For the Dead Travel Fast’: Foreign Contagion in Dracula

Abstract

Existing as a “dead man made alive” (Stoker, Notes 17), Count Dracula reflects Victorian fears of foreignness and illness spreading into the individual bodies of English citizens and the national body of English society. Lorenzo Servitje notes that cholera, in particular, was linked to the understanding of disease as enemy (34). Throughout Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the Count exists as a physical manifestation of this diseased, foreign enemy threatening the safety and civilization of England. Between 1831 and 1866, cholera epidemics in England resulted in the deaths of over a hundred thousand men, women, and children in three waves of contagion (Underwood 173), which served to emphasize and reinforce racial understandings of the disease.