The Oxford World's Classics DRACULA edited by Roger Luckhurst has the best introduction and the best notes to DRACULA I've ever seen. It outclasses THE ESSENTIAL DRACULA, whose notes push the reader around one way or another. It explains more and it also, wisely, keeps quiet more, letting the book weave its own spell.
The introduction shows how DRACULA is a wonderful mix of almost every kind of evil the Victorian English could think of. The vampire has evil features from anti-Catholic prejudice, from anti-Semitic prejudice, from prejudice against Islam, Middle Europe, the unscientific past -- about the only un-English thing that gets a good word is garlic. As the introducer points out, Dracula is in part based on the "real" Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, but is also based on so many other evil rulers and monsters, real and fictional, that no single source for our monster can be cited or believed in.
In other words, Stoker got together a lot of reference works and then made Dracula up, and what a stunning, wonderful job he did.
The Luckhurst Oxford World Classics edition is available on Kindle for a small price that's well worth its wonderful notes and analysis. Amazon, in its curiously mysterious way, will not show you the book if you just type in DRACULA. You have to type in something like DRACULA OXFORD instead, and I very much suggest you do that. Doing without notes of one kind or another seems out of the question to me. There are passages in a messed-up seaside-town dialect Stoker made up from a reference book, and I contend NO ONE can read these passages without notes. Luckhurst also fits all the superstitions together, to the degree that Stoker lets him, and I think you need that kind of help too.
As for Stoker's DRACULA itself, it came across to me in this reading better than it ever had before. I'd read it two or three times in the past, but I'd been overexposed to NOSFERATU and the Lugosi movie, so I misremembered the book, made it cruder in my recollection than it actually was. Two main points I had forgotten (I'm afraid deep DRACULA readers won't think much of me after these admissions -- and watch out, because some of them are mild S-P-O-I-L-E-R-S):
1) Jonathan Harker, Dracula's helpless victim throughout the first fifth of the book, not only survives but gets a pat on the back for his manliness from the rest of the novel's many heroes. That was a relief, and unified the book for me. You can't keep a good man down.
2) Renfield, the crazy guy who eats flies and spiders, is a good reasoner from a high social class (Luckhurst's annotations make this quite clear, and the way Renfield talks tells the reader the same thing). In movie versions, he's creepy and that's about it. In the novel, he's a philosopher, and some of the most important points about vampire philosophy in general come to us from him.
Put these two things together, and the book comes out more intelligent than I remembered, and less pure senseless horror. As pure senseless horror it's just a bit silly. The intelligence and strength of Harker and Renfield save it from that silliness.
Lots of people who don't like the book point out that the opening section, where Harker and Dracula face off against one another, is as horrifying as anybody who likes nineteenth century thrillers could possibly want ... but then the book seems to go soft suddenly, focusing on a shallow woman and seeming, for quite a while, like a dull romance novel.
Luckhurst's notes, again, helped me get over this impression of slowdown. The nature of manliness and womanliness is tremendously important to Stoker's world-view. As Luckhurst points out, all the novel's manly men break down at one point or another, and are braced up by their need to care for weak, helpless women. All the clichés about masculinity and femininity are dragged out -- and all of them are subverted in the most interesting, and horrifying, possible way.
Mina, for example, is a strong, capable woman. Furthermore, she's practically indispensable to the vampire-hunt. The tough doctor, Seward, keeps a diary on phonograph cylinders. He's totally up-to-date, but he forgets even to write a summary of what the cylinders are about, so he can't find anything he told his recorded diary! All he can do is paw helplessly through a drawer full of phonograph cylinders. Mina types them up for him, so that at last the good guys can start tracking Dracula down.
But the good guys' decision to keep her out of the rest of their activities, and inform her of nothing as they start sharpening their stakes, makes her immediately fall into Dracula's clutches.
In other words, if only they trusted women more, their women wouldn't get hurt so much.
Stranger than Dracula himself. But the book has lots of this kind of strangeness. We find out what vampires are bit by bit and bite by bite, but when we're all done, strangely enough, we still don't know what we've really been dealing with: a middle-European monster, or our own monstrous views of how life should go.
I never had more fun than with this DRACULA.
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Reviews with images
The delivery
The book came in a little bit crooked on the front part of it, but either way, I can't wait to read this
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