Guide to Dracula

Dracula Characters: Van Helsing, Mina, Jonathan Harker and Renfield

One Count against a small band of friends who write everything down

By Tori BooksUpdated November 20267 min readContains spoilers

Bram Stoker

Who's who and how they end up

Count Dracula

The Count is an old nobleman who lives alone in a crumbling castle and plans to move to London, where millions of people will never suspect him. He can command wolves and bats, crawl down walls, appear as mist and grow younger as he feeds. Part of what makes him frightening is how rarely he appears: after the opening chapters he is mostly glimpsed, a shadow on the edge of other people's diaries.

Jonathan Harker

Jonathan is the young solicitor sent to Transylvania to help the Count buy a house in England. His journal opens the novel, and it moves from travel notes about food and scenery to the slow horror of finding that the doors are locked, there are no mirrors and his host never eats. He escapes, falls ill in Budapest, marries Mina and later joins the hunt with a hard new courage.

Mina Murray, later Mina Harker

Mina is a schoolmistress who learns shorthand and typing so she can help her husband in his work, and she becomes the one who holds the whole story together. She types up everyone's diaries into a single record, spots connections the men miss and works out the Count's route home. When he attacks her and binds her to him, she turns that link into a weapon, letting Van Helsing use her trances to track him.

Lucy Westenra

Lucy is Mina's lively, much-loved friend, and in a single day she receives three marriage proposals, from Dr Seward, Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood. She accepts Arthur. On a visit to Whitby she begins to sleepwalk and grow pale, and despite blood transfusions from all four men she weakens and dies. She returns as a vampire, and the men led by Van Helsing finally lay her to rest, a scene that shows how much the hunt costs them.

Professor Abraham Van Helsing

Van Helsing is a professor from Amsterdam, Seward's old teacher, called in when no English doctor can explain Lucy's illness. He is a doctor, a lawyer and a scholar of old folklore all at once, and he is the first to say out loud what they are fighting. In the book he is an eccentric, warm older man with odd English, far from the action hero of later films.

Dr Seward, Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris

Seward runs an asylum next door to the house the Count buys, and he records his notes on a phonograph. Arthur is Lucy's fiancé and inherits his father's title of Godalming; his money and title open doors for the hunters. Quincey is a cheerful Texan with a bowie knife, the only American in the book, and he dies in the final fight, just after striking the Count. Seven years later the Harkers name their son Quincey after him.

Renfield

Renfield is Seward's most puzzling patient. He eats flies, feeds them to spiders, wants to feed the spiders to birds and believes each life he swallows gives him strength. He senses the Count's arrival and serves him as a kind of willing servant, letting him into the asylum. At the end he turns against his master to protect Mina, and the Count kills him for it.

More about Dracula

Books Like Dracula

Les Liaisons dangereusesPierre Choderlos de LaclosJane EyreCharlotte BrontëThe Castle of OtrantoHorace WalpoleThe Mysteries of UdolphoAnn RadcliffeRebeccaDaphne du MaurierHeart of DarknessJoseph ConradThe Picture of Dorian GrayOscar WildeInterview with the VampireAnne Rice

This guide discusses the whole plot, including the ending.