Dracula

Readers coming to Dracula for the first time should try to peel away the layers of preconception that they can hardly help bringing to the novel. We should try to forget Bela Lugosi, we should forget the great evil (and anachronistic) Freudian clichés; we should put out of our minds all our received twentieth- and twenty-first-century notions of friendship and love, both heterosexual and homosexual. If we let the novel stand on its own, just as it appeared to Bram Stoker’s contemporaries in the last years of the Victorian era, what exactly do we find?