Dracula in England

Just over a century ago, the novel Dracula was published, written by the Irish author Bram Stoker. It created a widespread interest in vampirism. But what was Stoker’s inspiration?

Philip Coppens

On June 24, 1897, Midsummer’s day, the London publisher Arthur Constable published Dracula, by author Bram Stoker. He was a relatively well-known author, with already a certain amount of works published. Nevertheless, they did not provide an adequate source of income, which meant that he continued to work as manager of the Lyceum Theatre, in the heart of London, where he co-operated with the famous actor Henry Irving.
Dracula was a thriller that featured vampires, creatures that feast on human blood. In an era where the story is most famous as films, the novel was written as a series of letters, sent between the various characters. The sum of these letters was the story of count Dracul, living in Transylvania. The count desired to buy several properties in and around London, for which he employs the services of a London based business agency, who decide to send an employee to Transylvania, to liaise with the count. His name is Jonathan Harker, who soon realises that the count is not his average client and notices his rather “eccentric” nature.
While he is away, his fiancée Mina is staying with her rich friend Lucy Westenra, in the English coastal town of Whitby. It is in that harbour that the count’s ship arrives and a series of bizarre events are set into motion. Lucy becomes ill and suffers from a remarkable amount of blood loss. It allows for the protagonists to realise that the count is a vampire, using human blood to attain immortality. Assisted by the Dutch professor van Helsing, Harker and his friends are able to defeat the count. To save Lucy from an eternal “undead”, a stake is driven through her heart and her head is chopped off.

Transylvania has opened all sites of its “vampire trail” to tourism. But Stoker never visited the area and the sites that formed the inspiration for Transylvania were all located in his native Ireland and his adopted home in England. The only item that came from Romania and that was used in his book was the story of count Dracul, based on Vlad Tepes. He was born in 1431, a royal who would assume the throne later in life. He founded the city of Budapest, the capital of Hungary. He was a cruel man and there are legends that he forced mothers to eat their own children. In a fight against the Turks, it is claimed that he killed 20,000 of his enemies, displaying them on pointed, oiled wooden posts. One of his nicknames was apparently Dracul, as it was claimed that he was a member of a knightly order known as the “Dragons”. Like vampires, they are mythical creatures, both having a reputation for cruelly killing innocent people.
However, Stoker did not merely transform the dragon into a vampire. The legend of the vampire predated Stoker, even though his novel would become its most famous example. At the time when Stoker was writing his book, there were several reports in the newspapers that spoke about “vampire-like creatures”. They were mostly seen in and around churchyards and cemeteries. It was a type of story that had been running on and off and Stoker himself knew some of these tales: his mother had told him such stories as a child and they had remained with him for the rest of his life.

Stoker wrote Dracula, or The Undead, in his spare time. He used elements of his own life and worked them in the story. Whitby, where Dracula arrives in England, was the coastal town where Stoker spent his holidays. After slaying a victim in the town, the count then moves south to London; it was the voyage Stoker himself made upon his return from his holidays. Stoker also moved in the mundane circles of London and he used this in the novel. Psychiatrist Seward, a friend of Lucy, using morphine, as what seems to be nothing more than a recreational drug – a sign of London’s times at the end of the 19th century.

In London, Dracula tourism is mostly centred on Highgate Cemetery, in northern London. The cemetery is a labyrinth of graves, largely in the Victorian style. Many believe that the cemetery forms the backdrop for the climax of the novel.
The scene involves the moment when friends of Westenra decide to stop her suffering as an undead. Her only crime was to fall in live with count Dracul, which she paid for with her life, and an eternal life as a vampire. Her friends convene in a pub, Jack Straw’s Castle. The pub still exists, in Hampstead. From there, the friends decide to go to Lucy’s grave, to give her eternal rest. This site is normally given as Highgate Cemetery, but research has shown that the voyage from Hampstead to Highgate does not correspond with the descriptions given in the book.
Lucy’s tomb was placed in Hendon, not Highgate. In Hendon cemetery, there is a strange mausoleum, which perfectly fits the descriptions of Stoker’s novel. In reality, it is the tomb of Philip Rundall, a prominent member of Hendon’s community, who died in 1827. The cemetery was also one of the favourite places of one of Stoker’s best friends.

Dracula not only inspired a rage, it also inspired a new obsession: where people wanted to become a vampire. It resulted in people hoping to feed them solely on human blood – or if difficult to obtain, blood. More often, it resulted in trying to roleplay the various rituals that the count practiced in the novel. Some even believe that they are only able to survive on human blood – the sole contents of their diet. Despite this bizarre belief, they tend to live an otherwise normal life and do not go about sacrificing humans.

Highgate Cemetery (left) has always been the preferred location for the setting of Dracula,
but it seems that Hendon Cemetery (right) is a more likely and fitting location.

It is remarkable, as Stoker himself seems to have been an ordinary human being. Still, some have claimed that he was a member of a secret society, the Order of the Golden Dawn. The group is notorious as it is claimed to have been a hotbed of strange sexual activity and rituals. There is, however, no solid evidence that proves that Stoker was a member of the organisation. But it is not necessary that he was a member; he was a member of London society and may have heard about these and/or other organisations’ bizarre rites.

Dracula was Stoker’s fourth novel – The Jewel of the Seven Stars – was one of his later books. This novel would inspire another modern fascination, for which Stoker would be less remembered: the Egyptian mummy horror stories, which to some extent also lay at the basis of the “mummy’s curse” stories, which circulated across Europe at the time of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, in the early 1920s. When Stoker’s Dracula was a hundred years old in 1997, many remembered this momentous novel. When The Jewel of the Seven Stars reached its centenary in 2003, no-one noticed…

This article originally appeared in Frontier Magazine 3.6 (1997) and was slightly adapted.