Review of Dracula

Read the complete historical review

Manchester Guardian, 15 June 1897. Complete Dracula review, transcribed from the original clipping reproduced by The Guardian in 2012. The modern introduction is not reproduced.

A writer who attempts in the nineteenth century to rehabilitate the ancient legends of the were-wolf and the vampire has set himself a formidable task. Most of the delightful old superstitions of the past have an unhappy way of appearing limp and sickly in the glare of a later day, and in such a story as Dracula, by Bram Stoker (Archibald Constable and Co., 8vo, pp. 390, 6s.), the reader must reluctantly acknowledge that the region for horrors has shifted its ground. Man is no longer in dread of the monstrous and the unnatural, and although Mr. Stoker has tackled his gruesome subject with enthusiasm, the effect is more often grotesque than terrible. The Transylvanian site of Castle Dracula is skilfully chosen, and the picturesque region is well described. Count Dracula himself has been in his day a mediæval noble, who, by reason of his “vampire” qualities, is unable to die properly, but from century to century resuscitates his life of the “Un-Dead,” as the author terms it, by nightly draughts of blood from the throats of living victims, with the appalling consequence that all those once so bitten must become vampires in their turn. The plot is too complicated for reproduction, but it says no little for the author’s powers that in spite of its absurdities the reader can follow the story with interest to the end. It is, however, an artistic mistake to fill a whole volume with horrors. A touch of the mysterious, the terrible, or the supernatural is infinitely more effective and credible.