Why Bram Stoker’s 'Dracula' Almost Had a Very Different Name

In May 1897, London booksellers got their first copies of a yellow-covered novel by Bram Stoker, the business manager of the actor Henry Irving, and the title on the front was Dracula. For most of the seven years Stoker spent on it, the book had been called something else. Mental Floss has noted before that the book was nearly The Un-Dead, and the documents Stoker left behind show just how close it came.The Count Came FirstFrederic Lewis/GettyImagesThe vampire got his name before the book did. Stoker’s working notes, now at the Rosenbach in Philadelphia, originally call the villain “Count Wampyr.” In the summer of 1890, Stoker borrowed William Wilkinson’s survey of Wallachia and Moldavia from the library in Whitby and copied out a footnote about the word “Dracula,” and at some point he went back through his notes and crossed out “Wampyr” in favor of the new name. Mental Floss has the full Whitby story.The book’s title held out much longer. The Un-Dead appears in Stoker’s own handwriting in those notes, and it’s the handwritten title on his 529-page typescript, a heavily marked-up working copy that turned up in the United States around 1980. A collector who bought it in 1984 put it up at Christie’s in New York in April 2002, where it was expected to bring about £1 million and failed to meet its reserve.The Paper Trail Gets Weird in May 1897Book: Darcula Bram Stoker Archive | Bill Tompkins/GettyImagesThe oddest document in the pile is Stoker’s publishing contract with Archibald Constable and Company. Stoker drafted it himself, and the final version is dated May 20, 1897, with his initials on pages dated as late as May 25. Its opening clause still describes him as the author of a work called The Un-Dead.By then, though, his publisher was already selling Dracula. According to newspaper research by the scholar John Edgar Browning, Constable advertised the book under that name in The Athenaeum on May 8, 1897, and began running front-page ads in the Booksellers’ Review on May 13. So the title changed at least 12 days before Stoker signed a contract that didn’t mention it, for a first edition of 3,000 copies at six shillings apiece.Stoker hedged on the stage. On May 18, eight days before the novel’s scheduled release, he staged a rushed reading of his own adaptation at the Lyceum Theatre to protect the dramatic rights, and he billed it as Dracula: or The Un-Dead. Mental Floss has the story of that performance, which drew almost no audience.Who Made the Call?Portrait of Bram Stoker Seated | Bettmann/GettyImagesThat’s the part nobody can answer. Some accounts say an editor changed it, but a 2012 study that lined up the contract, the typescript, and the ads concluded there is no way to tell exactly when the title changed, or whether Stoker was the one who changed it.The old title didn’t go anywhere, either. The word “Un-Dead” turns up more than 30 times in the finished novel, and in 2009, Stoker’s great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker and the Dracula historian Ian Holt published a sequel and called it Dracula: The Un-Dead.Read More: