At every station there were groups of people, sometimes crowds, and in all sorts of attire. Some of them were just like peasants at home or those I saw coming though France and Germany, with short jackets, and round hats, and home-made trousers; but others were very picturesque.
Dracula, chapter 1
The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were very clumsy about the waist. they had all full white sleeves of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of course there were petticoats under them.
The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who were more barbarian than the rest, with their big cow-boy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into the m, and had long black hair and heavy black moustaches. They are very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing. On the stage they would be set down at once as some old Oriental band of brigands. They are, however, I am told, very harmless and rather wanting in natural self-assertion.
Though this quote is close to the beginning, it gives me a very clear picture of the people around Jonathan Harker and his opinion of them. The way he describes them is very straight-forward, but focus in on specific details rather than describe the whole picture. This sort of description seems to be something a bit consistent among the Victorian novels that we’ve read thus far: a vague-but-specific description of things, guiding the reader to focus on certain things and letting the readers make the rest up for themselves.
It’s interesting to me, the things that he chooses to focus on. Rather than on the people and how they appear and act, he focuses on the things they choose to wear or style aesthetically. I would have gone about it differently, had I been the writer, as I tend to describe the innate features of a person.
If given the opportunity, how would you have described the groups of people he’s surrounded by?
