About the book
This epistolary novel follows Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor traveling to the remote Carpathian Mountains to finalize a real estate transaction for a mysterious nobleman. As he journeys deeper into this isolated region, he encounters growing unease and local superstitions that hint at a dark, unfolding threat awaiting him at the secluded Castle Dracula.
The opening
How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them.
All needless matters have been eliminated,
so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact.
There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary,
given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.
CHAPTER I JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL
(Kept in shorthand.)
3 May.
Bistritz.—
Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning;
should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late.
Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse
which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets.
I feared to go very far from the station,
as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible.
The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East;
the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube,
which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.
We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh.
Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale.