Something that is essential.

Latin, roughly 'sure footing'. Pou sto is 'a p,ace to stand'.

It is honestly really amusing to see this referenced like this in a novel. So professional as it wasn't yet cultural canon.

Not entirely sure what he's trying to say but transcendentalism is an 1800s philosophy that divinity pervades everything; will o the wisp are mythical balls of light that lead people to their destiny.

Hey bestie? Kindly, what the fuck?

This is a vampire trope I've never seen outside Dracula.

this is a specific set of rites in the book of common prayer.

Archaic spelling of skeptic

a mixture of doctrines; predecessor to 'hodgepodge'

Recording angels are angels in Judaic, Christian, and Islamic angelology. Recording angels are assigned by God with the task of recording the events, actions, and prayers of each individual human. This includes bad sins, and good deeds. [Wikipedia]

I don't know if I mentioned this before, but this is still how vampires are popularly created today.

He's referring to the Crusades here

Is he saying that if the Count dies, Mina will live?

The idea that the properties of the Earth give the occult or paranormal powers is a Spiritualist one that is still quite pervasive among the ghost hunting community, real neat huh!

Dracula is apparently the only place where this phrase appears. The meaning is of course there in context, but how else it may be used or why... uncertain.

Her grammar is interesting. Perhaps it's because she's quoting something said in the past about the past but it was spoken originally in present-future?

British-ism: used as an expression of surprised annoyance or as a command to calm down. - Merriam Webster

lol she's taking minutes i love her

The OG main characters

This is making me think... I wonder if Seward, who has little to no Bible knowledge, has shown any religiousity throughout this that I didn't catch? After all, there are no Athiests in foxholes and everyone else seems to be getting more religious the more intense the battle gets.

Plural, and sometimes alternate spelling, of double entendre.

Upper class Englishmen used to hunt in red coats.

Interesting. As I believe I noted earlier, she seems to have some sort of connection to the Count because of the bite, as is common to vampire mythology of all eras.

It's this thing.

This whole thing is so Spiritualist. I love how in-its-era Dracula is as a novel. It feeling so recent really reminds me that 1893 wasn't long ago. (though, and repeatedly in my own annotations, I've forgotten that the year isn't 1993 and that 1893 was in fact over 100 years ago).

Again this seems like foreshadowing of her becoming a vampire, face red like when gorged on blood

Wow, this combined with the "rest in peace" above really seems like it's foreshadowing Mina's death. Anyway if Mina dies I die--

Thiiis phrasing is a little sus.

This reminds me of a poem: https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=2535

What can I say? I think Stephenie Meyer intended this to be a Jesus thing but it ends up being a very Queer coded reference; I've definitely heard other people mention this before.

This feels really out of place and considering the surrounding context I'm almost tempted to call it antisemitic, which again all things considered isn't surprising.

Latin, formal, lit. "note well". to observe carefully or take special notice (used in written text to draw attention to what follows) - Oxford dict.

had to use a classic gif for this

Not a real person, but does share a name with one.

general or widespread hatred or disgust directed toward someone as a result of their actions - Oxford dict

This is really reminding me of the antisemitic undertones of vampires. The fact that specifically Christian objects will not cure, but entirely kill a vampire really speaks to the Jewish aversion to Christianity, not to mention the whole concept of vampires is blood libel. But as I've mentioned before, I believe this to be an evolution of vampire mythos that was not original; instead, it was originally homophobic 🙃. Fortunately, it seems that modern vampires have diverged from both of these and have become simply explicitly an exploration of Queer relationships.

This is SO Queer coded

He's starting to seem suspiciously experienced with this...

LMAO THIS IS SO FUNNY WHY DOES THIS FEEL SO MODERN, THESE COP DODGERS

Okay Iago

This is the origin of this phrase!

I like to think that this isn't a friendly love or my polyamory conspiracy theory but rather a genuine unrequited "friend with a crush" situation, and to which I appreciate the delicateness this is handled by him.

Stoker's other new word

DUDE I REALIZED THIS SEVERAL CHAPTERS AGO GET WITH THE PROGRAM JOHN!!!!!

A now-common phrase which originated in, guess what, Hamlet! Clearly Stoker's fave play... or foreshadowing.

I do appreciate that there's a character in a book of this age that can't quote scripture at people

I love how they're planning to do crimes so casually, but furthermore that Van Helsing seems very good at that

Another real restaurant! Tea rooms run from the 1860s through 1980s. Still exists in faded signs above a Sainsbury's.

"a self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others." Oxford dict.

starting to think Stoker learned a new word when writing this.

a row or street of houses or apartments that have been converted from stables or built to look like former stables. -Oxford dict.

I love how he spells in Cockney lmao, but this is actually a real historical thing but has less to do with education level than you'd think (phonetic spelling being common for hundreds of years, not all teachers trained equally, and so forth).

Oh for crying out loud, it was this cockney accent that made it finally dawn on me that The Magnus Archives is a retelling of Dracula.

Still think it's funny how indicative it is of the time how often they use opiates and brandy in this novel, and how barely a hundred years later we're like DON'T DO THAT

...it's giving me "compulsory heterosexuality" like babe you're allowed to feel pity please don't turn this into something bigger than it is (the bigger thing is vampires)

HAHA YEAH, DREAMS, AMIRITE?! TOTALLY DREAMS AND NOT REALITY AT ALL HAHA SO FUNNY,,

So this was one of the annotations I made while travelling, and I wrote, while crying according to my notes: "i swear to god if mina becomes a vampire i'm gonna resurrect bram stoker and stab a stake through his heart MYSELF". so uh, be warned, stoker, i guess?

It's giving me "allegory for Queerness as monstrosity"

DON'T YOU DARE DO THIS TO ME MINA

I shouldn't have internet access: https://www.tiktok.com/@mousecalledted/video/7165402944991612206

https://www.tiktok.com/@mousecalledted/video/7165416484863348011

I'm gonna regret sharing this this but I made a tiktok about this moment because there's a sound that's just too perfect for it: https://www.tiktok.com/@mousecalledted/video/7165402944991612206

PLEASE THIS IS SUCH A FUNNY IMAGE

So, this is an exclamation of disgust that comes from an Irish word of the same pronunciation. It's meant to be an onomatopoeia, and personally, while we don't actually know the etymology of the word 'fuck' but I think this is where fuck comes from. Linguistically speaking, they're from the same origin, have the same use case, and the pronunciation is an easy linguistic evolution from faugh.

This is interesting-- it seems to just be an observation of Jonathan's, because if we go off of modern vampire interpretation this would mean that the Count was recently turned, which we know to not be true.

Increased the durability of boot soles, when they were still cobbled on

archaic spelling of jail

made up by Stoker.

in Romanian folklore, Scholomance is a school of black magic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholomance

unfortunately not a real university; I also haven't talked about the spelling of Budapest before but it comes from the appropriate pronunciation of Budapest.

I found this really interesting because I've seen roses used as symbolism before with vampires however i've not actually seen it used as a deterrent in modern vampire media

Greek peninsula, around Crimea today.

interesting. these are tropes we really don't see, for the most part. we see the bats and perhaps like turning into a mist but we don't see a lot of these tropes anymore and I'm wondering why these fell out of favor.

I know what he means but that sounds a little transgender

Obsessed with immortality

Ugh so noble

An offensive phrase referencing Native American people popularized by Tom Sawyer.

they literally have the biggest crush on each other

I see the parallel here with the fact that Arthur couldn't kiss her as she lay dying, however I have seen this trope come up before of kissing your dead lover and I'm wondering again where that is from.

I wonder what is the true origin of this "lover needing to kill their own lover because they've become evil" trope. I see it a lot in the sort of media I like.

here we go again with the Norse mythology

Finally Van Helsing explains it outright. I can only imagine how wild it must've been to read this book when it came out, before vampires were so much in the cultural canon that we're able to assume what's going on without much context or explanation.

I believe I've mentioned this before but a Sexton is the manager of a cemetery

This is actually the originator of this iconic phrase!

Waxed cloth used in burial.

The host is the wafer representing the body the body of Christ. And from here we learn that Van Helsing is a practicing Catholic. They also mention indulgences, which were absolution or reductions of various sins that could be purchased through the Catholic Church, however as I was aware this practice did not go into the Victorian era, however I suppose in places like Amsterdam perhaps they continue longer than other places.

Phlegmatic was one of the four temperaments, which was very popular form of personality psychology at the time. To be phlegmatic means to be agreeable, unassuming, and intuitive.

Figured out where the garlic thing comes from: "Garlic, specifically the chemical compound allicin inside garlic, is a powerful antibiotic. Some European beliefs around vampires stated they were created by a disease of the blood, so a powerful antibiotic would “kill” a vampire." -Carnegie Museum of Natural History

this is only insinuated before; I wonder why he chose to mention it out right here.

Bruh you could've put that lightly

to use few words.

Who found it? Who is compiling these entries?

Big leather trunk

this was a great problem in the Victorian era- people who were comatose being buried alive, so many graves had 'safety bells' attached to their coffin so that they ring it and alert the groundskeeper or sexton to get them out, that they had been buried alive.

i'm now wondering what the inspiration was for garlic being a repellent for vampires

here meaning 'to jest'

he seems to me proceed here as opposed to precede... interesting.

The term "body snatcher" referred to the literal of taking of bodies from their graves by grave robbers starting in the 17th century, however this term has now come to mean an alien-like being taking control of your own body, coming from sci-fi.

This is interesting--some Victorians stripped the clothes off of their dead before burial, sometimes even for the viewing of the body, though this practice was not incredibly widespread.

I viscerally hate this.

This is a real place with a very long history of has included patrons such as Charles Dickens. It has existed since the 18th century and though the building still stands today it is currently unused. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Straw%27s_Castle,_Hampstead

it's interesting that Stoker chooses to make this note here, as it's only been implied thus far that vampires have any sort of connection with bats.

This spelling is an archaic form in English, perhaps used by Stoker to invoke the Germanic origins of these characters, however it was also used in English to denote an open or fronted version of the O vowel so rather than 'zoo-logical' it was pronounced 'zoe-uh-logical'; this also gives us insight into the British accent of the time as the American English accent would not have had this vowel at all--it's more like 'zoe-œ-logical' rather than 'zoe-uh-logical' (with a schwa) as is pronounced in American English.

"a small area of grass that is thicker or longer than the grass growing around it." Oxford dict

holy men who are said to have the power to perform miracles

english soldier who was thought to live for 169 years

one of the fathers of neurology

this is the most Victorian spiritualist sentence possibly in this whole book

still very relevant

I enjoy how consistent Bram Stoker is in that he almost always juxtaposes two characters that are going through similar situations one entry after the other.

Not linner- because there was no lunch! Fascinating. Note from future Teddy: at the time, Germanic people, and people from the former Holy Roman Empire in general, including Romanians did not eat lunch; they wouldn't eat lunch until the 1900s.

it makes perfect sense that the concept of takeout is not new but I was weirdly unprepared for learning that Victorians also had take out

I love this game for her

this phrase does not quite mean the literal translation: the literal translation is 'in both hands' but what it means is more like to have the nerve to do something.

Coming from a man who jokes about bigamy and polygamy I can't help but think he understands how Mina feels

That sounds much larger than what Lucy had...

"a two-wheeled horse-drawn carriage accommodating two inside, with the driver seated behind." Oxford dict.

of course he has PTSD, but this poor man has PTSD :(

I keep trying to research whatever this must have meant but it is exceedingly hard to try to find something called Victoria in Victorian era

there is a pain that goes on and on...

Short for omnibus, horse drawn carriage that could carry more people.

interesting- so I suppose this is why we have letters that Lucy never opened from Mina in Dracula.

this is pretty pointed

I probably should have selected a longer sentence to annotate, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about a Victorian customs around death. We really see the influence of the time that Bram Stoker is writing here with how the body is still kept in the house for a certain amount of time although less than 30 years prior, people are having a lot of physical contact with the body, as well as the corpse is viewed as beautiful especially if it had been very sickly prior to death.

literal and purposeful dehumanization

"Is Teddy gonna talk about the vampire scare again?" Yes yes they are. This was a real thing that was done to suspected vampires, even when there was a degree of uncertainty as to whether they were vampires or not, so that they would not come back and make havoc on a town. They would exhume bodies postmortem from their graves and cut their heads off and hearts out among other gory procedures, not always all of the possible procedures as there was a regionality to these practices.

And that's on foreshadowing

I like this sentence very much because a lot of the appeal of vampires especially in modern vampire folklore is that they're immortal and therefore can avoid death or have a death and it becomes this beautiful thing for them; however the vampires in more traditional vampire folklore like in Dracula have this just horrendous existence and horrendous deaths and see stuff like that all the time.

"this is when she human dies" -natalie

He's literally like "don't kiss the vampire!!!!!"

Polycule moment

I like how this version of the vampire mythology actually explains why they have long teeth and it's because they're dead, because newer vampire mythology has expounded upon that in a very different direction with like retractable teeth and stuff like that; they're going much more of a monster direction than they are going in a dead people direction.

South American grassland

I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but this is an old medical idea that, before we really fully understood organs, blood was considered to be the thing that was our very life force and even when we knew what organs were this idea still proliferated in a popular culture.

Ok I get he's a vampire but please have some standards

I see now where all of the wolf references are coming from: it's supposed to be, I guess, a warning sign of vampires, that wolves and seemingly animals in general don't like vampires (which tracks for monster lore as a whole--animals are usually portrayed as being more perceptive to monsters). However, I also wondered about the connection with this presence of wolves in Dracula to werewolf mythology. I admit that werewolves are a major gap in my monster knowledge, however I assume there must be some sort of connection. I don't know if werewolves are pre or post dracula but that would be really interesting to look into considering that werewolves and vampires have often been portrayed as enemies at least in modern vampire literature.

somebody has to say it: every time Bram Stoker tries to transcribe an accent he does too much accent description and it is just illegible I have no idea what they're trying to say.

this is the first time we hear Lucy actually say that she was commanded by this voice.

at this point it seems that Van Helsing isn't trying to hide the fact that he knows about vampires and he knows how to treat vampirism, however he's also not explaining to the people around him what vampirism is I assume so as not to scare them

Oh NOOOOOOO; although I would be remiss to mention the fact that this was a common treatment (for up until actually very recently and even now it is considered by some to be beneficial) to get some fresh air so opening the windows when it was stuffy was thought to rid the place of sickness, which there's an extent at which this is true, though it is rooted in the idea of miasma and miasma was basically the idea that sickness traveled through the air by way of smells and stuffiness and things like that--and again it's not completely wrong but it's also not germ theory.

Whoop there it is

Morphine

Lit. "god in heaven". Archaic; now "himmel!" is a more common German expression expressing the same sentiment of "oh my god"

Ya know, like a vampire

something something ardently admire and adore

[OC]

the concept of absolutely having to give someone your blood and picking between the person feels weirdly Queer coded... like I'm giving you my life

Queer

once again we see Lucy and Renfield having the same experiences

i'm coming up on a theory that this is juxtaposed with Lucy feeling better because they're actually trying to tell us that the moon has an influence on the vampire's power

This is absolutely beautiful, it's definitely mirroring his proposal; I think there's also a lot of pop culture references to this concept, once again bringing up NBC's Hannibal and The Magnus Archives as its characters make a similar pact that is also similarly terrifying and romantic simultaneously.

this characterization is really interesting--that she wouldn't have been jealous of Jonathan being in love with another woman.

NAME CHANGE NAME CHANGE NAME CHANGE

This combined with his devotion to a 'master' makes me think about my observations about Lucy and my belief that she was in the middle of being turned--I think this is the same case.

Here we go again, lizard fashion.

Hmm where have we seen this before...

Chloral hydrate is a schedule IV drug in the US and is incredibly hard to obtain even with a prescription. It is a sedative and a hypnotic and is known as a date rape drug.

[OC]

"a light low-wheeled carriage with a removable folding hood" Oxford dict.

"a mixture of meat or vegetables chopped and seasoned for use as a stuffing or garnish" Oxford dict.

As a historical note, the reason that Victorians did not like showing the feet is largely unknown to us today. It seems to be coming from many different cultural traditions all at the same time, however scholars mostly agree that it was not actually because the feet were being sexualized and currently it is thought that it was largely out of protection of the feet--they shouldn't have been sore, and especially a woman's feet should not have been sore because she shouldn't have been working. In this context of the story that makes a lot of sense.

In Victorian literature on this meant either Scarlet Fever or meningitis that had that resulted in encephalitis. Pop culture note: We see this is in nbc's Hannibal where Will Graham is given induced encephalitis by Hannibal. In pop culture, including for the Victorians, this brain fever, because of its reputation for causing hallucinations (and at the time was considered to an extent to be psycho somatic) though it was in actuality was caused by viral infection, was/is considered to be a sign of abuse of that character who suffers from it.

I have been very carefully paying attention to all the times that Mina refers to something of 'our happiness' 'our favorite place' or what have you between her and Lucy

I have several theories about what's going on right now: 1) Lucy was turned into into a vampire and she's experiencing the initial effects of what that is to that 2) she was possibly glamored by a vampire 3) following the trope that, once you are bitten by a vampire, you have a sort of weird relationship to them, like this permanent connection and you feel... like called to them

In this journal entry not only do we see more resignation about Jonathan's fate from Mina but we also see more of the fact that they are Queer women who share a bed together and like live together and take care of each other.

While I'm aware that they literally just did get their feet dirty, the juxtaposition of this with the prayer makes me think of the fact that in the New Testament the washing of the feet is usually a sexual metaphor.

Trope 20, this one is less common; the color of the eyes seems to be very debated in vampire literature, which makes sense as it's not something that's necessarily integral to the vampire as a being.

This is both a lil gay in 1) women thinking they'd be good at the man thing was viewed as butch at the time 2) the fact that she just to be kind of resigning herself to the fact that Jonathan is dead 3) she's also like fully moved in with Lucy what's up with that

A related piece of media that clearly in hindsight takes a lot of inspiration from this is a sequence in an audio drama called The Magnus Archives where a man buys a ship and all of its crew and starts taking taking them through expeditions through places like Greenland and Russia and has them pick up cursed objects and ship them all around the world for sale and the crew ends up dying because of these objects, and one of those things is often these nasty coffins full of dirt.

I don't think it's too far of a jump to call this either Trope 18 or 19--whichever were at now--because this is very clearly done by a vampire. Vampires are shown to, in desperation, eat animals. This is something that has continued into modern vampire literature just to not as thorough as an extent as previously existed.

I had no idea it was that old!

i'm getting more nervous yet because the vampire trope is intensifying

this is a vampire trope and seeing this outside of a vampire context makes me nervous for what I'm about to read next

...oh boy.

this whole thing is clearly symbolic of something though of what I'm not yet certain

this whole entry was so ominous. I suspect there's some foreshadowing going on here or at least supposed to be some sort of juxtaposition towards the last time we heard from Jonathan

this whole letter is just extraordinarily Queer

well I guess THAT term meant something different

Largely unrelated to Dracula: I find it interesting that there are people who consider themselves to never have used slang. i'm sure they did and perhaps had a different definition or perhaps they really were just trained to speak "properly".

shakespeare again, but oh my god why like that

...oh joy

...these are Lesbians.

Trope 18? it seems odd, but it sounds like Jonathan somehow knows that vampires can create other vampires. I don't know where he would have gotten that knowledge from because it's not shown to us at any point that he's learned that... perhaps it's something he learned when he wasn't writing in his journals for whatever reason?

this is so incredibly Queer coded

trope 17- so this is, again, where we get some of this very early vampire mythos--this trope of not having any vital signs and needing to drink blood in conjunction with each other. A lot of early vampire myths, after the era of the usual folklore of 'risen from the dead', the vampires of the tuberculosis era were the first time that we saw them feed on blood and have no vital signs, because that is what was being said of the so-called vampires in these small American towns--that they had died some sort of horrible death and then their family started dying in the same way as the 'original' deceased. And so they would go exhume them find that they have no vital signs, but still find them full of blood. And that's where we get this idea that they were feeding on the blood of their family and that had no vital signs even though they still had color in their faces-because they were supposedly feeding on the blood of their family which was what was killing their family and gave them life post-mortem.

This is a very old trope that's not really used anymore; part of it being that it comes from the old vampire mythos of the vampire scare era, Mary Brown in Connecticut was purportedly found with her eyes open when they exhumed her to see if she was the cause of her family's deaths

Trope 16- sleeping in coffins