Bram Stoker’s after-life

When he died 100 years ago today, the Irish writer had not received due recognition for creating our favourite vampire, says Robert Hume

DUBLIN-BORN writer Bram Stoker died 100 years ago today, and spent longer in the capital city than other writers more closely associated with it.

So it is baffling that Dublin poorly represents itself as the home of the creator of one of literature’s enduring characters, Dracula.

The Bram Stoker Experience, opened in Clontarf in 2003, was not well-supported, though a hit with Dracula fans.

Stoker’s home, No 15, The Crescent, in Clontarf, is selling for €570,000, but the State is unlikely to buy it and there are few more reminders of his 30-plus years in the city. Meanwhile, Whitby, the English seaside town where much of the book is set, started a successful Gothic festival in 1994 and is preparing for the 2012 festival next week.

A Dracula-themed walking tour of Stoker’s native city would surely start in the still-leafy suburb of Clontarf, where, in 1847, he lived before moving to Artane Lodge.

The Clontarf house is in a smart semi-circle terrace, overlooking Bram Stoker Park. It is here that Bram lived with his civil-servant father and his mother, Charlotte, who was active in charity work.

Bram was bedridden in early childhood and “the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts”. Charlotte told him stories: one, about sick people buried alive, which he never forgot.

From the age of seven, Bram played in Clontarf graveyard, above the resting places of suicide victims, highwaymen and robbers — future vampires. His family had a tomb in the spooky vaults of St Michan’s church.

The narrow galleries housed coffins, some open, exposing a body with a protruding arm or leg. Heads were thrown back, mouths open as if they had fallen asleep. He called them the ‘undead’ — his original title for Dracula.

In 1864, Stoker entered Trinity College Dublin, where he read mathematics and was a leading light in the historical and philosophical societies. Passionate about sport, he enjoyed weight-lifting, gymnastics, rugby and swimming — years later, he earned a medal from the Humane Society for trying to rescue a drowning man in the Thames. A strapping six-foot two inches (“ugly but strong”, as he said), Stoker won the Trinity races in 1867.

After Trinity, Stoker worked with his father as a junior clerk in the creepy surroundings of Dublin Castle. He stayed for ten years and published The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, an authority on the subject. He was living in the city — either in Kildare Street, or above a grocer’s in St Stephen’s Green. While working part-time as an unpaid theatre critic for the Dublin Evening Mail, in 1876, he saw Henry Irving as Hamlet at the Theatre Royal and became star-struck. Impressed by Stoker’s flattering review, the actor invited him for dinner. “Soul had looked into soul,” Stoker wrote. “From that hour began a friendship as profound, as close, as lasting as can be between two men.”

In 1878, Stoker married 20-year-old beauty Florence Balcombe, who numbered Oscar Wilde among her former suitors. Five days after their wedding, they followed Irving to London.

Irving ruled over theatre land, and appointed Stoker as his business manager and secretary at the Lyceum Theatre. His job was to pay actors and backstage staff, arrange the sets and read hundreds of scripts. He wrote 50 letters a day on Irving’s behalf, and organised tours, including eight to the US.

After the performances, Stoker would dine with important visitors. At this ‘beefsteak club’ he became friends with the author Arthur Conan Doyle and with William Gladstone, whose ideas on Irish Home Rule he admired. He also socialised with playwrights WS Gilbert and George Bernard Shaw.

Although his salary was three times what he had been earning as a civil servant, the job was insecure and had no pension. His parents (living in Switzerland) believed he was taking a risk, and his wife resented his being at Irving’s beck and call.

The confidence Irving had in Stoker was not misplaced: between 1878 and 1900 the takings at the Lyceum exceeded £2m. Twice he was invited to the White House and was introduced to Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. In Philadelphia, he met the poet Walt Whitman. In Chicago, he met Mark Twain and became his agent in London, where he also managed the finances of painter James Whistler.

In his spare time, Stoker wrote 30 short stories and 12 novels and qualified as a barrister.

In 1897, he published Dracula. Stoker never visited Transylvania, where the novel is set, and got most of his information from the British Museum.

Vampires were not new in novels: the Dublin writer Sheridan Le Fanu told the tale of a lesbian vampire in 1872. Dracula got a mixed reception: Irving found the work ‘dreadful’.

When his hero died in 1905, Stoker described himself as a ‘widow’ and quickly set to publishing a biography, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. The work exhausted him and shortly afterwards he suffered a stroke, which left him with a jerky walk and impaired eyesight.

For a while, he worked as a reporter for The Daily Telegraph, until a second stroke, in 1910, left him too ill to write.

His finances became precarious and he accepted a grant of £100 from the Royal Literary Fund.

On Apr 20, 1912, Stoker died at his home in Belgravia. The cause of death was given as ‘locomotor ataxia’, a disease of the nervous system, probably brought about by tertiary syphilis.

In its obituary, The Times described him as ‘the intimate friend’ of Henry Irving.

The Irish Times found his stories “readable, though … not marked by any particular originality”. The New York Times agreed that they “were not of a memorable quality”.

The press concurred that Stoker would be remembered for his biography of Irving, rather than what The Times labelled a “lurid and creepy kind of fiction”.

Ironically, although Stoker was a multi-faceted man — mathematician, orator, sportsman and businessman, besides a valet — we only remember him as the creator of the most notorious vampire.

* Whitby Gothic Weekend takes place Apr 26-30. See www.whitbygothicweekend.co.uk.