Dracula's Guest And Other Weird Tales (5 page)

Although an enormous number of books have been written about
Dracula
, there is a remarkable dearth of critical literature on Bram Stoker’s other novels and stories. For a comprehensive list of
Dracula
criticism, readers should consult Maurice Hindle’s ‘Further Reading’ in the Penguin Classics edition of
Dracula
. The list that follows concentrates on criticism that looks beyond Stoker’s most renowned work.

Barbara Belford,
Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of ‘Dracula’
(New York: Alfred Knopf, and London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996). The author describes her book as ‘the first Stoker biography to make use of unpublished letters and manuscripts from private collections and university archives in Britain, Ireland and the United States’.

Daniel Farson,
The Man Who Wrote ‘Dracula’: A Biography of Bram Stoker
(London: Michael Joseph, 1975). The first of Stoker’s biographers to argue for the author’s contraction of syphilis.

Harry Ludlum,
A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker
(London: W. Foulsham & Co. Ltd, 1962). Ludlum worked in close collaboration with Stoker’s son, Noel, to write the first biography of the author.

Paul Murray,
From the Shadow of ‘Dracula’: A Life of Bram Stoker
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2004). The most recent biography of Stoker, in which the author’s life, rather than his work, is the primary focus.

Richard Dalby and William Hughes,
Bram Stoker: A Bibliography
(Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex: Desert Island Books, 2004).

Antonio Ballesteros González, ‘Portraits, Rats and Other Dangereous Things: Bram Stoker’s “The Judge’s House”, in
That Other World: The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature and its Contexts
, ed. Bruce Stewart, vol. 2 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smyth Ltd, 1998).

William Hughes, ‘“The Fighting Quality”: Physiognomy, Masculinity and Degeneration in Bram Stoker’s Later Fiction’, in
Fictions of Unease: The Gothic from Otranto to The X-Files
, eds. Andrew Smith, Diane Mason and William Hughes (Bath: Sulis Press, 2002).

Lillian Nayder, ‘Virgin Territory and the Iron Virgin: Engendering the Empire in Bram Stoker’s “The Squaw” ’, in
Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875–1925
, eds. Claudia Nelson and Ann Sumner Holmes (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).

David Punter, ‘Echoes in the Animal House:
The Lair of the White Worm
’, in
Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic
, eds. William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).

David Seed, ‘Eruptions of the Primitive into the Present:
The Jewel of Seven Stars
and
The Lair of the White Worm
’, in
Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic
, eds. Hughes and Smith.

Carol Senf, ‘
Dracula
and
The Lair of the White Worm
’. Bram Stoker’s Commentary on Victorian Science’,
Gothic Studies
, 2/2 (2000): 218–31.

Joseph Andriano,
Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).

Fred Botting,
Gothic
(London: Routledge, 1996).

Richard Davenport-Hines,
Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin
(London: Fourth Estate, 1998).

Bram Dijkstra,
Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Markman Ellis,
The History of Gothic Fiction
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001).

Christopher Frayling,
Nightmare: The Birth of Horror
(London: BBC Books, 1996).

David Glover,
Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).

Lucy Hartley,
Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

William Hughes,
Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Context
(Basingstoke: Macmillan/Palgrave, 2000). — and Andrew Smith, eds.,
Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).

Kelly Hurley,
The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the ‘Fin de Siècle’
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Darryl Jones,
Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film
(London: Arnold Publishers, 2002).

Sally Ledger,
The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

David Punter,
The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Present Day, 2
vols. (London: Longman, 1996).

Elaine Showalter,
Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the ‘Fin de Siècle’
(London: Virago Press, 1992).

The text follows that of both the first edition of
Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories
, collated by Florence Stoker and published in London in April 1914 by George Routledge & Sons Ltd (price 1s.) and the first edition of
The Lair of the White Worm
, published in London in November 1911 by William Rider and Son Ltd (price 6s.).

The Routledge edition of
Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories
went through three impressions in 1914, and ten more in the next twenty years. A souvenir edition limited to 1, 000 copies was published in 1927 to mark the occasion of the 250th London performance of
Dracula
at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre in London. Given away to members of the audience, when the book was opened, a black bat (separately enclosed in the front cover), powered by elastic, flew out. In 1966 Jarrolds and Arrow simultaneously published the stories under the title
Dracula’s Guest
(price 15s., and 3s. 6d. respectively), and in 1974 Arrow published a reprinted edition with identical pagination. An American edition of
Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories
was published in New York by Hillman-Curl Inc. in 1937 (price $1.50).

Following its initial publication in 1911,
The Lair of the White Worm
was subsequently published by W. Foulsham & Co. Ltd in 1925 (price 2s.); this edition was heavily abridged and partly rewritten (with the deletion of both the illustrations and several important passages), condensed to only twenty-eight chapters and 182 pages of text. The modern reprints from Arrow (1960), Jarrolds (1966) and Brandon (1991) used this condensed version instead of the original. An American edition
of
The Lair of the White Worm
was published by The Paperback Library (New York) in May 1966 under the title
The Garden of Evil
. This edition contained the complete text of the original edition of
The Lair of the White Worm
.

Minor alterations in typography and punctuation (the length of dashes, single quotation marks for doubles and no full stop after personal titles or monarch’s numbers, e.g. Mr, Mrs, William IV) have been silently made throughout the text printed here to conform to house style. The majority of other inconsistencies of spelling and punctuation such as Stoker’s fickle use of the oxford comma, variant spellings (e.g. ‘realise’/‘realize’, ‘Walpurgis Nacht’/‘Walpurgis-Nacht’/‘Walpurgis night’, ‘to-day’/‘today’) and instances of double punctuation (:– and –, ) have been left as they originally occurred in the first edition. The exception to this is in ‘The Judge’s House’ where the first edition’s interchangeable use of ‘Malcolmson’ and ‘Malcomson’ has been regularized to ‘Malcolmson’. Obvious misspellings have also been silently corrected, for example ‘artistocratic’ has been amended to read ‘aristocratic’.

In a very few cases punctuation has been added where grammatically required, and very slight textual changes have been made where meaning would otherwise have been compromised. A list of such changes is given below: