Blog Post on Dracula

I am have just started reading Dracula, and I find it a very interesting book. I have decided to focus on one of the characters in the book, a very obvious choice, Count Dracula. Although I am not that far in the book, I have decided to ask an imposing question. How do we classify characters in a book as good or bad, based not on their actions and personality but on how we see them in the book?
Obviously, everyone knows that before we even meet Dracula we know he is a vampire, and that he is evil. But imagine reading this book without this prior knowledge, would we be able to tell he was "evil"? I looked closely through the text and noticed a few things. When Jonathan (a business man who comes to visit Dracula to help him deal with paperwork for he has just bought a house) first meets Dracula, we can tell he is a strange man. Jonathan describes him as lean and tall, dressed all in black. He also described more of his finer points, with me having my past experiences identify as clues he is a vampire, "His mouth was fixed and rather cruel-looking, his ears were pale and extremely pointed." These remind me of other descriptions of vampires from past series. Now, this relates to the question I said before, Dracula's personality and description do not suggest anything out of the ordinary. However, this part of the book has a very tense tone, one that might suggest it is leading towards action. I feel that even someone reading this book for the first time would get a sense that something was amiss.
Dracula personality is described as courteous and gracious, Dracula being very welcome to Jonathan who has traveled very far. Even though Jonathan has a sense that something may be wrong, Dracula's calm nature exterminates those suspicions. As Jonathan stays longer in Dracula's castle, his uncomfortable feelings do not arise, for Dracula is very kind to him. But me as the reader, see this as weird and that something has been wrong.There has been little action in the book for a long time now, and that usually means when the next action occurs it will be big. Although, Dracula has not done anything wrong, nor has the way he has been described suggest he has done anything wrong.
Furthermore, I made an inference that the author (Bram Stoker) made Dracula seem scary before he had done anything bad. This makes me realize that we judge characters more on how the author sets them up rather than how they behave. As I also mentioned in my question, Dracula has not done anything bad, but because of our knowledge of this book and that anxious tense mood of the story we might start to guess he is in fact, abnormal. I think that this was on purpose to show how later in the book how evil Count Dracula is. My last idea is this reminds me of what we did in class on author's purpose and craft, because the author purposely created this tone to let readers in on what would be the evilest and worst character in the book, using the craft of a very dark and scary tone.