I don’t have an annotated copy of Dracula. I have three or so regular editions of various ages. When I saw this in the bookshop the other week I grabbed it. Really interesting. Especially this:
On page seven is a photo of the crime scene from Jack the Ripper’s fifth victim Mary Kelly. As my mother is a crime and true-crime aficionado, I have lived my life surrounded by books full of very adult content. Whether these have scarred me psychologically or not isn’t the point (in this post) but this particular photograph has always filled me with…fear. Repugnance. When I was flicking through the pages the first night I got the book, I only needed to lay my eyes on the grainy image and see that face – or what was left of it – for me to snap the covers together and wait for my sister to arrive the following day.
My sister always has boasted she is the one made of ‘tougher stuff’ than myself, and I quite agree. As children, even given my two and a half years seniority, she was the one who had to watch the scary parts in movies and tell me when they were over. So when she arrived for my book launch, I handed over Dracula and asked her to cover the picture so I could read it without having to worry again. And she did. Legend.
This story could end there, but the fact is I have – at last count – almost ten different books on Jack the Ripper. Although I generally dislike crime novels now, unlike my mother, I do enjoy true-crime, like her. ‘Enjoy’ is probably the wrong word, though. I find differing pathologies of people fascinating. Good. Evil. etc. These books contain crime scene pictures too, yes, although they all are corralled in the middle glossy pages, bound together in sickness and awfulness. I can easily avoid them. This example was different.
What I find most interesting about this picture, though, is why it is included in Dracula to begin with. Well it seems Bram Stoker wrote a preface in 1898, but was not published until 1901, which drew a comparison between Dracula and Jack the Ripper; how both caught the public imagination in horribly gruesome ways; how their ‘legends’ will live ever on. So it’s worth pondering then just how the serial killer’s rampage influenced – if at all – Stoker’s writing of the tale. Later in the annotations of Chapter 20, the note is made that one of Dracula’s real estate purchases to host his earth-filled coffins was right in the middle of the map of killings of the 1888 murders. Fascinating, no?
Well it’s the sort of stuff I like anyway.
