True to Life Elementary Teacher's Book

Teachers are more apt to focus on shortcomings, and students more apt to linger on such amusing antiquities as Dr. Seward's phonograph diary, Quincey P. Morris's hideously overdone drawl, or the monster's lucky grab-bag of philosophic literature. It's true that none of these books approaches the great novels of the same period, and I will not argue that they do; you need only compare two books of roughly the same period- Dracula and Jude the Obscure, let's say-to make the point pretty conclusively. But no novel survives solely on the strength of an idea-nor on its diction or execution, as so many writers and critics of modern literature seem sincerely to believe . . . these salesmen and saleswomen of beautiful cars with no motors. While Dracula is no Jude, Stoker's novel of the Count continues to reverberate in the mind long after the more ghoulish and clamorous Varney the Vampyre has grown silent; the same is true of Mary Shelley's handling of the Thing Without a Name and Robert Louis Stevenson's handling of the Werewolf myth ...»