Abstract
Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula has been adapted numerous times, often in forms that would be defined as Neo-Victorian, including a series of nine novels by Fred Saberhagen published between 1975 and 1996. In the first volume, The Dracula Tape, Saberhagen works with the fact that Stoker’s master vampire is always silent, his story told by characters who have sworn to destroy him. By having Dracula tell his own story in his own words, Saberhagen creates a surprisingly humane and sympathetic character with ethical standards that are equivalent or superior to those of his opponents. Two volumes The Holmes-Dracula File (1978) and Séance for a Vampire (1994) also combine Dracula with Sherlock Holmes, alternating chapters by Dracula and those by Dr. Watson. Highlighting Dracula’s humanity is the fact that Saberhagen introduces a surprising plot twist: Holmes is Dracula’s nephew, the son of Dracula’s brother Radu. Saberhagen’s redemption of Dracula makes his series worthy of inclusion in this handbook because it reveals that the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries often respond to their Victorian ancestors by criticizing that past. The Holmes-Dracula File is set in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee and looks pointedly at both Victorian science and colonialism, while Séance for a Vampire (1994) features spiritualism and takes Dracula, Holmes, and Watson to St. Petersburg, where they encounter Rasputin on the eve of the Russian Revolution.
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Notes
- 1.
Stoker is the subject of a number of biographies including Harry Ludlam’s A Biography of Bram Stoker: Creator of Dracula (1977), Daniel Farson’s The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker (1975), Barbara Belford’s Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (1966), and Paul Murray’s From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker (2004). While the biographies refer to his closeness to his brothers Thornley and George, the clearest evidence of his reliance on them for medical information can be found in Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition; for example, the volume includes a memo written by Thornley regarding the head injury Renfield sustained when he tried to protect Mina from Dracula (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 2008, 179–81, 282).
- 2.
Charlotte’s influence on Bram is evident in the various Stoker biographies, but the most thorough discussion of Charlotte’s work as a social reformer can be found in The Un-Dead: The Legend of Bram Stoker and Dracula (1997) by Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne (1997, 46).
- 3.
One of the best resources for people who are interested in Stoker’s relationships to the actresses in the Lyceum is Catherine Wynne, Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage (2013). People interested in primary sources can also consult Wynne’s two-volume study, Bram Stoker and the Stage (2012).
- 4.
- 5.
One thinks of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s wax cylinder recording of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in 1890. See Caplan (2021).
- 6.
See, for example James Craig Holte who observes the “more positive depictions of vampires in the works of Rice, Saberhagen, and Yarbro” who “depict Dracula as a romantic hero” (1999, 112). Ekman Stefan explores a new tradition in which a new kind of vampire, the human vampire, replaces the monstrous vampire: “This kind of vampire, which began its development with authors such as Fred Saberhagen and Rice in the 1970s, straddles the divide between the human world and the world of the vampire or monster, not fully belonging to either” (2016, 465). Finally, Neal Wilgus refers to Saberhagen’s Dracula as a hero even though he believes that that choice “robs the story of that menace of evil which is necessary for a truly horrific atmosphere” (1985, 97).
- 7.
Including a spiritualist in the novel is yet one more way that Saberhagen echoes his Victorian predecessors only to reveal the extent to which he differs with them. While Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Arthur Conan Doyle, and even Queen Victoria attended séances hoping to communicate with the dead, Saberhagen looks on séances as a parlor trick.
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Senf, C. (2024). Fred Saberhagen’s Dracula: The Vampire as Neo-Victorian Hero. In: Ayres, B., Maier, S.E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32160-3_9
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