Dracula: Annotated — Every Victorian Reference Explained. The 1897 Vampire Novel, with Introduction, Historical Context, Notes & Glossary (Complete & Unabridged)

Product Information

Product Description

A young English solicitor takes the night coach into the Carpathians to close a property deal, and by the third evening he has worked out two things: his client casts no reflection, and the doors of the castle are locked from the outside.“In seeking a parallel to this weird, powerful, and horrorful story our mind reverts to such tales as ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho,’ ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘Wuthering Heights’… Dracula is even more appalling in its gloomy fascination than any one of these.” — the Daily Mail, 1 June 1897.Jonathan Harker rides east to sell a ruined London property to a client who has never left Transylvania. The Count is courteous, curious about English law, and interested above all in how a foreigner might live in London without being noticed. By the time Harker understands what he has been helping to arrange, the boxes of Carpathian earth are already on their way to the coast.Weeks later a schooner runs aground at Whitby in a storm with her crew gone and her captain lashed dead to the wheel. Lucy Westenra begins walking in her sleep to the cliff at night; her doctors cannot explain the blood she keeps losing, and the old Dutch professor they send for asks them to hang garlic in her room and not to laugh. Against the thing they are finally forced to name, five people have only what they can gather and compare: diaries kept in shorthand, letters, cylinders spoken into a phonograph, cuttings from the papers. Mina Harker types it all into a single record — and that record is the only weapon that works.Published in 1897, Bram Stoker''s novel did not invent the vampire; it fixed the vampire in place, and everything written since has had to answer it. It remains a book about modern people — timetables, telegrams, case notes, blood transfusions — discovering that the old superstitions were field reports all along.Content of this Special Edition:The complete 1897 text, unabridged, with Stoker''s chapter structure intactIntroduction on the notebooks, the sources, and what Stoker actually readNotes on the shorthand, phonograph and telegrams that drive the plotGlossary of Victorian medical, legal, nautical and folklore termsHistorical context: the New Woman, contagion, and 1890s LondonBiographical portrait of Stoker and his 27 years at the Lyceum TheatreThis Annotated edition is part of The Immortal Book Project by Bonefire Editorial — the classics that were never meant to be forgotten. Read more