Drafts of Dracula

Acknowledgments

Richard Dalby, Joel H. Emerson, and Sylvia Starshine deserve special mention for helping us decipher Bram Stoker’s often all but illegible handwriting. We would also like to thank Paul Allen, who gave us access to the typescript. Rickard Berghorn, René Claveau, Elizabeth Fuller (of the Rosenbach Museum & Library), Peter Golz, Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Leslie S. Klinger, J. Gordon Melton, and Philip Spedding (of the London Library) were kind enough to check and improve parts of Drafts of Dracula. The illustration of Dracula on page 184 is from Simone Berni’s Dracula: The Mystery of the Early Editions.

Foreword

By Dacre Stoker

Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller have done it again! In 2008, they presented a groundbreaking transcription of Bram Stoker’s working notes for Dracula to delighted scholars and fans all over the world. Drafts of Dracula renders their research as a gift that keeps on giving. A decade’s worth of scholarship combined with recent discoveries by the Stoker estate and the London Library have allowed Eighteen-Bisang and Miller to continue their efforts to outline "the birth of Dracula in the mind of Bram Stoker" (as Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu put it).

Dracula’s conception and gestation are illustrated by a detailed analysis of early drafts of the novel, including Dracula’s Guest, the typescript and the dramatic reading of 1897. Hundreds of footnotes on vampire literature and popular culture illustrate how the novel changed and evolved over the years.

My great grand-uncle’s often careless handwriting and spare, note-to-self style of writing reflects the intimacy of its content. His notes are a spontaneous, creative record, not a self-conscious narration. Bram’s note-taking style reflects his background as a civil servant and qualified barrister and affirms his status as a part-time writer. The primary occupation of his adult life was managing London’s Lyceum Theatre (1878–1904), which involved coordinating the theatre’s local seasons and international tours, keeping its financial records, and doing secretarial work for Sir Henry Irving. Needless to say, he was a busy man, and the notes suggest the extremes of a part-time passion, as pages of bullet-points and shorthand cohabitate with typewritten research and time-charted plotlines. Several entries show the bumping and sloping hand of someone who is writing with a pad balanced on his knee.

Photographs of several of the original documents give readers the sense of looking over Stoker’s shoulder, but there remains a beguiling distance from the mind of the man himself. The closest he came to an autobiography was his two-volume Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, which is not terribly close.

The decade since Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula’s initial publication has yielded a treasure trove of new discoveries. In 2012, Elizabeth and I had the pleasure of publishing Stoker’s Dublin journal (The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker) which, for years, had been hiding in plain sight on his great-grandson’s bookshelf on the Isle of Wight. Stoker’s journal from his young adult life in Dublin outlines musings, observations, and rough-drafts of plots.

There is a growing interest in the locations where Stoker composed his drafts and manuscripts. While proof of his whereabouts when he wrote particular sections remains elusive, we know from an 1897 interview with Jane Stoddard of the British Weekly that Stoker gave the actual writing period to be about three years (although the plot had been in his mind for some time longer). The fall of 2018 saw the publication of Michael Shepherd’s study When Brave Men Shudder, which pinpoints Cruden Bay in Scotland as the place where Stoker spent most of his summer holidays between 1893 and 1910 - a far greater period of time than previously thought. There is now no doubt that he wrote the lion’s share of Dracula there, as well as The Mystery of the Sea and The Watter’s Mou’.

Another area of scholarship connects Stoker’s research with the resources available to him at specific times and places. Eighteen-Bisang and Miller’s examination of Stoker’s holiday in Whitby is a singular example. The belief that Stoker discovered the name Dracula in a book that he borrowed from a library in Whitby in 1890 has long been part of what-everybody-knows-about-Dracula, but Philip Spedding discovered that William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820), and most of books that Bram used to create his masterpiece, were available at the London Library where Bram did the bulk of his research.

One of the entries in Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula, See Samuelson’s Roumania. P. 146, refers to James Samuelson’s study of 1882, Roumania Past and Present, which focuses on the early-medieval Bulgari people. The text contains a captivating account of Attila the Hun’s Carpathian descendants (whose blood is in these veins, claims Count Dracula) and a sketch of Vlad the Impaler’s life, lineage, and reputation. This raises the possibility that Stoker knew more about the historical Dracula family than was previously believed.

Each new discovery has the potential to alter the course of everything we know about the story, making the depth of commentary and clarity of insight offered in these pages an invaluable resource, both as a clearinghouse of contemporary scholarship and as a foundation for future explorations.

In February of this year, Robert Eighteen-Bisang and I were invited to attend Creation Theatre Company’s avant-garde adaptation of Dracula which was performed at the London Library - the very site where my great-grand-uncle did much of the research for his masterpiece. The play, which featured two actors (Sophie Greenham and Bart Lambert) in a variety of roles, used innovative settings and designs to present the most eloquent and dramatic passages from the novel.

Following the play, I introduced Robert to my cousin, Robin MacCaw, and his daughter, Mimi. Given a deluge of new information about Dracula, we are planning a series of annotated editions of the novel, the play, and the abridged edition of 1901, which will be authorized by the Stoker estate. These books will take advantage of recent discoveries by our family, as well as Robert’s world-famous collection of vampire books.

Introduction

Drafts of Dracula is a new book that includes excerpts from our award-winning Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula which was published by McFarland in 2008. Hence, the first nine drafts in this book update and revise our initial findings.

Early drafts of Bram Stoker’s landmark horror novel were auctioned at Sotheby’s in London in 1913 and eventually made their way to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia where they are housed today. They show the development of the plot from early, often unrecognizable pastiches of people, places and events to a nine-page calendar of events that includes most of the familiar story that has been told and retold for more than a century. These papers (hereafter the Notes) are indispensable for scholars and anyone who is interested in the genesis and composition of Dracula.

The first reference to the Notes appeared in Raymond McNally’s anthology A Clutch of Vampires in 1975. Two years later, Joseph Bierman undertook a comprehensive study of these documents. He summarizes them succinctly:

… handwritten and typewritten notes, dated and undated, about numerous subjects of central or tangential interest to a writer who was thinking of settings, characters, and plot for a story of the supernatural; descriptions of topography, landscape and customs from the work of contemporary travellers in Danubian countries; notes on a theory of dreams; transcriptions of tombstone inscriptions; accounts of conversations with old sailors and coastguardsmen; and notes for the novel itself (52).

Bierman determined that the earliest dated note was written on 8 March 1890, but his contention that Bram Stoker found the name Dracula in a library in Whitby while on vacation with his wife, Florence, and their son, Noel, in the summer of 1890 has been challenged by a recent discovery. In 2018, Philip Spedding discovered that Stoker had been a member of the London Library from 1890 to 1897 and did much of his research for Dracula there.

Few people knew that the Notes existed until Professors Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu came upon them fortuitously when at the Rosenbach Museum & Library. Their surprise and joy are evident in the introduction to The Essential Dracula (1979). "We were paralyzed with amazement…. After we had pored over the Stoker notes, we looked at each other in triumph. We knew that we were at last witnessing the birth of Dracula in the mind of Bram Stoker" (17).

Their annotated edition of Dracula (The Essential Dracula) drew heavily on the Notes for annotations to the first three chapters, which are full of details about Transylvanian history, geography, and customs.

Christopher Frayling conducted a detailed examination of the Notes in his vampire anthology, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (1991) where he focused on material that shaped the first three chapters of the novel. In his words, "Not only are these by far the best-known chapters of Dracula - they reappear in all the major screen adaptations - but they are also the chapters for which Bram Stoker did the most interesting research" (303).

Over the ensuing years, authors used the Notes in ingenious ways. In Bram Stoker (1982), Phyllis Roth uses highlights from them to provide a review Dracula in Dracula’s Guest and other works. Clive Leatherdale’s The Origins of Dracula (1987) reprints excerpts from William Wilkinson, Sabine Baring-Gould, Major E. C. Johnson, and Emily Gerard. David J. Skal’s Hollywood Gothic found that The Dracula notes, with their abundance of overlapping characters, offer one the few tangible insights into Stoker’s working methods (22). The Rosenbach’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Centennial Exhibition (1997) includes photographs of several pages of notes with brief explanations of their contents. Two of Elizabeth Miller’s books - Dracula: Sense & Nonsense (2000 [revised 2006]) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Documentary Volume (2005) - draw heavily on the Notes to challenge widespread misconceptions about the novel. Bram Stoker’s Notes have even inspired a novel. In The Un-Dead: The Dracula Novel Rewritten to Include Stoker’s Deleted Characters and Events (2007), Joel Emerson imagines what Dracula would look like if the characters and events that Stoker hinted at in the Notes were reinserted into the text.

Until we obtained permission from the Rosenbach to publish an annotated transcription of this material, only a handful of its 124 pages had seen the light of day. The primary intention of Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula was to make photocopies and transcriptions of every page of the Notes available to anyone who is interested in them.

The Notes are divided into three sections: handwritten plot notes, handwritten research notes, and typewritten research notes. The arbitrary order in which these documents are arranged is often confusing but, before we could place them in a logical and readable sequence, we were confronted by the challenge of transcribing the handwritten material.

As Stoker himself confessed, I seldom wrote, in working times, less than fifty letters a day. Fortunately - for both myself and the readers, for I write in an extremely bad hand - the bulk of them were short (Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving v1.42). We were able to decipher most of his script without difficulty, but particular words, phrases and lines of text resisted our initial efforts. Parallel passages in other parts of the Notes, sources cited in the Notes and the text of Dracula, helped us solve many of these puzzles. Patience and perseverance enabled us to transcribe most of the handwritten material, but a number of expressions refused to yield their secrets to us.

We crossed out any text Stoker had deleted text and indicated unreadable text with xxx. Hence, any illegible deletion is transcribed as xxx. We also took the liberty of correcting spelling errors and amending the author’s idiosyncratic abbreviations and punctuation. Finally, we inserted an en dash to indicate any pause the author ignored or took for granted. For instance, Seward’s diary wants a cat is rendered Seward’s diary - wants a cat. These conventions allowed us to transcribe the text page by page, line by line and word by word.

Our next task was to determine the proper sequence of the plot notes. We would like to have been able to present them in the same order in which they had been written, but many pages contain revisions that were made at a later, unknown date (or dates), making it impossible to determine what the first draft said. Dated pages and other clues allowed us to group pages together in rough chronological order: early outlines of the plot, chapter-by-chapter drafts of the entire novel, a calendar of events which contains a new version of the plot of the novel, and various outlines for the final part of the book.

After a great deal of trial and error, we found that the key was how the position of each page affects the flow of the text. Our decisions were more of art than a science, for the Notes can be arranged in various ways. Drafts of Dracula presents them as nine complete drafts with eight sections of notes on specific chapters or topics.

The most important difference between Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula and the current volume may be the position and interpretation of the first three pages. We have decided that pages 38a, 38b and 38c are neither research notes nor a simple memo. They constitute the earliest-know draft of Dracula.

In addition, we have not provided photocopies of every page of the original material. However, most drafts are introduced by a photocopy of the first page of text.

Method of Presentation

Our explanatory text and footnotes contain three types of references:

1.The original page numbers of the Notes are referred to as the Rosenbach numbers. These numbers are not part of the original document; they were added by the Rosenbach Museum & Library.

2.Quotations from Dracula give the chapter and page number in Archibald Constable’s text of 1897. Hence, I am Dracula; and I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house (2:17) refers to chapter 2, page 17.

3.Quotations from other sources give the author’s or editor’s name followed by its title or page number.

Limitations of the Notes

1.Bram Stoker’s Original Foundation Notes & Data for his ‘Dracula’ does not include all of his preliminary drafts. Given his habit of jotting ideas on any scrap of paper that was readily available and the inevitable passage of time, some material has been lost.

2.Almost half the events in the novel are not mentioned in the Notes. Most of the interaction between human beings and vampires from chapters 16 to 27 are missing.

3.The Notes are just one stage in the development of the text. The typescript is the next known pre-textual document, but it is impossible to have moved directly from one to the other. Bram Stoker must have bridged the gap between them with one or more drafts of his masterpiece.

Once we began to see the material in the Notes as a series of drafts and commentaries, it became apparent that Dracula’s Guest, The Un-Dead (the typescript), and Dracula: or the Un-Dead (Bram Stoker’s dramatic adaptation of Dracula) could also be seen as drafts. Imagine our delight when we discovered that putting all of these drafts together for the first time offered new insights into the creation and evolution of the novel.

Appendices:

Eight appendices contribute to our understanding and appreciation of Dracula:

1.A Bram Stoker Timeline provides a brief biography that shows how people and events in Bram Stoker’s lifetime may have influenced his work.

2.The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker contains ideas for stories Stoker jotted down between August 1871 and 4 June 1882.

3.The Rosenbach Page Numbers lists the Rosenbach’s page numbers in their original order and in the order we have presented them.

4.The London Library revolves around the London Library’s recent discovery of the very books that Stoker used to research his masterpiece.

5.The Argosy’s Dracula provides an amusing early précis of the novel and a foreword by Florence Stoker.

6.Dracula: The Novel We Could Have Read presents characters and events from the Notes that do not appear in the novel.

7.Early Adaptations of Dracula concludes that the notorious Jack the Ripper preface was not written by Bram Stoker and is not part of what Sherlock Holmes’ fans would call the Canon.

8.Is There No End? presents unanswered questions about Dracula.

Bram Stoker’s Original Foundation Notes & Data for His Dracula

[This remarkable book, which has already run into nine editions,¹ has been aptly described as the very weirdest of weird tales.²]

¹. Archibald Constable’s final edition of Dracula claims to be the Eighth edition of 1904. Hence, when William Rider & Son assumed the rights to the novel in 1912 they designated their first printing the Ninth Edition.

². The phrase the very weirdest of weird tales originated in a review of Dracula that appeared in Punch on 26 June 1897.

1

Handwritten Notes on the Plot

Draft 1: Vampire

Draft 1:

Vampire

Rosenbach #38a. Size (in inches): 6 x 3.

Vampire³

Memo (1)⁴

no looking glasses in Count’s⁵ house⁶

never can see him reflected in one - no shadow?⁷

lights arranged to give no shadow⁸

never eats nor drinks⁹

carried or led over threshold¹⁰

enormous strength

see in the dark

power of getting small or large

money always old gold¹¹ - traced to Salzburg banking house¹²

I-2¹³ At Munich Dead House¹⁴ see face among flowers¹⁵ - think corpse¹⁶ - but is alive¹⁷

III          +¹⁸ Afterwards when white moustache¹⁹ grown is same as face of Count in London²⁰

          Doctor at Dover Custom House²¹ sees him or corpse²²

          Coffins selected to be taken over - one wrong one brought²³

³. The word vampire is emphasized and underlined to create a title which may be a tribute to John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), whose villain, Lord Ruthven, is often seen as the progenitor of modern vampire fiction.

⁴. The first page of the Notes emphasizes vampires’ strengths and weaknesses for, before you can play any game, you must know what the rules are.

⁵. Stoker’s vampire was a Count before he was named Dracula or lined his coffin with soil from Transylvania.

⁶. [H]ouse, rather than castle, hints at an early or missing plot.

⁷. The vampire women in Castle Dracula threw no shadow on the floor (3:38) and, in the typescript, Seward remarks, It was a strange trick of the moon light, to be sure, but it appeared that he [Dracula] cast no shadow what so ever.

⁸. No such arrangement appears in the novel.

⁹. It is strange that as yet I have not seen the Count eat or drink (2:27).

¹⁰. This belief comes from folklore, which consists of local myths that are created for amusement.

¹¹. Dracula has gold of all kinds… covered with a film of dust (4:48).

¹². Salzburg is about 175 miles east of Vienna. In the published text, the Count’s bankers are Herren Klopstock and Billreuth of Buda-Pesth.

¹³. I–2, I, II and III are book and chapter numbers, which may have been added at a later date.

¹⁴. The role of the Munich Dead House is expanded in the Notes and mentioned in the typescript, but it was dropped from the novel. A dead house is a mortuary, not a mausoleum. In the 31st chapter of Life on the Mississippi (1883), Stoker’s friend, Mark Twain, recalls: One day, during a ramble about the city, I visited one of the two establishments where the Government keeps and watches corpses until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in a trance state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows - all of them with wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds. Along the sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows; and in each of these lay several marble-visaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands. Around a finger of each of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring; and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a watch-room yonder, where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring to the aid of any of that pallid company who, waking out of death, shall make a movement - for any, even the slightest, movement will twitch the wire and ring that fearful bell. I imagined myself a death-sentinel drowsing there alone, far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that awful summons! So I inquired about this thing; asked what resulted usually if the watchman died, and the restored corpse came and did what it could to make his last moments easy. But I was rebuked for trying to feed an idle and frivolous curiosity in so solemn and so mournful a place; and went my way with a humbled crest.

¹⁵. After outlining the vampire’s powers and particulars, see face among flowers is the first line of action. Flowers mask the stench of decomposition.

¹⁶. David J. Skal notes that The corpse, of course, is the Count himself, who has found the perfect place to hide in plain sight as he makes longer and longer exploratory trips from Transylvania in anticipation of his triumphant relocation to England (Something in the Blood 244). This motif was dropped from the novel but may have inspired an incident in Dracula’s Guest where the narrator stumbles upon a beautiful woman with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier (11).

¹⁷. Edgar Allan Poe’s The Premature Burial of 1844 revolves around a man who is obsessed with the fear of being buried alive.