Bram Stoker was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1847. The son of a civil servant, Stoker was a sickly child. Stoker’s mother, a charity worker and writer, spent a good deal of time entertaining her son with fantastic tales. Stoker went on to study math at Trinity College and graduated in 1867, at which time he joined the Irish civil service. He also worked as a freelance journalist and drama critic, which enabled him to meet the legendary stage actor Henry Irving. The two men became lifelong friends, and Stoker managed Irving’s theater from 1878 until Irving’s death in 1905. Stoker married an aspiring actress, Florence Balcombe, and the couple had one son, Noel, who was born in 1879. Stoker moved to London in order to oversee Irving’s theater, and he fell into the city’s literary circles, which included figures such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
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Stoker also relies heavily on the conventions of Gothic fiction, a genre that was extremely popular in the early nineteenth century. Gothic fiction traditionally includes elements such as gloomy castles, sublime landscapes, and innocent maidens threatened by ineffable evil. Stoker modernizes this tradition in his novel, however, moving from the conventional setting of Dracula’s ruined castle into the bustle of modern England. As Stoker portrays the collision of two disparate worlds—the count’s ancient Transylvania and the protagonist’s modern London—he lays bare many of the anxieties that characterized his age: the repercussions of scientific advancement, the consequences of abandoning traditional beliefs, and the dangers of female sexuality. To this day, Dracula remains a fascinating study of popular attitudes toward sex, religion, and science at the end of the nineteenth century.
Note that while there are stakes pounded in hearts and a head stuffed with garlic and the like, I did not find this a particularly gruesome book. The (full) SparkNotes entry was actually more gruesome than the book.
Never in a zillion years would I have guessed the author of Dracula was Irish.
My husband, middle and I have all read Dracula. My husband and I read it recently for one of our book review groups. Middle read it several years ago, in French. She suspects she missed a lot of the nuance of the story, because she was translating as she went. I have heard it said that one has to think in the language to really get it.
My husband and I loved this book.
It is yet another example of a story I did not think I would enjoy and it would have been on the bottom of my stack if it had not been assigned.
Most excellent writing, plot, characters, tale.
When I finished it, I could have turned around and listened to the whole thing again and picked up nuance that I missed the first time.
A very rich read.
