A copyright mistake helped make Dracula the most portrayed character in fiction
Bram Stoker filed the United States copyright for Dracula incorrectly, so the Count slipped into the public domain there. Film-makers noticed in the mid-twentieth century, and the adaptations poured out. Guinness now counts more than 700 appearances, making the 1897 vampire the most portrayed literary character anywhere.
Stoker, born in Clontarf, Dublin in 1842, was better known in his lifetime as a theatre man than as an author. After he reviewed a performance by the actor Henry Irving the two became friends, and Irving hired him as a business manager in 1878. Stoker wrote romance and sensation fiction on the side, publishing 18 books before he died in 1912; Dracula was the seventh.
The novel took years of preparation. Stoker gathered more than 100 pages of notes, beginning with an outline dated 8 March 1890, researching partly at a library in Whitby that summer and mostly at the London Library. He picked the name from a history of Wallachia and Moldavia because he believed it meant devil in Romanian. The long-popular link to Vlad the Impaler, promoted by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu in 1972, has little support: nothing about Vlad or vampires turned up in the papers they pointed to. Scholars agree much more readily that Irving himself, tall and lean with an aquiline nose, shaped the Count's look.
Told entirely through letters, diaries and newspaper cuttings, the story has no single hero. The solicitor Jonathan Harker travels to a Carpathian castle to help the Count buy a house near London; the vampire then crosses to England, preys on Lucy Westenra in Whitby, and is finally hunted down by a band led by Abraham Van Helsing.
Much of today's vampire lore is Stoker's own invention. Garlic and stakes came from folklore, but the need for an invitation, sleeping on native soil and a missing mirror reflection were his additions, and sunlight does not kill his Count. Early reviewers split between admiring the dread and finding the horror excessive, and several noticed its structural debt to Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White.
Source: Dracula
