Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Claire Carroll.
Literature Expert. Updated March 31, Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Carroll, Claire. Abraham 'Bram' Stoker was born 8 November in Dublin, Ireland to a civil servant father and charity worker and writer mother. He was a sickly child and spent lots of time in bed being told horror stories by his mother.
He entered Trinity College Dublin in and while he studied he also worked as a civil servant, turning his hand to journalism and drama criticism on a part-time basis. A fan of the romantic movement in literature, Stoker corresponded with Walt Whitman and was a friend of Oscar Wilde. A dull life in civil service provided the inspiration necessary to produce such master works as the classic horror tale 'Dracula' and numerous collections of horror short stories. In he met the famous actor Henry Irving and they soon became friends.
It appears that Stoker was always interested in writing because, for a time, he worked as a drama critic; additionally, the author whom he most admired was Walt Whitman, whose controversial book of poetry, Leaves of Grass, Stoker publicly defended. After years of correspondence, Stoker finally met Whitman in , and he met him again a few more times, the last time in Stoker also worked for the Irish civil service, much like his father had done.
In , when Stoker was twenty-nine years old, he met the famous and talented actor Henry Irving, a meeting which became of great value to both men.
Of course, Stoker had seen Irving many times before this, witnessing with awe Irving's considerable dramatic talent. Stoker and Irving became close friends, and Stoker soon became the actor-manager of Irving's theater. Stoker appears to have enjoyed the life of the theater for he held the position for twenty-seven years, beginning in , until Irving's death in October of At the time, Stoker was thirty-one years old, Wilde only twenty-four.
Stoker and Wilde remained friends, however, and Stoker was admitted into Wilde's literary circle. Bram Stoker's son and only child, Noel, was born in , and in Stoker published his first substantial literary effort, Under the Sunset, a collection of tales for children. Stoker's Dracula appeared in The story is centered around the diaries and journal entries of Jonathan Harke when he meets the mysterious Count Dracula.
The Transylvanian follows Harke to England, where the count continues his blood-thirsty endeavors. Laced with themes of lust and desire, Stoker spins a bloodcurdling tale that still haunts readers more than one hundred years after it was first published. Dracula is generally regarded as the culmination of the Gothic style of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries vampire story, preceded earlier in the nineteenth century by William Polidori's The Vampyre, Thomas Prest's Varney the Vampyre, J.
An early reviewer of Dracula in the Spectator commented that "the up-to-dateness of the book—the phonograph diaries, typewriters, and so on—hardly fits in with the medieval methods which ultimately secure the victory for Count Dracula's foes. Some early critics of Stoker's novel noted the "unnecessary number of hideous incidents" which could "shock and disgust" readers of Dracula. One critic even advised keeping the novel away from children and nervous adults.
Initially, Dracula was interpreted as a straightforward horror novel. Dorothy Scarborough indicated the direction of future criticism in when she wrote that "Bram Stoker furnished us with several interesting specimens of supernatural life always tangled with other uncanny motives. Critics have since tended to view Dracula from a Freudian psychosexual standpoint, which deals with the sexual desires of the unconscious mind.
However, the novel has also been interpreted from folkloric, political, medical, and religious points of view. Today the name of Dracula is familiar to many people who may be wholly unaware of Stoker's identity, though the popularly held image of the vampire bears little resemblance to the demonic being that Stoker depicted.
Adaptations of Dracula in plays and films have taken enormous creative freedoms with Stoker's characterization. A resurgence of interest in traditional folklore has revealed that Stoker himself did not use established vampire legends. Yet Dracula has had tremendous impact on readers since its publication. Whether Stoker created a universal fear, or as some modern critics would have it, gave form to a universal fantasy, he created a powerful and lasting image that has become a part of popular culture.
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