This copy of a letter written to William Gladstone by Bram Stoker on 24 May 1897 was published in Revue roumaine d’histoire 31 (1992): 175-78. It was reprinted in the Journal of Dracula Studies 1 (1999): 48. The original letter is located at the British Library (Mss. 44525, 221-22).

My dear Gladstone,

May I do myself the pleasure of sending you a copy of my new novel Dracula which comes out on 26th. Perhaps at your leisure you may honour me by reading it. It is a story of a vampire—the old mediaeval vampire but recrudescent today. It has I think pretty well all the vampire legend as to limitations and these may in some way interest you who have made as bold a guess at “immortaliability”. The book is necessarily full of horrors and terrors but I trust that these are calculated to “cleanse the mind by pity & terror.” At any rate there is nothing base in the book and though superstition is brought in with the weapons of superstition I hope it is not irreverent. You will I know pardon my adding to the labour of your life by even the reading of one more letter. My regard for you and your work through all my thinking life has been such that I deem it a high privilege to be able to address you in the first person and to be able to put before you a book of my own, though it be only an atom in the intellectual kingdom where you have as long held sway.

Believe me.

Your very sincere and respectful friend,

Bram Stoker