195
See also: Bleak House 14 6 – 49 ■ The Picture of Dorian Gray 194 ■
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 201– 02 ■ The Turn of the Screw 203S
tories of the supernatural
and the macabre, set within
ruins and wild landscapes,
characterized the gothic novel of
the late 18th to early 19th centuries.
The later urban gothic novel turns
city settings into places of horror,
playing on the anxieties of the
time, such as moral degeneration.
Dracula, by the Irish novelist
Abraham (Bram) Stoker (1847–1912),
takes the reader into the heart of
Victorian London, where a vampiric
foreign count threatens middle-
class society. Living for the most
part undetected, he is free to
choose his victims—the novel
reveals the horror that comes
with urban anonymity.Horror from the east
Dracula is about east versus west:
the count comes from the east
(Transylvania), lands on England’s
east coast, and resides in Purfleet,
to the east of London. This, for the
Victorian reader, would associate
him with foreigners, violence, and
crime (the horrors of Whitechapel,
East London, where Jack theRipper murdered several women in
1888, would still have been fresh
in readers’ minds).
All that is modern—gas lights,
science, technology, the police—is
no help in the face of this ancient
invader from lands of myth and
folklore. Count Dracula is depicted
as a foreign, dark, animalistic
force. Contagion, sexuality, and
degeneration, associated with the
squalor of urban living, feature too,
as the count threatens to spread his
curse of the undead. ■DEPICTING REAL LIFE
THERE ARE THINGS OLD
AND NEW WHICH MUST
NOT BE CONTEMPLATED
BY MEN’S EYES
DRACULA (1897), BRAM STOKER
IN CONTEXT
FOCUS
Urban gothicBEFORE
1852–53 In Charles Dickens’
Bleak House, urban fog is
used to signify claustrophobia
and confusion; it becomes a
key symbol of mystery and
terror in urban gothic fiction.1886 The Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by
Scottish writer Robert Louis
Stevenson, puts a horrific
spin on the tedium of middle-
class decency.1890 With its fixation on social
degeneration and mortality,
The Picture of Dorian Gray by
Irish author Oscar Wilde is a
classic urban gothic novel.AFTER
1909 French writer Gaston
Lerou x’s The Phantom of the
Opera takes the gothic novel to
the heart of Paris. Stage and
screen adaptations later bring
the story to a huge audience.What manner of man
is this, or what manner
of creature is it in the
semblance of a man?
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