There is a brief mention of Mina, in which the novel briefly
introduces the character, Mina Murray. She is obviously someone close
to Jonathan. Later on the reader realises that she is
Jonathan’s fiancée and later his wife.
The social context is very apparent. English men and women of Stoker's time had a strong tradition of observation and letter writing; educated English people used journals and letters to set down artful and detailed observations of their world and lives. Jonathon is obviously an educated man, indicating that he is of fairly high stature on the social ladder. He is able to read foreign and English books and can also remember quotes by famous poets. Jonathon, from his tone of language, at first seems quite relaxed. He makes notes in his journal to ask the count about the peasants’ strange behaviour seeming completely unperturbed by it. However, further on in the entry, some of their fear is beginning to affect him.
Many themes appear through the book, perhaps the strongest being love, evil and the will to go on. However, there are many other minor themes such as death, power, fear and superstition, a few of which appear in the first chapter. One of the novel's themes is the clash between the world of the supernatural and unknown with the scientific and rational world of Victorian England. Jonathan’s journal entries provide detailed descriptions of peasants he sees;
The women looked pretty, except… they were very clumsy about the waist. They had all full white sleeves of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of course there were petticoats under them.
Jonathon also describes the dishes he eats. He notes the quaint superstitions of the Eastern Europeans, and subsumes all he observes to a framework of science and reason. Although he has nightmares at the hotel, he blames them on his dinner of the evening before. When the coachman's body seems to become translucent, Harker blames the sight on a trick of the eyes. Stoker also chooses to focus upon fear and superstition in his first chapter. The peasants obviously fear wherever it is that Jonathon is going and the person within. They talk about it in their native languages, something often done when a person is scared or trying to conceal something from a foreigner.
Here, we see that for all of their backwardness the peasants know what Jonathan does not. When the coachman comes to collect Jonathan, the frightened carriage driver and the coachman have an exchange that makes it clear to the reader that the carriage driver was trying to trick (and save) Jonathan. He arrived an hour early and then tried to convince Jonathan to come to Bukovina, to get him away from Dracula's castle. The irony here is that Jonathan is ignorant of what is waiting for him at the castle; the quaint and uneducated peasant knows what the sophisticated and educated Englishman cannot seem to understand. The sign of the cross, the rosary, St. George’s Day, all seem to be pointing at some impeding danger. This chapter is important, because not only does it have undercurrents of evil but
also dwells on Jonathon’s feeling of uneasiness. There are references of Ordog (Satan), Bokol (Hell), Stregoira (witch), Vrolok and Vikoslak, which mean wolf and vampires. These are words spoken by the landlord and the crowd. They also emphasise on the foreboding of evil. This research is backed up when peasants along the way start giving him good luck charms. They have lived with vampires, and Dracula himself, for centuries, and have included superstitious protection devices into their religious culture.
There is a lot of evidence supplied in the first chapter to let the reader be aware of what period the book is set in. Stoker goes into great detail about the costume of the peasants, the origins of the four nationalities and notes that Jonathon has discovered in library books about the area. Jonathon has done research in order to find out more about this faraway region and has discovered that it is an area with many changing borders and many different peoples. He notes, "I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting."
There is also a lot of information about the landscape and how life in Transylvania has adapted to suit it. It also gives evidence of the type of transport used during that period… Now and again we passed a leiter-wagon--the ordinary peasant’s cart--with its long, snakelike vertebra, calculated to suit the inequalities of the road. On this were sure to be seated quite a group of homecoming peasants
There is much information that gives us clues to the nationality and period in which the people lived in…
The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who were more barbarian than the rest, with their big cowboy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them, and had long black hair and heavy black moustaches…
It seems as though Transylvania during that time was made up of many cultures… a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd
There is also much detail about the setting. Stoker tells us that Jonathon was in Munich and Vienna before he entered Bistriz. Jonathan describes the land and the geographical out lay of the places very well. This is similar to the characteristics between the author, Bram Stoker and Jonathan Harker. Both of them have got
their knowledge from the library of the British Museum. Before us lay a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road. There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom--apple, plum, pear, cherry.
Jonathon describes the scenery in a way that incorporates the reader, giving them a vivid image of what he is seeing and help to create the setting within one’s mind. As the journey continues, there is a change of the scenery as dusk and night falls.
As the evening fell it began to get very cold, and the growing twilight seemed to merge into one dark mistiness the gloom of the trees, oak, beech, and pine, though in the valleys which ran deep between the spurs of the hills, as we ascended through the Pass, the dark firs stood out here and there against the background of late lying snow.
This particular paragraph brings starts to the surface, the air of gloom and uneasiness, felt in the atmosphere as Jonathon closes in on his destination. The way it is written personifies the darkness and greyness making them seem almost alive.
…seemed in the darkness to be closing down upon us… great masses of greyness, which here and there bestrewed the trees. He also mentions that the foreboding atmosphere create by the darkness does nothing to help him shake of the thoughts he had concocted during his earlier experience before and during the early coach ride. As modern readers, we may find the setting vaguely reminiscent of Halloween, but Stoker's descriptions in fact reveal a great deal about nineteenth-century British stereotypes of Eastern Europe. As he approaches Dracula's castle, Harker notes that his trip has been "so strange and uncanny that a dreadful fear came upon [him]." Harker's sense of dread illustrates his inability to comprehend the superstitions of the Carpathian peasants
[the darkness and greyness bestrewing the trees] produced a peculiarly weird and solemn effect, which carried on the thoughts and grim fancies engendered earlier in the evening… the falling sunset threw into strange relief the ghost-like clouds
Vampire legends have been a part of popular folklore in many parts of the world since ancient times. Throughout the Middle Ages and even into the modern era, reports of corpses rising from the dead with supernatural powers achieved widespread belief. The Dracula family, which the count describes with pride in the early chapters of the novel, is based on a real historical family. Its most famous member, Vlad Dracula—or Vlad the Impaler, as he was commonly known—enjoyed a bloody career that rivalled that of his fictional counterpart. The fifteenth-century Prince of Wallachia, Vlad was a brilliant yet savage general who impaled his enemies on long spikes. The prince also had a reputation for murdering beggars, forcing women to eat their babies, and nailing the turbans of disrespectful ambassadors to their heads. While Stoker's Count Dracula is supposed to be a descendant of Vlad, and not the prince himself, Stoker clearly makes the count resemble his fearsome ancestor. This historical allusion gives Dracula an air of truth, and Stoker wants to suggest that the documents assembled in the novel are real.
