From Dennis the Menace to Vlad the Impaler

You might call this the flip-side of our Trash, Art and the Comics post. There we talked about  gaining insights into a period through its pop culture. Today's post is about how modern audiences often miss the point older works because they don't catch the obvious.

Though largely lost on today's readers, for those picking up the book in the 1890s, the contrast between Dracula's Transylvania and modern day London was obvious and explicit.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 12, 2020

In the the 1890s, people quite rightly thought of themselves as living at the height of a period of unprecedented scientific and technological breakthroughs. (I'd argue still unprecedented, but that's a topic for another post.) The characters in Dracula are well aware of the incongruity of a vampire roaming a contemporary metropolis. They discuss it at length through the book. Their leader, Dr. Van Helsing, explicitly frames the conflict as modern science versus an ancient supernatural force. 

Needless to say, most of this subtext never makes it to the adaptations, but even for readers of the original, I suspect most are likely to miss the point because we tend to underestimate grossly the period's sophisticated awareness of how science and technology was changing their world.