It has no single protagonist and opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula.

Lucy Westenra's letter to her best friend, Harker's fiancée Mina Murray, describes her marriage proposals from Dr. John Seward, Quincey Morris, and Arthur Holmwood.

In a letter to American poet Walt Whitman, Bram Stoker described his own temperament as "secretive to the world", but he nonetheless led a relatively public life.

[17][18] Some of Stoker's inventions applied unrelated lore to vampires for the first time; for example, Dracula has no reflection because of a folkloric concept that mirrors show the human soul.

[20][f] Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller notes that in his childhood Stoker was exposed to supernatural tales and Irish oral history involving premature burials and staked bodies.

[29] Stoker had praised a performance of Irving as "a wonderful impression of a dead man fictitiously alive [with eyes like] cinders of glowing red from out the marble face".

[58] Other concepts from Stoker's notes include a German professor called Max Windshoeffel confronting "Count Wampyr from Styria"; one of the vampire hunters would have been slain by a werewolf.

[76] According to Clive Leatherdale in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, there is a "widely held view" that the prose is "the excised first chapter of Dracula"; he contests this, noting that the material was incorporated elsewhere in the novel.

[80] Allison Case says Seed views that Dracula's absence generates tension by offering only "tantalizing glimpses" of his activities,[84] while literary critic Franco Moretti writes that it highlights the power struggle between the vampire and his hunters.

Dracula's journey on the Demeter is captured by the captain on the logbook, then "translated by the Russian consul, transcribed by a local journalist, and finally pasted by Mina into her journal".

[92] The novel is characteristically Gothic in its depiction of the supernatural, preoccupation with the past,[93] and embodying of the racial, gendered and sexual anxieties of fin de siècle England.

[94] Count Dracula generally represents these tensions: cultural critic Jack Halberstam notes that he is masculinised and feminised;[95] Jerrold E. Hogle highlights his attraction to both Jonathan and Mina, and his appearance as racially western and eastern.

[46] The novel's complexity has permitted a flexibility of interpretation, with Anca Andriescu Garcia describing interest from scholars of psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, social class and the Gothic genre.

[107] It is said of Mrs. Radcliffe that, when writing her now almost forgotten romances, she shut herself up in absolute seclusion, and fed upon raw beef, in order to give her work the desired atmosphere of gloom, tragedy and terror.

[120] A reviewer for the San Francisco Wave called the novel a "literary failure"; they elaborated that coupling vampires with frightening imagery, such as insane asylums and "unnatural appetites", made the horror too overt, and that other works in the genre, such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, had more restraint.

[128] Critics highlight the many places in which the novel disrupts these social mores: Jonathan Harker's excitement over the prospect of being penetrated;[129] Dracula's resulting anger and jealousy;[130] and Lucy's transformation into a sexually aggressive predator who drains "vital fluid".

[134] Christopher Craft argues that the primary threat Dracula poses is that he will "seduce, penetrate, [and] drain another male",[135] and reads Harker's excitement to submit as a proxy for "an implicitly homoerotic desire".

[154] In an influential postcolonialist analysis,[155] Stephen Arata describes the novel's cultural context of mounting anxiety in Britain over the decline of the British Empire, the rise of other world powers, and a "growing domestic unease" over the morality of imperial colonisation.

[163][w] Dracula's appearance resembles some other cultural depictions of Jews, such as Fagin in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838), and Svengali of George du Maurier's Trilby (1895).

[170] Croley argues that Dracula's association with the Romani made him suspect in the eyes of Victorian England, where they were stigmatised owing to beliefs that they ate "unclean meat" and lived among animals.

[172] Scholars discuss the novel's depiction of religion in relation to late Victorian anxieties about the threat which secularism, scientific rationalism and the occult posed to Christian beliefs and morality.

Considerable debate exists over whether Dracula is an Irish novel; while it is largely set in England, Stoker was born in British-ruled Ireland and lived there for the first 30 years of his life.

[185] Ralph Ingelbien notes that "recognizably nationalist" critics like Terry Eagleton and Seamus Deane favoured readings of Dracula as "a bloodthirsty caricature of the aristocratic landlord" where the vampire represents the death of feudalism.

[186] Bruce Stewart changes the focus to the lower classes,[186] suggesting Dracula and his Romani followers more likely represented violence by Irish National Land League activists.

[191] Chris Baldick maintains this line of analysis, describing Dracula as an undead symbol of feudalism but concluding that the novel is more concerned with "sexual and religious terrors".

Scholars John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan S. Picart note that the novel and its characters have been adapted for film, television, video games and animation over 700 times, with nearly 1000 additional appearances in comic books and on the stage.

[206] Literary critic Roberto Fernández Retamar deemed Count Dracula—along with characters such as Frankenstein's monster, Mickey Mouse and Superman—to be a part of the "hegemonic Anglo-Saxon world['s] cinematic fodder".

The manuscript was believed lost,[209] but the British Library possess extracts of the novel's galley proof containing Stoker's handwritten stage directions and dialogue attribution.

[212] Very little of the film survives, and David J. Skal notes that the cover artist for the 1926 Hungarian edition of the novel was more influenced by the second adaptation of Dracula, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922).

[218] Gary Oldman's portrayal in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), directed by Francis Ford Coppola and costumed by Eiko Ishioka,[219] established a new default look for the character—a Romanian accent and long hair.