Dracula's Guest And Other Weird Tales
DRACULA’S GUEST AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES
BRAM STOKER
was born in Dublin in 1847, the son of a civil servant. He overcame a long childhood illness to attend Trinity College Dublin, where he distinguished himself in athletics, became president of both Philosophical and Historical Societies, and graduated in science. From 1870 to 1877 he worked as a civil servant in Dublin Castle, publishing
The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland
in 1879. During this period he also wrote dramatic criticism, and in 1878 his strong admiration for, and burgeoning friendship with, Henry Irving led the actor to appoint him acting (business) manager at London’s Lyceum Theatre, an experience that produced
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving
(1906). Apart from
Dracula
(1897), Stoker’s other novels and stories have declined in popularity since their original publication, an
oeuvre
which includes
The Mystery of the Sea
(1902),
The Jewel of Seven Stars
(1903),
The Man
(1905) and
The Lair of the White Worm
(1911). A collection of Stoker’s short stories,
Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories
was published posthumously in 1914 by his widow, Florence Stoker.
KATE HEBBLETHWAITE
is a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. She was educated at the University of St Andrews and Trinity College Dublin, gaining a Ph.D. from Trinity in 2005. She has published a number of articles on popular fiction authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is currently working on the popular literature and culture of this period, with an especial interest in the relationship between science and the novel.
BRAM STOKER
with The Lair of the White Worm
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
KATE HEBBLETHWAITE
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories
published by George Routledge & Sons Ltd 1914
The Lair of the White Worm
first published in 1911 by William Rider and Son Ltd
This collection published in Penguin Classics 2006
1
Editorial matter copyright © Kate Hebblethwaite, 2006
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editor has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
EISBN: 978–0–141–90492–4
Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories
The Secret of the Growing Gold
Appendix I: Florence Stoker’s ‘Preface’ to
Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories
(1914)
Appendix II:
The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh
(1890) and
The Lambton Worm
(1890)
Thanks are due to the Trinity College Dublin Association and Trust for their allocation of a research grant to enable me to undertake this venture. I also have special debts to the editors at Penguin; particularly to Laura Barber, for commissioning the edition, to Marcella Edwards for seeing it through to its conclusion, and to Lindeth Vasey and Claire Peligry for their limitless patience.
My gratitude is similarly owed to the staff of Trinity’s library, in particular Charles Benson and the Department of Early Printed Books, and to my colleagues at the School of English, especially Ian Campbell Ross for his invaluable advice and Elizabeth McCarthy for her knowledge of the French Revolution. Without the practical support and generous friendship of Darryl Jones, however, this project would never have been started, much less completed, and it is to him that this edition is dedicated.
1847
8 November: Abraham Stoker (Bram) born in Dublin, to Charlotte and Abraham Stoker, the third of seven children.
1854–64
After long incapacitating childhood illness, attends private day school of Rev. William Woods in Dublin.
1864–70
Successful career at Trinity College Dublin: becomes University athletics champion, unbeatable road walker and capped footballer; speaker at the Philosophical Society, of which he becomes President in 1867; graduates as a Batchelor of Arts in 1870.
1867
28 August: sees Henry Irving acting for the first time at Theatre Royal, Dublin. Develops a passion for theatre.
1868
Deeply impressed by Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
(1855).
1870
Enters the Civil Service as a clerk in Dublin Castle.
1871
May: sees Irving again at the Vaudeville Theatre, Dublin. Accepts unpaid position as theatre critic for middle-class Protestant newspaper the
Dublin Evening Mail
. Becomes regular guest of Sir William Wilde and his family.
1872
18 February: writes long, admiring and confessional letter to Whitman (does not send). Elected Auditor of Trinity College Historical Society. September: short story ‘The Crystal Cup’ published. 13 November: delivers address ‘The Necessity for Political Honesty’ in the Dining Hall of Trinity College, later published in Dublin.
1873–4
November–March: becomes (part-time) editor of the short-lived
Halfpenny Press
.
1875
February–May: ‘The Primrose Path’, ‘Buried Treasure’ and ‘The Chain of Destiny’ published.
1876
14 February: writes again to Whitman enclosing his first letter; Whitman replies on 6 March. Irving plays Hamlet at Theatre Royal, Dublin. After Stoker’s momentous meeting with Irving on 3 December they become friends. Stoker is promoted to Inspector of Petty Sessions.
1877
June: Irving gives reading at Trinity College; thirteen days later Stoker spends annual holiday seeing Irving at Lyceum Theatre, London.
1878
June: visits and assists Irving at Lyceum in rewriting W. G. Wills’s play
Vanderdecken
. Mid November: accepts Irving’s invitation to become his acting (business) manager at the Lyceum Theatre. Marries Florence Balcombe on 4 December and joins Irving on tour in Birmingham on 9 December. Ellen Terry joins Irving Company as Ophelia for opening of
Hamlet
on 30 December.
1879
The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland
published. March: meets Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 29 December: Florence gives birth to Irving Noel Thornley Stoker.
1881
Autumn: organizes the first provincial tour of Irving and Ellen Terry. November: collection of children’s stories,
Under the Sunset
, published.
1883
October: manages the first (of six) of Irving’s tours of America.
1884
20 March: meets Whitman in Philadelphia. Becomes friends with Mark Twain.
1885
19 December:
Faust
opens at the Lyceum Theatre with Irving in the role of Mephistopheles: it is the company’s greatest commercial success. December: gives lecture at the Royal Institution, ‘A Glimpse of America’.
1886
October: visits USA to arrange tour of
Faust
for 1887. Visits Whitman at Camden, New Jersey. ‘A Glimpse of America’ published.
1889
The Snake’s Pass
appears as a serial story in the
People
and several other provincial papers.
1890
8 March: makes first notes for what will become
Dracula
. 30 April: called to the Bar of the Inner Temple. November:
The Snake’s Pass
published.
1892
Death of Walt Whitman.
1895
January:
The Watter’s Mou
published as companion volume to Arthur Conan Doyle’s
The Parasite
. 18 July: Henry Irving knighted. October:
The Shoulder of Shasta
published.
1897
18 May: the first and only performance of Stoker’s play
Dracula, or The Un-Dead
performed at the Lyceum Theatre. 26 May:
Dracula
published.
1898
February:
Miss Betty
published; the Lyceum Storage burns down, destroying all the company’s scenes and props.
1901
April: sixpenny paperback edition of
Dracula
published, abridged by Stoker.
1902
July: Lyceum Theatre closes and put into receivership.
The Mystery of the Sea
published, found to be ‘admirable’ in a congratulatory note sent by Conan Doyle. December: Ellen Terry leaves Irving’s company.
1903
November:
The Jewel of Seven Stars
published.
1905
September:
The Man
published. October: while on his farewell tour at Sheffield, Irving collapses and dies; he is buried in Westminster Abbey.
1906
October:
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving
(2 vols.) published. Stoker suffers a stroke which leaves his walking and sight impaired.
1908
15 January: interview with Winston Churchill published in the
Daily Chronicle
. June:
Lady Athlyne
published.
Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party
also published.
1909
July:
The Lady of the Shroud
published.
1910
December:
Famous Impostors
published.
1911
November:
The Lair of the White Worm
published.
1912
20 April: dies at 26 St George’s Square, London; later cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, where his ashes remain.
1914
Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories
published.
(
Readers new to this collection are advised that this Introduction discusses the stories’ plots in detail
.)
To many, Bram Stoker’s name has become synonymous with a single piece of work that, since its publication in 1897, has grown to typify the Victorian Gothic genre.
Dracula
, with its smorgasbord of sexual fantasies and social anxieties, has so far eclipsed anything else that he has written that, to the reader unaccustomed to Stoker’s oeuvre outside it, the extent and range of work that he produced will be somewhat surprising. Thirteen novels, two biographies, one play, one civil service manual and numerous lectures and short stories have all been overshadowed by a single vampire narrative. For a man who wrote so much, that so much should in turn be written about such a small section of his work is a paradox;
Dracula
remains at the forefront and the focus of both academic and popular interest.
This concept of paradox is actually wholly appropriate to Stoker’s work. Despite
Dracula
’s longstanding popularity, its literary merits are less assured, Maud Ellmann arguing that ‘the novel wouldn’t be so good if it weren’t so very bad’, whilst of his other works, ‘most of them [were] execrable’.
1
In turn, in his introduction to the 1983 Oxford World Classics edition of
Dracula
, A. N. Wilson scoffed that, ‘No one in their right mind would think of Stoker as “a great writer”.’
2
Popular yet pulp, enduring yet unendurable – the sense of discrepancy inherent in Stoker’s work is also applicable to the author himself; the volume of literature that has been produced about Stoker since the revival of his reputation in the early 1970s testifying, ironically, to his indecipherability. Since 1962 four full-length biographies have been written which, whilst illuminating the
facts
about Stoker’s life, nevertheless fail to get to grips with the man himself. There is very little material extant in which Stoker bares his innermost thoughts. As enigmatic as his most renowned creation, Stoker himself confessed in a letter to Walt Whitman in 1872 that, ‘I… am naturally secretive to the world.’
3
The bare facts about Stoker’s life have provided rich pickings for literary detective work, and critics have tended to read his works as much for the potential biographical insight they can offer as for the stories they tell. The most manifestly persistent of these critical interpretations has been speculation about his sexual proclivities. Claims have been equally stringently made for Stoker’s rampant heterosexual carnality, his closet homosexuality, his anal fixations, oral fixations, Oedipus complex, fear of assertive women (especially mothers) and domination fetishes. The most enduring mystery surrounding Bram Stoker’s life in this respect has been his death. Locomotor Ataxia, a stated cause of death on Stoker’s Death Certificate, was hailed as proof of the author’s contraction of syphilis and thus womanizing reputation by Daniel Farson.
4
Whilst this was rejected by Stoker’s third biographer, Barbara Belford, and similarly dismissed by Haining and Tremayne as ‘unproven’,
5
Stoker’s most recent biographer, Paul Murray, has once more taken up the argument for his ‘likely’ syphilitic condition, citing the author’s stroke in 1906, his prescription for arsenic medication in 1910 and his stamping way of walking as evidence.
6
The virtual impenetrability of Stoker himself and the excesses contained within his fiction lend themselves to this outpouring of biographical conjecture. William Hughes and Andrew Smith argue that
Dracula
has become ‘
the
Freudian text
par excellence
’,
7
revealing a wide range of repressed sexual desires and concerns. Among other interpretations, the syphilitic condition here too has been raised, the novel’s preoccupation with insanity, pestilence and implicitly sexual contamination being cited as evidence of Stoker’s own sexual ill-health.
To read novels solely for a glimpse of their biographical signposts, however, is to do both text and author a great disservice. Whilst fascinating in their own right as the last published works of Bram Stoker, the two books that comprise this
volume,
Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories
and
The Lair of the White Worm
also demonstrate that ultimately Stoker was a master of the Gothic genre, fully justifying his reputation alongside late-nineteenth-century ‘greats’ such as Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Aside from the spine-chilling excellence of such stories as ‘The Burial of the Rats’, ‘The Squaw’ and ‘The Judge’s House’, Stoker offset his tales of the weird and uncanny with an experimental outlook that not only responded to the social conscience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also tapped into contemporaneous experimental movements in art and literature. Far from the rather slapdash image that Stoker’s fiction beyond
Dracula
has generated, such works can be seen to be the product of deep thought, research and a profound understanding of the society in which he lived.
8
The Lair of the White Worm
, for example, widely dismissed as ‘clearly the work of a man sick in mind if not in body’,
9
is, in reality, an intensely intriguing novel, working on mythic, historical, social and sexual levels, whilst also responding to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century shifts in artistic expression. In short, Stoker was a popular fiction writer of significant aptitude, in tune with the undercurrents of the social thought and creative articulation of his time.
Considerable debate surrounds the relationship between ‘Dracula’s Guest’ and its namesake,
Dracula
. First appearing in
Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories
(1914), a volume of short stories collected and published by Bram Stoker’s widow after his death, it was claimed by Florence Stoker to be ‘an hitherto unpublished episode from
Dracula
… originally excised owing to the length of the book’. For this reason, the story as it now stands has often been accepted as the ‘original’ first chapter of
Dracula
, subsequently deleted by Stoker’s editors.
10
However, the relationship between the two stories is rather
more complicated than at first appears.
Dracula
is written as a series of diary entries, letters and newspaper reports; ‘Dracula’s Guest’, on the other hand, is a first-person account written by an
anonymous
author. Dissimilarities in tone and style further separate the two to such an extent that, whilst ‘Dracula’s Guest’ certainly displays strong links with the novel, it is unlikely that the story as it now stands was precisely that which was initially planned for publication with
Dracula
. Much more probable is the notion that the story is a self-contained episode, reworked from Stoker’s original ideas for the novel’s opening. Certainly, the final published version of
Dracula
itself is a much better work
without
such an opening: it is tighter and more immediate, and the reader is instantly drawn into the physical and psychological journey towards the Transylvanian Count.
Despite its apparently simple plot – a man goes for a walk, gets lost, has an adventure and is rescued – ‘Dracula’s Guest’ is skilfully ambiguous. The identities of both the ‘tall and thin’ figure that causes the carriage horses to ‘jump and kick about’ and the wolf that ultimately saves the narrator, and their own relationship to the Boyar Dracula whose telegram ends the story, are never fully stated. Yet similarities to the Count’s physiognomy and manner in
Dracula
itself can certainly be drawn; his height, his effect on carriage horses, his ability to metamorphose into ‘an immense dog’ when disembarking at Whitby, and his ‘peculiarly sharp white teeth’ and ‘red, gleaming eyes’,
11
would indeed suggest the two characters are one and the same. Likewise, the narrator’s description of the wolf’s ‘fierce and acrid’ breath and his instinctive ‘loathing, like the first stage of sea-sickness’ when in contact with it are analogous to Harker’s reaction to Dracula’s touch:
As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.
12
That Stoker keeps his readers guessing to the end of the story – and beyond – is testimony to his skill as a writer of the
Gothic tale. His close attention to detail and the progressive intensification of atmosphere and tension are characteristics of all the narratives in this collection. The violent storms at the stories’ zenith, in particular, are a familiar feature in Stoker’s work.
Such dramatic events and visually evocative scenes have made Stoker’s work a goldmine for cinematographic adaptation. From the many and various versions of
Dracula
that have been made subsequent to F. W. Murnau’s
Nosferatu
(1922)
13
to Seth Holt’s
Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb
(1972), Mike Newell’s
The Awakening
(1980) and Jeffrey Obrow’s
Bram Stoker’s The Mummy
(1997), which all drew their source from Stoker’s
The Jewel of Seven Stars
(1903), the keen eye for melodramatic detail and imaginative impact that Stoker acquired from his years at the theatre translated perfectly on to the silver screen. From this collection alone, ‘Dracula’s Guest’ and
The Lair of the White Worm
were, respectively, adapted into
Dracula’s Daughter
(1936, directed by Lambert Hillyer) and Ken Russell’s
tour de force
of satirical camp
The Lair of the White Worm
(1988). Far from being a one-book wonder, then, Stoker has influenced the changing trends in modern cinema.
The undercurrent of sexual tension that critics have been quick to detect in Stoker’s work is certainly apparent in ‘Dracula’s Guest’. The homoerotic nature of Dracula’s claim over Harker’s prostrate body – ‘This man belongs to me!’
14
– is mirrored in this story in the proprietorial guarding of the narrator’s body by the wolf. If the wolf is indeed also Dracula, then both its intimate action of licking the narrator’s throat and the feeling of ‘semi-lethargy’ that this prompts in the narrator – which recalls the state of languorous ecstasy induced in Harker by the three female vampires – undoubtedly lend a degree of support to those who have argued for a ‘queer’ reading of the Count. Certainly, as in
Dracula
the image of the undead female is a source of horror: sexually alluring but deadly, the Countess Dolingen is finally destroyed by a (phallic) iron stake, through which lightning is conducted. Like Lucy Westenra (
Dracula
), similarly pinioned, and Lady Arabella March
(The Lair of the White Worm)
who is also destroyed by lightning, in her death
the Countess Dolingen symbolizes both the final triumph of the male over the female and her purgation from Nature itself – punishment perhaps for her beauty, her allure or quite simply for her femininity.
In his depiction of fearsome women and atmospheric excess, parallels have been drawn between Stoker’s stories and those of another Irish writer of the Gothic, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73). The possibility of a direct connection between Stoker and Le Fanu is tantalizing: Stoker started working as an unpaid drama critic for the Le Fanu-owned
Dublin Evening Mail
in 1871; during this time he was also a regular visitor to the Wildes’ house in Merrion Square, Le Fanu being their close neighbour. Many of Le Fanu’s stories were published in the
Dublin University Magazine
(at one time also owned by him), which Stoker would undoubtedly have had access to during his period at Trinity, and Le Fanu’s
The Watcher and Other Weird Stories
(1894) was in Stoker’s library. Whether the two actually met is unclear, although it seems likely that they must have been aware of one another. Certainly, the influence of Le Fanu upon Stoker’s writing is widely acknowledged, most especially in the case of ‘Dracula’s Guest’ and
Carmilla
(1872).
Set in Styria and framed as a case from the file of Le Fanu’s psychic doctor, Martin Hesslius, the novella centres on the beautiful young Carmilla, who arrives at the castle of an aristocratic family. Uncannily, Carmilla is the very image of a figure that had appeared, many years before, in a dream of the family’s daughter, Laura. Whilst the two girls are forming an unusually close attachment bordering on the sexual, the surrounding villages are beset by a series of mysterious deaths. Laura soon falls victim to this ‘plague’ but is saved by a family friend, the uncle of one of Carmilla’s previous victims, who reveals their mysterious guest’s true vampiric identity. Carmilla’s tomb is subsequently discovered and, in her lifelike death-state, she is decapitated and staked. Stoker borrowed much from Le Fanu’s story, not least his technique of building a story on the shaky foundations of both doubt and fear, leaving the supernatural or unexplainable elements unexplained and indefinitely powerful. In the end we are left with only half a rationalization for
the events that take place in both Styria and Munich – and enjoy the stories all the more for it.
Both Stoker’s and Le Fanu’s Gothic stories deal with the violation of boundaries: between the worlds of the natural and the supernatural, dreams and reality, human and animal, life and death. Carmilla herself violates all four of these, adding sexual ambiguity (akin to Dracula’s) to her list of misdemeanours. She woos Laura like a predatory lover with ‘gloating eyes’ and ‘hot lips’, female sexuality displaying itself in all its guilty wantonness: ‘she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one forever.” ’
15
Whilst homo-social desire may be aberrant for Le Fanu, for Stoker, it is a source of sanctuary from dangerous female sexuality. Men tend to falter when strong women abound, as
Dracula
’s Professor Abraham Van Helsing’s words encapsulate: