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Bram Stoker (1847-1912): The man behind the monster
by Sydney Cheek-O’Donnell

Bram Stoker was born on November 8^th, 1847 in Dublin, Ireland, the third of Charlotte Thornley Stoker and Abraham Stoker’s seven children. In his memoir, Stoker reports that he was bedridden with a mysterious illness until the age of eight, at which time he recovered and became a robust and athletic child. In 1864 Stoker entered Trinity College and studied mathematics. After receiving his Master’s degree, Stoker secured a job in the civil service through his father, who worked for the British civil administration in Ireland, which was still colonized by Great Britain.

While at Trinity, Stoker became an avid theatergoer, volunteering as a theatre critic for the Dublin Mail. In his capacity as critic, Stoker met the great English actor Henry Irving in 1876. The two men became friendly, and in 1878 Irving invited Stoker to become the Acting Manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. Stoker had accepted the position, married Florence Anne Lemon Balcombe, and moved to London by the end of December. Stoker was Irving’s business partner, manager, and friend for 27 years until the actor died in 1905.

Although he had a demanding job overseeing over 50 employees and all operations at the Lyceum, Stoker still found time to write. By 1882, he had published his first collection of stories, Under the Sunset, and his first novel, The Snake’s Pass, in 1890. During the same year Stoker began working on Dracula while vacationing in Whitby, though he would not complete and publish it until 1897. In the intervening years, Stoker conducted detailed research and painstakingly drafted his masterpiece while publishing two other novels.

Shortly after Henry Irving’s death in 1905, Stoker suffered a stroke, yet he kept writing. Without the income provided by his job as the Lyceum’s Acting Manager, Stoker turned to writing as his primary source of income, publishing another five books, a two-volume memoir about Irving, and dozens articles for various periodicals before he died in April 1912. The cause of Stoker’s death has been the source of some controversy: one biographer has claimed that Stoker’s symptoms were consistent with the advanced stages of syphilis. But Stoker is also known to have suffered from gout and a serious kidney ailment called nephritis (or Bright’s Disease). Regardless of the cause of Stoker’s death, there can be no doubt that in Dracula Bram Stoker left us with one of the English language’s most enduring gothic romances.

The Immortal Vampire

Since Dracula was immortalized on the silver screen in 1931, hardly a year has gone by without some film, book, or television program capitalizing on the public’s fascination with vampires. By my count, there are currently three television shows about vampires on the air; and this summer saw the third film adaptation of the young adult vampire romance novel series, Twilight (say that three times fast!).

But the vampire story pre-dates the Hollywood film and Bram Stoker’s 1897 iconic novel. In fact, stories of supernatural beings that consume the flesh or blood of the living date back to the ancient world among the Mesopotamians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and Indians. In Ancient Greek mythology, for example, Hecate’s daughter Empusa seduced young men and then drank their blood while they slept, while the Lamia drank the blood of young, sleeping children. In the early 18th century, the vampire folklore of Southeastern Europe was written down for the first time and spread to Western Europe, followed quickly by reports of alleged vampire attacks. In terror, people tried to protect themselves with various folk remedies, which included digging up the corpses of suspected vampires and defiling them in bizarre and gruesome ways, including stakes through the heart and decapitation. The Austrian Empress Maria Theresa eventually ordered her personal physician to investigate the reports himself. When he found no evidence of vampires roaming the streets at night, the Empress banned the opening of graves and the desecration of bodies, putting an end to the hysteria.

But the vampire was not dead. He merely slumbered in his coffin until his reappearance in John Polidori’s 1819 horror novel The Vampyre. The first vampire in English literature, Polidori’s evil Lord Ruthven was inspired by the same brainstorming session that resulted in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Although it is now generally considered a terrible novel, The Vampyre gave the reading public its first glimpse of a suave, wicked, bloodthirsty vampire with a particular taste for young women. Thomas Presket Prest published the “enthusiastic potboiler” Varney the Vampire in 1847, and in 1871 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is said to have perfected the vampire genre in his novella “Carmilla.” Bram Stoker’s Dracula entered the canon of vampire literature in 1897, and has reportedly never been out of print since.

What is the nature of Dracula’s enduring appeal? What is it about these un-dead demons with an appetite for blood that continues to fascinate and thrill us? Besides the fact that Dracula is a page-turning Gothic adventure, my guess is fear. Obviously, Dracula explores the enduring fear of death itself and the desire to commune with those who have passed on. Dracula and his vampire brides are both dead and alive, but their immortality has a macabre price. On another level, Dracula also explores the fear associated with the sexual awakening of adolescence and young adulthood, when emotions and bodies feel out of control. Lucy, in particular, expresses the confusion associated with a new awareness of sexual attraction. It is probably the universal quality of these fears that allows each successive generation to use the vampire as a metaphor for its own specific anxieties.

When Stoker penned his novel in the late Victorian era, there was much for the British public to fear: the decline of the Empire, economic instability, increasing competition from abroad, terrorism in Ireland and Europe, and women’s emancipation. Given these fears it seems fitting that Stoker’s Count is a deadly predator without conscience, whose only real concern is his own survival. Although his physically repulsive characteristics began to fall away as early as the 1920s, the vampire remained a predator until the late 1960s. It was then—in another period marked by great social, cultural, and political turmoil—that the vampire developed a conscience as well as a longing to be human. This trend has continued, and in recent years some of our favorite vampires have been tortured, supernatural crime fighters (Angel, for example, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame). The conflict has shifted from an entirely external battle between forces of good and evil to a more internal battle for the soul waged by the afflicted vampire himself.

Like the Victorians we have much to fear: economic instability and the social unrest that comes with it, increasing competition from abroad, and terrorism. Yet the vampire stories we tell ourselves today seem to reflect a belief that the source of terror exists not only outside our borders, but also inside our own hearts and minds.