I was wondering about how Jonathan didn't even blink when Dracula informed him he was going to stick around for language tutoring. Like, did he expect to be there for a while? Do solicitors often do surprise bonus tasks for their clients that have little to do with their job description? Is he getting paid for this?? Or is this another case of Jonathan going "just another normal part of soliciting that no one bothered mentioning to me I guess!"/being too polite and embarrassed to express confusion and just going along with the next weird thing people expect him to be totally fine with
Of course you don't have to answer, but if you have any thoughts I'd enjoy hearing them!
I think this is one of those moments where Jonathan didn't expect yet another very bizarre thing to happen and he autopilots on polite acceptance rather than trying to make an objection. To be fair to him, he's a guy who just got his certification and he's on the first big job of his career and the Count is obviously a hugely important client. He is engaged to be married to a woman he is completely wild about, and seeing as this is the 1890s, sabotaging said career by walking out on said client would make it difficult to be married (even though women--including, as we will see, Mina--were in the workforce, there would still be expectations that a male partner would be the breadwinner). Additionally, without spoiling to much, his relationship to Peter Hawkins is not a simple employer/employee one, and Jonathan does not have a lot of personal resources/support outside of his fiancee and boss.
On top of all of that, there's just the immediate problem that he is in a remote, spooky castle in a desolate landscape full of wolves, and he is alone with the man making demands of him. He doesn't know how to get back to Klausenburgh if he decides to turn heel and walk out of the castle. His coachman was just the Count but with a different hat. They spiraled around and around in circles. He's dependent on his host if he wants transportation in the direction of his home.
A lot of the scariness of the early portions of Dracula is tied up in a sense that our pal Jonathan is the proverbial boiling frog--that he is being gaslit and endangered by degrees instead of being threatened with immediate harm. While I think it's very common to express frustration at his failure to get out before it's too late, I personally find his reluctance to act understandable and human, and I think it makes the horror of novel's initial arc all the more relatable.
