FROM LEGEND TO LITERATURE

To examine the rise and rise of Dracula, we need to examine just how unusual were his roots. The novel, published in 1897, had been in gestation since at least 1890, but some critics look for its origins far earlier in the life of its author. Bram Stoker came from Clontaf near Dublin, a well-educated member of the professional classes; like his father, he worked initially as a civil servant. His childhood background immediately sets up a rich field of connections, with Mrs Stoker amusing her sickly son with Irish legends that might have included the Dearg-due, the Banshee and the revenant Abhartach. Such traditions may well have set Stoker’s imagination en route to a world where the supernatural impinges dangerously on the everyday, but there is no direct equivalent of the eastern European vampire figure in Irish legend, and there were other Irish connections much closer in time. Stoker knew Sheridan Le Fanu, whose haunting novella of the seductive (and Sapphic) vampire Carmilla (1872) provides the prototype for some of Dracula’s themes, as well as its original setting of Styria, rather than Transylvania. He would certainly have known Oscar Wilde’sThe Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) – in Dublin they moved in the same circles and Wilde had wooed Florence Balcombe, the beautiful Irish girl who chose instead to marry Stoker himself in 1878. Dorian Gray isn’t a vampire tale, but its evocation of a modern London below whose surface uncanny corruption seethes unrecognised, plus the notion of an eternally youthful protagonist apparently exempt from mortal morality, do find echoes in Dracula, while its popularity would have suggested that writing a supernatural thriller was a sound idea. 

The iconic power of the Count himself, though, may have a less literary source. Stoker worked as a civil servant (his second book, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879), indicates just how uninspiring this was) but nurtured a passion for the theatre, writing reviews for the Dublin Evening Mail. In particular, he was mesmerised by the larger-than-life performances of visiting actor Henry Irving. Under Irving’s calculating encouragement, Stoker changed his career and his life, moving to London to become business manager of the Lyceum Theatre and effectively personal manager to the actor. Alongside domestic life with Florence, Stoker’s existence centred around Irving, a demanding, hypnotic personality used to striking poses and holding the stage. His gaunt aquiline features were especially suited to such sinister roles as Richard III or Mephistopheles, and Stoker’s Dracula reads like a part made for Irving to play.