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For most of his professional life Bram Stoker was known only as a footnote to the life another more famous man, the great actor Henry Irving, for whom he was personal secretary and biographer. Today of course Irving is forgotten except in the annals of theatre, while Bram Stoker is remembered worldwide for his own creation of an enduring character, Dracula. Abraham Stoker was born in Dublin, Ireland, to a civil servant father and writer mother, and followed into both of their professions. After graduating from Trinity College in Dublin as a mathematician in 1867, he joined the local civil service where he stayed for ten years, while writing as a part-time freelancer. For five years he was drama critic for the Dublin Evening Mail. He became friends with Sir Henry Irving and in 1878 agreed to move to England and become the actor's secretary and manager of his London-based Lyceum Theatre, a job he held for the next twenty-seven years. His first book, written before he left his native land, was not exactly a popular blockbuster, entitled as it was The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1878), but it became a standard text in the field. While working for Irving however, he began to write short stories and novels with a little more, though still limited, success. His first novel was The Snake's Pass (1890) but his biggest success came with Dracula (1897). It's been speculated that the character of Count Dracula was based on Irving, a charismatic figure whose demands on Stoker's time drained the younger man of the energy that would otherwise have gone into his literary career. Stoker managed to complete several other novels on the side, the best known of which is The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), a thriller/horror tale involving grave robbers of Egyptian relics and a mummy's curse. After Irving died, Stoker published Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906) and continued to produce fiction, including The Lady of the Shroud (1909), a Frankensteinian story of reanimation, and his second most popular work Lair of the White Worm (also called The Garden of Evil, 1911), a tale of ancient evil. None of his works, besides Dracula, has stood the test of time however. His writing (even in his most famous work) often appears awkward. His characters are cardboard thin and their moral concerns somewhat dated—obvious relics of the repressed Victorian era. Only in Draculawas he able to thrill his readers with the potential for breaking free of repression, while (barely) keeping a lid on the explosion of libido and free expression, in a fashion that would excite readers for the century to come. — Eric |
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© Copyright 2003-2006 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.
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STOKER, Bram 