Dracula

The Legend of Dracula

Dracula was first written by Bram Stoker, an Irish author in 1897. The novel is about Count Dracula, a vampire, who is in the process of relocating from Transylvania to England and the later battle between Dracula and a group of men and a woman. Dracula is classified as a gothic genre based novel but also can be described as horror or vampire literature. The novel also touches base with Victorian topics such as roles of women, immigration, culture and sexual conventions.

Information on the origins of the Dracula story

Bram Stoker did not originally come up with the name ‘Dracula’. There just so happened to be a Dracula in the 15th century whose name was Vlad the Impaler, but Stoker came across him when he was researching in a book titled An Account of the Principalities of Walachia and Moldavia (1820) who fought against the Turks. Stoker read in the books footnote by Wilkinson that “Dracula in the Walachian language means devil” and copied this down into his notes. He was originally going to call the vampire Count Wampyr but later changed it to Count Dracula. The real Dracula was not indeed a Count or vampire and since this there has been great confusion between the two. Stoker immersed himself in the history, lore and legends of Transylvania which he called a ‘whirlpool for the imagination’.

Stoker had a bad dream on the night of the 7 March 1890, and jotted it down the next day on another piece of Lyceum paper headed notepaper: ‘Young man goes out, sees girls on tries to kiss him not on lips but throat. Old Count interferes – rage and fury diabolical – this man belongs to me I want him’. This lead to Jonathan Harker’s journal entry for the night of 15 May in Dracula: ‘I suppose I must have fallen asleep; I hope so, but I fear…I cannot in the least believe that it was all sleep…’ (p 44), it was the origin of Dracula.

In between several other major writing assignments and three other novels he was working on the longest piece he had ever...