Yep. That’s one reason that Leslie Klinger re-annotated it a few years back. There are apparently errors in Wolf’s annotated Frankenstein, too.
There are actually several annotated editions, with one particularly expensive one apparently being the overall best – even Klinger cites it.
I assume the Skal you cite is David J. Skal. I didn’t know he’d done a Norton edition. He’s the author of Hollywood Gothic, the ultimate reference on Dracula from book to stage to movie, as well as V is for Vampire, the Monster Show and Dracula: The Vampire Play. He’s the expert I trust most on Drac. But when Coppola made his movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Wolf was his hired expert, not Skal. And Skal’s got some acid comments on that movie.
This is, I presume, Clive Leatherdale’s annotated edition, whose title is Dracula Unearthed. As you say, it’s expensive–Amazon has it at $148! I haven’t been able to read Leatherdale’s edition, but I would very much like to.
Something else that dates Wolf’s annotations is the discovery, since his work, of Stoker’s notes and outlines for the novel, which are held at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. As I understand it, they’ve been there since 1913, when the museum bought them at auction. But it was only in the mid-1970s that any serious Dracula scholars became aware of them. Leatherdale and Klinger were both able to examine those notes, while Wolf couldn’t, which gives them greater insight into Stoker’s creative process.
That has been the motherload, yes. There is one passage where Van Helsing cites vampires in “the Chersonese”. The term is ambiguous, but Wolf (rather sensibly) assumes it references the islands south of the Balkans. Stoker’s notes make it explicit that the good doctor is referring to Malaysia.
The notes are available in facsimile form now, by the way. edited by Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller. Also, there will be a new Norton edition out in 2019 or 2020, edited by Skal and John Edgar Browning. It promises to be a good one.
It’s been a decade since I read it, but I don’t recall disliking it.
While the Broadway version portrays the Phantom as a tormented genius, in the book he’s pretty much just a dick. IIRC he taunts Christine at one point, broadly hinting that he could easily rape her, but that his honor as a Gentleman forbids it. Or something.
Since the OP mentioned The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, I’ll chime in that I really didn’t get it as written. The novella is set up with one of Jekyll’s friends recounting how the events looked from his perspective, not knowing that Jekyll and Hyde were the same person. His portion of the narrative concludes with Jekyll’s suicide, with the Doctor’s written confession filling in the gaps. I comprehended it well enough, but I didn’t find it enthralling on the page. Then again, it’s been a while.
Part of the problem with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I think, is that it’s structured as a mystery. Why has Jekyll started behaving so strangely, and who is this loathsome Mr. Hyde that he’s befriended? Why would an upstanding man like Jekyll ever associate with such an awful creature? The revelation, toward the end, that Jekyll and Hyde were in fact the same person was meant to be a shock to the reader.
Unfortunately no one reading it today can experience it in that way. Even the most naive reader knows the basic plot. The very phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” has passed into common idiom to mean a split personality. So it’s like reading a mystery when you already know who the killer is–not much fun.
Oh, you’d be surprised – I have had students who were genuinely surprised by the ending of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This is at a middling state university with at least some admissions requirements, although in a part of the country where K-12 education generally sucks and tends to produce students with big gaps in their cultural knowledge.
(And, to answer the question in the OP, I’ve read both and taught Frankenstein.)
I’ve read Dracula and quite enjoyed it - I mean, it’s not Stephen King or Frederick Forsyth, but I thought it was pretty good and liked the narrative constructs of having diaries and audio recordings telling the story as well. In that respect it’s almost like a precursor to a lot of computer games.
I recall trying to get into Frankenstein but it was pretty obviously written in the early 19th Century and it was… well, slow, dull and I realised I had so very many other books to read that it went back into the Pile Of Books In The Corner.
The Phantom of the Opera was actually out of print when Lloyd Webber found a copy in a NYC used book store for a dollar. His thought was “This book can’t decide whether it’s a romance, mystery or horror novel.” He went with the romance, and the rest is history (30 years and counting on Broadway).
Even cutting some slack for the differences in writing styles between then and now, they are both badly written. Same with The Phantom Of The Opera. And yet, look what they have all morphed into.
Because of this thread, I decided to read Dracula. It had its moments–my favorite was the ship arriving in England during the storm. Another one I thought was memorable was when Harker observes Dracula making his (Harker’s) bed. It’s important to Harker because it proves his suspicion that the count has no servants. I found it odd to picture a vampire making a bed. Did it have hospital corners?
Tried *Frankenstein *about twenty years ago, and coldn’t get into it at all. The writing style seemed to drain away the excitement somehow.
Read *Dracula *as a teenager and loved it, on the other hand. Read it again about a dozen years ago when my son did it as a play with his high school and enjoyed it still, though not as much as the first time. It’s not a writing style I would’ve used myself or necessarily preferred, but it worked a lot better than *Frankenstein *IMO.
I’ve read both. I enjoyed Dracula much more than Frankenstein, mostly due to the prose style, but both would benefit from a good editor. I even started a thread about some of the incomprehensible dialect in some scenes in Dracula.
At least I read Dracula when I was old enough (early adolescence) to recognize the not-very-thinly veiled sex scenes, although the symbolic rape in Frankenstein is a little heavy-handed. And of course Mel Brooks has forever ruined my ability to read Frankenstein seriously, for which I am eternally grateful.
I sometimes think about trying to dig up a copy of Varney the Vampyre, which is alleged to have kicked off the vampire theme in novels of the period.
I have a copy, and it’s tough going. The Dover edition is in two volumes, and is probably the easiest edition to get in a Dead Tre edition. But it’s posted online at Project Gutenberg and there’s an online audio edition. See the links at the end of the Wikipedia page – Varney the Vampire - Wikipedia
Varney didn’t start the period vampire themese – that, it’s pretty much agreed, was John Polidorti’s The Vampyre, which is available in numerous editions, including online, a Dover edition, and other paperback editions. Polidori’s novella achieved fame in larghe part because people thought Byron wrote it. Byron did indeed start a fragment, which has been published, as well, and Polidori seems to have used Byron’s outline (although he didn’t copy his words) The Vampyre kicked off a series of Vampire plays, which really got the vampire tyhing going. Varney came by decades later.
I think, by the way, that Polidori has gotten a bad rap over the years. His Vampyr isn’t bad, despite what people say. He didn’t seek to get it published – that was someone else’s doing, so he wasn’t trying to steal Byron’s glory. For what it’s worth, I don’t think Byron could have written such a story, for various reasons. Certainly he never felt compelled to finish his own story. But The Vampyr is significant in changing our image of the vampiure from a zombie-like decrepit blood-sucker to a suave, titled, upper-class character who could pass for human, but secretly feeds on people. It’s such a powerful notion that the later vampires – the ones in the plays, Varney, Carmilla, and Dracula, were all titled, as Polidori’s Lord Ruthnen was.
For what it’s worth, by the way, The Vampyr was NOT Polidori’s contribution to the cycle of ghost stories the Shelley-Byron-Wollstonecraft party came up with that dismal summer in Switzerland. Mary Shelley thought he was writing a story about a woman punished wityh a skull-like head, but Polidoei actually considered his literary output from that affair to be a story about a doppelganger entitled Ernestus Berchtold, It’s been published, and, in my humble opinion, awful. Try reading it and you’ll appreciate The Vampyre more.
As I’ve noted before in another thread, we see a total of five vampires destroyed in Dracula: Lucy, the three vampire brides, and Dracula himself. Lucy gets a stake through the heart, has her head cut off and her mouth stuffed with garlic. The three brides get a stake through the heart and their heads cut off. No garlic in their mouths, because their bodies crumble to dust as soon as their heads are cut off. And of course, Dracula himself is stabbed through the heart with a Bowie knife, and has his head cut off with a kukri knife.
The one thing that all five deaths have in common is the severed head. For all that you hear about a stake through the heart, it’s clearly not necessary. And despite supposedly being his nemesis, Van Helsing isn’t the one who kills him–it’s Harker and Quincey Morris.
I think I’ve mentioned before that one of my most vivid memories is of reading the article on Dracula in the World Book Encyclopedia, which said that Dracula was killed by a stake driven through his heart. It was the first time that I had ever encountered a supposedly authoritative source that I knew from my own knowledge to be wrong. It shook me to my very core. What else was the encyclopedia lying to me about?
