One possible example of class struggle in Dracula comes in Bram Stoker's portrayal of Lucy and Mina. Lucy is a privileged young lady from a wealthy, socially-prominent family. She is the first of Dracula's victims, and remains a slave to his sickness before eventually passing away. After a long struggle with the consequences of Dracula's bite, she is vanquished as a vampire.

Mina, on the other hand, comes from a somewhat humbler background. She's a proud, intelligent woman who's worked for everything she has. Thanks to Van Helsing, Mina does not succumb to Dracula's evil. Like Lucy, the blood of Dracula courses through her veins, but thankfully his wicked curse is broken. It's as if Mina has escaped Lucy's fate on account of her greater humility, a character-trait directly related to her middle-class origins. It's instructive that a number of other privileged characters in the book die fairly sudden deaths, such as Lucy's mother, Mr. Hawkins, and Arthur's father. In Mina's survival, we see the triumph of the emerging Victorian middle-class.