Dracula

Higher Level · 2027 & 2028 Leaving Cert

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a Dublin writer’s novel about a foreign aristocrat arriving in London and quietly taking it apart from the inside. Read it as a book about fear of the outsider and it opens up fast.

Stoker published it in 1897, at the far end of the Victorian period, and the novel is soaked in the anxieties of that moment: new technology, new medicine, women who have started earning their own living, and an empire nervous about what might come back the other way. There is no single narrator. The whole thing is assembled from journals, letters, telegrams, newspaper cuttings and a phonograph diary, which matters more than it sounds.

It is prescribed for Higher Level students in both 2027 and 2028. Note carefully that the novel is the set text. Film versions differ from it in large ways and will cost you marks if you write about them by mistake.

The Story in Five Beats

One. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to close a property sale with Count Dracula. The welcome is elaborate and the doors are locked. Harker works out that his host has no reflection, climbs walls head first, and intends to leave him behind.

Two. Dracula sails to England aboard the Demeter, which runs aground at Whitby with every crew member gone and the captain lashed to the wheel. Lucy Westenra, holidaying there with Mina, begins sleepwalking and weakening.

Three. Doctor Seward cannot diagnose Lucy and sends for his old teacher, Professor Van Helsing, who knows exactly what he is looking at and will not say so. A series of transfusions buys time and then fails. Lucy dies, and starts appearing at night on Hampstead Heath, taking children.

Four. The men destroy what Lucy has become. Mina joins the group, organises the scattered documents into one record, and is then attacked herself, forced to drink from Dracula’s chest. She is marked, and can be tracked by him and, under hypnosis, can track him back.

Five. The group hunts down and sterilises his boxes of Transylvanian earth across London, driving him back east. They catch him at sunset outside his own castle. Quincey Morris dies in the fight, and the Count crumbles to dust.

The Outsider at the Door

The first four chapters are a masterclass in dread, and the source of it is hospitality. Dracula is a perfect host. He is also a landlord, a nobleman and a man of ancient family, and he says so.

“Here I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me, and I am master.”Count Dracula, Chapter 2

Harker’s fear is not of a monster in the woods. It is of being polite to something that is already inside the house and already owns the deeds. Note how carefully Stoker marks the border crossing on the way out.

“The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East”Jonathan Harker, Chapter 1

Blood, Appetite and What Cannot Be Said

The novel is far more direct about desire than its reputation suggests, and it uses blood to say what Victorian manners would not let it say plainly. Renfield, a patient in Seward’s asylum who eats flies to absorb their lives, states the principle in the clearest terms in the book.

“The blood is the life! The blood is the life!”Renfield, Chapter 11

Watch what happens to Lucy. Alive she is warm and a bit flirtatious, and jokes about wanting to marry three men at once. Dead she becomes something the men find frightening precisely because she now wants rather than waits, and Seward’s description of her is written in the language of disgust and attraction at the same time.

“the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth”Dr Seward, Chapter 16

If you are writing about how the novel treats women, this is your evidence. Lucy is punished for appetite. Mina is spared because hers stays useful.

Modern Minds Against an Ancient Thing

Every hunter carries a piece of the nineteenth century with them: a typewriter, a phonograph, blood transfusion, a train timetable, a Winchester rifle. None of it works alone. Van Helsing keeps insisting that the group’s advantage is not equipment but the fact that there are several of them.

“We have on our side power of combination, a power denied to the vampire kind”Van Helsing, Chapter 18

That is also a comment on the form of the novel. The documents only make sense once Mina types them into one file. The Count is defeated by an organised archive as much as by a knife.

Who’s Who

Count Dracula is a landowner, a strategist and a patient enemy. He plans the invasion of England in property law before he touches anyone, and his threat in Chapter 23 is about time, not strength.

“My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side.”Count Dracula, Chapter 23

Mina Harker is the novel’s real protagonist. She is a schoolmistress, uses shorthand and a typewriter, and holds the group together. Van Helsing’s praise for her is backhanded and revealing about the period’s assumptions.

Lucy Westenra is the warning. Three proposals in one day, dead by Chapter 12, destroyed by Chapter 16.

Van Helsing is doctor, lawyer, philosopher and folklorist. His broken English is doing a job: he is another foreigner, and the novel lets him be the good one.

Jonathan Harker, Doctor Seward, Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris divide up the male virtues of the period between them. Quincey, the American, is the one who dies.

How Dracula Is Examined

As a single text the paper favours questions on the Gothic, on good and evil, on the presentation of women, and on the outsider. Whichever you get, anchor the answer in the way the story is told. The fragmented, documentary structure is not decoration; it means we only ever know what someone had time to write down, and the gaps are where the fear lives.

Bring Ireland in briefly if the question allows it. Stoker was a Dubliner writing about an absentee landlord who lives off the blood of the people on his land, and Irish audiences noticed.

Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Anchor every point to a scene. The three that carry the most weight are Harker realising he is a prisoner in Chapter 3, the Demeter arriving at Whitby with no crew, and the destruction of Lucy in Chapter 16. Name the moment, use one short quotation, then explain what the choice of narrator does to it. Answers that mention who is writing and why beat answers that only retell what happened.

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