Dracula’s Origins, Unearthed at Long Last
By Dacre Stoker and Gary D. Rhodes
We’ve made an astounding discovery about Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In recent months, we’ve learned exactly why Count Dracula looks the way he does in the classic novel.
Dacre is the great-grand nephew of Bram Stoker himself, as well as the author of Dracul (2018), the authorized prequel to Dracula (1897). Gary is a filmmaker and professor, with much of his scholarship focusing on horror. Together we are vampire hunters, lest there be any doubt.
For years, Dacre has studied Bram Stoker’s inspirations and research into his writing of Dracula. There is little doubt in Dacre’s mind that Bram was looking for a human form of the Devil incarnate. Bram just needed to find real people with a believable past to create Count Dracula’s personality and demeanor, finding great similarity to nineteenth-century stage actor Henry Irving, famed for portraying roles like Mephistopheles. The results of Dacre’s research are compelling. Stoker, who for many years worked as Irving’s manager, based Count Dracula’s persona on his employer.
But the look of Count Dracula, his appearance, that’s another matter, and it has been a mystery, particularly to every reader of the last ninety years or more, as Stoker’s Dracula does not look like Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee. Nor does he look like Henry Irving. In Stoker’s novel, Count Dracula has bushy eyebrows and a moustache. He notably has an “aquiline” face. His hair is black, at least after drinking a great deal of blood.
When Gary was an undergraduate student in the early 1990s, he stumbled across Mór “Maurus” Jókai’s 1894 novel ‘Midst the Wild Carpathians at his university library. He immediately noted various similarities with Stoker’s Dracula. Not only were its descriptions of Transylvanian mountains similar, but half of Jókai’s novel chronicles the “Devil’s Garden.” Even in the English-language translation, the Garden’s name is rendered in Roumanian: “Gradina Dracului.”
Gary’s scholarship is largely devoted to studying the cinema. As a young man, he assumed Stoker scholars knew about Jókai. But they didn’t. Strangely, even after Stoker’s notes for Dracula resurfaced in the 21st century, notes that specifically refer to another Jókai novel, scholars did not go wild over ‘Midst the Wild Carpathians. In 2023, Gary undertook rigorous historical research, learning how popular Jókai was in Victorian England, including with Queen Victoria. Reviews and ads for his books, including Carpathians, appeared everywhere in British magazines and newspapers at about the time Stoker began writing Dracula in earnest.
Though Gary didn’t realize it until recent weeks, Dacre had examined Jókai’s Carpathians as well, observing that his great-grand uncle likely read it. For that matter, Dacre knew many of the books Stoker had relied upon for his research of vampires and Transylvania, a region he had never visited in person.
And Dacre also understood that Vlad Tepes — meaning Vlad the Impaler, meaning Vlad Dracula, the fifteenth-century Wallachian prince — probably had much less influence on his great-grand uncle, despite what some earlier scholars declared. The name “Dracula” at first seems to be such a positive connection, but “Dracul” means Devil in Wallachian. Stoker would have encountered that fact in one or more of his known sources.
But then there is Jókai. In Carpathians, he describes a Transylvanian character known as the Lord of the Manor. He has a moustache. He has bushy eyebrows. He has black hair. He is tall, with a high forehead, and an impressive stature for his age. And he very definitely has an “aquiline” face. He looks like Dracula before Dracula did.
Despite the similarities, as well as other apparent influences of the “Gradina Dracului” on Stoker, the question of coincidence remained. Perhaps Stoker never read Carpathians.
That is why Gary contacted the London Library, because that was where Dacre had undertaken research, specifically because that was one of the libraries where his great-grand uncle undertook research in the 1890s. In recent years, the London Library discovered various markings in books that Stoker mentioned in his notes, consistent marginalia next to given passages that Stoker definitely drew upon. After they received expert confirmations from the likes of Dacre and Nick Groom, author of The Vampire: A New History (2018), the London Library’s important findings made international news.
The London Library enthusiastically responded to Gary’s inquiry. They confirmed with photographic proof that their 1894 first edition of ‘Midst the Wild Carpathians features Stoker’s marginalia notations, just like those in other books that had already been researched. Dacre confirmed the same.
Stoker definitely examined ‘Midst the Wild Carpathians. He did so at the London Library, probably in 1896, when they accessioned the copy that they still have in their collection. He could not have missed the “Gradina Dracului,” because the “Devil’s Garden,” is the very name of the second half of the novel.
But the most revelatory finding is Stoker’s notation beside Jókai’s description of the Lord of the Manor. Stoker’s Count Dracula would go on to have a moustache, bushy eyebrows, and “aquiline” features. Both are tall and have high foreheads; both look stronger and more vital than their age. After he drinks blood in England, Dracula’s hair becomes black; the Lord of the Manor’s is “coal-black” hair. By that point in the novel, Count Dracula also has a “pointed beard,” akin to the Lord of the Manor’s “short, clipped beard.” And the vampire appears “well-preserved,” just like the Lord of the Manor.
Stoker’s Count Dracula did not look like vampires of folklore, nor did he look like prior, fictional vampires of the nineteenth century. Stoker’s Count Dracula instead resembles the Lord of the Manor, from the passage that Stoker himself marked.
Gary contacted Dacre with his findings, Dacre having separately considered the connection between ‘Midst the Wild Carpathians and Dracula. After carefully reviewing each other’s research, the vampire hunters knew the game was at end. At long last, they had captured their prey.
Yes, Stoker’s novel Dracula was born out of many sources and superstitions, an “imaginative whirlpool,” as Jonathan Harker writes in his diary. And yes, Stoker would have known of Vlad Dracula (often rendered as Vlad Dracul in English in the nineteenth century), just as he knew that the general translation of the word “Dracul,” apart from any person’s name, means “Devil.”
But his specific character Count Dracula was clearly a composite of three figures melded into one vampire. As Dacre has long argued, Count Dracula’s personality resulted directly from Henry Irving and his stage performances. And Vlad the Impaler provided a historical backstory, the biography of Count Dracula’s “warlike” days.
And now, for the first time, after much careful research and a series of confirmations, we can jointly announce that Count Dracula’s appearance resulted from the Lord of the Manor in Jókai’s ‘Midst the Wild Carpathians. We have finally unmasked Dracula’s face, and — as Jonathan Harker’s diary informs us — “It is only when a man feels himself face to face with such horrors that he can understand their true import.”
Here, finally, are the precise origins of one of literature’s most enigmatic and enduring characters. Here, finally, are the origins of Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula.
