Apart from all its other virtues, enthusiastically extolled at the Bram Stoker International Summer School last week, Dracula is remarkable for the fact that Stoker and, by extension, many of his characters, were astute observers of the weather, recording as they did every meteorological detail in their diaries, letters, and even on a phonograph.
The story opens, for example, with Jonathan Harker on his way to see the Count, and he duly puts on record the weather of a sultry Transylvanian May: "There were dark, rolling clouds overhead, and in the air the heavy oppressive sense of thun der. It seemed as if the mountain range had separated two atmospheres, and that now we had gone into a thunderous one."
As Harker approaches Castle Dracula, "it grew colder and colder still, and fine, powdery snow began to fall, so that soon we and all around us were covered in a white blanket." Perhaps the best weather sequence of the tale occurs around this time of year, in the second week in August in a year unspecified.
The storm conjured up by Dracula to facilitate his arrival in the Yorkshire port of Whitby is preceded by an appropriately lurid sunset.
"Then, without warning, the tempest broke with a rapidity which seemed incredible. Masses of sea fog came drifting inland - white, wet clouds which swept by in ghostly fashion, so dank and damp and cold that it needed but little effort of the imagination to think that the spirits of those lost at sea were touching their living brethren with the clammy hands of death."
Back in Transylvania the following November it was colder but equally unpleasant: "The wind now came in fierce bursts, and the snow was driven in fury as it swept in circling eddies. At times we could not see an arm's length before us; but at others as the hollow sounding wind swept by us, it seemed to clear the air space so that we could see afar off."
Transylvanian snowstorms, it seems, have a tendency to end abruptly and, less than an hour later, conditions improved dramatically: "The sun was now right down upon the mountaintop, and the red gleams," records Mina Harker, "fell upon my face so that it was bathed in a rosy light."
The improvement reflects the happy circumstance that in the meantime the eponymous villain has been stabbed through the heart, had his head cut off, and, as Mina graphically puts it, "before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight".