Abstract
“The Judge's House,” one of Dracula author Bram Stoker's best-known works of short fiction, is a horror tale in which Malcolm Malcolmson, a young college student, rents a haunted house to study for his mathematical tripos exams. He finds himself unable to combat the spirit of a dead, malevolent judge, embodied in the form of a rat. Stoker uses this story as a way of dramatizing the inefficacy of pure reason—symbolized in Malcolmson's mathematical studies—as a foundation for epistemology. Instead, the Christian faith—represented by Malcolmson's ancestral Bible—provides him the resources to ward off a distinctly supernatural evil, though he tragically fails to avail himself of this resource.
The 19th century in England saw the emergence and further development of several significant threats to the epistemological structures of the previous centuries, centuries that had been heavily informed by Protestant and Roman Catholic Christianity. These threats are of course well documented by now. Continental biblical criticism began to erode trust in the belief that the Bible was an inspired communication from God to humanity, while discoveries in the natural world appeared to undermine faith in a God who created and beneficently ordered the world. For many, the belief in the reliability of divine revelation through Scripture or tradition became an untenable proposition, while advances in pure and applied science might have been taken to suggest the ascendancy of humanity's rational capacities. For some, these changes led to the characteristic Victorian crisis of faith, but whether or not they chose to abandon religious belief, thoughtful or literate individuals in the 19th century could hardly escape grappling with the questions that these developments raised.
Bram Stoker, whose life straddled the second half of that tumultuous century, lived through these epistemological crises as they were debated in British society, and his works often address or allude to them. Naturally, his most obvious participation in the major debates of Victorian life comes in Dracula, which has endured so thoroughly in part because it interacts with virtually every hot-button topic of the fin de siècle. Over the past decades, increasing attention has also been paid to his other novels, such as The Snake's Pass, The Mystery of the Sea, The Jewel of Seven Stars, The Man, Lady Athlyne, The Lady of the Shroud, and The Lair of the White Worm. This attention is well deserved, for Stoker is a far more complex literary artist than he has often been given credit for, and many of the themes that animate Dracula can be found in his other novels. But there is plenty of room left for exploration of Stoker's corpus; he was a busy writer whose work spans multiple genres. To date, his short fiction has received only slight attention, including one of his most well-regarded short horror stories, “The Judge's House.” First published in 1891 (Murray 152) and later collected posthumously, 1 “The Judge's House” tells the story of Malcolm Malcolmson, a confident young university student preparing for his upcoming exams. Against the warnings of superstitious locals, he rents out an old house in the quiet town of Benchurch, a house they claim is haunted by the spirit of an old hanging judge. Malcolmson shrugs off their objections but soon finds his studies interrupted by an infestation of rats, including a large specimen who seems to be taking on the old judge's persona. Unable to ward this opponent off, Malcolmson realizes too late that he is in the presence of the diabolical judge, and he is found the next day hanging from a noose in the house. The story is an effectively creepy supernatural tale and could probably endure from the strength of its moody atmospherics alone. But on another level, “The Judge's House” also functions as a critique of purely rationalistic epistemology, offering traditional religious belief as a more foundational basis for understanding.
Unlike many of Stoker's other longer works, “The Judge's House” tackles Victorian epistemological questions in a manner that is seemingly abstract and yet surprisingly relevant to the time of its writing. In Dracula, the Crew of Light use science—or Stoker's version of it—to struggle against a foe who cannot be fully understood by science. The same could be said of the heroes in The Lair of the White Worm, with their battle against the hyperbolically degenerate Arabella March. But in “The Judge's House,” Stoker uses not science but pure mathematics as the symbolic representation of rationalism. Yet the field of mathematics in the Victorian period was itself a contested epistemological battlefield, one that Stoker was clearly aware of when he first wrote the story.
Malcolm Malcolmson, the story's protagonist, announces that he “is reading for the Mathematical Tripos” (Stoker, Dracula's 20). This immediately marks him as a student at Cambridge, which in the 19th century was renowned for its mathematical tripos exams, objects of love or hate, fame or infamy, and all-around controversy. Among the educational institutions of the United Kingdom at the time, as Tony Crilly has observed, Cambridge was known as “the ‘holy city of mathematics’” (18): Mathematics at Cambridge was regarded as the basis for a “liberal education.” It was a sort of pre-knowledge and it was held to be important to teach it to the young. … The knowledge of mathematics was not claimed to be useful in itself (except for those destined to become tutors or schoolteachers), but it was believed that the study of mathematics would develop and strengthen the faculties of the mind, and after the completion of this study one could go on to other fields and be more effective in them. In short, mathematics gave the “art of acquiring all arts,” and like physical games that prepared the body, mathematics toned the intellectual muscle. (19, italics original)
But as the 19th century progressed, the mathematical tripos took on a life of its own. The test questions were rigid and complex, requiring prolonged study and often intensive tutoring. But the rewards for success were considerable. Each individual who took the examination in a given year was ranked after the mathematical triposes were scored; those ranks were broken down in three broad categories: wranglers at the top, followed by senior optimes, and finally junior optimes. The highest scorer, known as the senior wrangler, ensured a name for himself in the annals of Cambridge history. Indeed, Crilly observes that “[t]he senior wrangler was an early example of a ‘celebrity’ and became someone believed to have superior powers quite beyond the competence tested in the mathematical examination” (21). The Cambridge examination system underwent many permutations in the 19th century, and by the time Stoker wrote “The Judge's House,” the format for the mathematical tripos had altered somewhat. But, a full overhaul of the old system did not occur until the early 1900s, and the examination's order of merit was still widely followed. In fact, in 1890, the year prior to the writing of “The Judge's House,” the mathematical tripos became quite the subject of conversation when Philippa Fawcett of the all-female Newnham College scored higher than the senior wrangler, a title she herself could not receive because of her sex.
Despite the ongoing popularity of Cambridge's mathematical tripos in the 1890s, change was certainly in the air. Nor was this system the only mathematical controversy of the late 19th century. An even more contentious and foundational debate was occurring in the realm of geometry at the time. To early Victorians, geometry was the perfect intellectual starting point, because it marked the intersection of the clean rationality of abstract mathematics with real-world application. As Joan Richards points out, for most British mathematicians in the mid-1800s, [t]he unique identifying mark of geometrical truth was that it was at once subjective and objective. To use Herschel's phrase, geometrical truths were embedded in objective space “as the statue in the marble.” At the same time, they were subjectively solid; once learned, they were known absolutely and with complete conceptual clarity. It was this conceptual clarity which set geometrical truths off from those known in less perfect sciences. It was the mark of geometry's special truth status, and throughout the century, new geometrical ideas were scrupulously examined under its blinding light. (51–52) was considered worth learning for the sake of its logic, at least as much for the sake of its geometry. Thanks to its formal structure, where theorems were proved only by deduction from what has already been proved or assumed, Euclid's system was studied as an instrument for training the mind in correct reasoning. (323)
However, not even the seemingly secure sanctum of Euclidean geometry was safe as the century wore on. Beginning on the continent and later filtering into England and Ireland, mathematicians started to question Euclid's unrivalled status. They began to create non-Euclidean geometrical systems: internally coherent mathematical structures that did not necessarily correspond to real-world application. Because of how heavily British educators had relied on Euclid's Elements for their perception of a rationally ordered world, the new geometries that began to filter in starting in the 1860s represented a genuine epistemological threat. According to Richards, “Non-Euclidean geometry derived its interest and impact from its foundational implications. It raised fundamental questions for long-standing interpretations of the nature of geometrical study” (11). Richards notes that these alternate geometries created a ripple effect into other avenues of knowledge, most noticeably (and troublingly) religious epistemology: Within the particular configuration of knowledge the nineteenth-century English had constructed, mathematical truth was central to theology. The transcendental truth mathematics was believed to describe had long stood as the exemplar of the perfect truth to which human intellect aspired. This was a particularly central issue in theology, where it was often argued that knowledge of the divine partook of the same transcendental necessity as knowledge of mathematics. In this tradition, knowledge of God was defended by being equated with the unquestioned status of geometrical truth. (104)
Of course, assaults on the reliability or universality of Euclid were not the only broadsides launched against Victorian religious epistemology. Richards astutely indicates that the union of Christianity and geometry was one “particular configuration of knowledge.” For most Christians of the 19th century, including many at the universities, the Bible represented a source of epistemology at least as foundational as rational mathematics, if not more so. But the Bible's application to reality was just as intensely interrogated as Euclidean geometry's was. The century's increasing intellectual critiques on the textual and factual soundness of holy writ are by now well established. Discoveries in geology and paleontology called into question the received interpretive chronology of Genesis's creation account, while writings in development theory, transmutation, and evolution culminated in Darwin's theory of natural selection, causing doubts regarding the divinely ordered structure of nature. Meanwhile, the importing of biblical higher criticism from the continent and the publication of works like Essays and Reviews, Colenso's Pentateuch treatises, and later Lux Mundi led to increasing skepticism regarding the historical accuracy and textual integrity of the biblical records. This constellation of doubts helped bring forth the crises of faith characteristic of so many Victorian writers and thinkers. The 19th century was an unsettling time for one trying to develop a stable epistemological base, since so many options were being discarded or introduced.
Born in 1847, Bram Stoker himself lived through some of the decades most heavily affected by these developments, both in the mathematical realm and in the biblical realm. It is not as surprising as one might think that references to mathematical examinations play a key role in many of his works. Stoker did not attend Cambridge, but in Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, he famously declares that he “had got Honours in pure Mathematics” while at Trinity College Dublin (1:32). William Hughes (5) and Paul Murray (33, 279 n. 7) have both established that Stoker's reminiscences here do not correspond with the record—he graduated with a Bachelor's, but not with Honours. Whatever Stoker's pretensions, however, his mathematical background may help explain his interest in a protagonist preparing for the mathematical tripos. England, though renowned for its mathematical rigor, was not nearly as innovative in the field as many continental countries, and Ireland lagged behind England. Still, as Raymond Flood has observed, Stoker's alma mater of Trinity College Dublin (TCD) was the spot in Ireland “where the situation for mathematics was most fruitful” (106). According to TCD historians R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, in the 1860s, when Stoker attended the school, “[m]athematics … though ousted from its complete predominance at Fellowship, still remained a subject of primary importance, and of the fourteen men elected to Fellowship between 1860 and 1880, nine had graduated in mathematics” (273).
Stoker had personal connections with at least one of those elected, George Fitzgerald, who is mentioned or alluded to at various points in his journal (Miller and Stoker 142, 273) and whose brother William would go on to illustrate Stoker's children's collection Under the Sunset. Another major figure of Irish mathematics was George Salmon, who moved from mathematics to divinity while Stoker was a student (McDowell and Webb 273) but was still widely known in his former vocation at the time. Whatever the specifics of his course of study, Stoker had ample opportunity during his attendance at TCD to study from and alongside some individuals whose understanding of mathematics was not insignificant. And his own ability to crunch numbers was likewise substantial, as evidenced by his unreservedly tedious first book, Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland. Remarking on that text, David Glover maintains, “In an ambitious attempt to rationalize the mass of ‘facts and theories resulting from the operations of the last twenty-seven years,’ Stoker itemized the formal requirements in preparing evidence for use in court proceedings” (62).
Stoker's background likewise gave him a thorough grounding in the study of the Bible. Timothy Larsen has chronicled “the remarkable extent to which the Bible was a dominant presence in Victorian thought and culture” (1), and growing up an Irish Protestant, Stoker was certainly exposed to Scripture and theology from a young age. Murray points to Stoker's “intensely religious upbringing” (28), including a heavily marked childhood Bible (27). Nor did such potential influences cease when he left home: TCD of the 1860s would have assumed the importance of theological training in its students, whether or not the students themselves displayed interest. Chapel and catechetical lectures were required to an extent, even for off-campus students like Stoker (McDowell and Webb 129, 383–87). Stoker's journals show that he was familiar with Archdeacon William Lee (Miller and Stoker 281), a lecturer in theology who was George “Salmon's principal lieutenant” (McDowell and Webb 246) when the latter turned to divinity. Lee was a high churchman who in 1857 had published The Inspiration of Scripture: Its Nature and Proof to uphold the orthodox Anglican position on inspiration. Meanwhile, Stoker's friend and future illustrator William Fitzgerald would go on from Trinity to become a clergyman.
Like at least some TCD students at the time, Stoker had a reputation for being irreverent. His journal observations from this period often offer acerbic commentary on the religious life at the college. One anonymous poem—presumably by a fellow classmate 2 —asserts that jokes are the object of Stoker's true worship and that he “leaves creeds to his sisters and their nurse” (Miller and Stoker 295). He was also known to champion causes some might consider morally suspect, most notably his call for the publication of Walt Whitman's controversial poetry. Yet whatever his reputation, Stoker clearly availed himself of ample opportunities to study Scripture. His journal reveals that throughout his Dublin life, he worked through several different biblically based poems (Miller and Stoker 15–16, 30–33, 40–41, 43–45); these included a version of the poem that would become “The One Thing Needful” (40–41), a verse adaptation of Luke 10:38–42 that would be reprinted in several venues throughout his lifetime. And well beyond his college years, Stoker's works demonstrate both a substantial background knowledge of the Bible and a willingness to cite and appeal to it as authoritative.
Indeed, one of Stoker's favorite tropes is to pit the limitations of purely rational epistemology—usually exemplified in abstract science or mathematics—against supernatural forces that are unaccountable within those frameworks. This juxtaposition appears early in Stoker's writing career with his collection of children's stories, Under the Sunset (1882). The story “How 7 Went Mad” plays with words and numbers in a way evocative of Lewis Carroll's work, suggesting an unease with rote, raw mathematics. On the other hand, the work is heavily layered with biblical allusions or references, including a creation account that roughly accords with Genesis (‘Under the Sunset’), a David and Goliath tale (‘The Rose Prince’), and an eschatological peaceable kingdom (‘The Wondrous Child’). Indeed, Hughes notes that while the work does not operate “in the privileged space of theological debate,” it nonetheless clearly “advances a simplified version of Christian doctrine” that is “more attractive to the child reader” (35). The book's qualms at mathematical rationalism in “How 7 Went Mad” are thus subsumed within the multiple narratives undergirded by biblical imagery and theology. The same is certainly true of Dracula, in which the seemingly pure science of John Seward is ill equipped by itself to cope with the supernatural danger represented by the Count. Van Helsing scolds Seward for being “too prejudiced” in this regard, lamenting that “it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain” (204). While particular interpretations vary regarding the relationship between faith and reason in the novel, 3 most critics can at least affirm Christopher Herbert's assertion that Dracula is “very likely the most religiously saturated popular novel of its time” (101). Indeed, Noelle Bowles has persuasively indicated the extent to which the vampire hunters' success is tied to the genuine efficacy of religious ceremony, specifically high-church ritualism. Eleven years after Dracula was published, in his article “The Censorship of Fiction,” Stoker would actually appeal to the Bible as the model for how fiction writing ought to operate, citing several examples of Christ's parables as exemplary (426–27).
“The Judge's House” falls squarely in this line of fictions in which the Bible's efficacy is juxtaposed against a rationalism that, in its most concentrated state, is inadequate to explain the mysteries of the supernatural world. Stoker wastes no time in establishing the parameters of his story, beginning with the opening line, “When the time for his examination drew near Malcolm Malcolmson made up his mind to go somewhere to read by himself” (18). The protagonist's name is immediately striking, the repetition within it suggesting circular reasoning. Etymologically, the name “Malcolm” refers to a follower of Saint Columba. Using the standard Latinate prefix “mal-” to mean “bad,” however, one could easily derive a meaning akin to “bad calm.” This would be appropriate to the portrayal of Malcolmson in “The Judge's House,” as he adopts a nonchalance early in the story that will prove to have dire repercussions for him later. When the local innkeeper warns him away from the haunted house, he assures her, But my dear Mrs. Witham, indeed you need not be concerned about me! A man who is reading for the Mathematical Tripos has too much to think of to be disturbed by any of these mysterious “somethings,” and his work is of too exact and prosaic a kind to allow of his having any corner in his mind for mysteries of any kind. (20)
As Antonio Ballestros González has observed (20), dismissing Mrs. Witham's concerns sets Malcolmson against the faith community embodied by the inhabitants of the local town, which is appropriately named Benchurch.
4
Mrs. Witham is the landlady of the local inn called “The Good Traveller,” which Malcolmson explicitly rejects. Her name, perhaps a play on “with him,” subtly connotes community, and it is an early mark of the young student's folly that he seeks to escape such community: He feared the attractions of the seaside, and also he feared completely rural isolation, for of old he knew its charms, and so he determined to find some unpretentious little town where there would be nothing to distract him. He refrained from asking suggestions from any of his friends, for he argued that each would recommend some place of which he had knowledge, and where he had already acquaintances. As Malcolmson wished to avoid friends he had no wish to encumber himself with the attention of friends' friends, and so he determined to look out for a place for himself. (18) It's too bad of me, sir, and you—and a young gentleman, too—if you will pardon me saying it, going to live there all alone. If you were my boy—and you'll excuse me for saying it—you wouldn't sleep there a night, not if I had to go there myself and pull the big alarm bell that's on the roof. (20)
Of course, Malcolmson, while appreciating her concern, scoffs at her misgivings, chuckling that “Harmonical Progression, Permutations and Combinations, and Elliptic Functions have sufficient mysteries for me!” (20). As Kate Hebblethwaite observes, this “listing of such mathematical terminology, continued in later pages of the story, highlights the battle between rational logic and the supernatural threat of the Judge” (382). The terminology is the complex language of the abstract mathematics that were still being tested at Cambridge's mathematical tripos but that were increasingly regarded as irrelevant to most, especially once the seemingly sure foundations of Euclidean geometry were called into question. It is perhaps not coincidental that Malcolmson speaks of his mathematical studies as “mysteries,” given that the Latin term for “mystery” is sacramentum; his equations and texts represent the sacraments of his rationalistic belief system. Stoker ensures that Malcolmson repeatedly demonstrates a grating level of condescension and hubris, so that the reader is signaled early on that his demise might be imminent if his attitudes persist.
Thus, when supernatural evil begins to emerge in the story, Malcolmson remains unprepared to face it. The very real human evil of the judge is established from the outset when Mrs. Witham narrates the dead man's history, which is likely based on the notorious historical figure of George Jeffreys (Hebblethwaite 382). Malcolmson's easy dismissal of any menace remaining in the judge's old house is of course predicated first on his denial of the supernatural. It may, however, also connote a more broadly progressive attitude toward history, consigning such evil acts to a less enlightened past. Malcolmson's genial, almost flippant, attitude certainly suggests someone little schooled in the darker realms of human existence. But for Stoker, who believed that “[i]t is as natural for man to sin as to live” (“Censorship” 423), this unwillingness to acknowledge the persistence of human evil leaves the protagonist defenseless, first at the hands of profit-minded town residents and eventually in his encounter with the judge's spirit.
It is unsurprising that the first manifestations of evil at the house come in the form of rats. Stoker was never shy about employing the folkloric associations of rats with the plague and dark tidings. In Dracula, rats are among “the meaner things” (252) that the Count is able to control, climaxing in the appearance of “thousands” of rats in Dracula's lair (269). They are also harbingers of ill tidings in Stoker's short story “The Burial of the Rats.” In all these texts, Stoker adopts the term “baleful” to describe his rats, a term that occurs seven times in “The Judge's House,” always applied either to the rats themselves or to the figure of the judge. “Baleful,” a chiefly poetic term meaning “[f]ull of malign deadly, or noxious influence” (OED), is used of the rat possessed by the judge from its first appearance (Dracula's 24); but though initially troubled by its presence, Malcolmson has no problem sleeping soundly that night, suggesting how oblivious he is to his impending peril. Indeed, he ironically refers to the rat as “one wicked looking old devil,” an attempt at humor that Mrs. Witham recognizes as only too prophetic, warning him, “Take care, sir! Take care! There's many a true word spoken in jest” (25).
In what may be the most pivotal scene for understanding the story, the rat returns on the second night to harass Malcolmson, who in response begins throwing books at the creature: Without stirring, he looked to see if his pile of books was within range, and then cast his eye along the rope. As he looked he saw the great rat drop from the rope on the oak armchair and sit there glaring at him. He raised a book in his right hand, and taking careful aim, flung it at the rat. The latter, with a quick movement, sprang aside and dodged the missile. He then took another book, and a third, and flung them one after another at the rat, but each time unsuccessfully. At last, as he stood with a book poised in his hand to throw, the rat squeaked and seemed afraid. This made Malcolmson more than ever eager to strike, and the book flew and struck the rat a resounding blow. It gave a terrified squeak, and turning on his pursuer a look of terrible malevolence, ran up the chair-back and made a great jump to the rope of the alarm bell and ran up it like lightning. (27) “Conic Sections he does not mind, nor Cycloidal Oscillations, nor the Principia, nor Quaternions, nor Thermodynamics. Now for the book that fetched him!” Malcolmson took it up and looked at it. As he did so he started, and a sudden pallor overspread his face. He looked round uneasily and shivered slightly, as he murmured to himself: “The Bible my mother gave me! What an odd coincidence.” (28)
The explicit references to works by Hamilton and Salmon give a distinctly TCD flavor to the reading of the Cambridge student Malcolmson. Though Stoker would not have taken an examination as demanding as Cambridge's mathematical tripos, it would be foolish not to recognize a level of autobiography here in Malcolmson's study plan. And given his boasts in Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, Stoker clearly valued his mathematical training at TCD. It would be myopic to maintain that he was opposed to logical or mathematic reasoning as a whole. Carol Senf has thoroughly recorded the various influences in Stoker's life that would make him amenable to the rapid advances in mathematics, science, and technology during the 19th century (Science 49–72). There are any number of indications in his work that he did appreciate his mathematical background, from the admiration that he shows for Mina's ability to memorize the railway schedule in Dracula to the painstaking care he put into explicating the complex biliteral cipher in The Mystery of the Sea.
Even so, Stoker's corpus clearly demonstrates a belief that reasoning apart from faith is insufficient as a basis for epistemology. In “The Judge's House,” as elsewhere in his writings, Stoker proffers the Christian religion as the site where reason and faith, the natural and the supernatural, can meet. In Dracula, Seward's scientific skepticism prevents him from recognizing the supernatural menace of the vampire; yet the superstitious inhabitants of Dracula's homeland are terrorized by the Count and find themselves equally impotent to defeat him; it is only when these two polarities are synthesized through figures like Van Helsing and Mina that Dracula is able to be conquered. This pattern is equally true of “The Judge's House,” except that in the brief pages of this horror story, no adequate synthesis is ever developed. On the one pole, we are presented with the skeptics like Malcolmson, Carnford, Mrs. Dempster, and even the more sympathetic Dr. Thornhill; on the other hand, the superstitious Mrs. Witham wisely counsels caution and community but is herself wholly unable to counteract the judge's malignant spirit. Whereas Stoker's longer works tend to reward his readers by allowing the protagonists victory over evil through a dialectic of faith and reason, “The Judge's House” is an undiluted horror story in which supernatural judgment is meted out on the rashly rationalistic main character.
Some critics have found Malcolmson's punishment to be unduly harsh. To González, “The Promethean spark in Malcolm is very feeble” (19–20), making the story “on the whole a Gothic fable in which an inexorable ‘fate’ disproportionately punishes an apparently slight transgression” (27). Senf finds the ending even more problematic, calling Malcolmson “an innocent victim who had done nothing to deserve his punishment” (“Three”). Yet these interpretations appear to miss the whole point of the story. In Stoker's moral order, Malcolmson may be naïve, but he is not innocent. His overreliance on his immature and incomplete rational powers is emphasized from the start, and this form of hubris, even in a college student, always has consequences in Stoker's fiction. The uncomprehending Seward and his associates prove unable to save Lucy in Dracula; the overreaching participants in the Great Experiment meet a grim fate at the end of Stoker's original edition of The Jewel of Seven Stars. Almost every page of “The Judge's House” contains a reference to Malcolmson's pride, condescension, or ignorance, almost ad nauseam. A 21st-century academic (perhaps even a 19th-century one) may be inclined toward appreciating Malcolmson's devotion to his studies, but a close reading of the text clearly reveals Stoker's critique of such single-mindedness.
Nor is Malcolmson's demise indicative of some form of moral anarchy. Hebblethwaite, while acknowledging the “symbolic triumph of faith over logic” in the story, sees the ending as an “ideological deconstruction of rigid confines between good and evil” (xxi). Senf finds the story troubling, contending that one of its predominant themes “is that these supernatural forces are not agents of cosmic justice but of a human evil so persistent that it refuses to die” (“Three”). These interpretations derive from a very obvious observation that Malcolmson dies in the end and the underlying implication that the judge's spirit remains. In a sense, then, the judge “wins.” Yet the very real evil of the old judge does not necessarily preclude him from playing a role in the symbolic judgment of the obtuse protagonist. Malcolmson's doom comes directly from the fact that he could have defeated the judge. González wonders why Malcolmson does not launch his old Bible at the rat again on the third night (26), but then, that is precisely the extent of his blindness to the spiritual world: the rat's fear of the Bible never becomes more than “an odd coincidence” (Stoker, Dracula's 28) to the young student, so he sees no reason why it should be efficacious a second time. The tragic irony of the story, Stoker heavily implies, is that the judge could have been defeated by the Bible if Malcolmson had indeed used it. The rat is “afraid” and “terrified” (27) in that moment, the only point in the entire story that he ever appears to lose control of the situation.
Read this way, Stoker's suggestion becomes clear. “The Judge's House” is populated entirely by characters who are either downright evil or too epistemologically limited to be of any use in combating the evil. The perverse justice of the judge remains unchecked at the end of the story. The skeptics of the town allow the evil to remain and fester because they deny its existence. Mrs. Witham recognizes the existence of a malevolent spiritual world, but her superstitious fear paralyzes her from action. Malcolm Malcolmson arrives young and fresh, a man with the resources available to him of both reason and religion, two epistemologies that were philosophical battlegrounds in the Victorian period. Elsewhere in his fiction Stoker seems to submit the traditional Christianity of his Irish forebears (like his own mother) as a means of resolving the dialectic of faith and reason; it is no coincidence that in Dracula the scientific analysis of the Count and the invocation of religious language both intensify as the novel reaches its climax. “The Judge's House” clearly demonstrates the same perspective, that the judge is an evil that can be exorcised; but such a victory is only possible when the conflict of epistemologies is resolved. Malcolm Malcolmson should have picked up the Bible his mother gave him one more time.