Undying legacy Celebrating 125 years of Dracula – the monster who changed the world
It’s exactly 125 years since the publication of Bram Stoker’s masterpiece Dracula. Here, our Writer at Large, a horror novelist who is a scholar of all things spooky, charts the roots of the evil Count and explains how the Dracula myth has shaped culture
DRACULA would never have been written were it not for the most decadent and sexually-charged holiday in literary history.
The novel turns 125 years old this month, but its roots lie in the torrid love affairs and drug-fuelled nights of fantasy which took place at the famed Villa Diodati overlooking Lake Geneva in 1816 – long before Dracula’s author Bram Stoker was even born.
The Swiss mansion was rented by Lord Byron – known throughout Europe as “mad, bad and dangerous to know” – as he fled scandal in England amid rumours of an incestuous affair with his half-sister.
He took up residency at the villa with his friend Percy Shelley, a fellow poet, Shelley’s wife-to-be Mary and her step-sister Claire, and Byron’s personal physician Dr John Polidori, dubbed Polly Dolly by the others.
This was the infamous Year Without a Summer – also known as “Eighteen Hundred and Freeze to Death” – when wild weather caused by a volcanic eruption in Indonesia meant temperatures in Europe plunged, crops failed, and food riots broke out.
In an atmosphere of foggy nights and dark stormy days, the group decided to pass the time inventing scary stories.
There was plenty of laudanum – a mix of pure alcohol and opium – on hand to fuel imaginations. Young Mary, of course, then just 19, created Frankenstein.
Her husband Percy was too scared by the goings-on to come up with a tale, Byron was too lazy, and Claire was sleeping with both Byron and Shelley, so she was preoccupied. Polly-Dolly, however, wrote The Vampyre, a work which would directly influence Stoker’s Dracula, published in May 1897.
Until Polidori, vampires were shambling brutes, peasants risen from their graves in Eastern European folk tales.
But Polidori was holidaying with one of the most sexually predatory aristocrats of the age – and that affected his imagination. Byron was infamous for seducing women, breaking their hearts, destroying their reputations and abandoning them.
The vampire villain in Polidori’s novel, Lord Ruthven, bears striking similarities to Byron – a dangerous aristocrat who literally sucks the lifeblood out of his female victims. Lord Ruthven is Scottish, incidentally, and the real title (Lord Ruthven of Freeland) still exists to this day. When The Vampyre was later staged in England, Lord Ruthven appeared in Highland regalia.
The motif of “the Byronic hero” would go on to inspire a host of other brooding characters from Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s
Wuthering Heights, all the way to modern creations like Edward Cullen in the teen vampire saga Twilight, and even the bondagelite mummy-porn fantasy figure Christian Grey from Fifty Shades Of Grey.
Stoker also drew on early Gothic fiction (as did Bronte in Wuthering Heights), picking up influences from novels like The Castle Of Otranto, which gave him the aesthetics of the vampire story with its creaking staircases and cobwebs. But that is just the fictional roots of Dracula.
There are some very strange “real life” events, too, which go into the ingredients of the undead Count.
Real life vampires
EARLY in Stoker’s novel, the hero Jonathan Harker, en route to meet Dracula at his Transylvanian castle, hears locals talking of