Our Boy Jonathan, Rotting Away In Castle Dracula And Having To Pretend He's Chill With It:

our boy jonathan, rotting away in castle dracula and having to pretend he's chill with it:

Thank you so much!

hello! your post about dracula's guest really intrigued me and so i was wondering if there is any good collection of material that was cut from dracula, or how i'd go about finding that?

So. Things might have changed since I last was really really engaged with Dracula scholarship and resources, but the three major categories of cut material people might be interested in are Stoker's notes for Dracula (which are very rough but show fascinating outlines of events and characters not present in the text), the original manuscript for Dracula (which has a lot of bits and pieces that were excised by the time the text reached publication), and "Dracula's Guest" (which is a stand alone story compiled out of material that Stoker had originally written into the manuscript before what we now have as Chapter 1).

The only way I know of to get the notes is to purchase the facsimile copy of them (available here) or to go to the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia and get reading permissions, although there are a lot of annotated Draculas that will give you info about content in the notes in their footnotes. Because the manuscript to Dracula was in the hands of a private collector (Paul Allen of Microsoft) for many years, the only way for most readers at this point in time to get their hands on manuscript content to to get a copy of Leslie Klinger's The New Annotated Dracula (available here), as Klinger was allowed to examine the manuscript for his annotation project (which is sadly riddled with inaccuracies and replicates some of the bigotries of prior annotators like Clive Leatherdale). HOWEVER, in the process of writing up this answer, I have learned that Emory University has acquired the manuscript following Allen's death and is seeking to have it digitized in the near future.

Lastly, "Dracula's Guest" is available in print and for free on-line in many many places. Gutenberg and Librivox both have free versions of the short story collection in which it was originally published, and people interested in getting deeper into Stoker's broader literary work might want to check them out as well (I will warn to people clicking links that one of the other stories has a racial slur as a title, and that Stoker is reprehensibly racist in ways that show even more strongly in a lot of his non-Dracula work.)

Hope all that helps!

It’s worth noting that while Stoker definitely drew upon sources purporting to describe vampire folklore in establishing rules for his own vampires, some of the vampire “lore” you see in play in Dracula is original to him. The mirror thing doesn’t seem to have been around before Stoker. While there are regional superstitions one can track down about needing to cover mirrors in the home of the recently dead to prevent their corpse from turning vampiric, the idea that vampires cast no reflection appears to really have had its start with this novel. What’s more, it was only part of what was planned in Stoker’s notes on vampiric irreproducibility. While it never made it into the final text, Stoker wrote down vampires also wouldn’t show up in photographs (which is might be related to Jonathan conveniently mentioning his kodak camera) and that even attempting to paint a vampire would fail. Apparently painting a vampire was just supposed to end up looking like somebody else. Photographs would either come out black or show a skeleton or corpse.

Dracula’s Lineage Speech

If anyone for any reason would appreciate a blow by blow breakdown of everything that is going on in the Count’s lineage speech, matching all of Dracula’s dialogue to Stoker’s research sources and describing the historical events being alluded to, I made one of those many many years ago and I’ve copy/pasted it under the cut:

Keep reading

Once Dracula Daily's done, I think one of the books we should put in email format next is The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis. It would be so funny for us to recieve an email every other day from our tired demon uncle Screwtape chastising us for being incompetent at our job.

@inception30daychallenge

funny story right

so i watched this movie like 7 times in 1 week (thanks adhd), devoured a ton of fanfic, then came onto tumblr and realised that, hey, the 30 day challenge is still going! so here i am.

Day 25: What pet(s) does Robert have?

Being the sole heir to a huge corporation - and a very competent businessman in and of himself - doesn't really leave a lot of time to care for animals. He probably has a few fish tanks that he can pay one of his employees to care for while he's out. Nothing too big or gaudy or expensive, but he has some very pretty schools of angelfish, and a few betta tanks as well. It's nice to have something to focus on aside from his work, so when he's got free time he often spends it scraping off algae or polishing the glass to keep away water streaks.

After he dissolves Fischer-Morrow, he does have a little more time to himself. He gets more into the less common animals, like starfish and horseshoe crabs, and sets up some marine tanks. (Nothing metal is ever safe in his office again - staplers last a week at most before they're covered in rust. At least the starfish look cool.)