The Mysteries of Annotation

It may be a bizarre psychological by-product of being an academic, but I've developed a little database in my head that notes "items in need of annotation" whenever I read a nineteenth-century novel.  Someone reading purely for pleasure may enjoy a peaceful, unbroken textual surface, free of aggravating asterisks, daggers, and what-have-you.  But when you're teaching a novel to a room full of young adults, of whom some are a little iffy on the whole "Victorian" thing ("Chaucer was Victorian, right?"), then those pesky annotations become a little more...crucial. 

Take Dracula, for example.  (Comedian: "Take my Dracula! Please!") I've just finished rereading the novel in A. N. Wilson's World's Classics edition, and the book was a near-Edenic paradise of asterisk-free pages.  There are fifteen endnotes, most of which explicate literary or mythological allusions.  In some contexts, Wilson's sparse annotations are perfectly fine; in others, though, they could be frustrating.  Let's say you want to emphasize the clash between English "modernity" (something of explicit concern to several characters) and Dracula's primal evil, handed down in "superstitions" and "traditions" centuries old.  One of the things that a student might not realize is just how trendy the protagonists are.  We've got Harker and his Kodak camera, Dr. Seward and his phonograph, and Mina Harker and her typewriter; at one point, Van Helsing even breaks out some "small electric lamps" (ch. 19).  Characters know their Charcot, their Lombroso, and their Nordau.    It's as though somebody dropped the characters from CSI into a Freddy Krueger movie.  Stoker emphasizes "modernity" enough that readers get the point without the annotations, but (if you'll excuse the pun) without the annotations, it's a dulled point.