i've been thinking a lot about jonathan's pre-written june letters, & started wondering about travel times. if jonathan writes in a letter dated june 19th that he's setting out the next day, how long would hawkins expect it to take for him to show up back in london? it seemed from the earliest journal entries that the trip there probably took less than a week, i assume you wouldn't expect the trip back to take much longer. even when the follow-up letter dated june 29th implies that he's somehow been delayed in bistritz for quite some time, surely him not materializing by the end of the first week of july is cause for concern? mina receives the june 19th letter, forwarded by hawkins, on july 26th, surely by this point jonathan is absolutely ages overdue already, even taking into account the follow-up letter & the possibility of unexpected delays. surely the train fiend knows this! is she just not writing it down for "cannot engage with the horrors" reasons? or am i totally off the mark about how long this journey would be expected to take?
feel free not to answer this ask until mina gets the june 19th letter btw i know we're trying to avoid spoiling first-timers. i just wanted to send it while it was on my mind.
I am bad at tracking the dates, but so far as I can see, you’re absolutely right. It is weird. A letter could make it from Budapest to London in two days in the 1890s, and from Bucharest to London in two and a half.
True, people travel more slowly overland than letters, then and now - there was a fun episode of Top Gear once where they raced a first class letter from the Isles of Scilly to Orkney in a sports car, and the letter won. And there’s the less well-connected bit through Transylvania to contend with.
But even if Jonathan’s journey has been beset by every conceivable delay, if he has sent a letter on the 19th of June saying he’s leaving Castle Dracula and updated from Bistritz on the 29th, he should be home before the 26th of July. And if something has gone wrong, in most conceivable circumstances he should have written or telegraphed or something on the way. And Mina would know that.
So why does she not seem more worried about him? I think the most logical explanation is the one that you suggest - she doesn’t want to engage with the horrors.
She admits it a little. She says in today’s entry, “I am anxious” and “I am unhappy about Jonathan” and his letter “makes me uneasy”. That all seems pretty mild, but we’ve already seen how much Jonathan downplays his emotions in his writing, and it seems possible that Mina does the same. (How much of this is their individual characters, and how much is just that Victorians were Like That, I’m not sure).
Maybe if she were to be entirely honest, she would write “I am scared shitless that my fiancé is dead”, but she doesn’t do that because a) she’s a proper Victorian lady, b) she doesn’t want to admit it to herself and c) the word “shitless” isn’t attested before 1936 anyway. So she’s putting a brave face on her considerable fears.
(There’s the separate question of what the hell Mr Hawkins is doing at this point. He should be worried as well, though I think it would be entirely in keeping with typical Victorian male treatment of women not to share those concerns with Mina. Maybe there’s a whole additional novel happening in parallel where he’s playing @wheresjonno from his offices in Exeter, trying desperately to track down his lost clerk.)
