To be contrarian, you’d have to think up something that hasn’t already been suggested about half a dozen times in the thread.
Being bitten by a vampire doesn’t turn you into one, by Stoker lore. Being bitten by a a vampire, and then him forcing you to drink HIS blood, turns you into one,
Victorians *wrote *really wordy letters.
Also, vampirism being transmitted by bite is absolutely a part of many eastern European folklore traditions. In addition, the vampires themselves are often portrayed as bestial, but rarely mindless, and sometimes fairly intelligent - a lot of myths ascribe vampires with strong OCD-like compulsions, such as having to stop and count the number of seeds their victim just dropped on the ground, or pausing to tie the shoelaces on a pair of untied shoes before attacking their victim.
Or Dorothy Dunnett?
Almost EDITED Dorothy Dunnett. Not the historical fiction; the mystery series about the guy with the yacht. Her agent took another offer.
Coincidentally, I just read a part of “The Pickwick Papers” that took place there.
I think we all know that, though, including the OP. The OP was asking if any reasons were given in the book.
The mechanism of becoming a vampire isn’t clear in the book. Lucy becomes a vampire, and AFAICT she never drank any of Dracula’s blood. She became a vampire because she died from being repeatedly bitten by Dracula.
Mina isn’t a vampire yet, but she is still alive. Dracula made her drink his blood to create a special connection with her, hoping apparently to get some kind of influence among the people who were trying to hunt him down. The implication seems to be that anyone who is bitten by a vampire becomes a vampire if they die before the biting vampire is destroyed - Van Helsing says that if Lucy is destroyed, the children who are bitten by “the bloofer lady” " will go back to their plays unsuspecting". Similarly Mina stops being a vampire - the burn on her forehead from being touched by the Host disappears when Dracula is destroyed.
The idea that anyone bitten by a vampire becomes a vampire when they die doesn’t work mathematically. Dracula has been in Transylvania for hundreds of years. If everyone he bit turned into a vampire, there wouldn’t be any non-vampires left. Unless everybody in the vicinity of his castle is onto him, and both blocks his attacks with garlic and crosses, and they are super-diligent about burying anybody he bites with a stake thru their heart or a mountain rose on their breast so they can’t get out of their coffins. So maybe the pickings have gotten so slim for Dracula that he wants to relocate to London, where nobody believes in him and he can start biting people more freely.
It’s not clear how often a vampire has to feed. Transylvania has supported Dracula for hundreds of years, and the three sister vampires for an undetermined amount of time. Dracula feeds once that Harker observes, when he finds Dracula in his crypt in the castle gorged with blood. I think the implication is that Dracula is storing up for the trip to England. And there is one time that Dracula kidnaps a child, in a bag, but I think he feeds the child to the three sisters.
I think the bottom line is that Transylvania is played out, so Dracula needs new hunting grounds.
Regards,
Shodan
Unless I’m missing something, it’s a fantastic coincidence (or the author’s contrivance) that Dracula makes landfall at the same seaside town where Lucy and Mina are vacationing, and that at least in Lucy’s case, she’s going to return practically to the doorstep of Dracula’s new lair.
^ It’s been a long time since I’ve read the book; this will be some wild-ass speculation: Dracula read all Harker’s mail, so he probably gleaned vacay news from one of Mina’s letters. I always assumed he hopped a boat near his residence, but it must have been Copenhagen or Amsterdam (that’s a looooong, risky trip over land for Mr. Fangs). The boat was probably heading for Edinburgh, until Drac killed the crew and hijacked the boat to Whitby (another risky trip over water for Batman). Mina or Lucy or both would tie him over until he could make it to London. If he could make it over land from Transylvania to the North Sea, I guess he would have no trouble getting from Whitby to London. :rolleyes:
No, Frankenstein was very far from being the first horror novel.
There was a whole genre of Gothic Fiction or Gothic Horror in the second half of the 18th century, not only in English but in other European languages. Many hundreds of Gothic novels were written before Frankenstein.
The Demeter started from the Black Sea port of Varna, approximately 200km southeast of Bucharest (as bat flies, longer overland). Now in Bulgaria but at the time part of the Russian Empire and thus Demeter is considered a Russian-flagged vessel. And Whitby was its planned destination. It took a suspiciously convenient storm to blow the derelict ship to the harbor.
Maybe this is implied by your comment, but I assumed that the storm was Dracula’s doing, so not a coincidence.
BTW: you don’t suppose the mystery of Dracula finally relocating could be as simple as his only having recently discovered the “trick” of moving boxes of his native soil to other lands?
It could well be. Stoker actually invented most of the vampire tropes we think of as “traditional” (there’s no “traditional” lore about vampires not throwing a reflection in mirrors, for instance. stoker invented that. Yet it “feels” like an old belief , because mirrors display the soul and all, and vampires don’t have souls. But it’s not traditional – it’s Stoker.) I don’t recall an old tradition that the vampire having to rest in Earth meant that he had to rest in His Native Earth. Stoker, I think, invented that, but also invented Dracula’s subterfuge of transporting boxes of his native earth to his new home in England, just to get around the restriction. The novel is full of both the vampire and the vampire hunters using modern technology as well as old lore (or, at least, what Stoker declares to be Old Lore) in fighting against each other.
It’s not just the Native Earth. There’s a genuine old stricture against evil spirits crossing running water. Dracula gets around that by having someone else carry him across the water in a boat.* He also gets realtors (Harker, and company) to locate a dwelling for him.
People are right to note the lack of consistency in The Way Vampires Work in Stoker’s novel. Some people become vampires when bitten by a vampire, others apparently don’t, or need other treatment. Dracula is comatose by day (but not powerless) in Transylvania, but he walks around London by day when he gets to England. Vampires have to be killed with a stake through the heart, yet Dracula is dispatched by being beheaded at sunrise. And so on.
I wasn’t joking when I said the endgame was “Fresh Snacks” – that’s quite literally what he was after.
*When Hamilton Deane wrote the play “Dracula”, which John Balderston later extensively rewrote for the Broadway performance. they had Dracula being transported from Transylvania to England by airplane (!!) No film version has ever portrayed this, to my knowledge – showing him aboard the ship “Varna” is just too picturesque, and gives them the chance to portray the crew being killed off, one by one, and have the deserted ship run ashore near Whitby. The airplane is given in the play as the reason tat Dracula finally leaves Transylvania for England – with the plane, he can at last make the journey in a single night. and with someone else flying him across the water, of course.
That would be a fascinating character to write these days, especially in first person. No love or remorse, but also no disdain or ill will–just the inner monologue of a predator amongst the groceries.
Fred Saberhagen wrote a series of novels where Dracula is the good guy, and misunderstood. I believe the first is The Dracula Tapes.
The “single night” part makes surprising sense. Although that still doesn’t explain why Dracula sat out, for example, the entire Napoleonic era of conquest and empire.