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WEREWOLVES AND SCHOLARS
a short story entitled ‘Dracula’s Guest’, contains material even more
suggestive of Stoker’s debt to Baring-Gould. Jonathan Harker, on his
way to the count’s castle, is stranded in snow, and kept warm during
the night by a wolf — a wolf which the soldiers he meets the following
day describe as ‘“A wolf — and yet not a wolf!” … “No use trying for
him without a sacred bullet.”’ 48 The story suggests that the wolf was
Dracula himself in lupine form, testifying further to Baring-Gould’s
influence upon Stoker. Indeed, although the vampire has generally
enjoyed greater popularity than the werewolf since the publication
of Dracula, this was not always the case. Baring-Gould’s The Book
of Were-wolves was originally intended as ‘the first of a series on
Popular Superstitions, to be followed by Treatises on Marine Monsters,
as Mermaids and Sea-Serpents, Vampires, the Wild Huntsman, the
Wandering Jew, &c’ — the selection of the werewolf for the inaugural
monograph indicating that Baring-Gould considered it to be the most
potent and compelling image in this list. 49
The use of Baring-Gould’s work by such a diversity of other writers
was indicative of the fact that patterns of authorship, scholarship
and even language-use were in flux when The Book of Were-wolves
was published in 1865. Baring-Gould himself belonged to a class of
writers identified by Heyck as the ‘men of letters’ (although some
were women) that dominated the dissemination of texts ‘for sale to
the public through a market system’ between the 1830s and about
1870. 50 He was also a clergyman (and the author of the hymn ‘Onward
Christian Soldiers’) — a role that complemented his literary pursuits,
as it was characteristic of such writers to frame their material in the
context of a contemporary moral or political issue. As Heyck points
out, the ‘men of letters’ were primarily moralizers and reformers. 51
Certainly, articles about lycanthropy were frequently framed in terms
of a moral issue; the material relating to the early-modern werewolf
trials, for example, was a popular subject until about 1880, because
it presented a bloody historical scenario against which enlightened
nineteenth-century values could be extolled. 52 Similarly, a connection
between Sergeant Bertrand’s mania and his consumption of alcohol
was stressed by both Baring-Gould and Young, the latter concluding
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