Inside the story
Meet Renfield
R. M. Renfield is a fifty-nine-year-old patient in Dr. Seward’s asylum, known there as a man whose calm reasoning can abruptly give way to violent mania. He is physically strong and catches flies and spiders to eat, believing that each life he consumes adds to his own.
On the page
An asylum patient of about fifty-nine, sanguine and heavily built with immense physical strength, morbidly excitable. Unkempt greying hair, a fixed unsettling stare and a sudden shifting between cunning calm and violence. Institutional clothes, dishevelled. Never a genial well-dressed gentleman.
