Is Dracula Moriarty? Is Holmes Van Helsing?

In an article in the Baker Street Journal Christmas Annual of 1957, William Leonard points out that the events of Bram Stoker’s novel unfold between May and November 1890, a period in which Watson records only three cases with Sherlock Holmes. Stoker’s novel cites several news accounts about the growing mystery, which would certainly have attracted Holmes’ attention. In order to intervene, he would have had to hide his identity to conceal the danger that confronted the women in the tale, who Stoker tells us are in such fragile health that any shock might kill them.

Van Helsing arrives ostensibly from Amsterdam, an intrepid polymath with a poised head; a hard, square chin; a long, straight nose with sensitive nostrils; and brows that knit deeply over a problem. He is older than Holmes, but we know that Holmes can affect that appearance. Both investigators use the same methods, and both are expert housebreakers. Supposedly a doctor, Van Helsing does not appear to be acquainted with medicine (“the professor’s actions were certainly odd and not to be found in any pharmacopeia”). And, strangely, his inexpert English becomes articulate when he’s under stress: “You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you.”

As for Dracula, both he and Moriarty are tall, thin, pale, and gray-haired — Dracula has a “lofty domed forehead” and Moriarty a “forehead doming out in a white curve.” Jay Finley Christ writes, “Moriarty and Dracula were two names for the same man. Mr. Holmes had been after him for over three months and began to catch up with him in January. Moriarty-Dracula knew this all the time, but Watson didn’t get it. If he had, he probably would have told the world about it before Bram Stoker got round to it in 1897.”

Richard Jefferies’ 1885 novel After London is one of the first post-apocalypse stories, an adventure tale set in a future England after an unspecified catastrophe has destroyed civilization, cut off communication with the continent, and set the surviving human population back to a quasi-medieval existence among the overgrown ruins of the “ancients.” The nature of the disaster is never explained, but it must have been prodigious — the interior of the island is now filled with an immense freshwater lake, and the old capital is now choked under poisonous vapors; one old house collapses like salt at the hero’s touch.

The first section, called “The Relapse Into Barbarism,” reads like a nonfiction natural history, describing in detail how nature reclaims the ruins in the decades after the conflagration. The longer second section, “Wild England,” recounts the adventures of the young nobleman Felix Aquila as he leaves the stultifying court life in which he has been raised and rows out onto the lake in a homemade canoe.

Why invent such a richly detailed future when the story is essentially a medieval romance? Why withhold the nature of the disaster? Felix’s adventures in this world seem to unfold as if unplanned, as if Jefferies invented it simply to explore it, to commune with his own creative faculty. He doesn’t seem to know what he’ll find in his own imagination.

The full text is available at Project Gutenberg and on Google Books, and there’s a free audio version at Librivox.

Grip, the talking raven in Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, was based on a real bird, a pet who lived in the family’s Marylebone home, where she buried items in the garden, terrorized the dog, bit the children, and tore at the family carriage. She died in 1841 after ingesting some lead-based paint, and Dickens wrote her into the novel, which appeared later that year.

Interestingly, when Edgar Allan Poe reviewed the story for Graham’s Magazine, he remarked that “The raven … might have been made more than we see it … Its croaking might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama.” In 1842, when the two authors met in Philadelphia, Poe was said to be “delighted” that Grip had been based on a real bird.

Poe’s famous poem appeared three years later, and scholars generally agree that Grip had inspired the “ebony bird” — in Dickens’ novel the raven had repeated the phrases “Never say die” and “Nobody” and is described as “tapping at the door” and “knocking softly at the shutter.”

Today Grip’s remains are on display in Philadelphia’s Parkway Central Library, where they may inspire yet more writings.

Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know. A writer should know too much.

— Ernest Hemingway, letter to Bernard Berenson, 1952

As a footnote to the above, I would like to say that I am getting very tired of literary authorities, on both the stage and the screen, who advise young writers to deal only with those subjects that happen to be familiar to them personally. It is quite true that this theory probably produced A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but the chances are it would have ruled out Hamlet.

— Wolcott Gibbs, New Yorker, January 6, 1945