Students do sometimes have difficulty sorting their (Jane) Austen from their Eyre, or their George from their TS (Eliot), but a story this week has taken this kind of misunderstanding into new territory.
At a college in Suffolk a teacher reportedly failed to notice that the AQA syllabus had changed. Pupils had therefore spent weeks preparing for questions on Bram Stoker's Dracula when the set text was in fact Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
True, they are very different books. Dracula dates from 1897 at the decline of Empire. The rapid growth of cities, the influx of "foreign" and colonial influences combined with anxiety about the spread of (sexually transmitted) disease underpin many elements of the plot. Frankenstein was published in 1818 in the wake of the French Revolution and the romantic aspiration to independent creative thought. Fear of ordinary people and the censure of the imaginative thinker are two of Shelley's themes.
But the exam for which these sadly confused students were preparing was one on "post-1800 English Literature Gothic texts", so maybe, after all, their teacher did them a favour.
A quick comparison of the books shows how the one is, in many ways, a rewriting of the other. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein brilliantly adopts a fragmented narrative in which the story is delivered by different tellers wrapped round the central confession of the "creature". Dracula too is told by many narrators, each given only a partial view of events. Frankenstein starts in the Arctic, centres on Mont Blanc and ends again in the far north. Dracula too covers ground, criss-crossing the whole of Europe. In Frankenstein the man who creates the "monster" is both victim and perpetrator, as is his creature and shadow side. In Dracula we are invited to admire the ingenuity of the wicked Count as much as that of the hero Van Helsing, and the complicity of the apparent victims blurs the boundaries of responsibility and guilt.
Essentially, there could have been no Dracula had there been no Frankenstein. So I would say, take heart. If these students (and their remorseful tutor) get cracking, they can all get As because they already have the answers at hand.
But this raises a more serious issue. Of course students need to get facts right, names right, dates right – and of course, texts right. So do teachers. But literary works are not handed down fully formed as a result of some God-given inspiration. The artist lives in the world and so the work reflects this. If these students were being asked to write on the historical and cultural context of Frankenstein, as opposed to Dracula, then they would indeed have a problem. 1818 is not 1897.
But books too make up the world of the writer, and texts very often refer back, refer across, answer, question, or challenge other texts. So Dracula (for instance) is, yes, a meditation on Frankenstein – and on Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
Too often syllabuses and reading lists privilege the old idea of the inviolable text. Students need to be encouraged to read books in the light of their historical setting, but especially in comparison with their literary predecessors.
I said that students sometimes muddle their Janes. But there might be more to this than mere sloppiness. Charlotte Bronte did not admire Jane Austen. Of the ever popular Pride and Prejudice she complained: "And what did I find?… a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck." So she put her own heroine in exactly that preferred setting, and called her … "Jane" Eyre.
These poor students have certainly been forced into it rather abruptly, but they may find that they already know more than they think.