Hellbent and Hydebound

“If you wish to know an era,” wrote sci-fi seer William Gibson, “study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirror of our darkest fears, much will be revealed.”

The Victorian era had a divided personality. On the one hand, the children of Empire celebrated industry and scientific discovery; on the other, they were fixated upon the occult and madness and death. Both obsessions found expression in some of the most enduring literary nightmares ever put to paper. Give the zoetrope a spin and watch a procession of nineteenth-century horror icons lurch past: Dracula, Carmilla and the Vampyr, Dr. Frankenstein and his creation, the mysterious Dorian Grey, the hound of the Baskervilles… Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. These characters haunt us still, revealing something powerful about the fears of their age—and our own.

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In Dracula’s day, London was rife with syphilis. Both and died of it. There can’t be any doubt that knowledge of the disease informed their work. One didn’t need to meet a Transylvanian Count to experience a longing for and guilt, a century later, in the 1980s, an era of AIDS and anxiety. For as long as the carnal goes hand-in-hand with fears of bodily corruption, the Count will count.