I’d brag that I understood what “Boofer lady” meant at age 12, but I was also reading Leonard Wolf’s Annotated Dracula, so I was sort of cheating.
I also had forgotten that Drac did have a wonderfully melodramatic speech just after escaping from one of his London flats with a handful of gold. IIRC, he summed up his motives basically as: “I’m going to seduce ALL your beautiful, innocent English ladies!”
Stoker was an Irish author who lived in London. It’s been many years since I read the book, but presumably it is just easier to write about what you know.
Nope…not all that into boats. But if I were, shouldn’t I read Horatio Hornblower first?
No. O’Brian writes in an old style that I enjoy.
What about Frederick Marryat (Peter Simple, 1834)? He’s supposed to the the originator of the modern sea adventure novel, and he was actually LIVING in old style.
I read his Midshipman Easy some time ago. I probably would not have finished it had it not been for my interest in the genra.
Bram Stoker no doubt thought London was all that, too, so why not have Dracula move there? It certainly opened up the novel, with more characters to expand it. (that was one of my favorite parts of the novel, the horrifying voyage on that doomed ship. It was at one time supposed to be the basis of a movie starring Viggo Mortensen, but it fell through.)
Sounds like Dracula was tired of his limited human blood diet in Olde Country (black bread and cabbage) and wanted to go to somewhere more cosmopolitan for a buffet - fish and chips (English), pasta (Italian), bread and bagels (Jewish), fried rice (Chinese) lol.
Vlad the Impaler, who Dracula was supposedly based on somewhat, might or might not have had designs on the British throne, but he had many descendents, and his blood flows through the royal family, many royal families, to this day.
It’s good to be the King.
The reason obviously is because Stoker lived in London, but there is a reason given in the story: Dracula had purchased numerous homes in London and sent Transylvanian soil so that he could live in them safely. Why London? A big city’s easier to hide in, and London was the biggest city in the world at the time. Dracula has read a lot about London, and says about the books:
“I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death and all that make it what it is.”
(I got that quote from here.)
So basically he was bored after centuries of living in isolation and wanted to be at the centre of the world.
FWIW, the first place in “London” that we see him in is not actually in London, even though the book calls it London - it’s Purfleet, which is in Essex. It borders London now, but at the time of the book’s writing it was a mainly rural area - London’s boundaries have expanded east since then, but still not as far east as Purfleet. I grew up a couple of miles away from Purfleet and now, weirdly, also live less than a mile from another of his London addresses, Chicksand St, which does exist, despite what the link I gave says. Also Jamaica Lane does sort of exist - there is a Jamaica Rd in Bermondsey and I don’t think changing it from road to lane makes it “fictional.”
I’m not sure which films make this reasoning clear, but in the book there actually was a reason for Dracula to go to London.
You could have gotten it from post #40. Just saying.
Sorry! Don’t know how I missed that. At least I provided a little extra info, I guess.
No worries. You did give all that neat London information.
Stoker uses an interesting mixture of fictional and real locations and businesses. Carter-Paterson, the transport company that Dracula uses to haul his coffins to Carfax, was an actual firm that readers of the time would have recognized. Likewise, The Spaniards, the pub that Van Helsing and Seward visit after their first encounter with the vampiric Lucy on Hampstead Heath, was a real pub (and still exists, according to wikipedia). These are interesting touches of reality in the midst of the various fictional law firms and estate agents that the characters deal with.
Another plausible reason, though not at all explicit in the book, is that the Transylvanians are getting too difficult. Remember, the peasants even several towns away all knew what was going on and how to protect themselves; they’re even pushing crosses and garlic onto a random stranger (Jonathan).
Drac may have thought it would be easier hunting somewhere that wasn’t full of peasant superstition. And he was right – he would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for that meddling old Dutchman who happened to show up.
I imagine it was partly because when you bring a threat closer to home, it becomes more relatable to the audience.
I figured he was motivated by the stellar reputation of British dental care.
He was misinformed.
I had no idea. That’s pretty cool.
He wanted to go to London because he heard how bloody it is.
Heck, he’s just a regular guy–wants to expand his business (collecting souls), get a nicer house in the city, find a nice girl, settle down and start a family.
To be a contrarian, I would say that the reason that Dracula went to London is the same reason that Hollywood films blow up the Statue of Liberty, anime films blow up Tokyo Tower, and Doctor Who has decided that it makes more sense to operate out of podunk England rather than the most powerful country on Earth, 'Merica.
This is to say, Dracula went to London because it was a British novel written for Britons. If the book had been written by Goethe then Dracula would have gone to Frankfurt, Berlin, or Vienna, probably. Had it been written by Gaston Leroux, then he would have gone to Paris.
I think this is a given. From Stoker’s point of view as the author, the horror was to bring a distant legend into the audience’s immediate setting–home isn’t safe.