Life & Wisdom Quote by Bram Stoker

Stoker opens Dracula not with fangs but with tourism: a prim, delighted English narrator treating Transylvania like an immersive museum exhibit. That “great delight” at something “thoroughly old-fashioned” is doing double duty. On the surface, it’s Harker’s polite curiosity, the reassuring voice of a man who thinks the world is legible if you take notes and keep your timetable. Underneath, it’s the novel’s trap snapping shut: the very appetite for “the ways of the country” becomes the weakness that lets the foreign and the archaic get close.

The phrasing “of course I wanted” is a small masterpiece of complacency. It signals entitlement disguised as open-mindedness, the Victorian professional’s assumption that other cultures exist to be observed, cataloged, and safely enjoyed. Stoker leans on that familiar travelogue tone so the reader relaxes into the genre of sensible reportage, making the later collapse into superstition and bodily horror feel like a violation of narrative contract.

Context matters: Dracula is a fin-de-siecle anxiety machine, written in an era of mass travel, imperial confidence, and creeping dread about modernity’s fragility. The “old-fashioned” isn’t just decor; it’s a flirtation with a premodern world that England imagines it has outgrown. Stoker lets Harker chase quaintness and gets to smuggle in the novel’s real theme: modern rationality isn’t defeated by ignorance, but by its own hungry certainty that the unfamiliar can be consumed without consequence.