Background

Abraham Stoker was born in Clontarf, on the northside of Dublin, Ireland on January 8, 1847; the third of seven children of Abraham Stoker and Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley. Sir Thornley Stoker, 1st Baronet was his elder brother.

Education

Though Abraham was a sickly child, bedridden for much of his boyhood, as a student at Trinity College, he excelled in athletics as well as academics, served as President of the Philosophical Society and graduated with honors in mathematics in 1870. He purchased his Master of Arts in 1875.

Career

Stoker worked for ten years in the Irish Civil Service, and during this time contributed drama criticism to the Dublin Mail. His glowing reviews of Henry Irving's performances encouraged the actor to seek him out. The two became friends, and in 1879 Stoker became Irving's manager. He also performed managerial, secretarial, and even directorial duties at London's Lyceum Theatre.

Despite an active personal and professional life, he began writing and publishing novels, beginning with The Snake's Pass in 1890. Dracula appeared in 1897. Following Irving's death in 1905, Stoker was associated with the literary staff of the London Telegraph and wrote several more works of fiction, including the horror novels The Lady of the Shroud (1909) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911).

Although most of Stoker's novels were favorably reviewed when they appeared, they were dated by their stereotyped characters and romanticized Gothic plots, and are rarely read today. Even the earliest reviews frequently decry the stiff characterization and tendency to melodrama that flaw Stoker's writing. Critics have universally praised, however, his beautifully precise place descriptions.

Stoker's short stories, while sharing the faults of his novels, have fared better with modern readers. Anthologists frequently include Stoker's stories in collections of horror fiction.

"Dracula's Guest," originally intended as a prefatory chapter to Dracula, is one of the best known. Dracula is generally regarded as the culmination of the Gothic vampire story, preceded earlier in the nineteenth century by Dr. William Polidori's "The Vampyre," Thomas Prest's Varney the Vampyre, J. S. Le Fanu's Carmilla, and Guy de Maupassant's "Le Horla." A large part of the novel's initial success was due, however, not to its Gothicism but to the fact, noted by Daniel Farson, that "to the Victorian reader it must have seemed daringly modern." An early reviewer of Dracula in the Spectator commented that "the up-to-dateness of the book-the phonograph diaries, typewriters, and so on-hardly fits in with the medieval methods which ultimately secure the victory for Count Dracula's foes."

Stoker utilized the epistolary style of narrative that was characteristic of Samuel Richardson and Tobias Smollett in the eighteenth century, and that Wilkie Collins further refined in the nineteenth. The narrative, comprising journal entries, letters, newspaper clippings, a ship's log, and phonograph recordings, allowed Stoker to contrast his characters' actions with their own explications of their acts. Some early critics noted the "unnecessary number of hideous incidents" which could "shock and disgust" readers of Dracula. One critic even advised keeping the novel away from children and nervous adults. Initially, Dracula was interpreted as a straightforward horror novel.

Critics have tended to view Dracula from a Freudian psychosexual standpoint; however, the novel has also been interpreted from folkloric, political, feminist, medical, and religious points of view. Today the name of Dracula is familiar to many people who may be wholly unaware of Stoker's identity, though the popularly held image of the vampire bears little resemblance to the demonic being that Stoker depicted.

Adaptations of Dracula in plays and films have taken enormous liberties with Stoker's characterization. A resurgence of interest in traditional folklore has revealed that Stoker himself did not conform to established vampire legend. Yet Dracula has had tremendous impact on readers since its publication. Whether Stoker evoked a universal fear, or as some modern critics would have it, gave form to a universal fantasy, he created a powerful and lasting image that has become a part of popular culture.

The vampire idea is very ancient indeed, and there are in nature, no doubt, mysterious powers to account for the vague belief in such beings. Mr. Stoker's way of presenting his matter, and still more the matter itself, are of too direct and uncompromising a kind. They lack the essential note of awful remoteness and at the same time subtle affinity that separates while it links our humanity with unknown beings and possibilities hovering on the confines of the known world. At times Mr. Stoker almost succeeds in creating the sense of possibility in impossibility; at others he merely commands an array of crude statements of incredible actions. The early part goes best, for it promises to unfold the roots of mystery and fear lying deep in human nature; but the want of skill and fancy grows more and more conspicuous. Still Mr. Stoker has got together a number of "horrid details," and his object, assuming it to be ghastliness, is fairly well fulfilled. Isolated scenes and touches are probably quite uncanny enough to please those for whom they are designed.

Achievements

• Stoker was the author of several novels such as 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 or, indeed, the quality of Dracula, a work which he is famous for. The fictional vampire achieved widespread popularity though numerous film and literary adaptations in the 20th century. Dracula was an early inspiration for author Stephen King.
  
  An annual festival takes place in Dublin, the birthplace of Bram Stoker, in honour of his literary achievements.

Works

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  • Dracula

    (Famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count...)

    1897
  • Under the Sunset

    (A collection of gothic stories from Bram Stoker, the auth...)

    1881
  • The Lady of the Shroud

    (The novel is an adventure story about a young man who inh...)

    1909
  • The Lair of the White Worm & The Lady of the Shroud

    (The Lady of the Shroud, published here in its full and un...)

    1911
  • Greater Love

    (Bill and Joe, two best friends, discover they have both f...)

    1914
  • The Snake's Pass

    (It is the story of Arthur Severn, an Englishman who has i...)

    1890
  • The Eroes of Thames

    (The Eroes of Thames tells the story of a famous swimmer, ...)

    1908
  • Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party

    (Snow Bound: The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party is a...)

    1908
  • Lady Athlyne

    (In Stoker’s novel Lady Athlyne he has a character that em...)

    1908
  • A Young Widow

    (This story is a romance about a man who saves a little bo...)

    1899
  • The Way of Peace

    (it is the story of a young man who is engaged to a woman ...)

    1909
  • The Watter's Mou'

    (It is the story of a young man who works for the Scottish...)

    1895
  • The Primrose Path

    (Jerry O'Sullivan, the honest Dublin theatrical carpenter,...)

    1875
  • Bengal Roses

    (It is the story of a teenage boy living in the countrysid...)

    1898
  • Dualitists: Or, The Death Doom of the Double Born

    (In it a married couple, after trying for many years, has ...)

    1887
  • The Seer

    (The tale is set in Cruden Bay, a locale Stoker used in ot...)

    1902
  • The Gombeen Man

    (The Gombeen Man is an evil moneylender who several peasan...)

    1890
  • Old Hoggen: A Mystery

    (When Old Hoggen disappeared, everyone in Charmouth suspec...)

    1893
  • A Yellow Duster

    (It is the story of two old men who have been friends sinc...)

    1899
  • Buried Treasures

    (In this story a man meets a beautiful woman on the street...)

    1875
  • Famous Impostors

    (It is a book that deals with exposing various impostors a...)

    1910
  • Our New House

    (In it a young man meets and falls in love with a young wo...)

    1895
  • The Jewel of Seven Stars 1903
  • Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula 1901
  • The Greatest Works of Bram Stoker
  • The Mystery of the Sea 1902
  • True Crime
  • The Shoulder Of Shasta 1895
  • Miss Betty 1898
  • The Man 1905
  • Dracula's Guest and other Weird Tales 1914
  • The Crystal Cup 1872
  • The Chain of Destiny 1875
  • Lucky Escapes of Sir Henry Irving 1890
  • Personal reminiscences of Henry Irving 1906

Religion

Stoker was raised a Protestant in the Church of Ireland.

Politics

Bram Stoker was a strong supporter of the Liberal Party and took a keen interest in Irish affairs. He supported Home Rule for Ireland brought about by peaceful means and remained an ardent monarchist who believed that Ireland should remain within the British Empire, an entity that he saw as a force for good. He was an admirer of Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, whom he knew personally, and supported his plans for Ireland.

Views

Stoker believed in progress and took a keen interest in science and science-based medicine. Some Stoker novels represent early examples of science fiction, such as The Lady of the Shroud (1909). He had a writer's interest in the occult, notably mesmerism, but despised fraud and believed in the superiority of the scientific method over superstition.

Quotations: "There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights."

"Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!"

"We learn from failure, not from success!"

"I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air."

"Once again...welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring."

"There is a reason why all things are as they are."

"I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul."

"Remember my friend, that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker."

"I want you to believe...to believe in things that you cannot."

"Oh, the terrible struggle that I have had against sleep so often of late; the pain of the sleeplessness, or the pain of the fear of sleep, and with such unknown horror as it has for me! How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams."

"Despair has its own calms."

"Loneliness will sit over our roofs with brooding wings."

"Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer--both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams."

"Denn die Todten reiten Schnell. (For the dead travel fast.)"

"How good and thoughtful he is; the world seems full of good men--even if there are monsters in it."

"I will not let you go into the unknown alone."

"I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats."

"No one but a woman can help a man when he is in trouble of the heart."

"How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams."

"Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men's eyes, because they know -or think they know- some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain."

"Though sympathy alone can't alter facts, it can help to make them more bearable."

"No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be."

Personality

Stoker had a lifelong interest in art, and was a founder of the Dublin Sketching Club in 1874.

Physical Characteristics: As a child Stoker was unable to walk until he was seven years old. An explanation for the illness was never found.

Quotes from others about the person

• Dorothy Scarborough: "Bram Stoker furnished us with several interesting specimens of supernatural life always tangled with other uncanny motives."

Connections

In 1878 Stoker married an aspiring actress named Florence Balcombe, who gave birth to their son, Irving Noel Thornley, in late 1879.

Father:

Abraham Stoker (1799–1876)

Mother:

Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley

(1818–1901)

Spouse:

Florence Balcombe

(July 17, 1858 – May 25, 1937)

child:

Irving Noel Thornley Stoker

(December 31, 1879 - September 16, 1961)

Friend:

Arthur Conan Doyle

Brother:

Sir Thornley Stoker, 1st Bt.

Sir William Thornley Stoker, 1st Baronet (March 6, 1845 – July 1912) was an eminent Irish medical writer, anatomist and surgeon.

Friend:

Henry Brodribb Irving

Friend:

Oscar Wilde

References

• Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula
  2017
• Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula
  1996