Dracula by Bram Stoker

Published 1897 · 407 pages · 160,356 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Horror, Literary Fiction

How hard is Dracula to read?

Dracula scores 53 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
Victorian prose with some technical medical vocabulary and Continental European references.
Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
Multiple narrators with distinct voices. Individual entries tend toward clear, direct prose.
Abstraction: 45 out of 100
Plot-driven Gothic thriller. Thematic concerns emerge through action rather than direct statement.
Information density: 58 out of 100
Multiple document types create information-rich texture. Forward momentum maintains accessibility.
Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
Epistolary form with multiple first-person narrators, none omniscient. Dracula himself remains opaque.
Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
Rich symbolic field: blood, infection, foreign invasion, sexuality. The vampire functions as overdetermined symbol.
Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
Narrators are sincere Victorian professionals. Little irony in the telling.
Resolution withholding: 35 out of 100
Good triumphs over evil explicitly. The ending is definitive.
Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
Complex assembly of document types, but chronology is clear and plot linear.

How Dracula is regarded

Dracula holds a literary regard score of 84 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Dracula sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (296 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Dracula scores 35 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Romance
we go out as the old knights of the Cross to redeem more.
Symbol: Mythical (Archetypal)
She is God's true dead, whose soul is with Him!
Mythos: Romance iii (the quest) (romance iii)
And then begins our great quest.
Genre: Romance + Anatomy
in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document.

Where the story of Dracula takes place

  • Victorian London, Whitby and Exeter, 1890s (1890 to 1897), the main setting
  • Castle Dracula and the Carpathians, Transylvania, 1890s (1890 to 1897)
  • Pursuit via Varna, Galatz and the Sereth to the Borgo Pass, October-November (1890 to 1897)

5 things that are true of Dracula, with the passage for each

  1. Harker finds fifty boxes of earth in the castle crypt.

    There, in one of the great boxes, of which there were fifty in all, on a pile of newly dug earth, lay the Count!

  2. Quincey Morris says Lucy has received the blood of four men in ten days.

    that poor pretty creature that we all love has had put into her veins within that time the blood of four strong men.

  3. Only twenty-nine of the fifty earth-boxes remain when the heroes first search Carfax.

    There were only twenty-nine left out of the fifty!

  4. Dracula is killed at sunset by Harker's Kukri across the throat and Morris's bowie knife into the heart.

    Whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris's bowie knife plunged into the heart.

  5. The closing note admits that the whole record is almost entirely typescript copy rather than original documents.

    in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document.

Scenes in Dracula that Frye would name

43 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
And, to our bitter grief, with a smile and in silence, he died, a gallant gentleman. Quincey's sacrificial death at the moment of victory.
Anagnorisis, untitled
They were made by Miss Lucy! Van Helsing's revelation reorients Seward's understanding of the whole plot.
Sparagmos, untitled
The thing in the coffin writhed, and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The staking of Lucy's body is a ritual mutilation of the beloved.
Agon, untitled
It was evident that they were bent on finishing their task before the sun should set. The sunset race at the cart is the climactic contest of the quest.
Anagnorisis, untitled
See! The snow is not more stainless than her forehead! The curse has passed away! The recognition that the scar is gone pivots the ending.
Demonic imagery, untitled
by its light I saw around us a ring of wolves, with white teeth and lolling red tongues The living ring of wolves is a classic demonic circle of the animal world.

Books that share these scenes with Dracula

About the author

Bram Stoker