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Dracula Q6: Setting details
Dracula was written and set in the 1890s, so wasn't a period piece. But we're not in that time, so we read it as such. What is distinct about the 1890s that makes you aware it's a different time?
For me, it's the frequent post, and the rather matter-of-fact acceptance of the deaths of Lucy and her mother.
Four of the five characters were definitely middle-class, with one (Holmwood) an aristocrat. Is this an aspirational book, or was it written for a middle-class audience?
Comments
Isn't van Helsing aristocratic as well? I suppose he came over to me like that because he is decisive in directing all the others to follow his lead.
Other period pointers - the predominantly agricultural nature of Europe, and the splintered state of Eastern Europe. It's a really good point about death being much more of an everyday phenomenon.
Who was it written for? So far as I can tell it was written all in a piece as a novel (unlike say Dickens who wrote serial installments in magazines etc). But through the whole of the 19th century there was enthusiasm for horror novels, from earlier writers like Horace Walpole (Castle of Otranto) and Anne Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho) plus of course Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and a good many others. So Bram Stoker is placing his book into a fairly long tradition rather than inventing something totally new - but bringing in new elements such as setting some of the plot in familiar English territory rather than all in exotic foreign climes.
My guess is that Stoker reckoned there would be a wide readership across a wide band of society, and that the social focus on middle and upper class leading figures was simply a reflection of his time rather than a call to social mobility.
Richard captures my thoughts well.
I found the constant pointing out of everyone else's genteel qualities was most striking. A modern book would quite likely have some people who didn't have such kind thoughts to one another!
For emphasis!
I'm not sure I accept that it was just a story of the 1890s that everyone would identify with. It's a story justifying those who aspire to be members of a ruling class. This market is much larger than the actual ruling class, and with the development of media technology in the second half of the 19th century became worth exploiting by commercial art.