Works · Novel · 1897

Dracula

First appeared 26 May 1897

Nocturne plate · illustration (AI-generated, 2026)

The English solicitor Jonathan Harker travels to the Carpathians to close a property sale with Count Dracula and discovers that his host is never seen by day and does not let him leave the castle. The Count crosses to England by ship and comes ashore at Whitby, and soon Lucy Westenra begins to waste away while her suitors and her doctors fail to explain why. The Dutch scholar Van Helsing arrives with a theory nobody wants to believe. The story is told through diaries, letters, newspaper cuttings and a phonograph, gathered into a single file by Mina Harker against an enemy centuries older than any of them.

“Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make!”

Chapter 2 (Jonathan Harker's Journal). Checked against Project Gutenberg ebook #345 (Gutenberg ebook 345 does not state its source edition; the file carries a 1897 copyright notice)

Facts

The Lyceum Theatre, where Stoker was manager, staged his adaptation before the public could buy the book. On Tuesday 18 May 1897 a copyright performance of his adaptation, ‘Dracula; or the Un-Dead’, was given there; the registration form is dated 19 May, and the novel was published a week later, on Wednesday 26 May.[1][2]
Stoker’s working notes of 1890 first place the story in Styria, the setting of Le Fanu’s Carmilla, with the solicitor who cannot speak German as the Harker figure. ‘Dracula’s Guest’, published in 1914 by Florence Stoker, shares that Styrian vampiress; whether it was a deleted opening chapter is disputed.[7]
The novel’s table of contents names its narrators and their records, among them ‘Mina Harker’s Journal’ and ‘Dr. Seward’s Phonograph Diary, spoken by Van Helsing’: the book presents itself as a file of typed and recorded evidence.[6]

Setting

Contemporary 1890s; the journal begins 3 May with no year given[6]

Transylvania
Whitby
London

Themes

Notes on dates 2 notes on disputed dates and attribution

Publication date: Wikipedia says ‘probably 26 May 1897’ and the Vuohelainen introduction to The Beetle says ‘June 1897’; The National Archives states Wednesday 26 May. The Archives’ date is followed.
Whether ‘Dracula’s Guest’ is the deleted first chapter: Florence Stoker’s 1914 preface said so; Franck and Beresford argue the notes show a Munich episode planned for the novel but that the story does not simply fit as a cut chapter.

Threads

Threads in

Descends from Carmilla 1871
The Victorian Web calls Carmilla ‘one of the sources of Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, and Franck and Beresford report that Stoker’s 1890 notes set the story in Styria, the setting of Carmilla (and that the Styrian vampiress of ‘Dracula’s Guest’ owes much to it, per Auerbach).[8][7][9]
A critic's reading links it to The Woman in White 1859
The Wilkie Collins Society article calls The Woman in White, narrated by several people through letters, diaries and records, ‘the main influence behind the style of Dracula’, and pairs characters across the two books (Marian Halcombe and Mina Harker, Count Fosco and Count Dracula).[10]

Threads out

No sourced relation from a later work on this timeline is recorded.

Contemporaries

Works on the timeline that first appeared within three years of 1897, and the other writers alive when Dracula appeared (ages computed from sourced dates).