That takes us, a little later than intended, to the big one, the mother of all vampire novels, the one anyone who is at all familiar with or interested in vampires will have read, or at the very least know about, and which formed the basis for countless Hollywood adaptations and many TV interpretations of his story of an ageless, immortal, evil monster who lives alone in a castle until one unsuspecting human gives him a chance to unleash his evil on the world, as Chris de Burgh once nearly wrote, far beyond those castle walls.
But before we dive - and we will dive, and deeply - into the novel that set the standard, how much do we actually know about the author, the man who could, in many ways, almost more than John Polidori or Sheridan LeFanu or James Malcolm Ryder, be said to be the father of vampire fiction, or if not, at least the one who brought it all together? How well do we know this man, what do we know of his life, what drove him to write one of the seminal novels of the nineteenth century, and one of the most important Gothic novels in human history? Well, not much I must admit.
Let’s fix that before we go any further.
Bram Stoker (1847 - 1912)
Beyond the Forest and Into the Dark: A Short Biography of Bram Stoker
Abraham “Bram” Stoker was, as probably everyone knows, an Irishman. This of course gives me a certain sense of pride, but not only that, he was also what we call a northsider, being born in Clontarf, on the north side of Dublin. Though Clontarf was and is an affluent suburb of the city, where property prices are far higher than, oh let’s take an example at random and say Darndale (!) and where the great and the good like to live - when they’re not on the southside that is - it is still on the north side of the city. Clontarf fronts onto the sea, is only literally a walk away from Fairview Park, and, incidentally, not that you care, a short distance from where I went to school. Stoker was born to a Protestant family, the third of seven children, a sickly child who spent his first seven years in bed. There is no information on what the illness was that laid him low, but his enforced time bedridden allowed his mind, if not his body, to fly free, and he thought about many things, the seeds of an embryonic writer perhaps already germinating in his mind.
Whether fate decided to make up for ruining his childhood, or whether his being restricted to bed had a positive effect on his growth, Stoker grew to be a giant, standing six two at a time when the average male height was about five foot five. He was huge, and not just tall: a real bear of a man, and excelled (no surprise) in sports and athletics. He was born at what could be described as an auspicious time, the same year as Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, two more men who would go on to make their indelible mark on history, though in different fields to his. 1847 also saw the publication of two important Gothic novels,
Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights, which provided some source material for Stoker’s later research.
And let’s not forget what was, at the time, the first real glimpse ordinary readers, through the agency of the Penny Dreadful, were able to experience vampires, as James Malcolm Rymer’s lurid but morbidly popular
Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood, was published, serialised in (sorry) bite-sized chunks for the easier digestion by the public, and to whet the appetite for more, more, more. All right, that’s all the food metaphors I’ll use for now. It’s quite clear that Stoker borrowed from this first popular vampire story, though he imbued what he appropriated with a sense of macabre majesty and grandeur, and true, dark but lower-key horror than had the excitable Rymer.
Ireland has always been a land of superstition, somehow treading a careful line between being the “land of saints and scholars” and being “land of the fairies and wee folk”; Irish people are, not uniquely but unusually, adept at believing strongly in Jesus Christ while at the same time firmly crediting the existence of spirits, fairies and other supernatural entities. The famous crying spirit, the banshee, is named from the Irish words for woman (
bean, pronounced as "ban") and fairy (
sidhe), so literally, woman of the fairies, and this notion has been exported well beyond its borders. Leprechauns, while nobody these days believes in them (unlike banshees) are also a product of the readiness of Irish people to believe in such beings - and, much later, to profit off and benefit from a nonexistent so-called feature of Ireland in a way few other countries have managed.
Death was a constant companion to the Irish, or any, poor in Stoker’s time. Life expectancies were low, mortality rates were high - more often than not, half or more of a family’s children would fail to survive to adulthood - and burials were, to be blunt, basic and hardly safe, with stories of bodies in a grave having to be disinterred in order to fit another one in, with the resultant noxious odours and sense of creeping terror such things engendered. So it’s not too hard to see why the young Stoker would have been fascinated - horrified maybe, but certainly drawn to the idea of death, and through ancient Irish beliefs, the notion too of rebirth of the soul. While vampires per se never had much of a hold in Irish folklore, there was no shortage of creatures who would go around stealing souls, or carrying victims off to fairy forts and castles where they would return, if at all, to find hundreds of years had passed.
This is only my own, more than likely wrong idea, but I consider the possibility that Stoker, a staunch Protestant, seeing the rise of Catholics in Ireland as the Penal Laws began to be relaxed and then repealed, may have even presented Dracula as an image of the unwanted power of the Papists rising like a horrible spectre from the dead to again threaten the living. But as I say, that’s based on nothing more than my own notions.
As if all that wasn’t enough, the young Bram entered the world in the midst of the worst famine Ireland had ever seen, or would ever see again, as the potato crop failed and people starved to death, the population of Ireland dwindling by a quarter as a million people died and a similar number fled the country. Though the Stokers survived the horror, a report in the Mayo Constitution, issued around the time of Bram’s birth, made clear how ghastly the scenes around the country were:
“In Ballinrobe the workhouse is in the most deplorable state, pestilence having attacked paupers, officers, and all. In fact, this building is one horrible charnel house. . . . The master has become the victim of this dread disease; the clerk, a young man whose energies were devoted to the well-being of the union, has been added to the victims; the matron, too, is dead; and the respected and esteemed physician has fallen before the ravages of pestilence, in his constant attendance on the diseased inmates.”
It’s easy to see Stoker later anthropomorphising the dread spectre of death and hunger and disease into the stalking figure of Dracula, the grim reaper bringing death to all of London, misery where he passed, darkness falling, the killing of hope and joy, the silence of the grave. Whether he would personally remember the Famine or not is debatable, as he would only have been a child at the time, but no doubt the recollections of his older brother and sister, and those of his parents, to say nothing of neighbours, then newspaper reports and later research would have brought home to him how, to the people of Ireland at the time, it must have looked like the end of the world was nigh. Like Europe under the Black Death five hundred years earlier, there would have seemed no hope, and people would have just been waiting for death to take them, as helpless as Stoker’s vampire’s victims would become, transfixed, not by Dracula’s penetrating red eyes, but by despair, horror and hunger.
Victorian times of course continued the medieval practice of blood-letting, as it was firmly believed by the medical community (who were, unlike now, completely and utterly trusted and never argued with, nor would they accept any such criticism from a mere patient, whom they surely regarded as a much lower life form) that an excess of blood was the cause of many illnesses. The idea of someone taking his blood (since he was sick for seven years it seems likely he was bled frequently) and the natural revulsion to, and horror of such a procedure, may have been seen to have contributed to Stoker’s development of Dracula as a character. Given that one of the preferred methods was to use leeches, and that he later describes the count as a “filthy leech, exhausted in his repletion”, this seems a good bet.
To some degree, reading Stoker’s biography and all about his life is like seeing the genesis of his dark masterpiece coalescing in his mind. So many elements point to what would influence his later writing. His father worked in the ancient castle that housed the oppressive (though not to him of course) seat of the British government in Ireland, Dublin Castle, which would have been looked upon by many of his fellow Catholic Irish as a place of darkness and revulsion, an unwelcome outpost of the enemy in their own land, a cruel, arrogant, uncaring edifice that sneered down on the city of Dublin and whose masters made of its people their slaves. You can almost imagine a Catholic coach or omnibus driver stopping short of the dread structure, eyeing it with resentment and fear, and muttering “This far will I go, and no further.”
That scene, too, takes in Irish folklore, as allied to the banshee already mentioned was the tale of the
Dulann, a headless horseman who was said to ride a huge black coach, carrying a coffin and drawn by four black headless horses past houses at the wail of the banshee, and that if it stopped at your door and you opened it a basin of blood would be thrown out at you. Though I’m familiar with the legend of the former I must admit this is new to me, but I will bow to the author’s superior knowledge on the subject, and assume he has done his research. Oh, and he quotes W.B. Yeats, so that settles it obviously. Charlotte, Stoker’s mother, is said to have heard personally the wail of the banshee on the passing of her mother, and the tales she told of growing up in the Cholera epidemic of 1832, which claimed over 25,000 lives, would also have struck a chord with him when he came to flesh out his novel.
Not only that, he would have (very young and second-hand) memories of the disease himself, as another epidemic struck as a result of the Famine, taking almost twice as many lives as the one his mother had lived through, raging across Ireland from 1847 into 1848. The spectre of disease, famine and death would have been a formative image in young Bram’s life, and the sight (or reports of) skeletal figures, more dead than alive, stumbling through the streets or collapsing on roads or in doorways or in fields, or anywhere they fell, would have affected him greatly when he grew up and remembered those times. Some might even say, given that he was born in the year that became known as “Black ‘47”, and later gave birth to the blackest, most evil figure ever to stride through the pages of literature and through the minds of men, that his birth could be in itself seen as a bad omen, a harbinger of death and misery.
Tales of the “coffin ships” that carried desperate Irishmen and women and children to the hoped-for safety of the New World, and on which many died, thus giving rise to the name, almost presage the situation aboard the Demeter, when the count stalks and hunts his prey on the ship as it heads for England.
“[30 April] The fever spreads and to the other horrors of the steerage is added cries of those in delirium. While coming from the galley this afternoon, with a pan of stirabout for some sick children, a man suddenly sprang upward from the hatchway, rushed to the bulwark, his white hair streaming in the wind, and without a moment’s hesitation, leaped into the seething waters. He disappeared beneath them at once.”
[13 May] . . . I saw a shapeless heap move past our ship on the outgoing tide. Presently there was another and another. Craning my head over the bulwark I watched. Another came, it caught in one cable, and before the swish of the current washed it clear, I had caught a glimpse of a white face. I understood it all. The ship ahead of us had emigrants and they were throwing overboard their dead.”
While Bram was born into a time when women were supposed to be silent and subservient, submissive and obedient to their husbands, and take second place in all things, it’s quite clear that Charlotte wore, figuratively if not literally, the trousers in the relationship. She was certainly one of the old breed of strong matriarchal figures so prevalent in the Gothic fiction popular at the time; a woman whose word was law, who the family looked up to, perhaps even feared, and against whom not even her husband dared go. As such, hers was the mind that shaped that of her young sickly son, and she had very clear ideas about education and language.
“A man’s mind without language”, she wrote,
“is a perfect blank; he recognizes no will but his own natural impulses; he is alone in the midst of his fellow-men; an outcast from society and its pleasures; a man in outward appearance, in reality reduced to the level of brute creation.”
So she would have very much encouraged - even forced - learning in her son (about her daughters she could care less, snapping that she “didn’t care tuppence” about their education) in the hope he would, perhaps and probably, rise to far more ambitious heights than her husband, his father, who worked almost all of his life as a clerk in Dublin Castle, only attaining the dizzy heights of senior clerk twelve years before he retired, having spent a total of forty years as junior and then assistant clerk. Charlotte surely wanted better for her sons, and was determined they should not disappoint. In the event, her hopes were realised, as Bram’s elder brother Thomas became 1st Baronet and a famous and respected surgeon, while her second son would literally write his name in the annals of history, a name never to be forgotten or unknown.
Although Ireland was by no means known as a place of learning, outside of the monasteries and state-run schools, with over half the population unable to read, the hammer blow of the Great Famine pushed this as a necessity, as while you could be a farmer without having ever to read a word in a book, the over-reliance on that way of life had been partly responsible for there being so much death and hunger, and people began to wean themselves off the agricultural path and into those which not only promised better money and prospects, but allowed them to leave behind the dependence on the humble potato crop. These pursuits though - the law, medicine, the sciences, government, and even less salubrious posts such as shopkeepers or teachers - all required at least a basic working knowledge of the printed word. Luckily for Charlotte - and Bram - they were Protestants, and so no real avenue of education or advancement was closed off to them, unlike the poor Catholics, who were still banned from holding many positions by the Penal Laws.
But Ireland has a rich tradition of folk tales, mostly told in oral form, and by the mid to late nineteenth century there had begun a rising interest in such things, as, along with the resurgence in popularity of the Gothic novel and Penny Dreadfuls, books of fairy-tales, translate from French, German and even Arabic, began to crop up in bookstores and in the carts of wandering pedlars for sale. Stories like
Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Sleeping Beauty and
Cinderella all made their way to Irish shores, where there was a ready market for them from people already familiar with tales of sprites and fairies. As he lay abed, Bram’s mother is likely to have read these stories to her sickly son, further firing his imagination with accounts of fantastical adventures, magic, evil and strange lands.
Unlike Irish and English fairy tales, which, while they preached cautionary tales, were more concerned with the idea of straying over to the dark side of paganism and a move away from God, German ones in particular seemed to take visceral delight in describing in gleefully graphic detail what happened when children - always children - didn’t do as they were told. One of the stories which may have had the most effect on the young Stoker is that of
Oswald, the Night Wanderer, who is transformed into a bat and flies away. Uh-huh. This idea, while surely at least partially responsible for the linkage of vampires with bats, could also have given rise to the “children of the night” description Dracula gives the howling animals outside his castle; those who were seen to disobey, rebel or fight against the innate goodness and obedience their parents or other authority figures tried to instil in them were destined to be lost, cast out, wandering the trackless depths of the night, forever bemoaning their fate and, just maybe, plotting revenge on those who had abandoned them.
Another major influence on Stoker was the pantomime, performed at Christmas and featuring disparate characters drawn from lore, fairy tales, other stories and mythologies. One prominent character in these was often the demon king, and of course there were, as has already been laid out, numerous plays in circulation based mostly on Polidori’s
The Vampyre, all of which would have given shape to Stoker’s later vision of his own demon king. Considering the change in him after his illness, it’s of course ridiculous but nevertheless intriguing to think that he had somehow drained the life-essence out of some doctor or other ministering person, as his count would drain Jonathan Harker, changing from a wizened, fragile and ancient figure into a powerful, strong, handsome and virile young man.
His mother, though, was to be disappointed if she expected him to gain academic honours. He barely scraped in through the entrance examination for Trinity College in Dublin in 1864, and once there proved a poor student, leaving in 1866 to join his father in a clerical post at Dublin Castle, but returning one year later and, while still no brainiac, excelled in sports and athletics, becoming one of the college’s most successful athletes, winning trophy after trophy, and also seeing the fruits of his imagination and interest in literature blossom in his presidency of both the Historical Society and the Philosophical Society, the only man ever to hold both posts.
In 1867 he met the man who was to have such an effect on his life - almost literally hold him in his thrall - and it’s interesting that a quote from him about actor Henry Irving could almost be read as one about his most famous creation, with the removal of one word: “a being of another social world.” Irving certainly wove a subtle spell around his new acolyte, and it’s hard not to see the genesis of Count Dracula in the tall, inspiring actor who would take him on as his protege. Other phrases in the same quote echo his future creation too:
“(whose ridicule) seemed to bite; shrouded and veiled; handsome, distinguished and self-dependent (though of course Dracula, when Harker encounters him first, is none of these things, save perhaps the middle one);
slumbrous energy; patrician figure; supreme and unsurpassable insolence; fine of manner.”