Who Is Dracula's Father? by John Sutherland

Author:John Sutherland [John Sutherland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785782985
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2017-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Dracula:

a chronological plot summary

1 May [1893]: The young lawyer Jonathan Harker leaves Munich for Transylvania via Vienna. He arrives on 3 May at Bistritz, the nearest town to Castle Dracula with a train connection. He has come to facilitate a property transaction for Count Dracula, who intends to move to London. Dracula instructs him to go by the afternoon coach next day to the Borgo Pass, where he will be met. At nightfall.

After a terrifying drive by horse and carriage through the night, in which the driver does mysterious things, Jonathan is kept waiting at the door of the castle. He is finally offered entry by an old man – the Count – on condition that he enters freely of his own will. Which he does. The castle, Harker discovers, has no other occupants and no servants.

Over the period 5 May–25 June Jonathan keeps a shorthand diary in which he records that Dracula is sinister and, probably, intends to kill him. Jonathan does not, at this stage, know what vampires are.

He narrowly escapes losing his virginity, and possibly his life, to three ‘weird sisters’. An attempt to kill Dracula, lying in his coffin, with a shovel, fails. Finally Jonathan discovers himself alone in the castle. Dracula has left for England, taking Jonathan’s clothes and 50 boxes of dirt. Jonathan faces death at the mouths of the three bloodsucking sisters. His diary stops. We know nothing more of him.

9 May: The novel switches back in time to an exchange of letters between Jonathan’s fiancée, Mina Murray, and her old school friend, Lucy Westenra. Lucy, just nineteen years old, has received three proposals of marriage: from the asylum keeper, Jack Seward; from the rich American adventurer, Quincey P. Morris; and from the aristocrat Arthur Holmwood. She chooses Holmwood.

25 May: Jack Seward’s phonograph diary. He is mortally disappointed by Lucy’s rejection.

25 May: Morris writes to Holmwood (an old friend on hunting expeditions), congratulating him. All three men still love Lucy.

25 July–3 August: The story jumps forward to 25 July and Whitby where Mina and Lucy are spending a holiday together. They have not met since schooldays. Mina befriends a talkative local, Mr Swales. She is worried about not having heard any news from Jonathan.

5 June: Seward describes his strange patient, R.M. Renfield.

3–8 August: A terrible summer storm wrecks a Russian schooner, the Demeter, in Whitby Harbour. All on board are dead, the captain’s corpse lashed to the wheel. Mysteriously, an ‘immense dog’ leaps from the wreck to hide itself in the woods behind the town. The captain’s log records having left Varna on 6 July. One by one the crew have been killed in a fog surrounding the ship. The vessel’s cargo is wooden boxes of soil.

8–11 August: Mina’s journal. Lucy is having mysteriously restless nights’ sleep, and sleepwalks. There are small wounds on her neck. A large bat is seen. Mr Swales dies of a broken neck.

17 August: Business correspondence. Boxes, recovered from the Demeter, are to be dispatched by railway to London, King’s Cross.

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