Carmilla Before Dr. Hesselius

Turn to page 434 of the December 1871 issue of a little London monthly called The Dark Blue and Carmilla begins at once, in a young woman's voice, in a castle in Styria, with no doctor and no case file in sight. That was 25 years before Dracula, and its first readers met the vampire cold.

The story as it is told

Open almost any edition of Carmilla and, before you reach the castle or the vampire, you meet a doctor. A short prologue explains that the account you are about to read was found among the papers of Dr. Martin Hesselius, a "learned" German physician of the occult, who meant to file it with an essay on the subject. The prologue's editor says he was anxious to reopen the doctor's correspondence with the woman who told the story, and found that she had died in the interval.

Then Laura begins, in a castle in Styria. Her father is English, retired from the Austrian service, and her mother, a Styrian lady, died in Laura's infancy. The schloss stands on a slight eminence in a forest, with a drawbridge never raised in her time and a moat stocked with perch and sailed over by many swans. The nearest inhabited village is about seven English miles away. Three miles to the west is a ruined village with a roofless church, where the mouldering tombs of the Karnstein family, now extinct, lie in the aisle. Laura's earliest memory is of waking in the nursery, no more than six years old, to find a solemn, very pretty face looking at her from the side of the bed: a young lady kneeling with her hands under the coverlet, who lay down beside her and drew her close, until Laura was wakened by a sensation as if two needles ran into her breast.

Years later, on a summer evening, her father tells her that General Spielsdorf's niece, the young lady who was to have visited, is dead. The General's letter speaks of a fiend who betrayed his hospitality, and of devoting his remaining days to "tracking and extinguishing a monster." While Laura and her father stand looking down over the forest in the moonlight, a carriage drawn by four horses bolts at the old bridge and comes thundering toward them. It overturns beside a lime tree and an ancient stone cross, with two wheels in the air, and a young lady is lifted from the wreck. She is Carmilla.

Most readers assume this is how the story has always arrived, and it is also widely said that Carmilla went on to shape Bram Stoker's Dracula, though that is an interpretation readers and critics often make, and we have not verified any statement by Stoker about it.

What we can confirm

The Dark Blue was a short-lived illustrated London monthly, and its volume 2 index lists "Carmilla. By Sheridan le Fanu. Illustrated by M. Fitzgerald and D. H. Friston," at pages 434, 592 and 701, which are the December 1871, January 1872 and February 1872 issues. The story concluded in the March 1872 issue, which opens volume 3, where the final installment begins "By Sheridan Le Fanu" and ends under a heading that reads "Conclusion."

The first installment, on page 434 of the December 1871 issue, gives the title, the byline and "Chapter I. An Early Fright," and then goes straight into Laura's voice: "In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss." There is no prologue on the page. A text search of the scans of all four installments turns up no mention of Dr. Hesselius. That search runs on machine-read text, so it is strong evidence rather than perfect proof, and the page images we checked by eye agree.

Later in 1872, Richard Bentley and Son published Le Fanu's collection In a Glass Darkly in three volumes, and in volume 3 Carmilla opens with a "Prologue": "Upon a paper attached to the Narrative which follows, Doctor Hesselius has written a rather elaborate note." The prologue's unnamed editor says he tried to reopen the doctor's correspondence with the woman who told the story, "a person so clever and careful," and found "she had died in the interval." With that frame in place, Laura's memoir becomes a document from a dead witness, filed among a physician's papers.

So Carmilla reached readers in two forms in 1872. Magazine readers had a first-person story by a young woman in Styria, and book readers had the same story presented as evidence from Hesselius's files. The frame belongs to the book, and it is the one most modern editions reprint.

The facts

• Vol. 2 index: "Carmilla. By Sheridan le Fanu. Illustrated by M. Fitzgerald and D. H. Friston," pp. 434, 592, 701. The Dark Blue vol. 2 contents, Internet Archive, archive.org
• Dec 1871 installment opens at p. 434 with Chapter I, "An Early Fright," and "In Styria, we..." with no prologue. The Dark Blue, Dec 1871, Internet Archive, archive.org
• Installments in Jan and Feb 1872 (Feb ends "To be continued"). archive.org ; archive.org
• Final installment and "Conclusion" in the March 1872 issue (vol. 3). archive.org
• No "Hesselius" in the machine-read text of any of the four issues. Same four items.
• Book: In a Glass Darkly, London: R. Bentley & Son, 1872, vol. 3, Carmilla with "Prologue" naming Doctor Hesselius; quotes above. University of Illinois copy, Internet Archive, archive.org

Related: Is Dracula (1931) public domain? · What enters the public domain in 2027

All sections · Monsters and Gothic Horror