With no entry on 10th May, I thought it a good opportunity to discuss a little of the paratext of Dracula, based on my Penguin Classics copy with Introduction and Notes by Maurice Hindle, and a Preface by Christopher Frayling.

The original Dracula was published with a famous yellow cover and red text in 1897:

Less famous is the 1901 sixpenny paperback, which Frayling says contains, on the jacket, “one of the only illustrations Bram Stoker ever had the chance to approve himself.” Dracula is shown as “a white-haired military commander, with a bushy moustache and a bat-like cloak”, shinning down the stone walls of Castle Dracula". I’m not 100% sure, because it’s much harder to find images of this than of the original, but I believe this may be it:

Apparently, Dracula was initially received with a rather tepid reception. Its reviews believed it to be transgressive of something, but didn’t think it was clear enough about what it transgressed to have literary value like the works of Oscar Wilde or Henrik Ibsen.

Dracula was inspired, to a significant degree, by a dream Stoker had in March 1890. It formed the basis of the 15th May entry that our read-through will be getting to shortly:

Young man goes out, sees girls one tries to kiss him not on lips but throat. Old Count interferes – rage & fury diabolical – this man belogns to me I want him.

That one dream, and the scene it turned into, says a lot about the themes of sexuality that are so strong in Dracula, and may go some way in evidencing the possible bisexuality of Stoker himself. The danger of female sexuality. The strangeness and threat of powerful homosexual men.

Originally, the character was going to be Count Wampyr, until Stoker came across the dry history book An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820), from whence he got the name Dracula. He changed the title of the novel from The Un-Dead “at the very last minute” before publication.

Quite sadly, when Stoker died in 1912, Dracula was not yet worthy in the public consciousness of a mention in his obituary. The first significant adaptation (in Murnau’s Nosferatu) wouldn’t release for ten years, and the famous Universal adaptation was almost two decades away.