Bram Stoker’s 'Dracula'

BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA WAS PUBLISHED in 1897, less than a year after Auguste and Louis Lumière debuted the cinematograph, a motion picture camera and film projector. The films the brothers presented in the early years of their invention showed the world in unfamiliar ways: ordinary events like a garden breakfast were shown in uncanny detail, a brick wall that had been toppled appeared to reconstitute itself, and, most famously, a train approaching a station seemed like it might burst through screen itself. Stoker’s novel, too, presents the world in unfamiliar ways, but contains no mention of the cinematograph or other early cinematic devices. Scholars of the Victorian era have debated whether Stoker had ever encountered a motion picture himself. In the 1890s, the Irish author worked as the business manager at Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre and would have been familiar with a wide variety of stage entertainments. Meanwhile, one of Dracula’s protagonists Jonathan Harker, the London clerk who is sent to Transylvania to arrange Count Dracula’s real estate affairs, is something of a Victorian tech bro: he keeps a Kodak camera among his possessions, and he encourages his fiancée Mina to compose her letters on a typewriter. Surely he would have taken an interest in the new technology.