Dracula, document by document

by @timescrolly3 May 1893 – 6 Nov 1893192 items

gothicnovels

Whitby Harbor, c. 1885 (the museum’s date), carbon print by Frank Meadow Sutcliffe. Cleveland Museum of Art (John L. Severance Fund, 1996.244), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Dracula, document by document

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is built from dated diary entries, letters, telegrams, a ship’s log and newspaper cuttings, and so is this timeline: each is one item, titled with the text’s own heading and cited to the chapter where it begins in the Project Gutenberg text (#345). Consecutive entries by one narrator on one day are merged.

Fiction, and a year the novel never states. The novel gives days and months but no year, and its few weekday and moon clues do not agree, so no single year fits them all. 1893 does not fit Mina’s “Thursday last” for 22 September (a Friday that year) or the full moon of 11 August (a new moon). This timeline uses 1893 as a convention, not a proof. Times are the clock times the text gives; where it gives none, an entry sits on its day.

Layers: one per narrator

1 — Jonathan Harker’s journal, kept in shorthand.
2 — Mina’s journal and letters, as Murray and then as Harker.
3 — Lucy Westenra’s diary, letters and memorandum.
4 — Dr. Seward’s phonograph diary, with his letters and telegrams.
5 — Van Helsing’s letters, memoranda and phonograph message.
6 — The captain’s log of the Demeter.
7 — Cuttings: the Dailygraph, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Westminster Gazette.
8 — Other letters and telegrams: Arthur, Quincey, solicitors, Sister Agatha.

What to try

Open the map view: entries sit at real places (Bistrița, the Tihuța Pass that stands in for the Borgo Pass, Whitby, Purfleet, Piccadilly, Varna, Galatz). The castle’s place is an approximate area, since the novel names no site, and Hillingham and Kingstead are invented names set on a wide area of north London. Filter by layer to follow one narrator, or by tag to follow Renfield, Lucy or the ships. Periods group the novel’s movements, and item relations link entries that tell one event from two sides, such as the Whitby storm, or that disagree. The entities and relations (the Crew of Light, the Count’s victims, engagements and a marriage) are listed under Entities. The Note that closes the book, set seven years later, is outside 1893 and is not an item:

in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting