#DraculaDaily 11 September.

“Aha, my pretty miss, that bring the so nice nose all straight again. (…) No trifling with me! I never jest! There is grim purpose in all I do; and I warn you that you do not thwart me.“
It’s sometimes hard not to want Dracula to rip Van Helsing’s throat out.

Also, 1890s online shopping. Van Helsing telegraphed yesterday and a cartload of garlic all the way from Harlem was delivered today. Suck on that, Bezos.

Also: garlic!
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#DraculaDaily 10 Sep (or by my reckoning, still 9 Sep). Lucy’s lost blood again while Seward slept. With thoroughbred studmuffin Arthur away, Van Helsing has to settle for transfusing Seward’s lower-quality nerd blood. (Or maybe all that was just an excuse because he’s fond of his student; he doesn’t want to drain him today either.)

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#DraculaDaily 9 September. Lucy is feeling oddly close to Arthur, ironically unaware of how much of him she’s got pulsing right inside her veins. Dr Seward has been going for at least 36 hours without sleep.

They’re booth a bit woozy, and so is the dating of their diaries: by my count, Lucy and Seward are both writing about last night; Lucy’s should have been dated 8 Sep, but Seward falls asleep, so it makes sense that he writes today – except his waking up will be dated tomorrow. 🤔

#DraculaDaily 8 Sep. Two kinds of people. Which one are you? The doctor or the damsel, the insomniac or the somnambulist?

Sleep is:

Outlook has been consistently sending #DraculaDaily emails to my inbox since I started subscribing to the newsletter... until today. For some reason, Outlook sent today's (September 8) Dracula Daily entry to the junk mail folder instead. 🥴

It is fortunate that I checked my junk mail folder before clearing it out, so I would not delete the Dracula Daily email by accident.

#DraculaDaily 7 September. It has now come down to a race between an ancient superstition and modern 19th-century medical science as to which one will kill Lucy first.

At this point human-to-human blood transfusions have been carried out in England for many decades (since Blundell's succes in 1818), but it's still hit and miss. Karl Landsteiner's crucial discovery of blood groups is yet to come (ca. 1901) and will take longer yet to inform medical practice.

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#DraculaDaily 6 Sep. “Do not lose an hour.” So how many hours does Van Helsing need to get from Amsterdam to London, in this great age of late-1800s globalization, if he does not lose a single one?

Let’s do like Dracula and study Bradshaw’s General Railway and Steam Navigation Guide (June 1896, no. 755, p. 694), where the Great Eastern Railway assures us the quickest route via Harwich and the Hook of Holland takes 11 hours.

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https://archive.org/details/brad-1896-june/mode/2up?view=theater

#DraculaDaily 4 September. Lucy’s doing better and, from the last change in Renfield’s behavior, we may infer it is because Dracula is back in residence at Carfax.

Renfield, after being abandoned for ten days, had just resigned himself to having to “do it for himself.” Do what? Apparently, appropriating the life force of other beings by consuming them alive. He has been looking to the master of this art, Dracula, to show him the way. 1/2

@louisajr #DraculaDaily

#DraculaDaily 2 September. Van Helsing has entered the chat. Get used to his charming continental speech patterns and sentimentalism. 1/2

Image caption: Trust me, I'm a doctor

#DraculaDaily 2 September.

"I did not have full opportunity of examination such as I should wish." 😉

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What Dr Seward thought he wrote: Don't worry, Lucy's not physically ill, but just to be sure I've asked a colleague to take a peek, a really great guy btw

What Arthur will read: Dear Art, Lucy is so fatally ill I've got a top European authority to rush all the way from Amsterdam. He'll clearly strike you as bonkers, but trust my slightly unhealthy adulation for the man, I'm a doctor

Okay, is "being so ill that receiving shocking news could kill you" an actual thing, or is it just a convenient plot device?

#DraculaDaily

#DraculaDaily 1 September. If this were a romantic novel, Lucy might be having second thoughts about Arthur, be secretly pining for Seward, or at least be ready to have her eyes opened when the doctor dashes in to save her life.

How convenient, then, yet how awkward given everybody's sense of honor etc., for Arthur to be called away just as he has invited her other admirer to come, take her pulse and look deeply into her eyes.

Spoiler follows

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#DraculaDaily 30 August. Lucy's reply to Mina raises two problems for the literal-minded nitpicker. First, "an appetite like a cormorant" suggests she eats a substantial fraction of her own weight in fish each day.

Second, it's been a 4–5 days since we last saw Lucy, and she was having a relapse of all her symptoms from Whitby. And – spoiler – Arthur is so worried for her that he's about to call a doctor. Yet she tells Mina she's sleeping well and full of life. 1/2

#DraculaDaily 25 August. Poor Lucy, all alone in her bedroom with the scratching and flapping at the window. Even though Arthur is visiting. I choose to read this as an indictment of Victorian sexual morality and how its strictures against even engaged couples cohabiting left young ladies unprotected against magical creatures of the night. Fortunately today we are more enlightened. 🙂

#DraculaDaily 24 August. A lot going on here.

🧛 Mina and Jonathan tied the knot! 🥂 Good for him, I guess.

🧛 "The idea of *my* being jealous about Jonathan!" Indeed, Mina, indeed.

🧛 Yesterday Dr Seward recorded a bat streaking west toward London. Today Lucy records feeling ill again, like she was in Whitby, but this time at the Westenra family home, Hillingham, which will turn out to probably lie somewhere in London's Hampstead area. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc?

#DraculaDaily 23 August. "... a big bat, which was flapping its silent and ghostly way to the west."

West along the winding Thames from Purfleet lies teeming London, population: about 6 million pulsing jugular veins, with no natural immunity to Carpathian vampirism, ripe for an epidemic.

But perhaps the strain is not so virulent? After all, patient zero has already quite recovered, sleeping soundly through the night with roses back in her cheeks.

And is back in London.

#DraculaDaily 21 August. In which the author of The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879) brings the receipts, so to speak.

“Such subjects as the advisability of uniform filing of papers or folding of returns, of using dots instead of 0's in money columns, or of forwarding returns at the earliest instead of the latest date allowable, may seem too trivial to treat of; yet every Clerk would do well to remember …” – from Stoker’s “Introduction” to TDCPSI 🙂

#DraculaDaily 20 August. Dr Seward's diary today is disconcerting. He appears to think a week has gone by since the events of yesterday, and then another three days before he's done recording for today.

Maybe someone just dated the recording wrong (Seward, Stoker, or, as we shall see, perhaps Mina). That seems to be the issue with the extra three days, at least - the date "23 August" should have come before the addition to today's entry.

Or maybe we have an unreliable narrator.

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The thing only crashed into Whitby two weeks ago and they've already got a dramatisation out? Dang. #DraculaDaily