The Man Who Invented Dracula
After his recovery, Stoker was able to lead a normal adolescence and went on to attend Trinity College, Dublin. He was a brilliant student but also excelled in athletics as well as academics and graduated with honors in mathematics. While at Trinity he auditor of the College Historical Society and President of the University Philosophical Society, where his first paper was entitled Sensationalism in Fiction and Society. He also wrote fiction and in 1872 one of his stories,. The Crystal Cup, was published by the London Society, followed by The Chain of Destiny, a four part serial published in a periodical of the day, The Shamrock.
Bram Stoker worked for the next ten years in the Irish Civil Service. While he was employed as a civil servant in Dublin, Stoker became the theatre critic for the newspaper Dublin Evening Mail. In December 1876, he gave a favorable review of the actor Henry Irving's performance as Hamlet at the Theatre Royal in Dublin. His glowing review of Henry Irving's performances encouraged Irving to seek him out. Irving invited Stoker for dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel where he was staying. The two men became friends and their later relationship played a profound role in shaping Irving's life and career. Stoker also performed managerial, secretarial, and even directorial duties at London's Lyceum Theatre.
Stoker had a strong interest in science and medicine and a belief in progress. Some of his novels like his 1909 work, The Lady of the Shroud can be seen as science fiction. Like many people of his time Stoker believed in the concept of scientific racism drawing on his belief in Phrenology and these fears form elements in novels like Dracula. This is also reflected in his interest in early theories of criminology he read both Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau and used them in Dracula. Stoker also was fascinated in the occult especially mesmerism, but was also wary of occult fraud and believed strongly that superstition should be replaced by more scientific ideas.
Despite an active personal and professional life, Stoker supplemented his income by writing and publishing novels, beginning with The Snake's Pass in 1890. The best known of his novels was Dracula, published in 1897. Before writing Dracula, Stoker spent several years researching European folklore and stories of vampires. 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 diary 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. Stoker's inspirations for the story may have included a visit to Slains Castle in Aberdeenshire, and a visit to the crypts of St. Michan's Church in Dublin. It has also been argued by students of New England vampire myths, that the character Lucy may have been influenced during a visit to America by articles about the infamous Mercy Brown vampire case.
Although most of Stoker's novels other than Dracula were favorably reviewed when they first appeared, they are 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 however, have universally praised, 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. It was proceeded by other nineteenth century works: 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."
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. Dorothy Scarborough indicated the direction of future criticism in 1916 when she wrote that, "Bram Stoker furnished us with several interesting specimens of supernatural life always tangled with other uncanny motives."
Despite the fact that his mother, Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thomely, was a noted feminist, Stoker was sexist by modern standards and strongly opposed to the idea of the New Woman. Several of his novels use this as a theme with the danger of assertive woman represented by the femme fatale. Psychologists over the ages have had a field day analyzing Stoker's female characters and use of stakes as phallic symbols. In 1931 Ernest Jones, in his On the Nightmare, drew attention to the theory that these "other uncanny motives" involve repressed sexuality". Critics have since 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.
Stories and novels appear just now in plenty stamped with a more or less genuine air of belief in the visibility of supernatural agency. The strengthening of a bygone faith in the fantastic and magical view of things in lieu of the purely material is a feature of the hour, a reaction--artificial, perhaps, rather than natural--against late tendencies in thought. Mr. Stoker is the purveyor of so many strange wares that Dracula reads like a determined effort to go, as were, "one better" than others in the same field. How far the author is himself a believer in the phenomena described is not for the reviewer to say. He can but attempt to gauge how far the general faith in witches, warlocks, and vampires--supposing it to exist in any general and appreciable measure--is likely to be stimulated by this story.
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. Dracula is highly sensational, but it is wanting in the constructive art as well as in the higher literary sense. It reads at times like a mere series of grotesquely incredible events; but there are better moments that show more power, though even these are never productive of the tremor such subjects evoke under the hand of a master.
An immense amount of energy, a certain degree of imaginative faculty, and many ingenious and gruesome details are there. 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. The people who band themselves together to run the vampire to earth have no real individuality or being. The German man of science is particularly poor, and indulges, like a German, in much weak sentiment. 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. Following the publication of Dracula, Stoker was associated with the literary staff of the London Telegraph and wrote several more works of fiction, including The Lady of the Shroud followed two years later by The Lair of the White Worm.
After suffering a number of strokes, Bram Stoker died on 20 April 20, 1912 at St. George's Square; some biographers attribute the cause of death to tertiary syphilis. He was cremated and his ashes placed in a display urn at Golders Green Crematorium. After his son, Irving Noel Stoker's death in 1961, his ashes were added to that urn. The original plan had been to keep his parents' ashes together, but after Florence Stoker's death her ashes were scattered at the Gardens of Rest.
This biography is from The Encyclopedia of World Biograph and Wikipedia and was edited by Francesca Miller
