Everything I discuss here is based on the publicly known details about Dracula, so I’m not marking it for spoilers, but proceed with caution if you know nothing about who Dracula is. Also, please keep in mind the lack of a spoiler tag when responding!

I can’t help but think about how our experience reading this today, even if we know nothing about the actual story, is forever altered by the lore and legends built over time after this book came out. You’d probably be hard pressed to find someone nowadays who doesn’t already know that Dracula is a vampire. And obviously, if you read the blurb for the book on here, you’d learn that before reading as well.

That makes this reading experience so fundamentally different when compared to that of someone who read it shortly after its release. My basic understanding is that while this certainly wasn’t the first vampire story, it also wasn’t widely known that Dracula was a vampire until you actually read the book. So I’m curious to know what the experience must have been like to learn with Harker (and I assume the other characters later in the book) what Dracula is. Instead, we go into this with more information than the narrator and I don’t think that was the original intent. I definitely could be wrong though haha

I’ll be researching this as I read more I think and come back to update, but for any Dracula lovers or English majors out there, I’d love to hear your thoughts!