Bram Stoker
(born November 8, 1847, Clontarf, County
Dublin
, Ireland?died April 20, 1912,
London
, England) was an Irish writer best known as the author of the
Gothic
horror tale
Dracula
(1897).
Due to illness, Stoker could not stand or walk until he was seven years old. He went on to become an outstanding athlete and football (soccer) player at
Trinity College
(1864?70) in Dublin, where he earned a degree in mathematics. After 10 years in the
civil service
at Dublin Castle, during which he was also an unpaid drama critic for the
Dublin Evening Mail
(later the
Evening Mail
), he made the acquaintance of his idol, actor
Sir Henry Irving
. From 1878 until Irving’s death 27 years later, Stoker was Irving’s manager, writing as many as 50 letters a day for him and accompanying him on his American tours. (After Irving’s death, Stoker published
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving
[1906], a biography of Irving that includes a great deal of biographical detail about Stoker himself.) Stoker’s first book,
The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland
, a handbook in legal administration, was published in 1879. Turning to fiction later in life, he published his first
novel
,
The Snake’s Pass
, a
romantic
thriller set in bleak western
Ireland
, in 1890.
Britannica Quiz
The Literary World
Stoker’s masterpiece, the novel
Dracula
, was published in 1897. It was written chiefly in the form of diaries and journals kept by the principal characters:
Jonathan Harker
, who made the first contact with the
vampire
Count Dracula
; Wilhelmina (“Mina”) Harker (nee Murray), Jonathan’s eventual wife; Dr. John (“Jack”) Seward, a psychiatrist and sanatorium administrator; and Lucy Westenra, Mina’s friend and a victim of Dracula who herself becomes a vampire. The story is that of a Transylvanian vampire who, using supernatural powers, makes his way to
England
and there victimizes innocent people to gain the blood on which he survives. Led by Dr. Abraham Van Helsing?Seward’s mentor and an expert on “obscure diseases”?Harker and his friends, after many hair-raising adventures, are at last able to overpower and destroy Dracula. The novel’s influence on representations of vampires in Western popular
culture
has been immense and long-lasting.
Dracula
has enjoyed wide popularity in its many
adaptations
for film, television, and the stage.
Stoker died in 1912. The cause of his death is disputed. Two years later, in 1914, his widow, Florence Stoker, published
Dracula’s Guest
as part of a posthumous collection of short stories; most contemporary scholars believe that editors had excised it from the original
Dracula
manuscript. In 2009 Dacre Stoker (great grandnephew of the author) and Ian Holt produced
Dracula: The Un-Dead
, a sequel that is based on the novelist’s own notes and excisions from the original. The sequel, which shuns the epistolary style of the first
Dracula
for traditional third-person narrative, is a thriller set in London in 1912, and it features Bram Stoker as a character.
Stoker wrote several other novels?among them
The Mystery of the Sea
(1902),
The Jewel of Seven Stars
(1903), and
The Lady of the Shroud
(1909)?but none of them approached the popularity of
Dracula
.