The Dracula Series: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Horror and the Vampire as Late Victorian Energy Crisis (Part 3 of 3)
Part 3: “By road, by rail, by water” Or; The Logistics of Dracula
October has come and gone, November is just about over, and we’re still talking about Dracula. 🤷🏻♀️ I spent part of November traveling internationally, and then paying for it with a truly nasty bout of COVID. The month seemed to escape! But indulge me with a Dracula post one last time and I promise you won’t regret it. We’ve covered quite a bit of ground in Posts 1 and 2 , but because the topic of logistics is a big deal in Stoker’s novel, I don’t want to leave it out! We’ll soon move onward and upward, and I have some good stuff planned. 😊
Apropos of logistics, I have written most of this post while traveling abroad. It often felt like I was cobbling my writing together while riding in trains, planes, and while waiting out layovers. If you know me well, you understand I feel most secure and focused at my home desk, and that I hate writing “on the go” (or in environments that don’t include my dogs). But, actually, there’s hardly a better desk for writing about logistics in Dracula than your own itinerant lap as you book it around Europe. While writing, I marveled at the ground covered by Dracula and his western pursuers, as Mina puts it: by road, by rail, and by water. Things move in this novel. Boxes are shipped; warehouse workers are bribed; trains are taken; teams of horses are hired.
When you read Dracula, you’ll notice that the last third of the novel features a logistical campaign to, first, locate the Count’s scattered boxes of earth, and, second, chase him all the way back to Transylvania to kill him. Because a vampire can safely rest only in the soil of his homeland, Dracula arranges for “[f]ifty cases of common earth” [1] to be shipped to England and subsequently distributed among his six English estates. He literally ships himself to England in one of these boxes. The remaining forty-nine are for redundancy. The vampire hunters must track down each house, “sterilize” each box with a holy communion wafer, and then - when the Count realizes he’s losing ground (literally) - hunt Dracula as he retreats back east.
Considering the time frame of the novel’s narrative action, there is a remarkable amount of travel, shipping, and communication going on. Jonathan Harker arrives in Transylvania to meet Dracula for the first time in May, and by early November the whole vampire hunting Scooby gang is back in Transylvania, cutting off the Count’s head. Within those six months, Van Helsing travels and telegrams between Antwerp, Whitby, Amsterdam, and London; Mina spends extended time in Whitby before trekking east to marry an ailing Jonathan; and all the men (except Jonathan) travel to Whitby to care for Lucy. Meanwhile, Dracula ships himself to England on the Demeter, wreaks havoc for a bit, and then ships himself back to Transylvania on the Czarina Catherine. Lucky for the vampire hunters, Mina has memorized the train time-tables and knows exactly which trains will take them to Galatz, nearest to Dracula, as quickly as possible. She even calls herself the “train fiend.”
The movements of Dracula’s characters, and how they generate, extract, and order information, are markers of the fast-paced advances Harker references when he describes his shorthand diary as “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance” [1]. Technologies of modernity like the telegraph, the steamship, and the railway reordered the experience of space and time. They expanded Britain’s empire, enhanced its supply chains, and allowed its subjects to travel long distances and communicate across the globe in minutes. But these logistical feats of empire came at a cost. In thermodynamic language, we might say that by creating localized order, or by funneling wealth and raw materials to the metropole for production, Britain created disorder in the larger system. The associated entropic consequences were, and are, located in the slow violence [2] of colonial and environmental disruption.
In this post, we will explore some of the darker sides of nineteenth-century modernity, and how Dracula exposes anxieties “that the empire might strike back,” as Barri Gold puts it [3].
The technologies of logistical control allowed the British to expand their empire. It makes sense, then, that Dracula’s study and manipulation of western energy systems threatens their infrastructures of influence, and reflects on colonial violence.
Dracula, of course, represents both the colonizer and the colonized [3]. This means that, though Van Helsing repeatedly trivializes Dracula’s intellect and powers of movement in daylight, Dracula is brilliant at controlling the infrastructures of influence by night. He enrolls animals, women, and asylum patients to work for him at a distance. Moreover, even in the daytime he manages to spread out his resources so thoroughly that his adversaries cannot efficiently focus their efforts in tracking him down. They lose precious time as the clock winds down on Mina’s humanity, and they only manage to succeed in tailing Dracula because they put their own hefty resources and privilege to work.
All of this is horrifying to British sensibility because, like their own empire, Dracula operates as an “entropic individual” [3], or an entity who creates islands of localized order only by increasing entropy or creating disorder in the larger system. Dracula is so good at controlling logistics for the production of new vampires, i.e. the creation of his own empire, that if we’re comparing empires to empires, Dracula is arguably more British than the British.
Sympathy, Colonialism, and the Nasty Side of Telegraphy
Back in Part 1, we discussed how the telegraph was celebrated as Britain’s “Great Peace-Maker” [4], whose feminized powers of sympathetic connection promised to enjoin all of Britain’s diasporic subjects to sentimental fellow-feeling. Here, I’ll expose some of the realities behind that image.
We know that, along with industrial expansion, the enslavement and trade of African peoples, and the trade of goods abroad, the telegraph was a tool of imperial accumulation. Far from simply connecting British subjects, international telegraphy was privatized and remained inaccessible to those who couldn’t afford the cost to cable long-distance messages [5]. Overpricing aside, the telegraph played a more sinister role in Britain’s peripheral territories, where it was used as a military tool to track the movements of adversaries [5].
The 1857 Indian Rebellion is an example that bears out telegraphy’s Janus-faced affordances, at once soliciting the “thoughts and prayers” of English Christians and targeting the subjects of those prayers for military attack. The 1857 Indian Rebellion (this is a contested name and is also called the “Sepoy Mutiny,” the “Revolt of 1857,” the “Indian Mutiny,” and the “First War of Independence” [6]) refers to an uprising against the British East India Company, who ruled the subcontinent on behalf of the British Crown. As Jill Galvan explains, “preachers in England declared [the telegraph] a conduit for rousing the hearts of the nation in sorrow over reported brutalities against Anglo-Indians. On the other hand, on the ground in India, wired communications helped the British to track their opponents’ movements and arrange troops rapidly, making telegraph lines a repeated strategic target for destruction by the insurrectionists” [5]. So, the telegraph cut both ways: apparently amplifying prayers for the people its communications elsewhere targeted for attack.
In addition to targeting the telegraph, itself, insurrectionists found discrete ways to organize by sending surreptitious messages through networks unknown to the British East India Company. Reporting on these opaque modes of transmission, the British sometimes referred to them as the “Occult Telegraph” [5]. Now: Imagine you are a late-century Victorian. You’ve lived through the 1857 Indian Rebellion. Maybe you’re currently living through the first or the second Boer War (they were both bad news for the British). It looks like the empire has some serious weaknesses. Maybe you open a newspaper and read about the clever ways colonial subjects, or those who don’t want to become them, are refusing subjugation. When eastern invaders with occult variations of electromagnetic technologies of communication and control show up again and again in late nineteenth century gothic literature, are you surprised? Probably not.
“Bribery can do anything, and we are well supplied with money”: How Many Millionaires Does It Take to Kill a Vampire?
Before Dracula retreats to Transylvania, he sneers at his western adversaries: “You think to baffle me, you - with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher’s. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! You think you have left me without a place to rest; but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side” [1]. He’s right. Dracula spent centuries planning his invasion of Britain, and he can stand to wait longer and try again. Meanwhile, Mina’s soul is on the line for the western team. She will be literally damned if they don’t hurry up and slay the Count.
But Dracula doesn’t just spread his revenge over centuries, he spreads it out spatially. Tracking down each and every one of those earth boxes is a very inefficient process, requiring many bribes and all the conveniences money and privilege can bring. As Mina puts it, “I felt so thankful that Lord Godalming is rich, and that both he and Mr. Morris, who also has plenty of money, are willing to spend it so freely” [1]. Too bad for Dracula that these dudes are loaded because, otherwise, England would have been crawling with Dracula’s spawn.
At the risk of boring the reader, I’ve condensed Jonathan Harker’s quest for the location of Dracula’s earth boxes to the bulleted points below. Give it a read. Seriously. Consider how much ground Harker covers and how much time he wastes tracking down what the team needs to make any progress killing the Count. Consider, also, how many times Harker must catalyze his progress with a bribe or a name-drop:
He starts by tracking down all the papers concerning the consignment of the boxes before talking to the Customs officers at the port where they landed. The harbour-master remembers the boxes (because they were super weird) and puts Harker in contact with the men who physically received the boxes.
Harker next visits King’s Cross, where he asks the station-master about the arrival of the boxes. The station-master puts Harker in contact with the proper officials.
The carriers of the boxes report that when they delivered them to Dracula’s house, it was absolutely disgusting and covered with dust. Harker knows he’s on the right track.
Harker drives to Walworth to talk to a Mr. Smollet, who checks a barely-legible notebook and gives Harker the destinations of the boxes. It’s pretty clear to Harker at this point that Dracula means to scatter his earth boxes all over London.
Harker asks Smollet if he knows anything else. Smollet is mum until Harker bribes him. Well, as a matter of fact, Smollet does know an address! But he spells it wrong and Harker is misled. Lots of time is wasted.
By way of more bribes, Harker manages to locate some workmen at a coffee shop. These fellows are discussing a warehouse and Harker overhears their conversation.
So Harker goes to this warehouse. There, he bribes a foreman and learns that this man had made two journeys from Dracula’s Carfax house and a house in Piccadilly. The foreman had taken nine earth boxes from the Carfax house to the Piccadilly house.
At this point, Harker needs more information about the Piccadilly house, including who purchased it. They really want to be certain that Dracula is the homeowner here because they plan on breaking and entering. So, Harker goes to the real estate agent and asks who bought the house. The agent refuses to release this information until Harker name-drops his very good friend, the eminent Arthur Holmwood (Lord Godalming), and then he gets whatever he wants.
When it’s time to break into the house, Van Helsing assures everyone not to worry - just act like you own the place and call a locksmith. No one will even notice. When I taught this novel, one of my students balked at this: “Wait, they’re just… they’re just breaking in and no one cares… at all???” Correct, friend. Again, Lord Godalming comes in handy here because, come on, he wouldn’t break into a house. He must own the place. It all goes according to plan, they break into the Piccadilly house, and BAM! Earth boxes are discovered and sterilized.
What a ride!
The text reads like a victory for the western team, but when you think about it, Dracula has these guys running all over London, throwing their money around and influencing people with their connections. This tactic of forcing his adversaries to scatter their energies is what leaves Mina vulnerable to Dracula’s attack, a fact he impresses on his western foes when he tells Mina: “They should have kept their energies for use closer to home. Whilst they played wits against me - against me who commanded nations, and intrigued for them, and fought for them, hundreds of years before they were born - I was countermining them” [1]. As we discussed in Part 1, some of the mistake here is their decision to cut Mina out of the loop while they put their man brains together. But as logistics and energy flows are concerned, the western team lacks Dracula’s ability to focus energy for movement and production. Instead, they are forced to track Dracula and his resting places down inefficiently, traveling long and winding distances, gathering information from sources that sometimes mislead them, and leaving Mina open to attack while doing so.
It is questionable whether Dracula’s ending is “happy” for the British. Although they slay the Count, the task requires enormous energy and resources. Defeating Dracula is not an easy victory, even with the advantages of wealth and privilege. At the end of the novel, Lucy and Quincey are dead; and, as far as reproductive futurity goes, it looks pretty bleak. Jonathan and Mina’s son Quincey is the only child among all of the vampire hunters.
When we consider the effort spent in this saga - the physical, emotional, national, and sexual energies expended - the cost to our Scooby Gang is enormous. Referencing Stephen Arata’s work on Dracula, Laura Otis has suggested that the vampire “brings to life Victorian fears of an energy drain, a degeneration of the nation’s vital force” [6], [7]. We discussed general fears of degeneration and energy dissipation in Part 2, where, recall, I explained that the virtues of productivity and production were written into the language of thermodynamic laws. Otis describes the fear of dissipation when she explains why Dracula is so horrible, even though he’s been slain: “Bled by a foreigner who reproduces himself infinitely, the British men are barely able to produce to the next generation” [6]. Dracula has thus disrupted the flow of bloodlines and inheritance, much like the wealth he’s taken out of circulation by hoarding it in his castle.
Wrapping Up
The technologies of modernity that allow Dracula’s characters to move and communicate are technologies of empire. While they organized and enriched Britain, they also created the slow violence of colonial entropy.
When we look at Dracula as a villain, then, we can see echoes of just such energetic manipulation, where efficient production and localized order create disorder in a larger system. Dracula also underscores cultural fears of colonial retaliation, in language similar to the descriptions of the “occult telegraph” that followed conflicts like the 1857 Indian Rebellion. Of course, the general fear that Britain was losing its grip on energy control contributed to the novel’s frantic logistical campaign to exterminate a counter-colonial fiend.
To this latter point, we see in the novel a clear energy loss on the western side as the vampire hunters inefficiently rush around, tracking Dracula down and leaving Mina vulnerable, then race to exterminate the Count before it’s too late to save her. In the end, even though they’ve killed their foe, all of these inefficient movements and energy expenditures leave the westerners (and, by extension, the empire) somewhat wasted. Lucy and Quincey are dead, Jonathan has sort of frittered out and gone grey, and the only couple to produce a child is Mina and Jonathan.
…And there you have it! Thank you for joining me on three separate Dracula journeys! Stay tuned for something completely new next time; and if you enjoy this content, be sure to share it!
Citations
[1] Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Dover Publications, 2000.
[2] Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.
[3] Gold, Barri J. ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science, The MIT Press, 2010.
[4] Horne, Richard Henry. “The Great Peace-Maker: A Sub-Marine Dialogue.” Household Words. 14 June 1851. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ucl.b3352548.
[5] Galvan, Jill. The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, The Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859-1919. Cornell University Press, 2010.
[6] Otis, Laura. Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century, University of Michigan Press, 2001, 2011.
[7] Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies 33 (1990): 621-45.
Such a great post! It's about time someone wrote about Dracula and logistics ... :)
Great work here. Without your insights and analytical skills, I could not have seen the complexity that underlies this classic Victorian novel. Thank you.