#stoker forgetting jonathan was there to visit renfield

[vickyvicarious]

There's a lot of foolishness happening in today's entries... Starting right from the very beginning. Why were they planning on going over at 4am? Because that was the plan, Renfield only delayed them. They literally just talked about how much weaker Dracula is during the day. Either they're banking on him being gone hunting because they're afraid of him being there and basilisk glaring them (a la shovel day) if they go during the day, or... I don't know. It's not like even if he's gone he wouldn't know they had been by, because they're going to leave plenty of footprints in the dust. I don't understand the reasoning.

[cherubinas]

did stoker just. forget jonathan harker was there when the men went to visit renfield?

[zoophagist]

huh. i’d been wondering why people were saying renfield was being rude to jonathan in the “please release me” encounter because i’ve always read his “i can only congratulate you on having the coolest wife” remark as positive but i thought, well, sure, people can read into it differently, and surmising that renfield resents jonathan’s stronger association with dracula is clever and so i’m not against it. and different editions do/don’t include jonathan in this scene at all. and then i was reading the oct. 1 email update and was surprised to find that line missing and renfield saying nothing of jonathan’s presence at all.

now i know that jonathan doesn’t join this visit in earlier versions of the novel, so i could have understood if he was just totally absent, but no, drac daily is indeed pulling from the edition where harker joins in. so now i’m baffled by this missing line that i remember so clearly. cue me pulling out my three copies of dracula and the project gutenburg text to find which is the edition that includes it. i verify that the email wasn’t in error and i have a copy that reads just as the drac daily one does. (the other two are copies where jonathan is not in the scene.)

at this point i’m baffled. this line is so clear in my mind because of its connection to how much renfield admires mina. why isn’t it in any of my texts?

so i search the portion of the exact quote i can remember — “Mr. Harker, I can only congratulate you“ and google returns less than 60 references to this phrase, highly unusual if it is indeed a quotation from dracula, and the first result is ... embarrassingly... my own blog. what immediately follows it is even more embarrassing, though. this line does exist and i haven’t dreamed it up... but it is not from the canon dracula text. it is from Renfield: Slave of Dracula, a spin-off novel i read years ago (and largely forgot about, since i don’t use much of its version of renfield for my characterization). i’m just so deep in the renfield weeds that i have been forgetting for YEARS that this line isn’t canon, just someone’s published fanfic version of that scene. anyway if you want to know, the full of what renfield says to jonathan, it’s:

And Mr. Harker, I can only congratulate you upon having the wisdom and discrimination to find, in all the wide world, that pearl among women who is your beautiful wife.

so. that’s fun for me. all these years i’ve been worried about getting my The Book of Renfield lore mixed up with canon, meticulously delineating the boundaries in my mind of bram stoker vs tim lucas canon, only to be blindsided by the barbara hambly lore i unknowingly internalized. what a twist.j