Dracula

By Bram Stoker and Eleanor Bourg Nicholson

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Nov 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781681491455

Bram Stoker

Bram (Abraham) Stoker was an Irish novelist, born November 8, 1847 in Dublin, Ireland. 'Dracula' was to become his best-known work, based on European folklore and stories of vampires. Although most famous for writing 'Dracula', Stoker wrote eighteen books before he died in 1912 at the age of sixty-four.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Eleanor Bourg Nicholson

[T]o fail here, is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him. . . . To us for ever are the gates of heaven shut; for who shall open them to us again? We go on for all time abhorred by all; . . . an arrow in the side of Him who died for man.¹

Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It’s pure lunacy.²

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, that very weirdest of weird tales, is a living conundrum.³ It is a novel that should by all sane judgments fail as a novel—a distorted, contorted, plot-hole-ridden Victorian monster that brews a concoction of folklore, religion, the occult, technology, history, politics, languages, linguistics, and a host of literary traditions and genres (epic, romance, Gothic, mystery, and horror, with a dash of proto-cyberpunk)⁴ and inflicts the lot onto the epistolary form at oppressive length. This literary smorgasbord is full of moments of unintentional hilarity. Its characters have been derided as stereotypical. It purports to deal with issues more important than life or death, but it has at its head a Dutch vampire-slaying professor who spouts a scrambled cornucopia of religious notions in broken English and rattles off vampiric remedies as if cribbed from a recipe book (pace Mrs. Rundell)⁵. Its creator was a civil-servant-turned-theatrical-business-manager whose first published book was entitled The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879). And yet, as an early reviewer of Dracula noted, this literary failure, penned by an unlikely author, is an exuberant masterpiece, demonstrating extraordinary potency in the midst of its lack of artistic restraint: If you have the bad taste, after this warning, to attempt the book, you will read on to the finish, as I did,—and go to bed, as I did, feeling furtively of your throat.⁶

From its inception, Dracula received mixed reviews. The Athenaeum denounced it as highly sensational, but . . . wanting in the constructive art as well as in the higher literary sense, the Spectator called it decidedly mawkish even as it praised the book as a clever but cadaverous romance, and the Detroit Free Press declared it almost inconceivable that Bram Stoker wrote it.⁷ Other papers applauded the novel as rich in sensations, powerful and horrorful, one of the best things in the supernatural line that we have been lucky enough to hit upon, one of the most powerful novels of the day . . . a superb tour de force which stamps itself on the memory.⁸ Archibald Constable and Company had not gambled unwisely in accepting the manuscript; the first printing of three thousand copies sold reasonably well and was followed by a second printing a few months later. This moderate success would be followed by over one hundred English editions and many translations. The novel would remain in print and gain commercial success at a rapid rate. Sales would rise like a vampiric horde, spreading its bloody contagion across an unresisting world, so that millions of copies were sold by the end of the twentieth century, prompting some to compare Dracula’s sales to those of the Holy Bible.⁹ What is this strange novel? How has it endured? To answer these intriguing questions and to prepare those innocent and unsuspecting readers who are venturing into its clutches for the first time, the man behind the novel must first be introduced.

Abraham Bram Stoker, named after his father, was born at Clontarf, a seaside suburb near Dublin, Ireland, on November 8, 1847. He was the third of seven children of civil servant Abraham Stoker (1799—1876) and his young wife, Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley Stoker (1818—1901). Bram was sickly as a boy and was confined to his bed for a considerable amount of his childhood. His affectionate parents were attentive to their often lonely son; his mind and his imagination were richly nurtured through reading and daydreaming and, in a special way, through the dark and eerie Irish tales told him by his mother—tales that established his lifelong fascination with fantasy and folklore.

The Stoker sons, owing to the ambitious determination of their mother, received university educations, establishing them as members of the Irish Protestant bourgeoisie. After attending the University of Dublin, Bram went on to read history, literature, mathematics, and physics at Trinity College. He was a successful student, graduating with honors. His early interests were not fully neglected: while at Trinity, he wrote a paper for the University Philosophical Society (for which he was elected president) entitled Sensationalism in Fiction and Society. Although he followed his father’s example in working as a civil servant, even going to the point of penning The Duties of Clerks—later described as dry as dust by its author—he still yearned for something beyond his chosen profession.¹⁰ In 1871 he began writing theater reviews for the Dublin Evening Mail. He even produced some fiction, including Under the Sunset (a collection of fairy tales for children, 1881), and The Primrose Path (1875), a short novel published in installments in an Irish weekly magazine.

In 1876 his life was completely changed through a meeting with the celebrated actor Henry Irving (1838—1905), who is often seen as a major inspiration for the character of Count Dracula. Two years after that momentous meeting, Stoker gave up the civil service, married the beautiful actress Miss Florence Balcombe (1858—1937)—whose previous suitors included Oscar Wilde (1854—1900)—and moved to London to serve as business manager of Irving’s Lyceum Theatre in London. The following year, in 1879, Florence gave birth to a son: Irving Noel Stoker (1879—1961). Stoker’s relationship with the actor, which persisted and intensified until Irving’s death in 1905, would prove one of the most defining of his life. As Sir Hall Caine remarked in Stoker’s obituary, I say without any hesitation that never have I seen, never do I expect to see, such absorption of one man’s life in the life of another.¹¹

Indeed, for over two decades, Stoker’s life was entirely absorbed in that of Irving, with punctuating moments of individuality. In 1881 Stoker was awarded a medal for heroism after attempting to rescue a suicidal jumper who had leaped into the Thames River. He arranged European and North American tours for the Lyceum Theatre Company, and in 1883, during a tour in America, Stoker met both Walt Whitman (1819—1892) and Mark Twain (1835—1910). This expanded his familiarity with major writers of the day across the Atlantic; he already was personally acquainted with Oscar Wilde, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859—1930), William Butler Yeats (1865—1939), and possibly Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814—1873).

His writings at this time primarily concerned the Lyceum. His A Glimpse of America (1886) chronicled the company’s touring experience, and a later collection of short stories was an obvious product of the same inspiration: Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party (1908). Stoker’s fiction attempts continued, though slowly. He published three novels in the early half of the 1890s: The Snake’s Pass (1890), The Watter’s Mou’ (1895), and The Shoulder of Shasta (1895). Meanwhile, he was in the midst of vast and disparate research projects for Dracula, which spanned from March 1890 (when his research commenced) until the novel’s publication in 1897. It was followed by Miss Betty (1898), The Mystery of the Sea (1902), The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), The Man (also known as The Gates of Life; 1905), Lady Athlyne (1908), The Lady of the Shroud (1909), and The Lair of the White Worm (also known as The Garden of Evil; 1911).

Soon after Irving’s death in 1905, Stoker suffered a stroke. His career passed into a decline, with the exception of the publication of his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (his greatest commercial success during his lifetime). Stoker died in 1912. Two years later, Florence Stoker published Dracula’s Guest, and Other Weird Stories (1914), a posthumous collection of her husband’s previously unpublished stories, all of which continued in the horror and fantasy vein, though without even a fraction of the brilliance of his magnum opus. Dracula and its creator would remain largely ignored by critics until the publication of Phyllis A. Roth’s biographical work Bram Stoker (1982). The following year, Oxford University Press published an edition of Dracula in the Oxford World’s Classics series. Ten years later Stoker’s biography appeared in Missing Persons, a special supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography.

Such is the author of Dracula. His early fascination with folklore and fairy tales (which, in the Irish tradition, are particularly dark and haunting) formed him to join the ranks of high-fantastical adventure writers by the end of the nineteenth century. Toward the end of the century, the Gothic genre, which had already helped spawn the adventure novel, simultaneously bifurcated further into the horror novel and the mystery novel. A host of related and yet dissimilar works appeared: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae (1889); Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890); Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (beginning in 1887); Rudyard Kipling’s (1865—1936) The Man Who Would Be King (1888) and The Jungle Book (1894); H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man (1897); and George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894).

Vampire stories were also already well established by the time Stoker began his novel, principally through John William Polidori’s The Vampire (1819), begun on the same legendary visit near Lake Geneva that inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).¹² At midcentury, the lurid Varney the Vampire (1845—1847) was serialized to popular acclaim among the aficionados of penny dreadfuls. Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) continued the tradition, followed by even more chilling horrors in La Horla (1887), a short story penned by Henri Guy de Maupassant (1850—1893). Finally, Doyle’s The Sussex Vampire, set in 1896 but not published until 1924, would counter the entire tradition with Holmes’ rigorous logic: It’s pure lunacy. In such company, and particularly among all of the vampiric works that have been written since 1897, Dracula stands apart.

Its uniqueness is partly a consequence of the period in which Stoker lived. He came of age in the midst of Victorian expansion and wrote his novel as the period—and the century—came to a close. The reign of Queen Victoria (1819—1901) began in 1837 and encompassed a dramatic range of religious movements; legislative, economic, and societal changes; and scientific developments. Political turmoil was pervasive. From the Industrial Revolution and the blossoming of urban centers (particularly Manchester, Birmingham, and London) to imperial growth (culminating in the declaring of Victoria as empress of India in 1876); from developments in natural philosophy and natural history to the expansion of the electrical telegraph; from the Catholic Relief Act (1829) to the Evangelical Revival, the world of the Englishman—or Irishman—was very much in flux.

All of these influences can be seen in Dracula. The novel has been analyzed in reference to English conceptions of race; national and imperial politics; the threat of foreign pollution or contagion; Freudian sexual theories; and Darwinian loss of faith. It is an adventure novel in which heroic Englishmen battle a bloodsucking Romanian count who dares to cross the English Channel in an attempt to expand his vampiric domain to the coastland cities of the British Isles and even to the streets of London, preying particularly upon beautiful young women. Its very form bespeaks advance and innovation: while earlier epistolary novels consisted of letters, Dracula brings together a wide range of additional documents, including diary entries, newspaper clippings, telegrams, transcripts from a doctor’s dictated notes, and ship’s logs. Technology is well represented; the novel displays innumerable gadgets. One early critic even went so far as to object to this up-to-date-ness as being incongruously joined with the medieval methods which ultimately secure the victory for Count Dracula’s foes.¹³

Stoker’s extensive research is also a major contributor to the overall power of the novel, though readers should not, as renowned Draculean scholar Elizabeth Miller cautions, take the extensiveness of the research as a sign that it is thorough and meticulous—he seemed content to throw sundry bits and pieces into the mix, sometimes with confusing results.¹⁴ Nevertheless, his labors went largely unappreciated until the 1975 publication of Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Dracula (updated and republished in 1993), for which Wolf made use of Stoker’s extensive notes. This was followed by The Essential Dracula (1979) by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu. Stoker’s notes themselves, auctioned in 1913 by Sotheby’s, one of London’s most prestigious auction galleries, passed into the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. These were published in facsimile in 2008, complete with transcriptions and numerous appendices.¹⁵ As the notes became more widely available, any misconception that Stoker had somehow cobbled his work together in a lackadaisical fashion was effectively laid to rest—it was a haphazardly executed business indeed, but Stoker did research!

But beyond all of the biographical and societal influences described above and even beyond the wide range of books into which Stoker glanced there is yet another influence that, united to the imaginative exuberance and inspiration of the author, provides the novel with its remarkable effectiveness, and that is its haphazard theological profundity, born of Stoker’s relationship with Roman Catholicism and the growing secular cynicism of his era. Stoker, as a non-Catholic Irishman, has a relationship with that religion that sets him apart from his English colleagues. While an Englishman would more readily cast a Catholic priest as a villain (as indeed happens throughout British Victorian literature, most frequently in the Gothic tradition), Stoker displays a certain openness to Catholicism, its notions, its accessories, and its imagery. The result is not merely a lurid book about bloodsuckers but rather a profound novel that ruminates (albeit indirectly and in the most scattered and inconsistent manner) upon the sacramentally infused reality of a world in which the blood of Christ has been shed for the salvation of sinners. Even more particularly, it is a conflicted Catholic novel that is possible only in a post-Enlightenment, protestantized, and increasingly secularized nineteenth-century British world. To appreciate this fully, we must see first the vampire as a character of ancient, mythological origins.

The walking dead; ghosts granted an eerie physicality; flesh-eating, blood-drinking corpses, animated by a demonic influence, coming forth from the grave to terrorize and feed upon the living—such are the characteristics of the vampire and its fellows in ancient mythology: the graveyard-lurking ghoul and the animated corpses of the revenant and the voodoo-induced zombie.¹⁶ These myths of the vengeful dead combine mortal man’s fascination with the fuel of his mortality (i.e., blood) and an abiding dedication to ancestry to manifest a larger concern about the unwholesomeness of dead bodies and the nature of the afterlife. Could the dead, through some supernatural influence, rise from their graves and prey upon the living? Were bodies merely discarded relics of human existence, or could they have a deeper and more lasting spiritual significance—for good or for evil?¹⁷

Despite the vampire’s roots in antiquity, the European heyday of the creature did not occur until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The vampiric epidemic centered primarily in Hungary, Moravia, and Galicia, and like some minor outbreaks in the Middle Ages, these were erratically documented. Charles Ferdinand de Schertz’s Magia posthuma (1706) belatedly presented a number of exaggerated accounts of vampiric incidents, particularly regarding vampires of Bohemia and Moravia, including the case of Petar Blagojević (Peter Plogojowitz), a Serbian-peasant-supposedly-turned-vampire whose purported bloody ravages were among the earliest and best-documented evidences of vampire hysteria.

This great vampire fright came upon the heels of a substantial panic over Satanism, particularly in France. This was principally manifested in the Affaire des poisons (the Affair of the Poisons), a dramatic scandal during the reign of King Louis XIV, wherein rumors surrounding mysterious deaths—accusations of poisoning, witchcraft, and murder—touched even the inner circle of the king. A special court was established, the Chambre ardente (burning court), to judge cases of poisoning and witchcraft. Until it was abolished in 1682, the court severely investigated fortune-tellers, alchemists, witches, and midwives, as well as some members of the aristocracy. Subsequent anxieties regarding Satanism would largely inform vampirism concerns as they would rise in the following century.

The Church was deeply concerned in all of this. Folklore attested that the vampire was the soul of a heretic, a criminal, or a suicide, or some other soul the eternal fate of which was popularly considered uncertain. The Church accepted incorruptibility as a sometime characteristic of dead saints and, even more dramatically, preached belief in the resurrection of the dead. If God was inclined to intervene in such a way, it was asked, could not the Devil intervene in the natural order as well? The Church resoundingly denied that Satan was imbued with such power. As peasants hurried to diagnose the vampiric tendencies of a dead family member by means of a hawthorn stake, their heresy was countered by priests, prelates, scholars, and popes who worked to defuse a situation that was unhealthy physically and spiritually.¹⁸

The rumor mills of history, however, would paint a different picture, wherein the medieval Church, with her sinister Inquisition at its head, preyed upon the credulity of the masses, arbitrarily excommunicating scores of innocent believers and terrifying them with dark tales of damnation and thereby conditioning them for full-fledged vampire hysteria.¹⁹ The problem with this colorful explanation is that it is categorically false. The waves of vampire hysteria took place during the so-called Age of Reason, also known as the Enlightenment. The seventeenth century, not the fourteenth, proved the real breeding ground for horrors. While Europe sloughed off the chains of Catholic antiquity and advanced toward industrial and scientific marvels, she found herself frantically digging up and staking corpses.

This tension between the modern and the ancient is critical to the novel, for Dracula is as indebted to the old religion as it is to the scientific offspring of the new: the post-Enlightenment world, with its scientism and technological enthusiasms, unleashes the monster that only the relics of antiquity can properly combat. Catholic peasants would know how to deal with a vampire; well-bred, educated nineteenth-century Englishmen would not. By Enlightenment standards, only that which can be rationally explained truly exists. This is precisely what makes the increasingly secular stage of fin-de-siècle England the place of all the world most of promise for Dracula—"for in this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be his [Dracula’s] greatest strength" (see pp. 423, 424; emphasis added).

The satanic nature of the count is rendered all the more terrifying because of his undeniable physicality, his real presence in flesh—and blood. Van Helsing rightly notes, Our enemy is not merely spiritual (see p. 334). This is where Stoker’s substantive contribution to the genre truly lies: he takes the theological connotations of the vampire to their proper zenith, seeing the vampiric feast as a direct counterpoint to the Catholic Eucharist.²⁰ While folklore recognized the power of sacramentals in battling demonic forces, the anti-Eucharistic aspirations of the vampire were never fully explored until Stoker’s novel. In a dark mirroring of the Eucharistic sacrament, Dracula is a superphysical being in whom a supernatural power is lodged. The Eucharist is the ultimate transformative and life-giving agent (John 6:58); vampires consume blood to perpetuate an undead eternity. The blood on the Cross was given willingly (John 15:13); vampire victims do not submit of their own volition. They are hypnotized, entranced, or otherwise reduced to an altered state of consciousness. Dracula as Satan is thus elaborately developed, engaging in an anti-sacrifice and an anti-Eucharist. He is the apocalyptic Antichrist who comes to collect souls and set up an alternative eternity to that promised in the New Testament. The Eucharistic connection is quite deliberate; early drafts of the novel included a parodied Last Supper with the Count appearing formally in the role of Antichrist.²¹

At the same time, the use of both the Eucharistic Host and the crucifix (as opposed to a generically Christian cross—an important distinction) introduces an aspect of tension between Protestant and Catholic. The amorphous Christianity of the English characters (supplemented by the quasi-secular, rogue-Protestant American representative Quincey Morris) becomes problematic with the entrance of Van Helsing, nominally an advanced medical student but more a lay priest (and necromancer) and the book’s main religious authority.²² Van Helsing ratifies the symbolic association of this man, this vampire, with Satan (see pp. 318-19). He unequivocally defines the fight against Dracula as religious (see e.g., p. 320, quoted above). Even more important, he introduces all of the thoroughly Catholic tools necessary to combat the vampiric threat.

Van Helsing, coming from the religiously complicated realm of Holland, is the carrier of a foreign religiosity embodied in the consecrated Host as it is first introduced at the tomb of a suspected vampire. When he crumbles the Host into putty and uses it to line the tomb so that the Un-Dead may not enter, his friends question this bizarre behavior:

Van Helsing reverently lifted his hat as he answered:—

The Host. I brought it from Amsterdam. I have an Indulgence. It was an answer that appalled the most sceptical of us, and we felt individually that in the presence of such earnest purpose as the Professor’s, a purpose which could thus use the to him most sacred of things, it was impossible to distrust. (See p. 286.)

The non-Catholic members of the antivampiric league are shocked, not at the unbelievable claim that a priest might be induced to grant a dispensation (here, in garbled theology and garbled English, rendered an Indulgence) allowing the desecration of the Host, but at the presence of the object itself.²³ Similarly, Jonathan Harker’s conflicted feelings about the crucifix seem to typify the religious tension at the novel’s darkened heart:

Bless that good, good woman who hung the crucifix round my neck! for it is a comfort and a strength to me whenever I touch it. It is odd that a thing which I have been taught to regard with disfavour and as idolatrous should in a time of loneliness and trouble be of help. Is it that there is something in the essence of the thing itself, or that it is a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort? Some time, if it may be, I must examine this matter and try to make up my mind about it. (See p. 52; emphasis added.)

What is Stoker’s conclusion with regard to all of this bizarre religious conflation and conflict? Perhaps this is ultimately the question that the novel asks and with which every reader must grapple. But, truly, it is precisely this element that consecrates Dracula as a masterpiece. Were it merely a cleverly crafted book, or merely eccentric, or merely horrible, or merely adventurous, it would probably have enjoyed a great deal of success, its innumerable plot holes and contradictions notwithstanding. But it would not resonate so vividly across cultures and hang like a dark shadow over every single vampiric attempt in film or fiction since. Is it rubbish? Perhaps so. But I defy any scoffing reader to attempt a chapter late at night. In the midst of a derisive chuckle, you will surely feel the skin at the back of your neck creep, and you will look about yourself for some mark of spiritual reassurance, à la Jonathan Harker.

TEXTUAL NOTE

The text for this edition has been taken from the first British edition (Archibald Constable and Company, 1897). Many typographical errors have silently been corrected, though some have been noted.

The composition of annotations for Dracula is a complicated business, particularly with regard to the first four chapters of the novel. Bram Stoker, in his descriptions of Transylvania and its peoples, as well as in his often haphazard reconstruction of history in the region, frequently borrowed passages almost verbatim from his sources. Additionally, in his descriptions of the English sea town of Whitby, he not only paraphrased sources but relied heavily upon his personal knowledge of the place. This personal knowledge is shown in a number of places, including in the list of tombstones given in chapter 6, all of which are taken from actual tombstones in the churchyard on the cliff.

The multiplicity of direct quotations does not continue at the same pace throughout the book. By the novel’s final chapters, Stoker not only neglects his sources but even abandons the precision of his timeline and the measured (though often contradictory) development of plot. The final chapters move very quickly and do not spend much time in panoramic descriptions.

Because of the complex nature of Stoker’s use of his sources, we have chosen to provide the following list of works that he consulted, without indicating at each point in the book which source has been directly referenced by the author:

Baring-Gould, Sabine. The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1865.

Bird, Isabella. The Golden Chersonese. London: John Murray, 1883.

Boner, Charles. Transylvania: Its Products and Its People. London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1865.

Browne, Thomas. Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors. London, 1646.

Crosse, A. F. Round about the Carpathians. London: Black-wood, 1878.

Gerard, Emily. Transylvanian Superstitions. Nineteenth Century 18 (July 1885): 128-44. (Also published in 1888 as part of The Land beyond the Forest, a popular Victorian account of Transylvania and its colorful history that Stoker does not appear to have read in its entirety.)

Johnson, E. C. On the Track of the Crescent. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885.

[Mazuchelli, Nina Elizabeth]. Magyarland; Being the Narrative of Our Travels through the Highlands and Lowlands of Hungary. By a Fellow of the Carpathian Society, Author of The Indian Alps. London: Sampson Low, 1881.

Robinson, F. K. A Glossary of Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Whitby. London: Trubner, 1876.

Rivington, F.C., and J. Rivington. The Theory of Dreams. London: Saint Paul’s Churchyard, 1808.

Scott, Robert H. Fishery Barometer Manual. London: HMSO, 1887.

Wilkinson, William. An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. London: Longmans, 1820.

If these annotations serve merely to whet the imaginative appetite of the reader rather than satisfy it, we recommend further investigation of Stoker’s notes for Dracula, an invaluable resource now available in a facsimile edition: Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula, edited by Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2008); Clive Leatherdale’s The Origins of Dracula (London: William Kimber and Co., 1987), which contains excerpts from Stoker’s original sources; any of the writings of Elizabeth Miller; and, for those more inclined toward the folklorish sources than the literary, The Vampire: A Casebook, edited by Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp. 3-11. Further, Stoker’s Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (New York: Macmillan Company, 1906) indirectly provides many additional details: this two-volume work clearly demonstrates the author’s relationship to the actor and through him to the great dramatic works of the English canon, particularly those of Shakespeare, whose plays are repeatedly referenced in Dracula.

Readers should, however, be warned: the over fifty years of critical neglect of Dracula has been followed by a deluge of meticulously annotated editions of the novel. Of these, the most prominent are those by Clive Leatherdale and Leslie Klinger. While annotated editions are valuable resources, they are undermined by various critical agendas; consequently, all conclusions must be weighed with a sizable grain of salt.

Finally, debate has raged over the precise dating of the events of Dracula. The evidence most strongly supports identifying the novel with the year 1893; therefore, we have opted for organizing the journal entries of the book according to the weekdays of the 1893 calendar.

The Text of

DRACULA

DRACULA

by

BRAM STOKER

To My Dear Friend

HOMMY-BEG¹

How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact.² There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.³

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 Jonathan Harker’s Journal

CHAPTER 2 Jonathan Harker’s Journal

CHAPTER 3 Jonathan Harker’s Journal

CHAPTER 4 Jonathan Harker’s Journal

CHAPTER 5 Letter from Miss Mina Murray to Miss Lucy Westenra

CHAPTER 6 Mina Murray’s Journal

CHAPTER 7 Cuttings from The Dailygraph

CHAPTER 8 Mina Murray’s Journal

CHAPTER 9 Letter from Mina Harker to Lucy Westenra

CHAPTER 10 Letter from Dr. Seward to the Honourable Arthur Holmwood

CHAPTER 11 Lucy Westenra’s Diary

CHAPTER 12 Dr. Seward’s Diary

CHAPTER 13 Dr. Seward’s Diary

CHAPTER 14 Mina Harker’s Journal

CHAPTER 15 Dr. Seward’s Diary

CHAPTER 16 Dr. Seward’s Diary

CHAPTER 17 Dr. Seward’s Diary

CHAPTER 18 Dr. Seward’s Diary

CHAPTER 19 Jonathan Harker’s Journal

CHAPTER 20 Jonathan Harker’s Journal

CHAPTER 21 Dr. Seward’s Diary

CHAPTER 22 Jonathan Harker’s Journal

CHAPTER 23 Dr. Seward’s Diary

CHAPTER 24 Dr. Seward’s Phonograph Diary, Spoken by Van Helsing

CHAPTER 25 Dr. Seward’s Diary

CHAPTER 26 Dr. Seward’s Diary

CHAPTER 27 Mina Harker’s Journal

AUTHOR’S PREFACE¹

The reader of this story will very soon understand how the events outlined in these papers have been gradually drawn together to make a logical whole. Apart from excising minor details which I considered unnecessary, I have let the people involved relate their experiences in their own way; but, for obvious reasons, I have changed the names of the people and places concerned. In all other respects I leave the manuscript unaltered, in deference to the wishes of those who have considered it their duty to present it before the eyes of the public.

I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the events here described really took place, however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight. And I am further convinced that they must always remain to some extent incomprehensible, although continuing research in psychology and natural sciences may, in years to come, give logical explanations of such strange happenings which, at present, neither scientists nor the secret police can understand. I state again that this mysterious tragedy which is here described is completely true in all its external respects, though naturally I have reached a different conclusion on certain points than those involved in the story. But the events are incontrovertible, and so many people know of them that they cannot be denied. This series of crimes has not yet passed from the memory—a series of crimes which appear to have originated from the same source, and which at the same time created as much repugnance in people everywhere as the murders of Jack the Ripper,² which came into the story a little later. Various people’s minds will go back to the remarkable group of foreigners who for many seasons together played a dazzling part in the life of the aristocracy here in London; and some will remember that one of them disappeared suddenly without apparent reason, leaving no trace. All the people who have willingly—or unwillingly—played a part in this remarkable story are known generally and well respected. Both Jonathan Harker³ and his wife, who is a woman of character, and Dr. Seward are my friends and have been so for many years; and the highly respected scientist,⁴ who appears here under a pseudonym, will also be too famous all over the educated world for his real name, which I have not desired to specify, to be hidden from people—least of all those who have from experience learnt to value and respect his genius and accomplishments, though they adhere to his views on life no more than I. But in our times it ought to be clear to all serious-thinking men that

there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.⁵

London

August 1898

B.S.

Chapter 1¹

JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL—(Kept in shorthand.)²

Wednesday, 3 May.³ Bistritz.⁴—Left Munich⁵ at 8:35 P.M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late.⁶ Buda-Pesth⁷ seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible.⁸ The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East;⁹ the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube,¹⁰ which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.¹¹

We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh.¹² Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale.¹³ I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem.,¹⁴ get recipe for Mina.)¹⁵ I asked the waiter, and he said it was called paprika hendl,¹⁶ and that, as it was a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians.¹⁷ I found my smattering of German¹⁸ very useful here; indeed, I don’t know how I should be able to get on without it.

Having had some time at my disposal when in London,¹⁹ I had visited the British Museum,²⁰ and made search among the books and maps in the library regarding Transylvania;²¹ it had struck me that some foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to have some importance in dealing with a nobleman of that country. I find that the district he named is in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia²² and Bukovina,²³ in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe. I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula,²⁴ as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps;²⁵ but I found that Bistritz, the post town²⁶ named by Count Dracula,²⁷ is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina.

In the population of Transylvania there are four distinct nationalities: Saxons in the South, and mixed with them the Wallachs, who are the descendants of the Dacians;²⁸ Magyars²⁹ in the West, and Szekelys³⁰ in the East and North. I am going among the latter, who claim to be descended from Attila and the Huns.³¹ This may be so, for when the Magyars conquered the country in the eleventh century they found the Huns settled in it. I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting. (Mem., I must ask the Count all about them.)

I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams.³² There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty. Towards morning I slept and was wakened by the continuous knocking at my door, so I guess I must have been sleeping soundly then. I had for breakfast more paprika, and a sort of porridge of maize flour which they said was mamaliga,³³ and egg-plant stuffed with forcemeat,³⁴ a very excellent dish, which they call impletata. (Mem., get recipe for this also.) I had to hurry breakfast, for the train started a little before eight, or rather it ought to have done so, for after rushing to the station at 7:30 I had to sit in the carriage for more than an hour before we began to move. It seems to me that the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains.³⁵ What ought they to be in China?³⁶ All day long we seemed to dawdle³⁷ through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills³⁸ such as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods. It takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear. At every station there were groups of people, sometimes crowds, and in all sorts of attire. Some of them were just like the peasants at home or those I saw coming through France and Germany, with short jackets and round hats and home-made trousers; but others were very picturesque. The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were very clumsy about the waist. They had all full white sleeves of some kind or other, and the most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of course there were petticoats under them. The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks,³⁹ who were more barbarian than the rest, with their big cow-boy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them, and had long black hair and heavy black moustaches. They are very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing. On the stage they would be set down at once as some old Oriental band of brigands. They are, however, I am told, very harmless and rather wanting in natural self-assertion.

It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz, which is a very interesting old place. Being practically on the frontier—for the Borgo Pass⁴⁰ leads from it into Bukovina—it has had a very stormy existence, and it certainly shows marks of it. Fifty years ago a series of great fires took place, which made terrible havoc on five separate occasions.⁴¹ At the very beginning of the seventeenth century it underwent a siege of three weeks⁴² and lost 13,000 people, the casualties of war proper being assisted by famine and disease.

Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel,⁴³ which I found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country. I was evidently expected, for when I got near the door I faced a cheery-looking elderly woman in the usual peasant dress—white undergarment with long double apron, front, and back, of coloured stuff fitting almost too tight for modesty. When I came close she bowed and said, The Herr Englishman?⁴⁴ Yes, I said, Jonathan Harker. She smiled, and gave some message to an elderly man in white shirtsleeves, who had followed her to the door. He went, but immediately returned with a letter:—

"My Friend.⁴⁵—Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. Sleep well to-night.⁴⁶ At three⁴⁷ to-morrow the diligence⁴⁸ will start for Bukovina; a place on it is kept for you. At the Borgo Pass my carriage will await you and will bring you to me. I trust that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land.

"Your friend,

Dracula.

Thursday, 4 May.—I found that my landlord had got a letter from the Count, directing him to secure the best place⁴⁹ on the coach for me; but on making inquiries as to details⁵⁰ he seemed somewhat reticent, and pretended that he could not understand my German. This could not be true, because up to then he had understood it perfectly; at least, he answered my questions exactly as if he did. He and his wife, the old lady who had received me, looked at each other in a frightened sort of way. He mumbled out that the money had been sent in a letter, and that was all he knew. When I asked him if he knew Count Dracula, and could tell me anything of his castle, both he and his wife crossed themselves, and, saying that they knew nothing at all, simply refused to speak further. It was so near the time of starting that I had no time to ask any one else, for it was all very mysterious and not by any means comforting.

Just before I was leaving, the old lady came up to my room and said in a very hysterical way:

Must you go? Oh! young Herr, must you go? She was in such an excited state that she seemed to have lost her grip of what German she knew, and mixed it all up with some other language⁵¹ which I did not know at all. I was just able to follow her by asking many questions. When I told her that I must go at once, and that I was engaged on important business, she asked again:

Do you know what day it is? I answered that it was the fourth of May. She shook her head as she said again:

Oh, yes! I know that! I know that, but do you know what day it is? On my saying that I did not understand, she went on:

"It is the eve of St. George’s Day.⁵² Do you not know that to-night, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway? Do you know where you are going, and what you are going to? She was in such evident distress that I tried to comfort her, but without effect. Finally she went down on her knees and implored me not to go; at least to wait a day or two before starting. It was all very ridiculous but I did not feel comfortable. However, there was business to be done, and I could allow nothing to interfere with it. I therefore tried to raise her up, and said, as gravely as I could, that I thanked her, but my duty was imperative, and that I must go. She then rose and dried her eyes, and taking a crucifix from her neck offered it to me. I did not know what to do, for, as an English Churchman,⁵³ I have been taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous,⁵⁴ and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such a state of mind. She saw, I suppose, the doubt in my face, for she put the rosary round my neck, and said, For your mother’s sake," and went out of the room. I am writing up this part of the diary whilst I am waiting for the coach, which is, of course, late; and the crucifix is still round my neck. Whether it is the old lady’s fear, or the many ghostly traditions of this place, or the crucifix itself, I do not know, but I am not feeling nearly as easy in my mind as usual. If this book⁵⁵ should ever reach Mina before I do, let it bring my good-bye. Here comes the coach!⁵⁶

Friday, 5 May. The Castle.—The grey of the morning has passed, and the sun is high over the distant horizon,⁵⁷ which seems jagged, whether with trees or hills I know not, for it is so far off that big things and little are mixed. I am not sleepy, and, as I am not to be called till I awake,⁵⁸ naturally I write till sleep comes. There are many odd things to put down, and, lest who reads them may fancy that I dined too well before I left Bistritz, let me put down my dinner exactly. I dined on what they called robber steak—bits of bacon, onion, and beef, seasoned with red pepper, and strung on sticks and roasted over the fire, in the simple style of the London cat’s meat!⁵⁹ The wine was Golden Mediasch,⁶⁰ which produces a queer sting on the tongue, which is, however, not disagreeable. I had only a couple of glasses of this, and nothing else.⁶¹

When I got on the coach the driver had not taken his seat, and I saw him talking with the landlady. They were evidently talking of me, for every now and then they looked at me, and some of the people who were sitting on the bench outside the door—which they call by a name meaning word-bearer⁶²—came and listened, and then looked at me, most of them pityingly. I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd; so I quietly got my polyglot dictionary⁶³ from my bag and looked them out. I must say they were not cheering to me, for amongst them were Ordog—Satan, pokol—hell, stregoica⁶⁴—witch, vrolok and vlkoslak—both of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian⁶⁵ for something that is either werewolf or vampire.⁶⁶ (Mem., I must ask the Count about these superstitions.)

When we started, the crowd round the inn door, which had by this time swelled to a considerable size, all made the sign of the cross and pointed two fingers towards me. With some difficulty I got a fellow-passenger to tell me what they meant; he would not answer at first, but on learning that I was English, he explained that it was a charm or guard against the evil eye.⁶⁷ This was not very pleasant for me, just starting for an unknown place to meet an unknown man; but every one seemed so kind-hearted, and so sorrowful, and so sympathetic that I could not but be touched. I shall never forget the last glimpse which I had of the inn-yard and its crowd of picturesque figures, all crossing themselves, as they stood round the wide archway, with its background of rich foliage of oleander⁶⁸ and orange trees in green tubs clustered in the centre of the yard. Then our driver, whose wide linen drawers covered the whole front of the box-seat—gotza they call them—cracked his big whip over his four small horses, which ran abreast, and we set off on our journey.

I soon lost sight and recollection of ghostly fears in the beauty of the scene as we drove along, although had I known the language, or rather languages, which my fellow-passengers were speaking, I might not have been able to throw them off so easily. Before us lay a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road. There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom—apple, plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I could see the green grass under the trees spangled with the fallen petals. In and out amongst these green hills of what they call here the Mittel Land⁶⁹ ran the road, losing itself as it swept round the grassy curve, or was shut out by the straggling ends of pine woods, which here and there ran down the hillsides like tongues of flame. The road was rugged, but still we seemed to fly over it with a feverish haste. I could not understand then what the haste meant, but the driver was evidently bent on losing no time in reaching Borgo Prund.⁷⁰ I was told that this road is in summertime excellent, but that it had not yet been put in order after the winter snows. In this respect it is different from the general run of roads in the Carpathians, for it is an old tradition that they are not to be kept in too good order. Of old the Hospadars⁷¹ would not repair them, lest the Turk should think that they were preparing to bring in foreign troops, and so hasten the war which was always really at loading point.

Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves. Right and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling full upon them and bringing out all the glorious colours of this beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly. Here and there seemed mighty rifts in the mountains, through which, as the sun began to sink, we saw now and again the white gleam of falling water. One of my companions touched my arm as we swept round the base of a hill and opened up the lofty, snow-covered peak of a mountain, which seemed, as we wound on our serpentine way, to be right before us:—

Look! Isten szek!—God’s seat!⁷²—and he crossed himself reverently.

As we wound on our endless way, and the sun sank lower and lower behind us, the shadows of the evening began to creep round us. This was emphasised by the fact that the snowy mountaintop still held the sunset, and seemed to glow out with a delicate cool pink. Here and there we passed Cszeks and Slovaks, all in picturesque attire, but I noticed that goitre⁷³ was painfully prevalent. By the roadside were many crosses, and as we swept by, my companions all crossed themselves. Here and there was a peasant man or woman kneeling before a shrine, who did not even turn round as we approached, but seemed in the self-surrender of devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for the outer world. There were many things new to me: for instance, hay-ricks in the trees, and here and there very beautiful masses of weeping birch, their white stems shining like silver through the delicate green of the leaves. Now and again we passed a leiter-wagon—the ordinary peasant’s cart—with its long, snake-like vertebra, calculated to suit the inequalities of the road. On this were sure to be seated quite a group⁷⁴ of home-coming peasants, the Cszeks with their white, and the Slovaks with their coloured, sheepskins, the latter carrying lance-fashion their long staves, with axe at end. As the evening fell⁷⁵ it began to get very cold, and the growing twilight seemed to merge into one dark mistiness the gloom of the trees, oak, beech, and pine, though in the valleys which ran deep between the spurs of the hills, as we ascended through the Pass, the dark firs stood out here and there against the background of late-lying snow. Sometimes, as the road was cut through the pine woods that seemed in the darkness to be closing down upon us, great masses of greyness, which here and there bestrewed the trees, produced a peculiarly weird and solemn effect, which carried on the thoughts and grim fancies engendered earlier in the evening, when the falling sunset threw into strange relief the ghost-like clouds which amongst the Carpathians seem to wind ceaselessly through the valleys. Sometimes the hills were so steep that, despite our driver’s haste, the horses could only go slowly. I wished to get down and walk up them, as we do at home,⁷⁶ but the driver would not hear of it. No, no, he said; you must not walk here; the dogs are too fierce; and then he added, with what he evidently meant for grim pleasantry—for he looked round to catch the approving smile of the rest—and you may have enough of such matters before you go to sleep. The only stop he would make was a moment’s pause to light his lamps.

When it grew dark there seemed to be some excitement amongst the passengers, and they kept speaking to him, one after the other, as though urging him to further speed.⁷⁷ He lashed the horses unmercifully with his long whip, and with wild cries of encouragement urged them on to further exertions. Then through the darkness I could see a sort of patch of grey light ahead of us, as though there were a cleft in the hills. The excitement of the passengers grew greater; the crazy coach rocked on its great leather springs, and swayed like a boat tossed on a stormy sea. I had to hold on. The road grew more level, and we appeared to fly along. Then the mountains seemed to come nearer to us on each side and to frown down upon us; we were entering on the Borgo Pass. One by one several of the passengers offered me gifts, which they pressed upon me with an earnestness which would take no denial; these were certainly of an odd and varied kind, but each was given in simple good faith, with a kindly word, and a blessing, and that strange mixture of fear-meaning movements which I had seen outside the hotel at Bistritz—the sign of the cross and the guard against the evil eye. Then, as we flew along, the driver leaned forward, and on each side the passengers, craning over the edge of the coach, peered eagerly into the darkness. It was evident that something very exciting was either happening or expected, but though I asked each passenger, no one would give me the slightest explanation. This state of excitement kept on for some little time; and at last we saw before us the Pass opening out on the eastern side. There were dark, rolling clouds overhead, and in the air the heavy, oppressive sense of thunder. It seemed as though the mountain range had separated two atmospheres, and that now we had got into the thunderous one.⁷⁸ I was now myself looking out for the conveyance which was to take me to the Count. Each moment I expected to see the glare of lamps through the blackness; but all was dark. The only light was the flickering rays of our own lamps, in which the steam from our hard driven horses rose in a white cloud. We could see now the sandy road lying white before us, but there was on it no sign of a vehicle. The passengers drew back with a sigh of gladness, which seemed to mock my own disappointment. I was already thinking what I had best do, when the driver, looking at his watch, said to the others something which I could hardly hear, it was spoken so quietly and in so low a tone; I thought it was An hour less than the time. Then turning to me he said in German worse than my own:—

There is no carriage here. The Herr is not expected after all. He will now come on to Bukovina, and return to-morrow or the next day; better the next day. Whilst he was speaking the horses began to neigh and snort and plunge wildly,⁷⁹ so that the driver had to hold them up. Then, amongst a chorus of screams from the peasants⁸⁰ and a universal crossing of themselves, a calèche,⁸¹ with four horses, drove up behind us, overtook us, and drew up beside the coach. I could see from the flash of our lamps, as the rays fell on them, that the horses were coal-black and splendid animals.⁸² They were driven by a tall man, with a long brown beard and a great black hat, which seemed to hide his face from us. I could only see the gleam of a pair of very bright eyes, which seemed red in the lamplight, as he turned to us. He said to the driver:—

You are early to-night, my friend. The man stammered in reply:—

The English Herr was in a hurry, to which the stranger replied:—

That is why, I suppose, you wished him to go on to Bukovina. You cannot deceive me, my friend; I know too much, and my horses are swift. As he spoke he smiled, and the lamplight fell on a hard-looking mouth, with very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, as white as ivory. One of my companions whispered to another the line from Burger’s Lenore:—⁸³

Denn die Todten reiten schnell—

     (For the dead travel fast.)⁸⁴

The strange driver evidently heard the words, for he looked up with a gleaming smile. The passenger turned his face away, at the same time putting out his two fingers and crossing himself. Give me the Herr’s luggage, said the driver; and with exceeding alacrity my bags were handed out and put in the calèche. Then I descended from the side of the coach, as the calèche was close alongside, the driver helping me with a hand which caught my arm in a grip of steel; his strength must have been prodigious. Without a word he shook his reins, the horses turned, and we swept into the darkness of the Pass. As I looked back I saw the steam from the horses of the coach by the light of the lamps, and projected against it the figures of my late companions crossing themselves. Then the driver cracked his whip and called to his horses, and off they swept on their way to Bukovina. As they sank into the darkness I felt a strange chill, and a lonely feeling came over me; but a cloak was thrown over my shoulders, and a rug across my knees, and the driver said in excellent German:

The night is chill, mein Herr, and my master the Count bade me take all care of you. There is a flask of slivovitz (the plum brandy of the country) underneath the seat, if you should require it. I did not take any, but it was a comfort to know it was there all the same. I felt a little strangely, and not a little frightened. I think had there been any alternative I should have taken it, instead of prosecuting that unknown night journey. The carriage went at a hard pace straight along, then we made a complete turn and went along another straight road. It seemed to me that we were simply going over and over the same ground again; and so I took note of some salient point, and found that this was so. I would have liked to have asked the driver what this all meant, but I really feared to do so, for I thought that, placed as I was, any protest would have had no effect in case there had been an intention to delay. By-and-by, however, as I was curious to know how time was passing, I struck a match, and by its flame looked at my watch; it was within a few minutes of midnight. This gave me a sort of shock, for I suppose the general superstition about midnight was increased by my recent experiences. I waited with a sick feeling of suspense.

Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road—a long, agonised wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind which now sighed softly through the Pass, a wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night. At the first howl the horses began to strain and rear, but the driver spoke to them soothingly, and they quieted down, but shivered and sweated as though after a runaway from sudden fright. Then, far off in the distance, from the mountains on each side of us began a louder and a sharper howling—that of wolves—which affected both the horses and myself in the same way—for I was minded to jump from the calèche and run, whilst they reared again and plunged madly, so that the driver had to use all his great strength to keep them from bolting. In a few minutes, however,