine the place around it at all – and gathering a few stones, formed them into some device. Once there appeared a strange optical effect: when he stood between me and the flame he did not obstruct it, for I could see its ghostly flicker all the same. This startled me, but as the effect was only momentary, I took it that my eyes deceived me straining through the darkness.
Why has the soil of Transylvania turned itself into a gigantic gas-fired hob? Stoker picked this lore-detail up, and made a powerful scene out of it, again from ‘Madame Dracula’, Emily Gerard. More specifically from her article ‘Transylvanian Superstitions’ in The Nineteenth Century magazine (1885) and her follow-up travel book, The Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania (1888). She, unlike the author of Dracula, had lived in Dracula’s country. Stoker lifted plentifully from her first-hand accounts without acknowledgement (all’s fair in love and horror fiction).
As Dracula explains later to Harker, the soil of the region is blood-soaked and wars have left many residues of lost treasure. Emily Gerard fills out the accompanying ‘x marks the spot’ scenario with rich detail:
In the night of St. George’s Day (so say the legends) all these treasures begin to burn, or, to speak in mystic language, to ‘bloom’ in the bosom of the earth, and the light they give forth, described as a bluish flame resembling the colour of lighted spirits of wine, serves to guide favoured mortals to their place of concealment. The conditions to the successful raising of such a treasure are manifold, and difficult of accomplishment. In the first place, it is by no means easy for a common mortal who has not been born on a Sunday nor at midday when the bells are ringing, to hit upon a treasure at all. If he does, however, catch sight of a flame such as I have described, he must quickly stick a knife through the swaddling rags of his right foot, and then throw the knife in the direction of the flame he has seen. If two people are together during this discovery they must not on any account break silence till the treasure is removed, neither is it allowed to fill up the hole from which anything has been taken, for that would induce a speedy death.
Dracula is no ‘common mortal’. He can follow the flames without having to stab his right foot or any of the folderol Gerard describes. We may suspect he has gone blue-flame hunting many times before on the nights they blaze.
There are a couple of puzzles that remain: (1) Why has Dracula not arranged for his gypsy hirelings to bring Harker to the castle? (2) Why has Dracula arranged it that Harker arrives on this particular night, 4 May?
The simplest reason might be that Jonathan – or, rather, his coach driver from Bistritz – has jumped the gun. The first words Dracula says are ‘You are early to-night, my friend’. From which we may deduce that Dracula originally intended to get to work with his shovel on the outward journey, picking up Jonathan when dawn breaks.‡
There are other explanations. One of them is that Stoker, a man of the theatre to the core, wanted son et lumière: the wolves howl – sweet music, Dracula calls it – and flames light the way to the ruined castle. Bluntly, it is an ‘effect’ to amaze and tantalise the reader. Which it does.
The second reason, banally, is that Dracula is currently strapped for cash. He is embarking on a big adventure. It will not be a cheap adventure. The Count has, Harker discovers in his illicit tours round the castle, a secret treasure room.
The only thing I found was a great heap of gold in one corner – gold of all kinds, Roman, and British, and Austrian, and Hungarian, and Greek and Turkish money, covered with a film of dust, as though it had lain long in the ground. None of it that I noticed was less than three hundred years old. There were also chains and ornaments, some jewelled, but all of them old and stained.
An impressive heap. But one does rather wonder how Count Dracula is going to convert this museum-worthy wealth into the ready money required to buy a property in England in 1893. The Roman denarius had not, for 1,500 years, been coin of the realm.
Dracula is in the process of buying a large estate in England – ‘Carfax’ – and many other expensive pieces of real estate in the capital. He is leasing an entire schooner, the good ship (Dracula will make it something else) Demeter, for transporting his 50 boxes of Transylvanian dirt to England.
His ultimate aim? To conquer England; to do to it what Attila would have done. Make it part of I
mperium Dracula. He and his paladins will suck humanity dry. World conquest will, in the long run, involve millions. Every little helps: hence Dracula’s interest, on the night of 4 May 1893, in mysterious incandescence in the Transylvanian wilderness. Money, always money.
* The text reveals that Stoker used Baedecker for scene setting, often transcribing from the guide verbatim.
† See http://www.jasoncolavito.com/transylvanian-superstitions.html.
‡ Dracula has normal human abilities in daytime, if he intends to use them. Early morning would be a more likely time for the coach to depart.
How does Vampire Lucy escape from a lead-lined coffin?
If Stoker made a list of his favourite writers the name at the top, it is fair to guess, would be Edgar Allan Poe. Dracula manifestly owes greatly to Poe’s ‘Ligeia’, for example. Poe’s fable tells the story of a vampire wife who will not lie still in her vault (under the ruined mansion) but comes back to possess the person of her successor in the marital bed.
‘Ligeia’ is written with an eeriness of effect Stoker would have been the first to admire. The story went on to inspire (if that’s right word) the finest of Roger Corman’s schlock-horror films, starring the master of sinister, Vincent Price.*
Like Poe, Stoker was fascinated by the coffin as a fetish object. That final destination wooden box fascinates and is feared. As mentioned previously (see page 110), the fear of being buried while still alive was widespread in the 19th century. It led to ingeniously engineered coffins with bells, message pulls, and air-holes. The horror of undead interment is immortalised in one of the simplest and most powerful of Poe’s tales: ‘The Premature Burial’.
One of the myths about vampire extermination Stoker did not pursue was that they can be killed by shooting a firearm into their coffin. With his maxim gun, Quincey could reduce any off-the-shelf 19th-century coffin to matchwood. But perhaps not with a mere six-shooter. And if we’re talking Lucy Westenra’s coffin, almost certainly not.
In Dracula the undead Lucy – ‘the bloofer lady’ as her brood of Hampstead kids call her – does not roam nightly from an interred coffin, under two tons of soil. It would be something of a challenge for her to get out of a night, unless she metamorphosed into a mole.
Lucy has been laid in the Westenra family vault, on an elevated, waist-high, plinth. The description her unrestful resting place is quite precise. This is how it is described by Seward (forgive a lengthy quotation):
At last we reached the wall of the churchyard, which we climbed over. With some little difficulty – for it was very dark, and the whole place seemed so strange to us – we found the Westenra tomb. The Professor took the key, opened the creaky door, and standing back, politely, but quite unconsciously, motioned me to precede him. There was a delicious irony in the offer, in the courtliness of giving preference on such a ghastly occasion. My companion followed me quickly, and cautiously drew the door to, after carefully ascertaining that the lock was a falling, and not a spring, one. In the latter case we should have been in a bad plight.
Then he fumbled in his bag, and taking out a matchbox and a piece of candle, proceeded to make a light. The tomb in the day-time, and when wreathed with fresh flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough; but now, some days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns; when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance; when time-discoloured stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass, and clouded silver-plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. It conveyed irresistibly the idea that life – animal life – was not the only thing which could pass away.
Van Helsing went about his work systematically. Holding his candle so that he could read the coffin plates, and so holding it that the sperm dropped in white patches which congealed as they touched the metal, he made assurance of Lucy’s coffin. Another search in his bag, and he took out a turnscrew.
‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.
‘To open the coffin. You shall yet be convinced.’ Straightway he began taking out the screws, and finally lifted off the lid, showing the casing of lead beneath. The sight was almost too much for me. It seemed to be as much an affront to the dead as it would have been to have stripped off her clothing in her sleep whilst living; I actually took hold of his hand to stop him. He only said: ‘You shall see,’ and again fumbling in his bag, took out a tiny fret-saw. Striking the turnscrew through the lead with a swift downward stab, which made me wince, he made a small hole, which was, however, big enough to admit the point of the saw. I had expected a rush of gas from the week-old corpse. We doctors, who have had to study our dangers, have to become accustomed to such things, and I drew back towards the door. But the Professor never stopped for a moment; he sawed down a couple of feet along one side of the lead coffin, and then across, and down the other side. Taking the edge of the loose flange, he bent it back towards the foot of the coffin, and holding up the candle into the aperture, motioned to me to look.
I drew near and looked. The coffin was empty.
It is a grisly scene. The ‘sperm’ dripping on to the coffin jolts (Stoker could have used the unjolting word ‘wax’). The scene also illumines the ways in which Victorians treated their dead – something that not all of us know nowadays. By law at the time, the coffins of those in vaults, above-ground tombs, or catacombs, tunnels beneath the earth, were required to be double or triple shelled (not counting the interior velvet padding). The inner, or middle, lining was sealed lead, as referred to by Seward in the above passage. Such a coffin could easily weigh a quarter of a ton.
The funereal flowers wilt in days. The wooden casing will be rotted in a few years. The lead is eternal. The body within will be well placed to emerge on solid ground and be first in line when the trumpets blow at the four corners of the earth for Judgement Day. ‘Resurgam’ was a popular inscription on Victorian tombstones. Lucy Westenra can conveniently ‘resurge’ every night of the week. But how does she get out of the lead shell? Is there some small aperture (a breathing hole?) in the metal for her to emerge in a Draculean mist? Van Helsing cannot find any. Nor is the lead casing around Lucy visibly damaged, until Van Helsing gets to work on it. Dracula himself can surely not drop by every night with a ‘turnscrew’ to release his newest apprentice. And once out there are problems for Lucy the Vampire. The door of the tomb, we are told, has a simple lift-lock on the inside. No problem getting out. Getting back in, at daybreak, though will be tricky, without a key. It is, one finally concludes, best not to concern oneself overly with such trivial details. Move on to important things.
But something lingers. Once read it is hard to forget this scene. Anything to do with coffins – that final box in which we exit the world – haunts the mind, as does the womb, the warm organ by which we entered. One can end, as this chapter began, with Poe’s thrilling depiction of premature burial: the following, for example, testified to by a grisly disinterment in Baltimore:
The lady was deposited in her family vault, which, for three subsequent years, was undisturbed. At the expiration of this term it was opened for the reception of a sarcophagus; – but, alas! how fearful a shock awaited the husband, who, personally, threw open the door! As its portals swung outwardly back, some white-apparelled object fell rattling within his arms. It was the skeleton of his wife in her yet unmouldered shroud.
A careful investigation rendered it evident that she had revived within two days after her entombment; that her struggles within the coffin had caused it to fall from a ledge, or shelf to the floor, where it was so broken as to permit her escape. A lamp which had been accidentally left, full of oil, within the tomb, was found empty; it might have been exhausted, however, by evaporation. On the uttermost of the steps which led down into the dread chamber was a large fragment of the coffin, with which, it seemed, that she had endeavored to arrest attention by striking the iron door. W
hile thus occupied, she probably swooned, or possibly died, through sheer terror; and, in falling, her shroud became entangled in some iron-work which projected interiorly. Thus she remained, and thus she rotted, erect.
The last four words chill like verbal ice. Stoker clearly knew his Poe backward, and echoes it in the depiction of Lucy’s restless interment and final, decapitated and eviscerated rest. Resurgam in pieces.
* The 1982 film The Tomb of Ligeia is available on YouTube and well worth visiting.
Where have all the vampires gone?
They are rare birds. If, as Van Helsing says, one bite and you’re ‘turned’, and go on to be a biter yourself, there ought to be more vampires in Transylvania than starlings. Exponential, my dear Watson. But one of the oddities of the Romanian vampire community is that they simply aren’t there. We meet just four long-toothed Transylvanian locals in the novel: the Count and the weird sisters. This after 600 years ravaging?
On the good ship (bad ship it turns out) Demeter Dracula destroys 50 or so mariners. None of them seem to become vampires. Just corpses. Whitby’s dogs are at risk for a while: but the local community is apparently unscathed from the enemy of mankind roaming free among them. In London Dracula’s score (two ladies and, via one of them, some Hampstead urchins) is minimal, given the 1890s level of metropolitan crime. Jack the Ripper outdoes Dracula three to one. How, one wonders, is the Count keeping body and soul (if he has one) together during his London sojourn?
To ask a simple question why haven’t vampires, given the millennia at their disposal, taken over the whole human show?
I have, as it happens, pondered this question before (in my 1999 book Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?). Then, in the absence of any entirely satisfying answer, I put forward some speculative suggestions including the following:
Who Is Dracula's Father? Page 12
