Bram Stoker

Life

Abraham Stoker was born in Clontarf, near Dublin, in November 1847, the third of seven children. He was bedridden with an unexplained illness until about the age of seven, then recovered fully and became an athlete at Trinity College Dublin, where he studied mathematics and was president of the Philosophical Society. After graduating he joined the Irish civil service and, in his spare time, wrote theater reviews for a Dublin newspaper.

A favorable review of the actor Henry Irving’s Hamlet in 1876 led to a friendship, and in 1878 Irving invited Stoker to London to manage the Lyceum Theatre, which Irving had just taken over. Stoker held the position for twenty-seven years, handling the business of one of the most important theaters in the English-speaking world and accompanying Irving on tours of Britain and North America. He married Florence Balcombe the same year he moved to London, and they had one son.

Stoker wrote fiction alongside his theater work, producing a dozen novels and several story collections. Dracula was published in 1897 after years of research and planning. After Irving’s death in 1905 Stoker’s finances and health declined; he suffered a stroke and died in London in April 1912.

Literary significance

Stoker’s reputation rests on Dracula. The rest of his fiction, including The Jewel of Seven Stars and The Lair of the White Worm, is read mainly by enthusiasts. Dracula, however, became the source of one of the most durable figures in popular culture, and its combination of Gothic material with the documentary apparatus of the 1890s, diaries, letters, typewriters, and phonographs, has kept it a subject of serious study as well as a popular horror novel. Nearly every later vampire story defines itself with or against Stoker’s version.

Where to start

Dracula is the book, and the only one of Stoker’s works in our catalog. The early chapters set in the Count’s castle are the strongest and will tell a reader quickly whether the rest is for them.