Dracula: The Postcolonial Edition

By Cristina Artenie, Bram Stoker and Dragos Moraru

This is the first postcolonial edition of Bram Stoker's gothic classic. Jonathan Harker's colonial adventure and Bram Stoker's imperialist discourse are restored to their original context: British economic and political involvement in East-Central Europe. Relying on both British and Romanian sources, this edition avoids misinformation perpetuated by previous editions of the novel and exposes the cultural appropriation and distortion of Romanian history and folklore. Richly annotated (there are 528 explanatory notes), with an introduction that sets the tone for a postcolonial analysis, the present edition is unique in its approach as well as in the use of Stoker's original sources.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Universitas Press
• Release date: Feb 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781988963471

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Introduction

Bram Stoker chose Dracula as title for his 1897 novel at the last moment (his first choice, The Undead, emphasised a terrifying quality that threatened to become an epidemic), but it was the right choice. Although he is given very few lines and, unlike other major characters in the novel, he never gets to tell any part of the story without the mediation of another narrator, Dracula sets all the wheels of the plot in motion. He is not the unfortunate creation of an unwitting scientist like Frankenstein’s monster, nor a chemical experiment gone awry like Dr Jekyll’s Mr Hyde. No daring explorers stumble upon him, waking him to life. On the contrary, everything that happens in Stoker’s novel is the result of Dracula’s original plan. He alone, from his ruin[ed] tomb in a forgotten land, has decided to invade England, while the mortals are simply forced to react to (and attempt to curtail) his formidable plan.

As a result, nothing is more important in Dracula than the Count’s person. Who he is, what he is, where he comes from – these are the most important questions, which the reader, the Count’s pursuers, and countless commentators of the novel have asked. Or have they? Dracula became an object of intense scholarship about four decades ago and until at least the end of the 20th century critical commentary on the novel followed especially two (very) different modalities. The first can be called historical and folkloric (or, more generally, explanatory): its proponents strongly suggested that the novel is based on real and well-documented folkloric beliefs and that its villain is inspired by the character and the cruel actions of a 15th-century Romanian ruler (improperly) dubbed Vlad the Impaler. The second, a mostly psychoanalytical (or, more generally, interpretative) modality, exhausted the many possibilities of the text in search for clues that it contained well-concealed instances of sexual encounters of all kinds, or it looked beyond the text in order to frame it as an illustration of Bram Stoker’s fear of women and feelings of unrequited love for other men.

The explanatory modality came under heavy pressure in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when many critics studying Stoker’s research notes for Dracula (henceforward called Bram Stoker’s Notes) became convinced that the novelist only very loosely based his vampire on a historical character also named Dracula, and that he imagined instead another, unrelated, 15th-century ruler, simply borrowing the name he had found in an old book. After all, as the new version of this modality suggests, there is nothing about the historical Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Notes except a very brief mention. There is no evidence that Stoker knew anything else about his character’s reputation as an impaling tyrant, or even that he knew the name of Vlad.¹ Also, the fact that Count Dracula clearly identifies himself as a Transylvanian Székely and only indirectly and confusingly as a Wallachian (Romanian) ruler, as well as the fact that critics usually find his genealogical speech baffling, have all led to the current quasi-consensus that the fictional Dracula is simply not the historical Dracula.

As it often happens in revisionist perspectives, commentators have gone from one extreme to the other, overlooking the many textual clues indicating that the Count is really supposed to be the 15th-century Romanian monarch. Stoker gave his character a genealogy and had him acknowledge as a Dracula indeed a single medieval ancestor, easily identifiable as the historical Dracula. Then, he had the three characters that know, or come to know, the Count more intimately (Arminius, Van Helsing, and Mina Harker) insist that he was indeed that same ancestor who, undead for centuries, had emerged as an immortal vampire in the late Victorian era. It seems fair to say that there are two Draculas in the novel, identical yet different: the real 15th-century anti-Ottoman warrior, unscrupulously borrowed by Stoker from Romanian history, and the fictional, 19th-century vampire, who is entirely Stoker’s creation.

Dracula’s extreme critical makeover in recent years is all the more surprising, knowing that the other capital tenet of the explanatory modality, namely that Stoker’s vampire is based on actual folkloric beliefs, is still alive and well. (It is, perhaps, less pursued, but it has never been under attack.) Not only are these beliefs generally assumed to have been real, rather than the result of religious propaganda,² but Anglo-American³ critics also summarily dismiss the protests of Romanian specialists who maintain that the existence of such beliefs in Transylvania is a gross misinterpretation of actual legends about other, essentially different, supernatural beings. More importantly, this view persists despite the fact that Bram Stoker’s Notes only contain the summary of a single paragraph about alleged Transylvanian beliefs in vampires and one other brief hint about vampires in Malaysia. The notes suggest that Stoker had found very little about such beliefs in his sources. After all, Dracula’s physical appearance is entirely drawn from a book about werewolves, not vampires.

The second, interpretative, modality was once widespread in the critical discourse on Dracula, as it benefited from the largely accepted conviction that Gothic literature had been somehow subversive and that it had answered back to bourgeois society and/or its primary literary expression, realism. This, too, came under attack in the early 21st century, when a veritable (albeit not universally accepted) turn in Gothic studies occurred. The Gothic, it is now often suggested, was not that subversive after all; blood transfusions in Dracula are not allegories of sexual relationships, but simply blood transfusions; and the plot of the novel is less the emanation of Bram Stoker’s subconscious and more a very conscious treatment of late-Victorian political and cultural themes. Of course, such a view already existed and it had generated a series of studies of the science, the technology, or the politics of the novel. Dracula had already been interpreted as a literary expression of the Victorian fear of racial degeneration (even of reverse colonisation), as a form of othering and xenophobic discourse, or even as a kind of Orientalism (or at least Balkanism). Nevertheless, the recent turn has cleared the waters and such interpretations of the novel (correlated with the study of Stoker’s cultural and personal background) have been quite prominent over the last decade.

One crucial problem remains: all this talk of Orientalism, othering, racial degeneration, or xenophobia suggests the possibility of a postcolonial analysis of Dracula. However, all commentators that have discussed the novel’s dubious politics have insisted that a postcolonial study of the novel is, indeed, possible, but only inasmuch as the discussion is limited to the othering discourse or to the fear of degeneration, because of the simple but clear fact that Romania and Transylvania (which were separate entities at the end of the 19th century, although the latter is now part of the former) were never colonies of the British Empire, whose mouthpieces Stoker and the many narrators in Dracula are supposed to be. One special case is that of Vesna Goldsworthy (1998), who agrees that these territories were never British colonies, but suggests, instead, that they should be treated as colonies of the mind, the result of an imperialism of the imagination.

The Postcolonial Study of Dracula

Starting from a similar view of the speculative imperialism of Victorian literature, some critics still admit that, although Dracula is Transylvanian, he is nonetheless Eastern (Brantlinger 48), which makes Stoker’s novel an example of imperial Gothic fiction (4), in which Transylvania is treated as the source of threatened invasions of the metropole by the barbarians (46). However, the general lack of direct Western colonisation of the region has crippled discussion of the power relations underlying representation (Hammond 601). William Hughes expressed the views of many when he concluded that Transylvania cannot represent a sphere of conventional British interest akin to an India, a China or an Africa, those locations of imperial Gothic returns in Kipling, Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle. It is, quite simply, outside the political sphere of British national or imperial presence, a component not of formal or informal Empire but of geographical generalisation . . . [an area] of sporadic interest outside of formal national control or interest (Hughes 91).

The informal empire, a notion Hughes pre-emptively uses in his defence of the limited imperialist stance of Dracula, was popularised in 1940 in one of the volumes of the Cambridge History of the British Empire, where it was used to refer to the British influence over territories that were not its actual colonies: countries or parts of countries whose economy and, very often, whose politics were controlled by representatives of Britain, working for the benefit of the empire. Despite being around for such a long time, the notion is not often discussed in connection with the formal empire, which involves acquiring dominions in the strict constitutional sense. The observations made by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in a seminal essay more than six decades ago still ring true: almost all imperial history has been written on the assumption that the empire of formal dominion is historically comprehensible in itself and can be cut out of its context. . . . The conventional interpretation of the nineteenth-century empire continues to rest upon study of the formal empire alone, which is rather like judging the size and character of icebergs solely from the parts above the water-line (1). In reality, the formal and the informal empire are essentially interconnected and to some extent interchangeable (6) and the British Empire is intelligible only within the total framework of expansion (7). Once we accept this, we may also notice that there are two major problems with the idea that the British influence in the East-Central European territories described in Dracula is limited or nonexistent.

First, while the region that comes first to mind when one thinks of Dracula is, undoubtedly, Transylvania, part of the novel is set in Romania, through which Dracula’s pursuers travel in search of the vampire; and the land, but especially the waters of 19th-century Romania were a part of that informal British Empire. Britain had been deeply involved in re-shaping the Romanian economy and in modifying the country’s political status, from the 1859 union of Wallachia and Moldavia, following the Crimean War, and the Independence of Romania, after the 1877-1878 war against the Ottoman Empire, recognised internationally only with the blessing and with the conditions imposed by Great Britain (see Seton-Watson, Disraeli 488-489). The way the British Empire managed to influence the internal affairs of Romania so as to favour its (mostly commercial) interests is evidence that, in the 19th century, "the colonies were not the only manifestations of [British] dominance. Other countries outside the empire could be dominated or controlled by one means or another from Britain almost as closely as her colonies (Porter 2). Perhaps more importantly, the British Empire did keep a foothold into Romanian territory for almost a century: between 1856 and 1948, the navigable course of the Lower Danube and of its tributaries, flowing through Romania, was entirely in the hands of the European Commission of the Danube (ECD), largely controlled by British representatives, acting in the interest of the Empire. All the Romanian ports, from Sulina on the Black Sea to Brăila in north-eastern Wallachia, were in the hands of the ECD, which acted as a distinct international entity (Blackburn 1154). The unofficial capital of this entity" was Galatz, where Stoker sent his vampire hunters.

Second, although Transylvania, unlike Romania, remained outside the British sphere of influence, it was never without interest to Britain. Like other regions in East-Central Europe, it was constantly constructed from discursive material the West had been developing primarily, though not exclusively, for usage on the colonial subject (Hammond 603). Such discursive material, alternately used for actual (formal or informal) colonies, as well as for possible colonies of the future, was employed by politicians, journalists, scientists, and novelists alike. It involved a series of rhetorics (to use a term preferred by Franco Moretti) that justified the British control over a region, whether that control was real or just within reach: a rhetoric of innocence, for example, that explained why the British needed or would need to extend its influence in the area. In literature, this translated into a corpus of fictional works about the unexplored regions of the world, represented by novels and short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Anthony Hope, Erskine Childers, Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and others. The exotic regions in these works of fiction are all peripheries, on the edge of the British imperial world view. These areas do not form part of the Empire but can be glimpsed in the unknown, unexplored distances from the outermost colonial outposts of the Empire (Leerssen 292). The colonial adventure in Dracula is set both in such an unexplored periphery and in an informal colony. For Stoker’s vampire hunters, Galatz is the outermost outpost of Britain.

The Scramble for Romania

The most important issues for the Empire throughout the 19th century, that is, between the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815) and the New Imperialist phase and the Scramble for Africa (1881-1914), were The Great Game (1813-1907) against Russia for the control of Central Asia and, especially, the Eastern Question (1774-1908), which, for a long time, meant bolstering the Ottoman Empire, that ‘Sick Man of Europe,’ whose increasingly insecure standing demanded constant attendance (Hammond 605). The Eastern Question also meant dealing with the perceived danger that the two other empires with interests in the so-called Near East (Austria and Russia) might snatch the territories controlled by Ottoman Turkey. During the Romanian long 18th century (1714-1821), when the two Romanian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia were at their weakest, they were led by princes of Greek origin, the so-called Phanariotes, who were appointed directly by the Porte (the Ottoman government) and who were powerless when Russia and Turkey turned their territories into battlefields and/or army headquarters. At the same time, Austria intervened in its own interest, often sending its troops to occupy the Principalities. The scramble for Romania began in 1774, at the end of a Russo-Turkish war, when Austria occupied part of Moldavia, annexed it and named it Bucovina. This is a region mentioned several times in Dracula. At the end of Stoker’s novel, Van Helsing and Mina Harker cross it on their way to Castle Dracula.

Although Britain was relatively far away, it was deeply interested in the fate of the Ottoman Empire, and British opinions about Moldavia and Wallachia were part of the debate concerning the survival of Turkey. For a while, London was undecided with respect to Ottoman-controlled territories like Moldavia and Wallachia, which was reflected in the Eton/Thornton debate at the turn of the 19th century. William Eton’s A Survey of the Turkish Empire (first published in 1798; several editions followed until 1809) argued in favour of the emancipation of subject nations (especially Greeks and Romanians, but he held a similar opinion about Egypt) and suggested it was in Britain’s interest that these nations be politically and economically freed. After spending many years in Turkey, Eton considered its empire barbaric and despotic. British commercial interests in the Near East were protected by the Levant Company, similar in nature to the East India Company. Eton was in favour of its dissolution, suggesting that Britain should instead deal directly with the new nations, once freed from the formal and the informal Ottoman Empire. By contrast, Thomas Thornton (author of The Present State of Turkey in 1807), who represented the Levant Company, argued that the Turkish Empire was salvageable. Although Eton’s suggestion was followed and the Levant Company was suppressed, Thornton’s ideas about British involvement in the region ultimately prevailed. He saw the Romanian Principalities, together, as a country which is now become of the highest importance in the politics of Europe (390) and accurately foretold the future of the Eastern Question: The present eventful crisis involves the fate of the world. On the decision of the question which is now at issue respecting Moldavia and Wallachia depends the existence of the Ottoman empire. These provinces cannot long remain under a divided sovereignty, nor can they raise themselves to independency on the powerful empires which surround them on every side. If they be restored to the Ottoman Porte, they must still owe their preservation to foreign influence, because of the weakness of the Turkish government (435). Starting at least with the 1840s, Britain will strive to become that foreign influence.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Turkey was a kind of client-empire for the bigger, stronger British Empire; and the former allowed the latter to open several of its own dominions. Stratford Canning (later styled Lord Stratford de Redcliffe), long-time British ambassador at the Porte, became a real Christian dictator on the Bosporus (Iorga 145). His influence was so great that he was able to request Turkey to send troops to Wallachia to quell the 1848 Revolution. In fact, this was not his first (or worst) intrusion on Romanian matters. His first decisive stroke of a long diplomatic career (Seton-Watson, A History 164) was persuading Turkey, partly by intrigue, partly by threats (165) to conclude an expeditious armistice with Russia and give the latter Bessarabia, the finest part of Moldavia (Wilkinson 118). The year was 1812, and Canning wanted to see Russia free to concentrate all efforts against Napoleon (Seton-Watson, A History 164). Thus, the British Empire, despite the alleged distance that would have hindered its influence in the region, was instrumental in one of the major cataclysms of Romanian history: for the next two centuries, millions of people found themselves residents of Russia, then of the Soviet Union, and many among them ended up deported to Siberia, imprisoned or killed. The territory ceded by Stratford Canning to Russia was later divided by Stalin: the largest part of it is today’s Republic of Moldova, while the northern and southern parts are in Ukraine.

As for Bucovina, cut off from Moldavia in 1774, only part of it was returned to Romania (the northern part was annexed by the Soviet Union and is now also in Ukraine). Historically just the north-western corner of Moldavia, the province of Bucovina is an Austrian political construct and, as such, it was first described immediately after annexation by government officials. These descriptions delineate the strategies of subsequent economic and demographic experiments of the imperialist government in Vienna: the newly created province was, in the conqueror’s view, underpopulated, and the land insufficiently exploited (see Grigorovici, passim). As suggested in these descriptions, deforestation, division of arable land, and foreign settlement (mostly from Galicia, but also from all parts of the Empire) soon (and forever) changed the economic and demographic landscape of the province, according to the commercial interests of the metropole. Austrian descriptions of Bucovina closely resemble the reports of British diplomats and, more generally, of British travellers who came to the Romanian Principalities (and, after their union, to Romania) throughout the 19th century. Direct involvement was unnecessary, and Romania never became a formal British colony, but Britain managed to change the economic and demographic landscape of Romania in ways very similar to those put to work by the Austrians in Bucovina. Their reports indicate that Britain was always ready to transform the country or parts of it into colonies, even though, in the end, what prevailed was the imperialism of the free trade, which, according to Gallagher and Robinson’s study, mentioned above, was one of the principal ways of British imperialist expansion.

Thomas Thornton’s successor with the Levant Company was William Wilkinson, who published his own Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820), one of Stoker’s main sources for Dracula. In it, Wilkinson insisted that the Romanian principalities were not cultivated enough: The great waste of land left in both principalities in a state of nature, and the universal custom of not cultivating the immediate vicinity of the high roads, give to the country, in many parts, an appearance of desolation (164). But his colonising gaze imagined armies of agricultural labourers toiling for the prosperity of the metropole: The fertility of the soil is such as to procure nourishment for ten times the number of the present population, and leave wherewith to supply other countries besides (85). The main purpose of Wilkinson’s Account was to raise awareness in Britain about the commercial opportunities in that part of Europe and to invite Britons to partake in the opulence (74) that the trade with the Principalities could provide. Referring to Wallachia and Moldavia’s Hellenophone princes, Wilkinson spoke of the region’s proverbial appellation of ‘Peru of the Greeks’ (71). He gave in lengthy detail all the articles of trade available in the principalities (from wheat all the way to hare-skins), the amounts that were produced annually, their cost, as well as their immediate availability. The two countries, he explained, needed a wise administration, under which industry and agriculture should receive their due encouragement, the trade of exports laid open, the commercial intercourse with foreign nations set upon a proper footing, and finally, the mines explored (84); the main obstacle were the inhabitants themselves, who were enemies of their prosperity (85).

The rhetorics justifying British interference are present in the very first accounts, whether official like Wilkinson’s or not. The foremost discursive rationalisation of political and economic domination claims that the natives are incapable of proper self-government . . . [unable] to develop the natural resources of their countries to full potentiality (Kennedy 313, 315). Like Wilkinson, many other travellers constructed the image of Romania as a poor little rich country through a series of tropes: there were not enough people; the riches (especially the land) were not exploited enough; it was a land of opportunity, either for settlers or for merchants (because everything was cheap); people were primitive, child-like. One of the most influential accounts of the early 19th century was that of Edward Daniel Clarke (1769-1822), a clergyman, naturalist, mineralogist, known as Dr Clarke. His multi-volume Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa went through several editions and were much followed and copied. He found Wallachia abandoned to woods or to pasture (255). Because of "knavery and corruption, it may be easily imagined what attractions the Capital of WALACHIA has for Greeks and Jews" (257). The 1812-1814 Private Diary of General Sir Robert Wilson (a hero of the war against the French in the Iberian Peninsula) describes a trip through Moldavia where, for a hundred miles, we did not see one village (I, 140). The country was, however, rich, and Wilson was entertained in the capital Iaşi with hospitality and costly magnificence. . . . This city is handsome, and contains many palaces. The room in which I dined this day was a hundred and twenty feet long, and the other apartments are in proportion (I, 141).

Perhaps the most widely read pre-Victorian travelogue about Romania was that of the Scottish physician Adam Neale (1779-1832). His Travels through Some Parts of Germany, Poland, Moldavia, and Turkey (1818) include trips up and down Moldavia and Wallachia, with Transylvania in sight. In Moldavia, he discovered pastoral life in the very infancy of society (155). He relied on earlier accounts, especially foreign: General Bau[e]r laments that this beautiful country, with so fertile a soil and so fine a climate, should be thus thinly peopled, being persuaded that it might nourish five or six times more inhabitants than it at present contains, and [Jean-Louis] Carra says, that there is only one fortieth part of the arable soil in tillage. The famished inhabitants of Switzerland might here find a refuge without crossing the Atlantic [O]cean. . . . The fertility of Moldavia is quite inexhaustible (Neale 166-167). Michael Joseph Quin (1796-1843), founder of the Dublin Review, described the principalities in his A Steam Voyage down the Danube with Sketches of Hungary, Wallachia, Servia, Turkey, etc. (1835), which was translated into French in 1836 and Dutch in 1838. He claimed to be travelling through a semi-barbarous region (68), whose inhabitants were indolent enough to practise animal husbandry rather than agriculture (142-143). Charles Boileau Elliott (1803-1875), vicar of Godalming (in Surrey), visited Wallachia and Moldavia on his way back from India, where he had served in the Bengal Civil Service. He stayed with the British vice-consul in Galatz, where one-fifth of the population were British subjects from the Ionian isles (I, 205), and was amazed at the cheapness of products: a goose in good condition costs sevenpence, a fat sheep three shillings, and an egg a farthing (I, 204). Moldavia, from the fertility of its soil, is capable of supporting four or five times the existing number (I, 207).

Captain Edmund Spencer, a prolific travel writer in the 1830s, described the two principalities as little known, and from their position highly interesting to the commercial world (II, 237). His arguments about the advantages brought to the local economy by the British presence and about Russian plots against such presence, were much repeated subsequently: Since the establishment of the house of Bell & Co. at Bucharest, and the extensive commerce carried on through their agency with Great Britain, which has been already a source of general benefit to the principalities, the Russian employées [sic] have never ceased endeavouring to interrupt a communication so productive of good in every point of view (II, 255). He came to the Romanian Principalities from the Caucasus and, in Galatz, a city where British merchants were already becoming extremely influent, he felt at home: "I first beheld, since I left Asia, the stars which herald in the dawn of European civilization, in the form of custom-house officers, sanitary officers, police-officers, &c." (II, 197).

The burgeoning British presence in Galatz in the 1830s and 1840s was due to London’s desire to keep the mouths of the Danube out of Russian influence, since the river was seen as an important commercial route between Western Europe and India. Towards the end of the hungry forties, which culminated with the Great Famine in Ireland, Wallachia and Moldavia became even more important as a ready source of wheat and maize. They began to be called the Danubian Principalities and were the main point of contention in the cold war that opposed Britain and Russia until 1853, when the former gave the latter an ultimatum, asking for the removal of any obstacle to the navigation on the Danube (see Rossetti and Rey 6). Russia was exercising its protectorship over the principalities in the wake of the 1848 revolutions, and its refusal to withdraw from Wallachia and Moldavia caused in Britain a similar reaction to the German military intervention in Belgium in the First World War (see Figes 122-129).

Britain had been following closely the informal parts of the Ottoman Empire, those connected with the Porte rather by treaty than as integral parts of the empire. In this light I view Moldavia and Wallachia on the north, and Egypt on the south (Eton 297). The comparison with Egypt, mutatis mutandis, can be very useful, since in both cases the rationalisation of British presence was centred on the necessity of preserving the commercial routes (the Danube and the Suez Canal, respectively) in such a way as to ensure the free trade. In 1859, Prime Minister Lord Palmerston explained that, We do not want Egypt for ourselves, any more than any rational man with an estate in the north of England and a residence in the south would have wished to possess the inns of the road. All he could want would have been that the inns should be well-kept, always accessible, and furnishing him, when he came, with mutton-chops and post-horses (Ashley II, 124-125). Of course, Egypt was transformed into a British dominion in 1882, but only because of a local revolt that threatened the free trade: It is only when the polities of these new regions fail to provide satisfactory conditions for commercial or strategic integration and when their relative weakness allows, that power is used imperialistically to adjust these conditions (Gallagher and Robinson 6).

The mouths of the Danube, situated in Romania, had a similar fate to that of the Nile in Egypt. Following the British victory in the Crimean War, the navigation on the Danube was transferred to the authority of the newly created European Commission of the Danube (ECD), largely controlled by Great Britain (see Artenie, Dracula Invades England 67-76). The first British commissioners were veterans of the war in Crimea – John Stokes (from 1856 to 1871) and Charles George Gordon (1871-1873) – or of the Kaffir War in South Africa: Herbert Taylor Siborne (1873-1881). All three had served with the Royal Engineers, as had Charles Hartley (1825-1915), who was Chief Engineer of the ECD and supervised the works on the Danube for more than half a century. More engineers, surveyors, and sappers also came from England (Hartley 110-111) and for the remainder of the Commission’s existence the Britons formed the majority of the personnel. Neither the British Commissioner nor the Chief Engineer ever asked the other Commissioners for permission. Instead, they communicated directly with the Foreign Office in London when they asked for people (110) or when they requested approval of the technical works on the river (157). As one of the Russian travellers of the time so eloquently put it, The Danube is, so to speak, quite a modern invention (Demidov I, 49). In fact, it was mostly a British creation and its origins are to be found in Britain’s need of cereals.

In Social Change in a Peripheral Society (1976), still the best analysis of the 19th-century British encroachment on Romania, Daniel Chirot suggests that the economy of the Danubian Principalities had already begun to mutate at the turn of the 19th century, when their rural villages, mostly pastoral and relying on the communal use of the land, were being forced to leave the hill and mountain districts and move to the plains and practise agriculture (see Chirot 80). Peasants were dispossessed as every effort [wa]s made to break village self-sufficiency in order to produce an exportable surplus (59). With the growing need for wheat in Britain, and especially after the creation of the ECD, the Romanian economy was ‘modernized’ – that is, colonized – much more thoroughly (88) and the villagers were transformed into agricultural peasants, as the rural economy shifted from being primarily pastoral to a primarily cereal-growing economy (98). After the Crimean War, when the Romanian Principalities became a European Protectorate, the British Empire managed to dictate the changes it had envisioned for the Romanian economy, including the division of agricultural lands, by concentrating all the power in the hands of a small elite of boyars: The British position was based, rather, on a general ideological reflex which Britain tended to apply quite consistently throughout its imperial zone of influence from South America to India. Any class that seemed akin to the English ‘gentry class’ was favoured. And of course, it generally favoured large concentrations of land in the hands of men oriented to the world market (115-116).

As a result, Romania became, in the following decades, more and more of a British informal colony. The average yearly number of hectares of wheat and corn cultivated grew 600%, just as the first travellers had suggested at the beginning of the 19th century. The entire focus of the economy was on the grain trade: the direction of development [was] not toward an industrial, urban economy, but rather toward a rural, cereal-export economy (Chirot 125). Romanian anti-colonial sentiments began soon after the Crimean War, as proven by the thoughts expressed by Ion Ghica (1816-1897), the first Prime Minister of Romania under King Charles I (and later Romanian Minister in London), when he came to desire pour l’honneur de l’humanité qu’une maladie détruise les Anglais jusqu’au dernier (qtd. in Lemny 210). It was in London that the fate of Romanians was being decided in the 1850s and 1860s. Wallachia and Moldavia desired to unite and form a single country called Romania, which was hotly debated in the British Parliament as well as in the London newspapers. Dimitrie Brătianu (another future Prime Minister of Romania) argued in The London Daily News of 18 October 1856 in favour of the union by invoking the 1460 treaty between Vlad (Ţepeş) and Mohamed II (see Bratiano 2). In the end, the union of Wallachia and Moldavia was decided by a vote in the British House of Commons. William Ewart Gladstone, then in the opposition, summarised it in his diary on 4 May 1858: Made my motion on the Principalities. Lost by 292: 114; and with it goes another broken promise to a people (Morley II, 4). In what seemed as an outrageous act of defiance against the decision made in London, the Romanians found a loophole and, in January 1859, they elected the same person first as Prince of Moldavia, then as Prince of Wallachia, and proclaimed the de facto union.⁴

The next time Romania acted against British interests was in 1877-1878, when, led by its new monarch Charles I, it allied with Russia against the Ottoman Empire and proclaimed its independence. One of the British travellers expressed his country’s sentiments in condemning the alliance, although, bad as it was, was as nothing comparing with the wickedness which was to follow (Ozanne 222). Russia was losing the war, until the Romanian army intervened: Well did the Roumanians fight, and it is clear that, but for their hearty co-operation, the troops of the Czar could never have held their own, but must have been driven back until they took refuge on friendly soil. Thus did Prince Charles add to his previous treachery the sin of warring against his Suzerain Lord (222-223). Ozanne’s views are very similar to those espoused by George Stoker, younger brother of the author of Dracula. George was a chief of ambulance in the Ottoman Army and he described his experiences of the conflict in a memoir called With the Unspeakables (1878). Romanian independence meant ridding the country both of the very informal Ottoman suzerainty and of the Western European protectorship, still in place since the Crimean War. The European powers, led by Disraeli’s British Empire, recognised the independence, but Romania’s request of being offered the same guarantee of neutrality as the one enjoyed by Belgium was refused. At the same time, the dominion of the European Commission of the Danube was extended to include not only the mouths of the river, but its entire flow on Romanian territory as well as that of the river’s tributaries, as long as they were navigable.

Britain’s first bridgehead at the mouth of the Danube, even before the creation of the ECD, was the port of Sulina. The following account, from a book owned by Stoker and written by an acquaintance of his, must be taken with a grain of salt, but it certainly gives an idea of the symbolical importance of Sulina for the foundational myth of what may be called the British Danube:

As early as the time of the Irish famine in 1847-48 hundreds of English sailing-vessels came to the Black Sea for grain. Most of them anchored in the mouth of the Sulina branch, discharged ballast there, and loaded with corn to supply the urgent demand for bread-stuffs at home. A squalid little settlement rapidly sprang up among the heaps of gravel deposited on the marshy banks, and as years went on the constantly accumulating ballast was spread farther and farther up along the stream, and inland over the morass, and streets and houses followed the expanding area of solid ground. The establishment of the European Commission of the Danube gave a fresh impulse to the growing place, and a busy commercial town soon covered the deposit of ballast, having its foundations, literally, on English soil. (Millet 287-288)

If Wilkinson thought Wallachia and Moldavia were similar to colonial Peru, Charles Cunningham, the British consul in Galatz, thought that Sulina was a little California where fortunes are to be made (qtd. in Focas 179).

In Stoker’s novel, Dracula sails from Varna to Galatz, which means that he enters the Danube at Sulina. From Galatz, he sails up the Siret (Sereth), pursued by Harker and Godalming in a steam-launch. All this time, the vampire and his enemies are travelling through waters governed by the ECD, an organisation with entirely discretionary functions . . . its own insignia and flag [and] enjoying a passive immunity from external interference (Blackburn 1154). It was not the only time that Britain acted, directly or indirectly, to preserve a water route for its free-trade empire. This was also the case of the Suez Canal and even that of South Africa, where the British were present primarily to safeguard the routes to the East, by preventing foreign powers from acquiring bases on the flank of those routes (Gallagher and Robinson 2). In Egypt and in South Africa, Britain had decided that a formal imperialist intervention was necessary. But this did not always happen: Once entry had been forced into Latin America, China and the Balkans, the task was to encourage stable governments as good investment risks, just as in weaker and unsatisfactory states it was considered necessary to coerce them into more co-operative attitudes (9). Britain was confident that its co-dependent relationship with Romania was enough to keep this country, in part via the British enclave on the Danube, in the informal network of free-trade imperialism. On the one hand, the wheat and Indian corn from Romania was so important to the British economy after the Crimean War, and especially after 1878, that [t]he price of grain on the London market was set and fluctuated depending on the activity of the people in the navigational complex of the Lower Danube (Focas 179). On the other hand, England’s position in the foreign trade of Romania was overwhelming: between 1885 and 1894, when Stoker was writing Dracula, it placed first in imports, exports, and overall as Romania’s most important commercial partner (see Dobre 100). Just by controlling Romania’s debt, accumulated in the modernising process (see Hammond 616-618), Britain was making sure that its informal influence extended well into the territory crossed by Dracula’s pursuers in the final chapters of Stoker’s novel.

Despite their different status, one being a formal dominion, the other only an informal one, Egypt and Romania were very similar in the representations of Britons. In an interview granted in 1983, Evelyn Shuckburgh, who had been Assistant Under-Secretary in charge of Middle East affairs during the Suez Crisis in the mid-1950s, explained thus his reluctance to leave Egypt behind: I felt then you see, that the British had been a very very great people primarily through the things they were doing outside their own island. Of course it wasn’t really true because it was because of our industrial success that we had this capacity but we had this wonderful position all around the world through our activities and our power and our influence and all that. . . . And we were being chucked back and pushed back and all that. It seemed desperate rather and one had a picture of us coming back to this island and starving to death (qt. in Yacoubi 219). In John Murray’s A Handbook for Travellers in South Germany and Austria, this sentence, which remained unchanged throughout the 19th century and into the next, expresses British feelings about Galatz: It is a free port, of great consequence as one of the outlets of the rich grain country of the valley of the Danube, a rival of Odessa. Hence the anxiety of Russia to put her claws on the Principalities, to secure the monopoly of grain-trade of the Black Sea, and so to starve out England at her will (Murray 585). To the metropole, it mattered little whether the British Empire was formal or informal, as long as its own survival and prosperity were ensured.

Transylvania: The Colonial Plot

British travellers through Transylvania and other regions in Austria-Hungary, many of whom were consulted and used by Bram Stoker, employed the usual rhetorics about a land too fertile for too small a number of inhabitants and about the need of foreign settlers. Nina Mazuchelli, author of Magyarland (1881), was impressed both with the wonderful fertility of these plains and the thinness of the population—in some districts that we pass through, vast tracts of uncultivated land many miles in extent, consisting of soil so rich that it only needs to be turned and sown with grain to yield rich increase; and as we gaze from horizon to horizon and see only one solitary farmhouse, we marvel that English colonists do not emigrate here instead of exiling themselves to the Antipodes (I, 120). Charles Boner, who wrote about Transylvania: Its Products and Its People (1865) wondered why Men expatriate themselves, emigrate to America, or some take a sheep-farm at the Cape, or lead the life of a savage in Australia, separated from friends and even from humanity, in the hope and for the sake of realizing a fortune in a certain number of years (389) when the enterprising Briton could find in Transylvania a virgin soil; and, like every virgin soil, it would yield him abundantly for his labour. There is as wide a field and as little competition as in the interior of Africa, where men find it worth their while to go and create a trade and a market for themselves. Were Transylvania further off, it would probably not have been so long overlooked by our daring merchant pioneers; or it may be that a greater charm is found in trafficking with a black king, seated under a red cotton umbrella as dais, than in building up one’s fortune in a land where there is quite as much of novelty, but which is nearer home (389-390).

There was, however, something new in the travelogues of the second half of the 19th century, when Transylvania was being discovered and constructed discursively in preparation of a possible inclusion, whether formal or informal, in the British sphere of influence. Travellers from England and their readers at home (including policymakers) already had a sense of racial or ethnic superiority, which came from the belief that their religion and customs (law, family, cultural standards) were unrivalled, but this was replaced in the 19th century by a belief in the superiority of British civilisation (science and technology), located at the top of the ladder of civilisations. The archaeologists’ discovery of pre-historical man and the belief in the constant progress of mankind also led to the conviction that Britain represented the present and the future, while other civilisations had been frozen in various moments in time and, as such, represented the past. The mid- and late 19th century in Britain saw the development of the new science of anthropology, especially with the foundation (by Richard Francis Burton and James Hunt) of the Anthropological Society of London, in 1863. Most of its members, often labelled scientific racists, were armchair anthropologists, but sometimes they were also travellers (for example Winwood Reade or especially Stoker’s friend Richard Francis Burton).

Very often, especially when writing about Africa, both travellers and anthropologists promoted the idea of conflict as a way of replacing the less civilised races, just as Darwin had noticed: At the present day civilised nations are everywhere supplanting barbarous nations . . . and they succeed mainly, though not exclusively, through their arts, which are the products of the intellect (Darwin I, 154). Anthropologists looked for natural laws that would explain both the variety of human races and the reason why superior races like the British were destined to supplant inferior ones. The Victorians’ faith in their own superiority granted them a ruthless attitude towards failure. . . . ‘Lower’ races were stagnant failures, relics of earlier episodes in the history of mankind’s ascent, with nothing further to contribute to the march of progress (Bowler 14). Among the Victorian intellectuals that Stoker knew and admired, Max Müller came perhaps closest to such a view, when he coined the terms progressive savages (pre-historic men) and retrogressive savages (uncivilised nations). He was sure that retrogressive savages could be made progressive again with the help of foreign intervention from the civilised West.

As one recent commentator has observed, in the 19th century the language and formulae of anthropology created both a justification and an imperative for imperialism (Pauly 258). Conflicts like those recommended for African regions were not the rule. Anthropology usually established that inferior civilisations were capable of improvement, but only with the help of advanced nations like Britain, thereby justifying colonial intervention. As Alfred Russell Wallace explained in 1865, The relation of a civilised to an uncivilised race, over which it rules, is exactly that of parent to child, or generally adult to infant, and a certain amount of despotic rule and guidance is essential in the one case as in the other (150). Thus, the British Empire had a noble, civilising mission, which was scientifically justified by anthropologists who, in turn, relied on travellers’ accounts. What could be termed the colonial plot of the advancement of the British Empire, both formal and informal, involved three separate stages: research, scholarship, engagement. The imperialist drive connected three different groups: travellers –> anthropologists –> policymakers.

The first and most important thing that all British travellers (and amateur anthropologists) noticed in 19th-century Transylvania was the presence of many nations: a strange admixture of different nationalities (Boner 10); strange admixture of races (Gerard I, v); a hotch-potch of races (Crosse 2). Among the many peculiarities which exist in this interesting country, there is not one that perhaps strikes the stranger so forcibly as the variety of races (Mazuchelli I, 38) which, in Dracula, Stoker turned into Jonathan Harker’s observation about the whirlpool of European races. More important, both these travellers and Stoker were more than happy to present Transylvania as a land inhabited by what Eric Hobsbawm would call proto-nations: populations living on large territories or even in dispersion, and lacking a common polity (Hobsbawm 64). All 19th-century accounts of Transylvania (Dracula included) insist on the presence of Székelys, Saxons, Wallachs, pre-1918 Slovaks, Gypsies, etc., all nations without a state of their own, although the Székelys are Hungarian-speaking and, as such, were in their own country (the Kingdom of Hungary); the Saxons are German-speaking and they, too, were at home in the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary; while the Wallachs were, of course, Romanians, whose mother country was just across the Carpathians. In Dracula, Stoker preferred, like some of the travellers (see, e.g., Boner 66), to call Transylvanian Romanians Wallachs so as to distinguish them from the actual Roumanians, and present them as a proto-nation, better suited for life in a multiethnic empire.

In the first British descriptions of the Transylvanian proto-nations, they were associated with the first races colonised by England: "The Wallachians are the shepherds, wagonners, and labourers,—the Irish of Transylvania, as the Szeklers have been compared to the Scottish highlanders (Conder 665). These associations continued in the accounts read by Stoker: The Wallach has many points of resemblance to our friend Paddy. He is grossly superstitious, as the number of crosses by the roadside and on every eminence testify; and, like his prototype, he lives in abject terror of his priest, of whose powers he has the most exalted ideas. . . . He is, too, a lazy, pleasant, good-natured, drunken, careless, improvident fellow; living like the grasshopper while the sun shine, and ‘the divil may care for the morn’ (Johnson 249). The same comparison justifies the traveller’s warning about the dangers of a close contact with the Wallack [who] much resembles his Hibernian prototype. He is much given to treacherous revenge, and is capable of the most awful atrocities when aroused" (251).

The Romanians of 19th-century Transylvania were the object of the most insistent operations of othering in the accounts of the travellers-anthropologists read by Stoker. Like the Africans or the Pacific Islanders whose inferior civilisation was supposed to justify the noble mission of colonial intervention, Transylvanian Romanians were presented as Wallack hordes . . . a wild uncultivated people, without a sense even of law or property (Boner 100); a population which is so little advanced in civilisation as to be indifferent to the first principles of order (Crosse 98); shut out from the world and all intercourse with others, the Wallack population is in the lowest state of civilised existence (Boner 280). Stories about the 1848 revolution of Transylvanian Romanians turned into opportunities to Orientalise and compare them to nations more commonly associated with primitivism in the Victorian era: These Eastern people are subject to terrible epidemies of frenzy! (Crosse 248); they took life, like the King of Dahomey, for the exquisite excitement it gave. . . . The dread they inspired was as great as the sound of the Indian war-whoop would cause in some English settlement (Boner 229).⁵

Just like other uncivilised populations around the world, Transylvanian Romanians could be saved, these travellers argued, if brought in contact with a superior civilisation like the British. The first issue to solve was to make them understand the benefits of such an encounter: If the Wallack could be raised out of the moral swamp of his present existence he might do something, but he must first feel the need of what civilisation has to offer him (Crosse 142). The problem was that this need could hardly exist as long as the pastoral life offered them both freedom and a certain level of prosperity: In these villages are seen no rags nor even mended garments, and if an ‘idle,’ the Wallachs would nevertheless seem to be a very thriving, people. Like the ‘gentle Slovaks,’ they have their cow, their poultry and their little plot of land (Mazuchelli II, 128). Transylvanian Romanians had to be convinced to cultivate the land, which could at the same time turn Transylvania into a cereal-exporting country and turn the improvident and stupid Wallachs (Johnson 229) into consumers who needed what civilisation has to offer. The travellers’ recommendations were quite clear: that the Wallacks should become an agricultural, instead of the pastoral people which they hitherto were. We find that by wise measures such change has been effected among the Caffres, and they have acquired habits of industry unknown to them before. . . . If such a conversion could be brought about with those South African people, the Wallacks will surely allow the possibility of the same thing being done with them (Boner 284).

The colonial plot described above remained incomplete in Transylvania, which, indeed, never became a British dominion, despite the preparatory accounts of travellers and anthropologists. The entire plot, however, can be found in Stoker’s novel. The plot of Dracula advances in the same three stages followed by British imperialists of the second half of the 19th century. The first part of the novel, set in Transylvania, relates the travel stage, with the discovery of the Other in all his horror. The second part, set in various locations in England, recounts in minute detail the constitution of the scientific arguments that will justify the imperialist intervention: these arguments are ultimately anthropological. The last part is about a retaliatory expedition in a territory (or rather a n0-man’s-land), among people who cannot govern (or at least cannot police) themselves. Many film adaptations of the novel prefer to narrate the story in chronological order and often start with Dracula’s plan to invade England, or even with his life as a 15th-century Romanian ruler. This is, however, not how Stoker arranged the plot: Dracula’s plan is only gradually discovered and further justifies the Westerners’ invasion of Transylvania.

The World according to Stoker

Did Stoker know all that much about Transylvania and Romania? He most certainly did. Owing to its role in the Crimean War (for Britain, this was the most important war of the 19th century, from Waterloo to the Boer War), Romania had been much talked about in Stoker’s early years. He then met and befriended many veterans of that war and married the daughter of Colonel James Balcombe, a veteran of Inkerman and Sevastopol. Romania was again at the forefront of the debates around the Eastern Question, the climax of which was Romania’s War of Independence (1877-1878). Not only was this war discussed daily in the British public and private sphere, but George Stoker, the novelist’s younger brother, took active part in the campaigns. Romanian cereal exports were important for both Great Britain and Ireland, where Stoker lived for the first three decades of his life. It is no wonder that one of Stoker’s major sources was confident that his British readers knew Romania sufficiently well: "It is composed, as most persons are aware, of the principalities, or provinces, of Wallachia and Moldavia (Johnson 104; our emphasis). As a recent commentator has put it, the Victorians in general knew more about Eastern Europe than we give them credit for knowing, and . . . Bram Stoker in particular was surrounded by friends, family, and acquaintances who understood much of the history, politics, and conflicts of these lands" (McLean 339).

Bram Stoker came to know many of these friends and acquaintances through Henry Irving, his friend and employer at the Lyceum Theatre. Irving was undoubtedly the most celebrated English actor of the time and Stoker began his collaboration with him in 1878, when he left Dublin and a job as inspector of petty sessions for the local government to become manager of the Lyceum. Owing to his star status in late-Victorian England, Irving was remarkably close to members of the Royal Family, including the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII), and especially Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge who, in 1867, had married the Duke of Teck, a descendant of the historical Dracula, on the side of his Székely mother. Stoker knew the Tecks very well, and once organised a birthday party for their daughter, Victoria May, the future Queen Mary (Stoke, Personal Reminiscences I, 311). At least as early as June 1889, that is, long before Stoker started working on the plot of Dracula, it was being reported in the British press that the young princess was to be engaged to the eldest son of the Prince of Wales (see Our Ladies’ London Letter 8). The coincidence is too great to be overlooked, especially since Stoker was close enough to the family to know stories about their ancestors. One of the mysteries of the novel, that is, the fact that Stoker mixes up Orthodoxy and Catholicism, as well as Romanian with Székely history, can easily be elucidated by the fact that the offspring of the historical Dracula (a Romanian) had lived for centuries as Székelys in Transylvania.

Transylvania was little known in early Victorian England, although that is easily explainable by the fact that it was seen as only a province, first in the Austrian Empire, then in Austria-Hungary (more exactly, as part of the Kingdom of Hungary). This meant that people and places from Transylvania were mentioned in British sources, but only as being from either Austria or Hungary. This changed, however, in the mid- and late Victorian era, when a series of travelogues about Transylvania were published and when the railways made travelling to that part of Europe more accessible. Transylvania was a destination included in popular travel guides like Baedeker and Murray, which Stoker appears to have consulted. Several books about both Transylvania and Romania were published in Britain in the second half of the 19th century, but, in most cases, whether Stoker opened any of them or not remains a mystery. There are, in fact, only a handful of undisputed sources for Dracula, as Bram Stoker’s Notes have made clear: William Wilkinson, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820); Charles Boner, Transylvania: Its Products and Its People (1865); Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves (1865); Andrew Crosse, Round about the Carpathians (1878); Nina Mazuchelli, Magyarland (1881); E.C. Johnson, On the Track of the Crescent (1885); Emily Gerard, Transylvanian Superstitions (1885) and The Land beyond the Forest (1888). There are, however, many other possible sources, some of which are only mentioned by title in Bram Stoker’s Notes, while others were found in Stoker’s library after his death.

It is in such books that Stoker may have found information about the European Commission of the Danube, whose headquarters were in Galatz, a city he decided to use in the novel as early as the summer of 1890 (see Bram Stoker’s Notes 246-247). From one of the books mentioned only by title in the research notes, Stoker could have learned that the Danube is the great artery through which, so to speak, the industrial life-blood of the nation circulates. But if it be a matter of primary importance to Roumania, it is hardly less so to ourselves. The greater part of the external trade of the countries bordering on the Danube which passes in and out of the Sulina mouth, the only navigable embouchure, is carried on in British bottoms (Samuelson 30). From a book that he owned, written by an acquaintance of his, Stoker would have learned that Between 1847 and 1860, 2648 English ships entered the river, representing a net tonnage of 509,723. Between 1861 and 1889 these numbers were raised to 12,363 and 9,842,260 respectively. In 1861, 214 English sailing-vessels and 35 steamers came to the port of Sulina, and in 1889, 842 steamers and not a single sailing-vessel (Millet 285). Even one of Stoker’s undisputed sources describes a group of middle-aged Wallachs or grave Magyars talking earnestly together, whispering of political complication between Russia and England, the result of the ‘Danube Commission,’ or the rising of the bed of the river Theiss (Mazuchelli II, 58).

Another book owned by Stoker can explain, at least in part, his decision to have vampires live among Romanians. J.F. Molloy’s The Faiths of the Peoples (2 vols., 1892), found in his library with a dedication from the author to Mrs Bram Stoker (see Stoker, Forgotten Writings 224), describes religious services in various churches in London. In the account about an Orthodox church, the author remarks: There is absolution for the dead. Tradition exists that those who die excommunicated cannot return to dust; that they become Katak hanades [sic], or Vampires; that they are tenanted by evil spirits and wander about by night sucking blood. In the absolution for the dead the priest prays, that if the deceased had in any way incurred the penalty of excommunication, it might be remitted to him, and his body might return to the elements of which it was composed (Molloy I, 135). There is, in fact, no excommunication in the Orthodox Church, but Molloy’s views are very illustrative of Protestant misconceptions about Christian churches of East-Central Europe. Molloy was much inspired by John Mason Neale, the greatest authority on Orthodox Christianity in early Victorian England. In an essay first published in 1857 in the influential journal The Christian Remembrancer, Neale criticised an anti-Orthodox tract published by a Catholic convert of Greek origin (L’Eglise Orientale, Rome: Imprimerie de la Propagande, 1855), although there was one thing he agreed with: it is certain that prayers are also said in the East for those who are held to be lost . . . and to have become, as the popular superstition goes, ‘katakhanades,’ ‘vrukolakai,’ or vampires, to the effect that it may please God that their bodies should return to dust; it being held that, in the case of those who have died under the ban of the Church, a part of their punishment consists in the indissolubility of their corpse (Neale 269). Such texts show that Stoker simply relied on stereotypes about the people of East-Central Europe that were largely accepted in Victorian England.

Unlike other modern editions of Dracula, the main purpose of the present edition is to avoid any justification or enhancement of Stoker’s othering of Romania and