Key themes
- Victorian anxieties about sex and death
- The foreign threat and the body
- Technology and the tools of modernity against the ancient
About this book
Letters and diaries trace a creeping invasion by an ancient predator; the novel that fixed the vampire in our imagination.
Published in 1897, Dracula drew on Stoker's research into Eastern European folklore and his friendship with a Hungarian scholar. The character of Dracula was inspired in part by his tyrannical employer, actor Henry Irving.
Discussion questions
- Dracula is never given an interior — we see him entirely through other characters' accounts. How does this absence shape the horror — and what would the novel lose if we could read Dracula's thoughts?
- The novel is assembled from journals, letters and newspaper clippings — a found document. What does this epistolary form add to the sense of reality and threat?
- Lucy Westenra's fate and transformation have been read as a punishment for sexual openness, while Mina's virtue protects her. Do you find this reading convincing — and does Stoker seem aware of it?
- Van Helsing assembles a small group with very different skills to fight Dracula. What is the novel saying through this collaborative model of resistance?
- The vampire myth has been adapted endlessly. What does reading Stoker's original reveal that adaptations often lose or transform?
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