Urban Gothic is a sub-genre of Gothic fiction, film horror, and television dealing with industrial and post-industrial urban society. It was pioneered in the mid-19th century in Britain, Ireland, and the United States, before being developed in British novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Irish novels such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). In the twentieth century, urban Gothic influenced the creation of the sub-genres of Southern Gothic and suburban Gothic. From the 1980s, interest in the urban Gothic was revived with books like Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and a number of graphic novels that drew on dark city landscapes, leading to adaptations in film including Batman (1989), The Crow (1994) and From Hell (2001), as well as influencing films like Seven (1995).
Poster for an 1880s dramatization of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
An illustration from Charles Dickens' Bleak House of Tom All Alones, the urban slum credited as a major influence on the development of the genre
A dark alley in the French Quarter of New Orleans at night, part of the distinctive architecture that made it the centre of Gothic novels by authors including Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite
Dracula is a novel by Bram Stoker, published in 1897. An epistolary novel, the narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist and opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. A small group, led by Abraham Van Helsing, investigate, hunt and kill Dracula.
Cover of the first edition
Vlad III, more commonly known as Vlad the Impaler
Stoker's handwritten notes about the novel's characters
1899 first American edition, Doubleday & McClure, New York
