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Bram Stoker's Dracula
The Greatest Irish Tale Ever Told
from Issue #9 May 2004
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If I were alive in 19th century Dublin, without doubt, I would have been a Bram Stoker 'groupie'. The author's accomplishments have had a phenomenal effect on world cinema, theatre, and art. His best-known novel, "Dracula", spawned an entire genre. It established a cult following and set fiction sales records that will never be equalled.
There is no question that of the 18 novels that Stoker penned, the blood curdling gothic novel "Dracula" was the one that made him famous. The enormity of the story eventually grew to eclipse Stoker himself. He became the world's most famous and everlasting Irish author.
Let us consider 19th century Ireland for a moment, and look at the Irish influences that appear in the novel. Stoker was a child during, "The Great Irish Famine" of 1846-1850. He grew up in a seaside environment at Clontarf, Dublin. His family attended St. Michan's Church famous for being host to mummified bodies. There the Stoker family had a burial vault with the suicide graveyard a short distance away in Ballybough. Many Celtic symbols, myths, and emblems appeared in the novel. His work as a court's clerk in Dublin Castle helped him come to know Ireland and her people well.
Mentally armed with these images and mythology, Stoker had the ideal background to write the novel "Dracula." However, working at Dublin Castle was cramping his passion and love of writing. We can assume by his role as a civil servant that he was trying to please his father. His father too had worked in the old Imperial Service. In the 1870's Bram Stoker wrote a regular drama review for a Dublin broadsheet. His articles greatly contributed to he dramatic scene in Dublin and eventually paved the way for the foundling of the National Theatre.
Starving Irish family during the Irish Famine.
Photograph Source:
National Library of Ireland
In the late part of the 1870s Stoker met the love of his life, Florence Balcombe. They married and then moved to England where he was engaged as a secretary to his acting hero, Henry Irving. Mr. Irving was also the manager of the Lyceum Theatre. From that point forward Stoker's life was busy with the theatre. He rubbed shoulders with many of England's greats such as William Gladstone and the young Winston Churchill. He toured America eight times with the Lyceum Players and mixed with the American elite: Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt. Bram Stoker grew to adore and love America.
After living a celebrated and full life, at the age of sixty-five (which was a grand age for those times), Stoker died in Pimlico, London. He was cremated at Golder's Green Cemetery. He was survived by his wife Florence and their only child Noel (born in 1879). Noel shares his father's Urn as witnessed in the photograph below.
Photograph courtesy of Connie Nisinger
It is presently estimated that Dracula has inspired more than 1,000 films. One of them, "Nosferatu," was the subject of a lawsuit by Stoker's widow. She saw to it that any mention of "Dracula" was removed from the final film.
In writing this I realize that I will not be the last person to write about Bram Stoker or his novel. There will be many more articles and many more books or movies written about vampires. Stoker achieved immortality and will live forever in our minds and hearts.
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