Bram Stoker

Abraham Stoker was born in 1847 in Clontarf, a coastal suburb of Dublin, the third of seven children in a middle-class Protestant family. He spent the first seven years of his life bedridden with an undiagnosed illness that left him unable to stand; his mother, Charlotte, told him stories during the long convalescence, including her memories of the 1832 cholera epidemic in Sligo, in which the dead were sometimes buried — or feared to be buried — before they were entirely dead. He recovered without apparent after-effects, grew into a tall, athletic young man, and went up to Trinity College Dublin in 1864, where he excelled at mathematics, took the auditor's chair of the Philosophical Society, and won university prizes for athletics.

After graduation he entered the Irish civil service as a clerk at Dublin Castle while moonlighting, unpaid, as the theatre critic for the Dublin Evening Mail. A favourable review of Hamlet in 1876 brought him into the orbit of Henry Irving — the most famous English actor of the Victorian stage — and the friendship reshaped Stoker's life. In 1878 he married Florence Balcombe (a former girlfriend of Oscar Wilde) and moved to London to become the acting and business manager of Irving's Lyceum Theatre. He held the post for twenty-seven years, running the box office, the tours, the accounts, and writing on Irving's behalf an estimated half a million letters. It was a job of complete subordination to another man's career. He wrote fiction in the margins of this work — early evenings, holidays, the long sea crossings of American tours.

Dracula was published in 1897. Stoker had spent roughly seven years on it, researching Eastern European folklore, vampirism in the medical and anthropological literature of his day, and the geography of Transylvania (which he never visited). The novel is constructed entirely from documents — letters, diary entries, ship's logs, phonograph cylinders transcribed to typewriter, newspaper clippings — a technique he had used in his earlier The Snake's Pass (1890) and would refine again in The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903). Count Dracula himself appears in person on only a few dozen pages; the horror is built from absences and second-hand reports. Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray, Lucy Westenra, Dr Seward, Quincey Morris, Arthur Holmwood, and the Dutch professor Abraham Van Helsing — the names have outlasted almost everything else Stoker wrote.

Henry Irving died in 1905. The Lyceum had already gone bankrupt the year before, and Stoker — without the salary, the prestige, or the surrogate father — suffered a stroke and never fully recovered. He wrote four more novels in declining health, none successful, and died in London in April 1912, three days after the Titanic sank. The certificate gave "exhaustion"; speculation about tertiary syphilis has been advanced and disputed.

Read Dracula in the epistolary form Stoker wrote it — most film adaptations strip out the structure that makes the novel work. The Jewel of Seven Stars is worth a look afterwards if you want more.