Count Dracula and the Martians

Abstract

In 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds was serialised in Pearson’s Magazine. This coincidence would be of little interest were it not that the two books, superficially so different, in fact share a number of common properties. In both, England is infiltrated by alien creatures of more-than-human power, and familiar locations (North Surrey in Wells’s novel; Whitby in Stoker’s) become the settings for nightmare events. In both books the alien creatures, for all of their astonishing accomplishments, are vulnerable to quite commonplace deterrents: the Martians succumb to ‘our microscopic allies’ the bacteria (WW, 80); Dracula cannot function in the presence of garlic, and a branch of wild rose placed on his coffin will imprison him inside it; as Dr. Van Helsing remarks, ‘he who is not of nature has yet to obey some of nature’s laws’ (D, 287). Both in Wells’s novel and in Stoker’s, the alien species is possessed of an insatiable thirst. Vampires, by definition, are blood-drinkers; but so, according to Wells, are Martians:

‘They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins … [B]lood obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal … ’ (WW, 133)