alpages. The ending of the book was changed, perhaps to leave it opened for asequel, in the manuscript the castle is destroyed but in the novel this 195 wordending is taken out:As we looked there came a terrible convultion of the earth so that weseemed to rock to and fro and fell to our knees. At the same moment, with a roarwhich seemed to shake the very heavens, the whole castle and the rock and eventhe hill on which it stood seemed to rise into the air and scatter in fragments whilea mighty cloud of black and yellow smoke volume on volume in rolling grandeurwas shot upwards with inconceivable rapidity. From where we stood it seemed asthough the one fierce volcano burst had satisfied the need of nature and that thecastle and the structure of the hill had sunk again into the void. We were soappalled with the suddenness and the grandeur that we forgot to think ofourselves.(Belford, p.268)Vampires in literature were nothing new by the time Stoker wrote Dracula;the first fictional vampire was Lord Ruthven from the book Glenarvon. This bookwas written in 1816 at the Villa Diodati, where Lord Byron asked his guests toeach write a ghost story. It was at the same time and place that Mary Shelleycreated her famous novel Frankenstein. Other well known vampire novels include;The Vampyre, The Feast of Blood, The Castle of Otranto, and The Mysteries ofUdolpho. Stoker found the name Dracula in a book he was researching entitled AnAccount of The Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. In this book there was asection on a prince of Wallachia Voivode Dracula who fought the Turks.Voivode Dracula was better known to the world as Vlad the Impaler, the cruelprince of Wallachia who ruled in the 14th century. Dracula in the Wallachianlanguage means son of the devil, or son of the dragon. Stoker scrapped his originalname for the main character who he was going to call Count Wampyr.On May 18th at 10:15am Stoker held a prepublication copyright reading ofDracu...
