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Note: the following article on Vampire Capital and Social Classes in Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 127-131) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see the list on the main website.

The emergence of the Gothic – particularly the Victorian Gothic – can be traced to the development of the market. The mid-nineteenth century also coincides with one of the most important theoreticians on capital, Karl Marx, who used numerous Gothic metaphors for his references to capitalism:

Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist (342).

Additionally, there is an association between, on the one hand, ghosts and specters, and, on the other, the transcendent nature of commodities and the invisibility of wealth. The association is facilitated through the introduction of economic devices such as the stock market and the prevalence of paper money (Smith, 149–150).

Andrew Smith claims that such an element can also be found in A Christmas Carol, as Scrooge’s wealth “is both there (hoarded) and not there (not in circulation)”, with a parallel formed between the “spectrality” of money and that of ghosts (150). Scrooge becomes a prime example – if not an actual personification – of this very invisibility of wealth.

Vampire Capital as Dead Labor

Nonetheless, apart from the mere chronological coincidence, there are also deeper issues at play. Franco Moretti, in his 2005 Signs Taken for Wonders, reads Dracula and Frankenstein as two opposite poles of the capital continuum:

Frankenstein and Dracula lead parallel lives. They are two indivisible, because complementary, figures; the two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes: the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor. The worker and the capital … The literature of terror is born precisely out of the terror of a split society, and out of the desire to heal it. It is for just this reason that Dracula and Frankenstein, with rare exceptions, do not appear together. The threat would be too great. (83; emphasis in the original)

Examining class and Gothic temporality, one realizes that vampirism has provided even more allusions, with the most well-known example arguably belonging to Marx, as I explained earlier. Essentially, what Marx introduces is a temporal dichotomy between the capitalist attempting to expand the working day and labor struggling to keep it in check.

The Undead Time of Vampire Capital

Marx’s vampiric metaphor inevitably acquires temporal connotations that echo in Gothic literature as a typical characteristic of vampires, who after having done “evil work by night, finally [confront] the harsh light of day, which is so horrific that it is the cause of [their] death” (Godfrey et al., 27).

Temporal interpretations of Marx’s metaphor of vampirism do not abound, although David Punter refers to the need of Count Dracula to adapt to a changing world, thus alluding to the passage he must take from feudalism to capitalism:

To the peasantry of central Europe, it may well have seemed that the feudal lord was immortal: the actual inhabitant of the castle upon the mountain might change, but that might not even be knownIt is also worth noting that this indirect immortality applies to Scrooge as well. When the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him the parallel universe where he is dead, the old man sees that upon his death, the people that owed him money are not released by their debt, as it is simply transferred to another creditor (CC 66).. What would have been known was that there was always a lord … at the expense, of course, of peasant blood, in the literal sense of blood shed in battle and cruelty. Dracula can no longer survive on blood of this kind … [A]s the nobleman’s real powers disappear, he becomes invested with semi-supernatural abilities, exercised by night rather than in the broad day of legendary feudal conflict. (258; emphasis in the original)

Although such an argument is valid, in the process introducing another day-night dichotomy, I would argue that in Dracula, the eponymous Count expresses a temporality much more complex than a simple transition from feudalism to capitalism.

The Modernity of Vampire Capital

Count Dracula can be seen as an expression of the modern, as both the vampire and the dawning modern world of the fin de siècle period shared in common a heightened awareness of the eternal present; a graspable sense of the “here and now”, albeit with all the connotations of anxiety and conflicted emotions it carries.

The text offers a remarkable scene in which this is expressed in very direct terms, and which intertwines temporality with capital and economics in an exceptionally visual way. When the vampire hunters succeed in tracking down the Count, finally meeting him face to face, Jonathan manages a blow with his knife against him:

The blow was a powerful one; only the diabolical quickness of the Count’s leap back saved him. A second less and the trenchant had shorn through his heart. As it was, the point just cut the cloth of his coat, making a wide gap whence a bundle of bank-notes and a stream of gold fell out. (D 326)

Not only does the vampire bleed money, he bleeds timeless money – both gold, an older, rather obsolete form of payment, but also banknotes, an allusion to economic modernity. Also in this, “the vampire is both an ancient figure and our perfect contemporary” (Godfrey et al., 34).

This conflicted financial essence of Dracula, with his currency being temporally ambiguous, reflects the anxieties of the period in terms of financial stability and continuity. Moretti argues that in 1897 Count Dracula alludes to the period’s capital that, “after lying ‘buried’ for twenty long years of recession”, comes back to life to continue the same, inevitable path of amassing and monopolizing (92).

Capitalism as a Living Organism

The Marxist metaphor of vampirism has also been expanded in ways that equate the corporate personality with a supernatural organism. As Ellis T. Powell argues, the financial system of the fin de siècle years had become an “organized, coherent and centralised financial force … [growing] towards increasing complexity of structure and enhanced capacity of self-protection, self-adaptation, and self-repair”, essentially using the desire for “unbroken continuity” as a tool for achieving corporate immortality (Ellis, qtd. in Houston, 124).

As Houston underlines, “the terrifying ‘Count’ named Dracula whose consumption is overdetermined may be a synecdoche for the consumption and (ac)counting that dominate the lives of the English characters” (121).

If the Gothic monster, Dracula, is obsessed with counting – as are the rest of the characters, including Renfield, who keeps track of his ingested life forms – it should come as no surprise that the association of the monstrous with the modern, as I have argued, produces “subliminal panic about and yearning for amalgamation and centralization, paralleling those same processes occurring in the economy at the end of the nineteenth century” (Houston, 126).

Houston approaches the story from a socio-economic perspective, and hence the term “amalgamation” is examined only in its financial context. As such, Houston argues that Dracula is a story of competition between two incorporated entities, the Crew of Light on the one hand, and Dracula and his vampires on the other. The undead Count becomes “an amalgamated corporation of vampires of which he is the brains” (117).

At the same time, however, he is also a temporal amalgamated corporation with links to his aristocracy and heritage: Dracula is not simply an individual, but a link to an entire history of Draculas, “a great and noble race” (D 256). The temporal aspect of class is important to emphasize, as it denotes a present that consists of an accumulated past.

In a way, Punter and Byron’s examination of the castle as a sign (259) is once again an apt description. Like the castle – and Gothic spaces, more generally – the aristocratic background of Dracula is described as a saturated accumulation of the past, which approaches a threshold in the present time, without however achieving a fully defined status.

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. London: Penguin Books, 1994. Cited as CC.
Godfrey, Richard, Jack Gavin and Campbell Jones. “Sucking, Bleeding, Breaking: On the Dialectics of Vampirism, Capital, and Time”. Culture and Organization. 10.1 (2004): 25–36.
Houston, Gail Turley. From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Marx, Karl. Capital Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.
Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms. Translated by Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller. London: Verso, 2005.
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror. London: Longman, 1980.
Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
Smith, Andrew. “Hauntings”. The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. Oxon: Routledge, 2007.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Penguin, 2003. Cited as D.