It would have been quite difficult to grab a few northern hemisphere headlines during the first half of 1897: the competition was stern. Among much else, in May there was a mining disaster on the Isle of Man, and an exhibition in Nashville illuminated by the marvel of hundreds of electric lights.
In June Mark Twain famously announced in the New York Journal that reports of his death had been exaggerated, Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee provoking across her vast empire festivities, isolated uprisings, and the murder in India of two British colonial officers. They were ambushed on their way back from a Government House party celebrating the Queen's milestone. The assassins were caught and hanged and the cause of Indian independence from Britain was launched with martyrdom.
Meanwhile, Archibald Constable and Company, Publishers, of 2 Whitehall Gardens, Westminster, brought out their latest book without fuss on 18 May. Oscar Wilde's release from prison the very next day probably stole their thunder but if Archibald and Constable were deterred — and history does not record their mood — they shouldn't have been. What they unveiled on that day was destined to reverberate all the way through the 20th century.
It would remain as vibrant as the legends and bons mots of Wilde and Twain, prove much more resilient in the cavalcade of history than Queen Victoria or the story of Indian independence, and, as the 21st century dawned, show no sign of fading from sight. The book was Dracula, by Bram Stoker.
From his unspectacular and unannounced first appearance Count Dracula, the vampire, flashed like black lightning across the world of horror and the occult, surpassing all its macabre and outlandish inventions.
There was plenty of competition in the Gothic novel genre to which Dracula belonged. In Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) the hero, Ambrosio, abandons 30 years of blameless chastity to become an insatiable satyr, murdering a woman whom he discovers is his mother in order to have his way with a 15-year-old girl who turns out to be his sister. This consummation takes place in a crypt beneath a Capuchin monastery 'by the side of three putrid half-corrupted bodies'.
In John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) the hero, Lord Ruthven, has a 'dead, grey eye', which unerringly spots feminine prey and marks them out for blood transfusions and various other kinds of spoliation.
Thomas Presket Prest's Varney The Vampyre (1874) has no literary