Dracula practice questions and worked plans

These 60 questions were written for this guide. They are not official examination questions. Questions 1–20 concern Dracula alone; questions 21–40 require a second text; questions 41–60 add board-style single-text practice. All 60 are available to students on every course. A style label is not a claim that a task reproduces every requirement of that board. For comparison, check the permitted texts and course requirements. A supplied-extract task will also require close attention to that passage.

The linked resources offer evidence to investigate, rather than predetermined answers. Use step 2 to marshal both sides and step 5 to select the key quotations.

Prepare across the whole novel. Do not try to guess the examination questions or prepare only selected topics. The categories below organise evidence; they do not predict a paper.

The categories overlap: a question on Lucy may concern women, desire and death at once. For each category, collect four or five moments across the novel, short exact quotations with chapters and speakers, relevant context and a reading that challenges your own.

The past-paper references describe the materials collected in Chapter C’s question catalogue, with gaps and wording checks identified there. “Further areas” are prompts for broad preparation, not claims that a subject has never been examined. The 2026 Leaving Certificate wording remains subject to checking against the original paper.

Prepare flexible evidence, not predictions. Examiners vary the wording and emphasis of questions. A topic already examined may return; an apparent gap does not make a topic more likely next time.

Do not use past questions to guess the next paper or prepare only a few topics. Examiners vary their questions. These are suggestions for broad preparation, not predictions for 2027.

To test this broader coverage, try 47: secrets, 49: blood, 56: the Count and 58: London, alongside the worked essay on desire. These are Estate-written tasks for preparation, not official questions.

No subject is “due” or “overdue”. This checklist cannot establish which questions are more likely in 2027. Prepare all eight categories, and answer the exact question you are given.

Explore the evidence: related argument and passages · context and themes · quotation bank.

Explore the evidence: related argument and passages · context and themes · quotation bank.

Explore the evidence: related argument and passages · context and themes · quotation bank.

Explore the evidence: related argument and passages · context and themes · quotation bank.

Explore the evidence: related argument and passages · context and themes · quotation bank.

Explore the evidence: related argument and passages · context and themes · quotation bank.

Explore the evidence: related argument and passages · context and themes · quotation bank.

Explore the evidence: related argument and passages · context and themes · quotation bank.

For the passage, use the full novel and the chapter specified. These are Estate-written practice tasks, available to all boards; they are not official question papers.

For the passage, use the full novel and the chapter specified. These are Estate-written practice tasks, available to all boards; they are not official question papers.

For the passage, use the full novel and the chapter specified. These are Estate-written practice tasks, available to all boards; they are not official question papers.

For the passage, use the full novel and the chapter specified. These are Estate-written practice tasks, available to all boards; they are not official question papers.

For the passage, use the full novel and the chapter specified. These are Estate-written practice tasks, available to all boards; they are not official question papers.

For the passage, use the full novel and the chapter specified. These are Estate-written practice tasks, available to all boards; they are not official question papers.

Compare the ways in which the writers of your two chosen texts present menace. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. shows the preparation, selected quotations, finished comparison and separate teaching notes.

The examination guidance now has one home in Chapter C: Your course and examination. Find question formats and permitted comparisons, official papers and mark schemes, and examiner feedback there. The questions and worked plans on this page are practice resources for Chapter F.

These plans show a line of argument, with the evidence each paragraph needs. They are not model answers to be reproduced; the quotations are chosen so that students can replace them with their own.

For the letters and journals used in these plans, see the complete text of Dracula. Cite the chapter and identify who is writing.

Line of argument. The statement is right, and the word “both” is the point. Mina’s modernity is constantly put to work for conventional ends. Stoker gives her the most up-to-date skills in the novel and directs every one of them towards being useful to men, marriage and motherhood. She is the novel’s picture of acceptable modernity: the New Woman’s competence without her independence. The novel is not fully comfortable with that compromise, because when the men try to make Mina purely conventional the consequences are disastrous.

• Modern skills. Shorthand practised “very assiduously” to help Jonathan (Ch. 5); typewriting the phonograph cylinders and arranging every record in date order (Ch. 17); train timetables and the river route (Ch. 26); criminology: “Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him” (Ch. 25). Point: she is close to being the novel’s author; the book we read is her compilation (Wicke).

• Conventional purpose. The shorthand is learned to be “useful to Jonathan”; she mocks “New Women” writers (Ch. 8); Van Helsing’s praise divides her: “man’s brain... and a woman’s heart” (Ch. 18); she comforts Arthur with maternal instinct (Ch. 17). Context: the New Woman debate of the 1890s (Senf).

• The foil. Lucy’s “heresy” about three husbands (Ch. 5) and her return as the hungry “Bloofer Lady” (Ch. 16) link female desire with monstrosity. Mina’s modernity is intellectual and therefore safe; Lucy’s is sexual and therefore destroyed (Roth). Evaluate: in sexual terms Lucy is the more modern character, which is why she cannot survive.

• The cost of convention. The men decide she must be “kept out of this dreadful business” (Ch. 18–20); alone, she is attacked (Ch. 19–21); “Unclean, unclean!” (Ch. 21). Once readmitted, she turns her wound into an instrument through hypnosis (Ch. 23–26). Argument: pure conventionality nearly destroys the alliance; her modern intelligence saves it.

• Ending. Motherhood and a boy named for the men; Van Helsing’s praise of “a brave and gallant woman”; the record she made is “hardly one authentic document” (Ch. 27). Containment that only partly succeeds.

Conclusion. Mina represents Stoker’s attempt to tame the New Woman, an attempt that only partly succeeds, because the plot proves that the hunt cannot be won without her.

Line of argument. In Frankenstein the transgressor is the hero: Victor’s overreach is tragic, internal and never fully punished or contained. In Dracula transgression comes from outside, in a foreign invader who corrupts English bodies, and it is dramatised in order to be defeated. Yet the effort Dracula spends restoring order shows how fragile its boundaries feel, while Frankenstein’s refusal to restore order makes it the more radical text.

• Life and death. Victor’s “profane fingers” and “the beauty of the dream vanished”; the Count’s “Un-Dead” state and Lucy’s restoration by the stake to “sweetness and purity” (Ch. 16). Shelley locates danger in human ambition; Stoker in an external other, with the scientists as defenders.

• Knowledge. “Learn from me... how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge” against Van Helsing’s “we have sources of science” (Ch. 18) and his warning that science “wants to explain all” (Ch. 14). In Shelley the pursuit of knowledge is the transgression; in Stoker modern knowledge defends against it but must borrow from folklore and faith.

• Gender and sexuality. Harker’s “wicked, burning desire” (Ch. 3), Lucy’s “arms are hungry for you” (Ch. 16), the forced feeding of Mina (Ch. 21); against Victor’s creation of life without a woman and the Creature’s “I will be with you on your wedding-night” (Moers on the female Gothic). Stoker externalises sexual transgression onto the vampire; Shelley makes the male creator’s denial of the feminine the source of horror.

• Sympathy. The Creature narrates at the centre of Frankenstein: “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.” The Count never narrates; he is seen only through others’ documents. Form controls sympathy (Mina’s pity for “the saddest case of all”, Ch. 23, is the exception that shows the rule).

• Endings. Dracula: the Count destroyed, the scar gone, the child named; but “hardly one authentic document” and a child born of a mother who drank the Count’s blood. Frankenstein: the Creature “lost in darkness and distance”. Test Botting’s claim that Gothic transgression reaffirms the limits it crosses: it fits Dracula’s surface and not Frankenstein at all.

Conclusion. Shelley’s transgression is internal, tragic and unresolved; Stoker’s is external, punished and apparently contained. The containment is the clue.

Read a worked paragraph connecting context, language and narrative sequence.

• Answer the question’s own words. “Transgression”, “modern”, “danger”, “foreign”: define the term in your first paragraph with a moment from the text, not a dictionary.

• Quote the document, not the author. Every line of Dracula is written by a character in a particular form on a particular day. “Harker’s journal records” is accurate; “Stoker says” rarely is. Credit goes to answers that use the form of the document as evidence.

• Make context explain a detail. A general statement about Victorian fears is not enough. Identify a feature of the language or form, explain how a relevant context helps us read it, and test that interpretation against another passage. Follow the method.

• Test a critic, don’t cite one. Where interpretations are assessed (OCR’s comparative essay, CCEA AS 2), name the reading, give the passage that supports it, then the passage it cannot account for. Edexcel’s Literature prose paper does not assess critical views, though examiners reward readings grounded in the text.

• In closed-book exams, learn short quotations by chapter. Six words you can place beat a paragraph you half remember. The quotation bank is built for this.

• In comparative essays, compare throughout. Alternate texts within each paragraph around a shared idea; do not write two essays joined by “similarly”.

• Watch the ending. Weak answers stop at the Count’s death. Strong answers read the final note.

Your teacher is best placed to advise on examination technique. The suggestions below are a starting point for later practice; follow the time, task and permitted materials on your own paper.

How should I practise a timed essay? Use the time allowed on your paper, and follow the same routine each time:

Closed book (OCR, CCEA): learn 15–20 short quotations, spread across the novel. Open book with clean copies (AQA, Edexcel): you cannot annotate your copy, so learn where the key passages are, chapter by chapter.

The reports cited above, with publication details and access notes, are maintained in Source materials: studying and teaching Dracula.

Work through the seven preparation steps or return to Practising and revising.