Now that Dracula Daily is over, I decided to go through my copy of the novel (Norton critical edition) to look for interesting footnotes and read the various essays/etc. at the back.
Here's some of my favorite footnotes:
An enlarged thyroid gland resulting in a swollen neck; one symptom of iodine deficiency; particularly common in some mountainous regions; may cause brain damage.
—Page 15/May 5, after Jonathan mentions seeing a lot of people with 'goitre' as he is driven out of town and up towards Castle Dracula. Didn't notice this detail at all, but it plays around with possible signs of being fed upon, mundane medical causes, and also maybe an association with madness and superstition. A neat touch.
The word strange in late Victorian England was often suffused with homoerotic undercurrents.
—Page 30/May 7, after Jonathan says "It may be that this strange night-existance is telling on me". Did not know that 'strange' was apparently a gay word in a way 'queer' (or even 'gay') was not at the time. Gives that line a kind of different possible reading... and now I kind of want to search up where else in the text that word is used.
A port city in Yorkshire, on the North Sea coast of England; in the 1890s, a vacation resort where Bram Stoker spent many summers. Whitby's eerie charm is a good setting for the ensuing action. It shares the harsh beauty of nearby Bronte country; moreover, in Victorian England its best-known product was the black stone worn as part of the mourning costume - mourning stone, or jet - a local industry now displaced by Dracula tours.
—Page 63/July 24, after the location is mentioned. Love the detail about the mourning stones.
"Not only Mr. Swales' preoccupations, but even his name, associate him with living death. The English Dialect Dictionary (1898) provides a revealing North Yorkshire definition of the verb "swale": "to consume or waste away; to melt or gutter as a candle in a draught."
—Page 66/July 24, after Mr. Swales' big speech on death. I can't believe he was actually named "Mr. Is-Dying".
Seward distributes his medical reports profigately.
—Page 105/September 2, in response to the line: "I reminded her that a doctor's confidence was sacred;" - I'm just laughing at the snarky footnote here.
This is the first and last we hear of Van Helsing's third career (he is also a physician and a professor). Characteristically, he uses his legal expertise to circumvent the law.
—Page 148/September 20, after VH says he is a lawyer. Characteristically indeed, ahaha.
Various late Victorian tonics used the advertising slogan "The Blood is the Life." Renfield might be referring to Hughe's Blood Pills or Clarke's World-Famed Blood Mixture. Both claimed to vitalize the body by purifying the blood.
—Page 207/September 30, after Renfield tells Mina that he tried to kill Seward while inspired by the Biblical phrase 'the blood is the life': "'Though, indeed, the vendor of a certain nostrum has vulgarized the truism to the very point of contempt.'" I just never really put together that this quote had been used as an advertising slogan and it's making me crack up. Imagine your mental patient attacking you and slurping your blood off the floor, then shouting "Ba-da-da-da, I'm loving it!" while being dragged away. (I know that's not the most direct comparison but it's the one that popped into my head and it's very funny.)
Again, the British characters have more difficulty communicating with each other than with the Romanian vampire.
—Page 231/October 1, after Jonathan is misled by phonetic/dialectic spelling. Even the footnotes are getting fed up with this dialect nonsense, Bram.