Burial of the Rats pg 27
Added 2017-01-11 23:09:40 +0000 UTCSo thankfully we lose the butcher's axe at this point. It was a great graphic symbol of the grisly danger our hero is in, but seriously, if it stayed in the story any longer it would grow to be too large for any of the eldsters to wield. A butcher's axe is less than a meter in length, a pole axe is up to (and sometimes over) two.
So by this point in the story I am just amused by the inconsistencies. The publish date of "Burial..." is 1914, two years after Stoker's death. After the last post I dug a little deeper and found that it was first published in two parts in the UK in the January 26, 1896 and February 2, 1896 issues of Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, London. So it actually predates Dracula by only a year.
This makes some sense. The dramatic difference in tone of the two halves can be explained better by this serialization, and artistic license could explain inconsistencies like the size of the axe. Periodicals were probably taken a bit less seriously than novels, so he may have figured no one would notice, or care much.
Speaking of which, discovering that the story was written maybe half a dozen years previous to when I had assumed it was set changes a few things. The Edwardian era (which I have set it in) did not begin until 1901, so some of the fashions may have been different, and the age of the inhabitants of the City of Dust may be a handful of wrinkles less... fortunately, the Eiffel Tower was built in 1887-1889, so I don't need to remove it.
But eh, I can leave it as Edwardian, n'est pas?
