1897 · Archibald Constable and Company, Westminster · first edition
Read Dracula online by date, from Harker’s 3 May diary to the last note on 6 November.
Stoker built Dracula out of documents. Diaries, letters, telegrams, a ship’s log, newspaper cuttings, each one dated. We indexed all of them, so you can read Dracula online on the calendar: open the entry for today’s date and read what Mina or Seward wrote on it. The text is free to read in full. Book clubs that want to run it as a six-month read-along can ask for a pack, quoted on request.
- Words
- about 161,000
- Reading time
- 11 h 17 min
- Chapters
- 27
- Read-along
- 3 May – 6 Nov
- Group packs
- Quoted on request
Chapter I · Jonathan Harker’s Journal
Read chapter one online: Munich to Bistritz, 3 May
Chapter I is about 6,300 words. Twenty-six minutes. Harker is still a solicitor on a business trip, worrying about paprika and train times. By the end of it he is on a coach through the Borgo Pass at midnight, and the driver is not who he seems.
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.
Source: Archibald Constable and Company, Westminster, 1897, p. 1. “Buda-Pesth” and “P. M.” as printed.
Read-by-date calendar
The dates the story moves on
The full index has every dated entry. These are the turning points, month by month, so you can see the shape before you start. Stoker never names the year. Most readers settle on 1893 because the weekdays fit it; we don’t insist.
May
Castle Dracula
June
Harker a prisoner
July–Aug
Whitby
September
Lucy
October
The hunt
November
The pass again
Reading on the calendar averages about 870 words a day, under four minutes. Some days have nothing. Early October has a lot: plan for forty minutes on 1 and 3 October.
Editor’s note on the 1897 Constable text
We set Dracula from the 1897 Constable first edition, 390 pages in yellow cloth. The 1901 abridged paperback cut about a quarter of the book and still circulates as a free file under the full title. It is not what you want. Check any copy for Seward’s long September entries; if they are short, you have the 1901.
Dates are the thing we proofed hardest. Every heading was checked against the page. A number of free files have typed “3 October” as “30 October” somewhere in the hunt, and the whole sequence then reads out of order. Ours matches the 1897 page in all 218 dated headings.
Van Helsing’s broken English is Stoker’s, not a transcription error. We left all of it alone.
Content notes
Graphic violence, the death of a child implied off the page in chapter IV, a staking scene in chapter XVI that some readers find hard, blood and sexual menace throughout, and the period’s attitudes to Eastern Europe and to women. Nothing is cut.
Correction ledger
Corrections logged against Dracula
- 2024-10-01Launch. All 218 dated headings checked against the 1897 page images. Whole text
- 2024-10-18Telegram set in small capitals as printed; we had it in ordinary type. Chapter XII
- 2024-11-05Calendar index: one Seward entry listed under 18 September moved to 17 September to match its heading. Index only, chapter X
- 2025-03-12Paragraph break restored between Quincey Morris and Arthur; they had merged into one speaker. Chapter XVIII
Running Dracula as a read-along group
Pick your start
3 May for the real-time version, or any date if you’d rather read it in six weekly meetings.
Tell us the group
Readers, format and start date, via the form below or by email.
We send a quote
By email, per group size and format. We never take payment on the site.
You get the pack
The full text with the date index, and a month-by-month sheet to pin up.
Reading Dracula by date: questions
How does reading Dracula by date work?
Every letter, diary entry, telegram and cutting in the novel carries a date from 3 May to 6 November. Our index lists them in order so you can read each one on its matching day, about six months in all.
Can I just read it straight through?
Yes. The date index is optional. Straight through, the novel takes about eleven and a quarter hours at 238 words a minute.
Does your text include Dracula’s Guest?
No. That story was published separately in 1914, after Stoker’s death. We publish the novel as Constable printed it in 1897. For a shorter ghost story, try the short stories shelf.
Group packs · quoted on request
Ask for a group-pack quote for Dracula
Tell us how many readers and when you start. We reply by email with a quote.