November 2, 2024 • 35 mins
This 2020 episode covers the life of the man who created Dracula. But even Bram Stoker's own life story - at least as he told it - may have some fictional elements.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Since October felt a little light on the
Halloween episodes this year, and since his name came up
in our discussions of Horace Walpole, today we are returning
to our episode on Bram Stoker, Oh Bram. This originally
came out October nineteenth, twenty twenty. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff
(00:26):
You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm
Tracy B. Wilson. So Tracy. The story that begins with
Jonathan Harker's travels to Transylvania on a business trip to
complete a real estate deal. This one almost everybody knows.
(00:48):
If I tell you that phrase, you would say, I
would say Dracula, right, because Dracula is iconic, And we
have talked about Dracula on several episodes of this podcast,
when we talked about the lives of Christopher Lee and
FW Murnow and Bela Lugosi and Dwight fry And it
seems like we must have talked about the life of
(01:09):
Bram Stoker before. Yeah, we have not. No, we had
a whole conversation where you were like, I can't believe
we haven't done this, and I was like, but we did, though, no,
we definitely it has come up. I feel like what's
come up more than Bram Stoker himself is his estate
and his widow not giving people permission to adapt his work.
(01:30):
But really we have not talked about him at all.
This is a case where once I started getting into
the research, after you and I had that discussion, I
knew we had not talked about it at all because
there's part of his story I one hundred percent would
have remembered and have been texting all of my friends
about for the last several days leading up to this recording.
(01:52):
So today we are going to talk about Bram Stoker.
Abraham Stoker was born on November eighth, eighteen forty seven.
His parents lived in the Klontarf suburb of Dublin, Ireland.
His father was also named Abraham Stoker. His mother was
Charlotte Matilda Blake Thornley Stoker and this was a large family.
(02:12):
Brahm had two siblings when he was born, and the
Stokers had another four more children after him. And as
a child, Bram, who was still going by Abraham at
that age, but to separate from his dad, will go
ahead and go to his adopted name of Brown. Was
not healthy. He was confined to his bed or wherever
an adult would carry him for the first seven years
(02:33):
of his life. And we don't actually know what the
nature of this illness was, and there have been all
kinds of theories, from it possibly having been some sort
of a fever, to a psychological element being part of it,
possibly a trauma of some kind, but this is absolutely
all speculation. We do not know what was up here.
Most biographers make the case that this early phase of
(02:55):
Stoker's life definitely influenced everything that came afterward. Ram's mother
told him about the cholera epidemic that she had lived through,
and specifically people being buried alive. His father would tell
him family stories, including military battles, and also described plays
that he had seen. All of this seated Stoker's imagination,
(03:18):
and he had a lot of time alone with his
thoughts since he couldn't really get up and go play
with his siblings and his peers. But despite this early
start in this mystery ailment, Stoker made a full recovery.
Biographer Barbara Belford, who is one of several biographers that
wrote about him, mentions how very odd it is that
(03:38):
Stoker never gave any detail of his illness in his
writing about himself. This was not a family that was
ignorant of medical matters. His uncle, William Stoker was the
family doctor. He also had three brothers who became doctors.
But the truth of those early years seems to have
been obscured and lost to time. Although a lot lot
(04:00):
of scholars of Stoker's work have scoured his writing for clues,
like anytime he mentions a child being ill, are they like,
is this a reference to his youth? But details regarding
the end of his illness are as murky as the
illnesses itself. He would later write, quote, this early weakness
passed away, and I grew into a strong boy in time,
in large to the biggest member of my family. In
(04:22):
eighteen sixty four, when Stoker was seventeen, he enrolled at
Trinity College at the University of Dublin, And while he
may have started life in pretty poor health as a
college student, he was actually really athletic. He was an
accomplished gymnast and a rugby player. He also participated in
endurance race walking. He won prizes in five and seven
(04:44):
mile walks. He also cut up pretty striking figure. He
was six foot two with red hair, and he was popular,
invited to join both the Historical Society and the Philosophical Society,
and he was elected to positions of responsibility in each
of them. His time at Trinity overlapped with that of
Oscar Wilde, who was younger than Stoker. The two of
(05:04):
them knew each other, and Bram had actually nominated wild
for membership of the Philosophical Society. Yeah, that's an interesting overlap.
It will come up again in just a bit. So
here's the thing. Stoker's performance in school did not really
hint to his future legacy. While he excelled at sports,
he was kind of an average student academically. But he
(05:27):
was writing essays and papers about things that sparked his
interest in his societal participations, including ones titled Sensationalism in
Fiction and Society and the Necessity for Political Honesty. In
eighteen seventy, he graduated from Trinity. He would later say
he graduated with honors in mathematics. This is untrue. Trinity
(05:48):
College actually has a biography of him, and they're like,
we don't know where he got this. If you're wondering
about it taking six years for him to earn a
bachelor's degree. That's because he was also for all but
the first two years of that schooling, Stoker took a
civil service job at Dublin Castle thanks to an assist
from his father, who had also worked there as a
(06:10):
civil servant until his retirement in eighteen sixty five. So
he was working six and a half days a week
while also taking classes. So at that point six years
is fast to me. Yes, me as well. And it's
one of those things where it's almost like this sets
the stage for his whole life of just being constantly
working on a lot of things and making time for
(06:32):
more things than anyone human should fit in a day.
But after he finished school, he continued in his civil
service position, although he also continued to be interested in literature.
In his last years of school, Stoker became somewhat obsessed
with Walt Whitman, and that deep interest in the man
in his work continued long after graduation from Trinity. In
(06:53):
February eighteen seventy two, Stoker wrote Whitman a two thousand
word letter in which he said, among others things, quote,
you have shaken off the shackles, and your wings are free.
I have the shackles on my shoulder still, but I
have no wings. Stoker's letter continues on to describe himself
and detail including the sorts of things that a person
(07:15):
today might normally share, maybe with a therapist, including how
he chose to interact with people, as well as the
sort of things he might tell a pen pal, and
then it concluded with quote, now I have told you
all I know about myself. Stoker didn't actually mail this
letter to Whitman, though, instead he left it in his
desk for the next four years, intending to make a
(07:37):
clean copy to send. This is a level of procrastination
I feel like I can experience in my life. I
think we all can. There's also the possibility, and again
this is a matter of speculation that some people have
theorized that he recognized how sort of raw and familiar
this letter was, and like, while that may have been
(07:59):
his truest feelings, he was also a little trepidacious about
actually sharing it, Like, maybe I shouldn't send this to someone, right,
Maybe I don't even want to acknowledge that I just
wrote all of these things to my literary hero, because
that's weird. We'll talk more about of this whole thing
on Friday. But after a gathering at which Whitman's work
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was criticized and rebutted in eighteen seventy six, and we
should point out that, you know, Whitman was controversial in
his time. There were poems, for example, that were part
of Leaves of Grass that were left out of some
publications of that work, particularly in Britain. There was a
lot of discussion about whether his work was appropriate in
some cases. But at that gathering Stoker provided the defense
(08:43):
position of the poet, and afterwards he wrote another letter
to Walt Whitman, similarly familiar and kind of intimate, where
he talked about having defended him because he thinks he
is such a great man. And this time he actually
mailed it as well as that one that had sat
in his desk drawer all of the intervening time. And
Whitman got these letters and replied that he hoped that
(09:05):
the two of them would one day meet, and he
commented on the unconventional, manly and affectionate way in which
Stoker had addressed him. Those are all adjectives that I
am quoting from Witmen regarding Bram Stoker's writing, Yeah, if
you want to know more about Walt Whitman in his writing,
we have a previous episode on him that I feel
like has been a Saturday classic. Not that long ago,
(09:27):
but it has been long ago enough ago since we
recorded it that I have no recollection. If it mentions
Bram Stoker in any way, I don't think so, because
I think I would have remembered that. Uh So. Anyway,
Whitman had been particularly delighted in all this by a
passage in which Stoker called him the quote father, brother,
(09:48):
and wife to his soul. Whitman later told a friend
that he felt that Stoker had actually been writing to
himself and kind of working through his own thoughts, and
that he felt compelled to respond to the young man.
Although Stoker had hoped that Whitman might one day travel
to Ireland and they could meet, Whitman's health at the
time kept that from ever happening. Yeah, he was not
(10:10):
able to travel, But don't give up on that thought.
This writing. These letters to Walt Whitman are the only
instances of writing from Stoker's youth where he speaks so
openly about himself and his inner world. He tends to
kind of keep his private thoughts private for most of
the rest of his writing, so they have become a
(10:31):
really important part of his history. In eighteen seventy six,
Stoker was promoted into the newly created position of Inspector
of Courts of Petty Sessions, and this many had a
travel to various municipalities and audit their small claims courts.
Three years into the job, he published a book on
this subject called The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions
(10:53):
in Ireland. Bless him. This sounds dull as dirt. I mean,
it's literally like going to a court and hearing people
talk about things. In one biography they mentioned him sitting
in on hearings about things like dog licenses, you know,
neighbors complaining against one another. But meanwhile, while working in
his civil service job by day and probably finding it
(11:16):
a little less than intellectually stimulating, Stoker started a side
hustle in the evenings as a writer on more interesting topics.
He first wrote theater reviews. He did not get paid
for these, but he did create a significant change at
the Dublin Evening Mail in working on them. Up to
that point, theater reviews normally published two days after the
(11:36):
show that was being reviewed, so if you went to
a show on Friday night, the review of it would
appear Sunday. But Stoker, who again was a very busy
bee and would pack a lot of work into any day,
instigated a shift so that next day reviews would run
at the paper, so if you saw that Friday show,
the review would run on the Saturday morning. And learning
the discipline of writing and doing this on a deadline
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enabled him to turn his pen to more creative efforts,
and he started writing short stories as well. In eighteen
seventy two, he had actually already published the first of
his short stories that was one called The Crystal Cup,
but in the late eighteen seventies he also started editing
a fiction magazine. In eighteen seventy five, he published a
novella over several installments in the periodical The Shamrock. That
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story is called The Primrose Path and was published under
the name A Stoker Esquire that unfolds over ten chapters.
This is a morality tale about the dangers of alcohol,
and it tells the story of a carpenter from Dublin
who moves to London and becomes an alcoholic, which ultimately
leads to misery, so much misery. It's a very dark,
(12:43):
dark story in many ways. In late eighteen seventy six,
Bram Stoker wrote a theater review that changed the course
of his life. And we're going to talk about that
after we first pause for a sponsor break. As we
(13:04):
said before the break. In eighteen seventy six, Bram Stoker
wrote a review. This review was of Henry Irving's performance
as Hamlet, and it was glowing. Bram was already something
of a Henry Irving fan. He had seen the famous
actor on stage for the first time in eighteen sixty seven,
when he had attended a performance of The Rivals in Dublin,
and he had when he saw that first performance, been
(13:27):
thinking about a career in acting himself. And Irving asked
Stoker out to dinner as a thank you for this.
This was a start of a long and very close friendship.
Henry Irving became a pivotal figure in Bram Stoker's life.
So it's worth giving his biography a little attention, just
for context. So Irving was born John Henry Broadribb in Somerset, England,
(13:48):
on February sixth eighteen thirty eight, and when he was
six his parents moved to Bristol, where his father had
found a new job, but they left John Henry with
an aunt and uncle in Cornwall rather than moving him
to a city. He did rejoin his parents a few
years later in London at the age of ten. He
started work as a clerk as a young man, but
really always wanted a life in the theater, so with
(14:10):
financial assistance from a relative, he started purchasing costumes and wigs,
and then he bought a role for himself in a
local production of Romeo and Juliet. He appeared in that
as Henry Irving. From there he started working with stock
companies as a bit performer and was in hundreds of
shows touring at Great Britain. Yeah, I read one statistic
(14:30):
that said something like over the course of three years
he was in four hundred different roles, so he was
doing a lot of very small bit players kind of acting.
Irving really started gating recognition in the mid eighteen sixties
and in eighteen seventy one he became very famous for
his appearance in The Bells at the Lyceum Theater. He
(14:50):
appeared at the Lyceum as the star of the company
for the next several years, and it was in late
eighteen seventy six that he starred in Hamlet, which was
of course reviewed by Bram Stoker for the Dublin Evening Mail,
and after reading that review in the morning, Irving wanted
to have dinner with Stoker that very evening. The two
men wrote letters to one another for several years, and
(15:11):
in eighteen seventy seven Irving made a move that really
changed Sooker's life. He purchased the Lyceum Theater in London
and asked Stoker to be its manager. Irving would work
as the director of the productions and of course also
star in them, and then Stoker would handle the business,
from tickets to press releases and managing the staff. This
(15:31):
was a really big ask. Henry Irving was the most
famous actor in late nineteenth century England, and he was
also known to be intense and demanding and uncompromising. And
Bram Stoker, who adored Irving, didn't think twice about it.
He bidded you to Ireland and his civil service job
to start anew as Henry Irving's business manager. Essentially, in
(15:53):
eighteen seventy eight, and this job was not a hobby job,
so the two of them could hang out. The lycee
him was large, with a seating capacity of two thousand,
and it was a social hub for London society in
addition to all the regular business of his position, entertaining
the illustrious patrons of the theater after shows with luxurious
(16:15):
dinners that also fell under Stoker's job description. This is
a gigantic job for one person, yes it is. In
doing this though he met numerous luminaries, including Mark Twain,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Prime Minister Gladstone. This is
so much work, and despite these long hours demanded of
(16:35):
this job, Stoker still found time to write. And this
was on top of the fact that he was writing
several dozen letters a day on behalf of Henry Irving,
so handling both his business correspondents and his personal correspondence
and things like fan mail. Somehow, while doing all of this,
Stoker also got married in eighteen seventy eight to Florence Balcolm.
(16:58):
Florence was eleven year years younger than he was and
was pretty outgoing, whereas he was more shy and reserved
her claim to historical fame is being the exquisitely pretty
girl that Oscar Wilde fell in love with, and she
didn't apparently tell wild that she had married his friend
from Trinity. While he was off traveling, Oscar Wilde wrote
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her a letter that he wished to have a gold
crossback that he had given to her because it represented
the sweetest time of his youth. She told him that
he could come to their home and get it, but
he thought that would be inappropriate and ask that they
meet at her parents' home instead. And Florence, for her part,
also wanted something back. She wanted all of the letters
that she had sent Oscar Wilde when they were corresponding
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and courting. It is unclear if these things were ever
exchanged and given back to each other. This whole interaction,
and this sort of triangle of relationships, is often summarized
as Florence having the choice to marry either Bram Stoker
or Oscar Wilde. But while Oscar Wilde, in his writing
to her, does seem to have really been hurt by
(18:05):
Florence marrying his friend, there's no evidence that he was
ever suggesting that he should be her husband or that
they should get married, and Wild and Stoker did remain
friends despite this whole thing. Bram and Florence had one child,
a son named Nol, and that was the first year
after they were married. Maybe in response to finding himself
a father. In eighteen eighty one, Stoker published a book
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of children's stories called Under the Sunset. There didn't seem
to be a lot of discord in the Stoker marriage,
but there also didn't seem to be that much closeness
or devotion between them either. No, they did a lot
of stuff separately. Stoker was a man who valued efficiency
and organization, and he was absolutely excellent at managing Irving's
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every need at the theater, and he seemed to put
his job and Irving ahead of everything else in his life,
including his own family. For example, the newlywed Stokers even
gift to honeymoon instead. Bram and Florence had traveled to
Birmingham so Bram could work. Stoker had not even told
his boss that he was getting married. In eighteen eighty three,
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the Lyceum Theater mounted a tour in North America. Stoker
managed all of the logistics, so the first of many
such tours, and Stoker collected his experiences into a travelogue
called A Glimpse of America that came out in eighteen
eighty six. On these travels to the US, Stoker met
two presidents, McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, and more importantly, he
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was finally able to meet Walt Whitman. And at this
point these two writers had been trading letters for years,
so there was a pretty easy friendship to their meeting.
Although descriptions kind of make it sound like Stoker was
initially a little nervous, there was one blemish to mar
this beautiful occasion, though Henry Irving had insisted on going
to meet Walt Whitman as well, so Stoker felt a
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little bit cheated of the intimate conversation that he had
dreamed of having with his idol. Witman noted also that
Stoker had switched from going by Abraham Stoker to Bram Stoker,
and he did not particularly like that shift in name.
He just didn't think it was very dignified. But overall
it was a really, really good meeting, and Stoker declared
Walt Whitman to be quote a man amongst men. During
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the eighteen nineties, Stoker was still publishing novels, including The
Waters Moot and that features star crossed lovers as part
of the story. There's also The Shoulder of Shasta, which
is a romance set in northern California. Even as these
books were being published, he was also working on what
would become his masterpiece, Dracula. While Bram Stoker was normally
(20:40):
a very fast writer, Dracula took him far longer than
his previous novels. He wrote it over the course of
seven years, perhaps even longer, but that's how long we know.
He was working on it while he was touring with
Irving and working on other writing projects. We'll talk a
little more about some of the research that went into
the most famous of Stockeker's books after we first take
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a break for a word from the sponsors that keeps
stuffymuths in history class going. If you look at the
notes that Stoker compiled as he was assembling his Vampiric Tale,
it becomes really apparent that he was, as we mentioned earlier, meticulous.
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He had carefully plotted out Jonathan Harker's journey to Transylvania
by train, using actual train schedules and only using connections
that he believed would have actually worked, and he created
a table of all of the correspondents that would appear
in the book to ensure that the dates that they
posted and the dates that they would arrive in the
recipient's hands was realistic. It also seems as though all
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of his work running a theater and tours kind of
informed the way he constructed narrative. He also was a
writer who really believed in research, and his work researching
what would become the novel Dracula is really deeply associate
with the town of Whitby, England's on the country's east coast.
He is said to have visited a library in Whitby
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to look at a specific selection of the Special Collections
title by William Wilkinson, which is an account of the
principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with various political observations relating
to them. It is from this book that he is
said to have learned of the name Dracula in relation
to vlad Tapesh. Prior to this, Stoker was planning to
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name his villainous character Count Vampier. This was a rare book.
It's an odd thing for Stoker to have just known about,
but a friend he knew from his theater circle Arminius
van Berry had told him about the story of the
Wilachean count and the book that he could find it in. Yeah,
it piece of knowledge. It's a very strange thing, right.
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I can only imagine as a librarian having someone walk
in and be like, hey, you know that rare book
that you don't even tell people you have. I would
like to see it. I mean, it's literally that strange.
Stoker then visited the Whitby Museum to work on that
route that we mentioned a moment ago for Harker to take,
including making notes about latitude and longitude, and next Stoker
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consulted with the Royal Coast Guard at the nearby harbor
and discussed the topic they would figure prominently in the
story of Dracula. In eighteen eighty five, the ship Dmitri
had left the port of Narva in Estonia and had
run aground near Whitby. According to the locals, only a
few members of the crew survived, and there was a
black dog that emerged from the ship and ran off
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while rescue efforts were underway. The Dmitri had been carrying
crates of silver sand that may sound mysterious, but silver
sand is actually a fine white sand that is commonly
used in construction mortar. But if you've read Dracula, that
might sound familiar, but not exactly the way you remember it.
Stoker borrowed the story of the Dmitri for the novel,
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making the show the conveyance of Count Dracula from his
home country to London, but in the fictional version the
name is changed to the Demeter, which also invokes the
Greek goddess and its associations with the cycle of life
and death, and Narva changes to Varna, Bulgaria as the
departure point for the ship. In Stoker's fictionalized version, the
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silver sand remains, but the ship is also filled with
crates of earth from Count Dracula's homeland, and then, of course,
the black Dog becomes an embodiment of the vampire himself.
Stoker's research wasn't confined to Whitby. He continued to consult
the library regularly to make notes that would contribute to
Dracula once he was back in London, but Whitby is
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very closely associated with the book at this point. Vampire
stories long predated Dracula, and like there are vampire like
entities like all over the world in various mythology and
folklore and fiction. But Stoker's version of vamporism is really
what we've come to know as like the classic vampire tropes,
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the vampire being able to shape shift into animals, the
count suddenly becoming almost crazed with thirst when Harker cuts
himself shaving, and the vampire needing to be invited into
a home. All that's present here in the nineteen oh
one Icelandic edition of Dracula, titled Macht Mirkrana, which translates
to Powers of Darkness. The preface that Stoker wrote includes
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insistence that the events relayed in the Dracula story are true,
writing quote, I am quite convinced that there is no
doubt whatever that the events here described really took place,
however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight,
and I am further convinced that they must always remain
to some extent incomprehensible, although continuing research in psychology and
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natural sciences may in years to come give logical explanation
of such strange happenings, which at present neither scientists nor
the secret police can understand. I state again that this
mysterious tragedy which is here described is completely true in
all its external respects, though naturally I have reached a
different conclusion on certain points than those involved in the story.
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But the events are incontrovertible, and so many people know
of them that they cannot be denied. So this has
led to all kinds of speculation since it came out
about whether Stoker was referencing Jack the Ripper here. The
Icelandic version of the book is different from the originally
published version, though having been abridged quite a bit. When
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it was translated back into English in twenty fourteen, it
became really apparent that the original translator of Stoker's work
into Icelandic, Vladimir Asmundsen, had reworked the plot significantly and
created a very different story. I remember when the English
speaking world found out about this and was like, what, Yeah,
(26:55):
it's actually really good if anybody wants to if you
seek it out. I think right now, as we record
this in October twenty twenty, if you have an Amazon
Prime account, I think you can download the Kindle version
for free, and Audible has the audio version available as
a freebie, and it's really quite delightful, and if you
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are a person who loves Dracula, it's very interesting because
there are characters you have never seen before in the story.
There are events play out very differently. Some things are condensed,
some things are gone completely, and it's just a new
way to experience this piece of lore. Yeah. I also
feel like I should just clarify that most people in
Iceland also speak English. When I say the English speaking world,
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I mean like places like the United States in Britain. Yes.
When Dracula was originally published in eighteen ninety seven, it
was really well received, but it really didn't hint that
the global long reaching popularity it would eventually achieve. It
was kind of like, you know if you see a
movie and it's like a great movie that year, but
you don't think, like, oh, this is going to launch
(28:02):
a kajillion things. Stoker's mother, Charlotte, is said to have
quite liked it and actually believed it would be a
huge success and be one of the things for which
her son would be remembered. Publishers in the United States
were not initially interested in this story, so Stoker actually
purchased the US copyright for himself. The first American edition
of the book appeared in eighteen ninety nine. Analysis of
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the text alongside Stoker's life story has sometimes led people
to believe that Dracula as a character is based at
least partially on Henry Irving and his demanding nature. It's
also possible that rather than modeling it on Irving, Stoker
was kind of thinking about how Irving could play the
count in a stage version of the story that actually
(28:47):
did not work out. Stoker had arranged a reading of
the Dracula story in play form at the Theater before
the novel came out. Irving declared it dreadful the fool.
At this point in time, the Lyceum was faltering. The
plays that they staged were not doing as well as
they once had, and Stoker thought that Dracula might be
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an opportunity to regain some interest in financial footing for
the business. But Irving would not have it, and then
the theater had a fire. The building was not destroyed,
but they lost a lot of their stock, props, and scenery.
It was expensive and messy as all of these problems
piled up, and the Lyceum had to enter into a
receivership so that its assets could be liquidated to cover
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its debts. The productions continued, although in less grand stagings
than the theater had once seen. Henry Irving gave his
last performance in October nineteen oh five. He died that night,
just after returning to his hotel. Stoker got there soon
after his friend had collapsed, but it was too late
to save his life. After Irving's death, Bram Stoker wrote
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about his own life and his long business partnership and
friendship with Irving in a two volume book titled per
Reminiscences of Henry Irving. This was Stoker's most popular work
in his lifetime. Although this was not some scandalous reveal
of the man behind the public face Brahm. Stoker wrote
of Irving in the most positive adulation, soaked way imaginable.
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At this point, Stoker was without the job that had
required all of his attention for so many years, and
so he turned to writing full time. From nineteen oh
five to nineteen eleven, he published several short stories and
novels in addition to his Irving memoir. The last of
these was The Lair of the White Worm. It's a
very strange horror tale with a lot going on in
(30:38):
terms of plot threads, including a story about Mongoose's. Yeah,
there's a whole lot going on in that some of
it is very outdated in terms of how different people
so the world's are perceived. In his last year, Stoker
found himself financially strapped. He did some more theater management
to make ends meet, but primarily he continued to focus
(31:00):
on writing. Dracula continued to be popular enough to earn
some royalties, and Stoker also wrote a bit as a
journalist for the Daily Chronicle, profiling notable figures of the day.
He also did something that seems a little bit odd,
which is that he took up the flag of censorship,
as in he was pro censorship. He advocated for banning
inappropriate books and writing that quote, A close analysis will
(31:24):
show that the only emotions which, in the long run
harm are those arising from sex impulses. During that time,
his health also declined. He had a series of strokes
starting in nineteen oh six, and in nineteen ten he
had what he described as a breakdown from overwork. I
was on a petition for a grant from the Royal
Literary Fund and nineteen eleven. Continually dwindling finances led Brahm
(31:49):
and Florence to move into a more modest apartment. They
left the one that had been their home in London
for more than three decades. Bram Stoker died at the
age of sixty four in nineteen twelve. That was the
same week that the Titanic sank. In the days leading
up to his passing, he had, like all of London,
been transfixed by the story of the ship's demise and
the investigation that was soon to begin. Even in death,
(32:13):
Stoker left something of a mystery. There are three causes
of death listed. They are kidney disease, exhaustion, and locomotor ataxia.
So that last one, locomotor ataxia, was generally used as
a synonym for tertiary syphilis, and that, of course has
led to all kinds of speculation about various, usually salacious
(32:37):
ways that he could have contracted syphilis. But looking at
all of his symptoms and his behavior leading up to
his death, that doesn't really add up. It's possible that
he was misdiagnosed due to some of the lingering effects
of the strokes he had had, but we will not
ever really know. Yeah, I have read some biographers are like,
we're not even sure why the coroner put multiple causes
(33:00):
of death when just saying kidney disease would have covered it.
But this fascination with the possibility that Stoker could have
had ciphilists is really part of a much bigger speculation
that has gone on for over a century about the
author's sexuality. And he seems in so many ways to
be a tangle of repression and confusion regarding sexuality and
(33:21):
desire in his writing, with so much erotic content that
it sometimes seems he doesn't even realize he is including.
There are multitudes of papers analyzing the sexuality of Dracula
and the disdain for the Victorian new woman that is
present in a lot of Stoker's work. His obsession with
figures like Whitman and Irving, and his friendship with Oscar Wilde,
(33:42):
who he saw go through the trial that ultimately, you know,
kind of ruined Oscar Wilde's life have naturally led to
speculation about an attraction to men that he may never
have truly recognized. But this, like his childhood infirmity and
his cause of death, can never be conclusively known. Well.
We do know, though, is that Dracula has never been
out of print. It has been adapted into films and
(34:05):
musicals and ballet, and has inspired innumerable other vampire stories,
and it also just continues to do so. Oh, bram
Stoker's Dracula, we can talk more about it in the
behind the scenes. Yes, he's so fascinating and complex. And
I really did not know all of that Walt Whitman
(34:26):
stuff to the degree that played out well. And I
took a second while we were kind of in our
in a in a sponsor break movement to see I
don't think we mentioned any connection to Bram Stoker in
the Walt Whitman episode. Yeah, I don't think so. I yeah,
I want to rewatch all of the Dracula now and
(34:49):
think about him in this way. Thanks so much for
joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send
us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(35:11):
your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. Since October felt a little light on the
Halloween episodes this year, and since his name came up
in our discussions of Horace Walpole, today we are returning
to our episode on Bram Stoker, Oh Bram. This originally
came out October nineteenth, twenty twenty. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff
(00:26):
You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm
Tracy B. Wilson. So Tracy. The story that begins with
Jonathan Harker's travels to Transylvania on a business trip to
complete a real estate deal. This one almost everybody knows.
(00:48):
If I tell you that phrase, you would say, I
would say Dracula, right, because Dracula is iconic, And we
have talked about Dracula on several episodes of this podcast,
when we talked about the lives of Christopher Lee and
FW Murnow and Bela Lugosi and Dwight fry And it
seems like we must have talked about the life of
(01:09):
Bram Stoker before. Yeah, we have not. No, we had
a whole conversation where you were like, I can't believe
we haven't done this, and I was like, but we did, though, no,
we definitely it has come up. I feel like what's
come up more than Bram Stoker himself is his estate
and his widow not giving people permission to adapt his work.
(01:30):
But really we have not talked about him at all.
This is a case where once I started getting into
the research, after you and I had that discussion, I
knew we had not talked about it at all because
there's part of his story I one hundred percent would
have remembered and have been texting all of my friends
about for the last several days leading up to this recording.
(01:52):
So today we are going to talk about Bram Stoker.
Abraham Stoker was born on November eighth, eighteen forty seven.
His parents lived in the Klontarf suburb of Dublin, Ireland.
His father was also named Abraham Stoker. His mother was
Charlotte Matilda Blake Thornley Stoker and this was a large family.
(02:12):
Brahm had two siblings when he was born, and the
Stokers had another four more children after him. And as
a child, Bram, who was still going by Abraham at
that age, but to separate from his dad, will go
ahead and go to his adopted name of Brown. Was
not healthy. He was confined to his bed or wherever
an adult would carry him for the first seven years
(02:33):
of his life. And we don't actually know what the
nature of this illness was, and there have been all
kinds of theories, from it possibly having been some sort
of a fever, to a psychological element being part of it,
possibly a trauma of some kind, but this is absolutely
all speculation. We do not know what was up here.
Most biographers make the case that this early phase of
(02:55):
Stoker's life definitely influenced everything that came afterward. Ram's mother
told him about the cholera epidemic that she had lived through,
and specifically people being buried alive. His father would tell
him family stories, including military battles, and also described plays
that he had seen. All of this seated Stoker's imagination,
(03:18):
and he had a lot of time alone with his
thoughts since he couldn't really get up and go play
with his siblings and his peers. But despite this early
start in this mystery ailment, Stoker made a full recovery.
Biographer Barbara Belford, who is one of several biographers that
wrote about him, mentions how very odd it is that
(03:38):
Stoker never gave any detail of his illness in his
writing about himself. This was not a family that was
ignorant of medical matters. His uncle, William Stoker was the
family doctor. He also had three brothers who became doctors.
But the truth of those early years seems to have
been obscured and lost to time. Although a lot lot
(04:00):
of scholars of Stoker's work have scoured his writing for clues,
like anytime he mentions a child being ill, are they like,
is this a reference to his youth? But details regarding
the end of his illness are as murky as the
illnesses itself. He would later write, quote, this early weakness
passed away, and I grew into a strong boy in time,
in large to the biggest member of my family. In
(04:22):
eighteen sixty four, when Stoker was seventeen, he enrolled at
Trinity College at the University of Dublin, And while he
may have started life in pretty poor health as a
college student, he was actually really athletic. He was an
accomplished gymnast and a rugby player. He also participated in
endurance race walking. He won prizes in five and seven
(04:44):
mile walks. He also cut up pretty striking figure. He
was six foot two with red hair, and he was popular,
invited to join both the Historical Society and the Philosophical Society,
and he was elected to positions of responsibility in each
of them. His time at Trinity overlapped with that of
Oscar Wilde, who was younger than Stoker. The two of
(05:04):
them knew each other, and Bram had actually nominated wild
for membership of the Philosophical Society. Yeah, that's an interesting overlap.
It will come up again in just a bit. So
here's the thing. Stoker's performance in school did not really
hint to his future legacy. While he excelled at sports,
he was kind of an average student academically. But he
(05:27):
was writing essays and papers about things that sparked his
interest in his societal participations, including ones titled Sensationalism in
Fiction and Society and the Necessity for Political Honesty. In
eighteen seventy, he graduated from Trinity. He would later say
he graduated with honors in mathematics. This is untrue. Trinity
(05:48):
College actually has a biography of him, and they're like,
we don't know where he got this. If you're wondering
about it taking six years for him to earn a
bachelor's degree. That's because he was also for all but
the first two years of that schooling, Stoker took a
civil service job at Dublin Castle thanks to an assist
from his father, who had also worked there as a
(06:10):
civil servant until his retirement in eighteen sixty five. So
he was working six and a half days a week
while also taking classes. So at that point six years
is fast to me. Yes, me as well. And it's
one of those things where it's almost like this sets
the stage for his whole life of just being constantly
working on a lot of things and making time for
(06:32):
more things than anyone human should fit in a day.
But after he finished school, he continued in his civil
service position, although he also continued to be interested in literature.
In his last years of school, Stoker became somewhat obsessed
with Walt Whitman, and that deep interest in the man
in his work continued long after graduation from Trinity. In
(06:53):
February eighteen seventy two, Stoker wrote Whitman a two thousand
word letter in which he said, among others things, quote,
you have shaken off the shackles, and your wings are free.
I have the shackles on my shoulder still, but I
have no wings. Stoker's letter continues on to describe himself
and detail including the sorts of things that a person
(07:15):
today might normally share, maybe with a therapist, including how
he chose to interact with people, as well as the
sort of things he might tell a pen pal, and
then it concluded with quote, now I have told you
all I know about myself. Stoker didn't actually mail this
letter to Whitman, though, instead he left it in his
desk for the next four years, intending to make a
(07:37):
clean copy to send. This is a level of procrastination
I feel like I can experience in my life. I
think we all can. There's also the possibility, and again
this is a matter of speculation that some people have
theorized that he recognized how sort of raw and familiar
this letter was, and like, while that may have been
(07:59):
his truest feelings, he was also a little trepidacious about
actually sharing it, Like, maybe I shouldn't send this to someone, right,
Maybe I don't even want to acknowledge that I just
wrote all of these things to my literary hero, because
that's weird. We'll talk more about of this whole thing
on Friday. But after a gathering at which Whitman's work
(08:21):
was criticized and rebutted in eighteen seventy six, and we
should point out that, you know, Whitman was controversial in
his time. There were poems, for example, that were part
of Leaves of Grass that were left out of some
publications of that work, particularly in Britain. There was a
lot of discussion about whether his work was appropriate in
some cases. But at that gathering Stoker provided the defense
(08:43):
position of the poet, and afterwards he wrote another letter
to Walt Whitman, similarly familiar and kind of intimate, where
he talked about having defended him because he thinks he
is such a great man. And this time he actually
mailed it as well as that one that had sat
in his desk drawer all of the intervening time. And
Whitman got these letters and replied that he hoped that
(09:05):
the two of them would one day meet, and he
commented on the unconventional, manly and affectionate way in which
Stoker had addressed him. Those are all adjectives that I
am quoting from Witmen regarding Bram Stoker's writing, Yeah, if
you want to know more about Walt Whitman in his writing,
we have a previous episode on him that I feel
like has been a Saturday classic. Not that long ago,
(09:27):
but it has been long ago enough ago since we
recorded it that I have no recollection. If it mentions
Bram Stoker in any way, I don't think so, because
I think I would have remembered that. Uh So. Anyway,
Whitman had been particularly delighted in all this by a
passage in which Stoker called him the quote father, brother,
(09:48):
and wife to his soul. Whitman later told a friend
that he felt that Stoker had actually been writing to
himself and kind of working through his own thoughts, and
that he felt compelled to respond to the young man.
Although Stoker had hoped that Whitman might one day travel
to Ireland and they could meet, Whitman's health at the
time kept that from ever happening. Yeah, he was not
(10:10):
able to travel, But don't give up on that thought.
This writing. These letters to Walt Whitman are the only
instances of writing from Stoker's youth where he speaks so
openly about himself and his inner world. He tends to
kind of keep his private thoughts private for most of
the rest of his writing, so they have become a
(10:31):
really important part of his history. In eighteen seventy six,
Stoker was promoted into the newly created position of Inspector
of Courts of Petty Sessions, and this many had a
travel to various municipalities and audit their small claims courts.
Three years into the job, he published a book on
this subject called The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions
(10:53):
in Ireland. Bless him. This sounds dull as dirt. I mean,
it's literally like going to a court and hearing people
talk about things. In one biography they mentioned him sitting
in on hearings about things like dog licenses, you know,
neighbors complaining against one another. But meanwhile, while working in
his civil service job by day and probably finding it
(11:16):
a little less than intellectually stimulating, Stoker started a side
hustle in the evenings as a writer on more interesting topics.
He first wrote theater reviews. He did not get paid
for these, but he did create a significant change at
the Dublin Evening Mail in working on them. Up to
that point, theater reviews normally published two days after the
(11:36):
show that was being reviewed, so if you went to
a show on Friday night, the review of it would
appear Sunday. But Stoker, who again was a very busy
bee and would pack a lot of work into any day,
instigated a shift so that next day reviews would run
at the paper, so if you saw that Friday show,
the review would run on the Saturday morning. And learning
the discipline of writing and doing this on a deadline
(11:59):
enabled him to turn his pen to more creative efforts,
and he started writing short stories as well. In eighteen
seventy two, he had actually already published the first of
his short stories that was one called The Crystal Cup,
but in the late eighteen seventies he also started editing
a fiction magazine. In eighteen seventy five, he published a
novella over several installments in the periodical The Shamrock. That
(12:21):
story is called The Primrose Path and was published under
the name A Stoker Esquire that unfolds over ten chapters.
This is a morality tale about the dangers of alcohol,
and it tells the story of a carpenter from Dublin
who moves to London and becomes an alcoholic, which ultimately
leads to misery, so much misery. It's a very dark,
(12:43):
dark story in many ways. In late eighteen seventy six,
Bram Stoker wrote a theater review that changed the course
of his life. And we're going to talk about that
after we first pause for a sponsor break. As we
(13:04):
said before the break. In eighteen seventy six, Bram Stoker
wrote a review. This review was of Henry Irving's performance
as Hamlet, and it was glowing. Bram was already something
of a Henry Irving fan. He had seen the famous
actor on stage for the first time in eighteen sixty seven,
when he had attended a performance of The Rivals in Dublin,
and he had when he saw that first performance, been
(13:27):
thinking about a career in acting himself. And Irving asked
Stoker out to dinner as a thank you for this.
This was a start of a long and very close friendship.
Henry Irving became a pivotal figure in Bram Stoker's life.
So it's worth giving his biography a little attention, just
for context. So Irving was born John Henry Broadribb in Somerset, England,
(13:48):
on February sixth eighteen thirty eight, and when he was
six his parents moved to Bristol, where his father had
found a new job, but they left John Henry with
an aunt and uncle in Cornwall rather than moving him
to a city. He did rejoin his parents a few
years later in London at the age of ten. He
started work as a clerk as a young man, but
really always wanted a life in the theater, so with
(14:10):
financial assistance from a relative, he started purchasing costumes and wigs,
and then he bought a role for himself in a
local production of Romeo and Juliet. He appeared in that
as Henry Irving. From there he started working with stock
companies as a bit performer and was in hundreds of
shows touring at Great Britain. Yeah, I read one statistic
(14:30):
that said something like over the course of three years
he was in four hundred different roles, so he was
doing a lot of very small bit players kind of acting.
Irving really started gating recognition in the mid eighteen sixties
and in eighteen seventy one he became very famous for
his appearance in The Bells at the Lyceum Theater. He
(14:50):
appeared at the Lyceum as the star of the company
for the next several years, and it was in late
eighteen seventy six that he starred in Hamlet, which was
of course reviewed by Bram Stoker for the Dublin Evening Mail,
and after reading that review in the morning, Irving wanted
to have dinner with Stoker that very evening. The two
men wrote letters to one another for several years, and
(15:11):
in eighteen seventy seven Irving made a move that really
changed Sooker's life. He purchased the Lyceum Theater in London
and asked Stoker to be its manager. Irving would work
as the director of the productions and of course also
star in them, and then Stoker would handle the business,
from tickets to press releases and managing the staff. This
(15:31):
was a really big ask. Henry Irving was the most
famous actor in late nineteenth century England, and he was
also known to be intense and demanding and uncompromising. And
Bram Stoker, who adored Irving, didn't think twice about it.
He bidded you to Ireland and his civil service job
to start anew as Henry Irving's business manager. Essentially, in
(15:53):
eighteen seventy eight, and this job was not a hobby job,
so the two of them could hang out. The lycee
him was large, with a seating capacity of two thousand,
and it was a social hub for London society in
addition to all the regular business of his position, entertaining
the illustrious patrons of the theater after shows with luxurious
(16:15):
dinners that also fell under Stoker's job description. This is
a gigantic job for one person, yes it is. In
doing this though he met numerous luminaries, including Mark Twain,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Prime Minister Gladstone. This is
so much work, and despite these long hours demanded of
(16:35):
this job, Stoker still found time to write. And this
was on top of the fact that he was writing
several dozen letters a day on behalf of Henry Irving,
so handling both his business correspondents and his personal correspondence
and things like fan mail. Somehow, while doing all of this,
Stoker also got married in eighteen seventy eight to Florence Balcolm.
(16:58):
Florence was eleven year years younger than he was and
was pretty outgoing, whereas he was more shy and reserved
her claim to historical fame is being the exquisitely pretty
girl that Oscar Wilde fell in love with, and she
didn't apparently tell wild that she had married his friend
from Trinity. While he was off traveling, Oscar Wilde wrote
(17:21):
her a letter that he wished to have a gold
crossback that he had given to her because it represented
the sweetest time of his youth. She told him that
he could come to their home and get it, but
he thought that would be inappropriate and ask that they
meet at her parents' home instead. And Florence, for her part,
also wanted something back. She wanted all of the letters
that she had sent Oscar Wilde when they were corresponding
(17:43):
and courting. It is unclear if these things were ever
exchanged and given back to each other. This whole interaction,
and this sort of triangle of relationships, is often summarized
as Florence having the choice to marry either Bram Stoker
or Oscar Wilde. But while Oscar Wilde, in his writing
to her, does seem to have really been hurt by
(18:05):
Florence marrying his friend, there's no evidence that he was
ever suggesting that he should be her husband or that
they should get married, and Wild and Stoker did remain
friends despite this whole thing. Bram and Florence had one child,
a son named Nol, and that was the first year
after they were married. Maybe in response to finding himself
a father. In eighteen eighty one, Stoker published a book
(18:27):
of children's stories called Under the Sunset. There didn't seem
to be a lot of discord in the Stoker marriage,
but there also didn't seem to be that much closeness
or devotion between them either. No, they did a lot
of stuff separately. Stoker was a man who valued efficiency
and organization, and he was absolutely excellent at managing Irving's
(18:48):
every need at the theater, and he seemed to put
his job and Irving ahead of everything else in his life,
including his own family. For example, the newlywed Stokers even
gift to honeymoon instead. Bram and Florence had traveled to
Birmingham so Bram could work. Stoker had not even told
his boss that he was getting married. In eighteen eighty three,
(19:11):
the Lyceum Theater mounted a tour in North America. Stoker
managed all of the logistics, so the first of many
such tours, and Stoker collected his experiences into a travelogue
called A Glimpse of America that came out in eighteen
eighty six. On these travels to the US, Stoker met
two presidents, McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, and more importantly, he
(19:33):
was finally able to meet Walt Whitman. And at this
point these two writers had been trading letters for years,
so there was a pretty easy friendship to their meeting.
Although descriptions kind of make it sound like Stoker was
initially a little nervous, there was one blemish to mar
this beautiful occasion, though Henry Irving had insisted on going
to meet Walt Whitman as well, so Stoker felt a
(19:55):
little bit cheated of the intimate conversation that he had
dreamed of having with his idol. Witman noted also that
Stoker had switched from going by Abraham Stoker to Bram Stoker,
and he did not particularly like that shift in name.
He just didn't think it was very dignified. But overall
it was a really, really good meeting, and Stoker declared
Walt Whitman to be quote a man amongst men. During
(20:18):
the eighteen nineties, Stoker was still publishing novels, including The
Waters Moot and that features star crossed lovers as part
of the story. There's also The Shoulder of Shasta, which
is a romance set in northern California. Even as these
books were being published, he was also working on what
would become his masterpiece, Dracula. While Bram Stoker was normally
(20:40):
a very fast writer, Dracula took him far longer than
his previous novels. He wrote it over the course of
seven years, perhaps even longer, but that's how long we know.
He was working on it while he was touring with
Irving and working on other writing projects. We'll talk a
little more about some of the research that went into
the most famous of Stockeker's books after we first take
(21:01):
a break for a word from the sponsors that keeps
stuffymuths in history class going. If you look at the
notes that Stoker compiled as he was assembling his Vampiric Tale,
it becomes really apparent that he was, as we mentioned earlier, meticulous.
(21:24):
He had carefully plotted out Jonathan Harker's journey to Transylvania
by train, using actual train schedules and only using connections
that he believed would have actually worked, and he created
a table of all of the correspondents that would appear
in the book to ensure that the dates that they
posted and the dates that they would arrive in the
recipient's hands was realistic. It also seems as though all
(21:46):
of his work running a theater and tours kind of
informed the way he constructed narrative. He also was a
writer who really believed in research, and his work researching
what would become the novel Dracula is really deeply associate
with the town of Whitby, England's on the country's east coast.
He is said to have visited a library in Whitby
(22:06):
to look at a specific selection of the Special Collections
title by William Wilkinson, which is an account of the
principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with various political observations relating
to them. It is from this book that he is
said to have learned of the name Dracula in relation
to vlad Tapesh. Prior to this, Stoker was planning to
(22:28):
name his villainous character Count Vampier. This was a rare book.
It's an odd thing for Stoker to have just known about,
but a friend he knew from his theater circle Arminius
van Berry had told him about the story of the
Wilachean count and the book that he could find it in. Yeah,
it piece of knowledge. It's a very strange thing, right.
(22:51):
I can only imagine as a librarian having someone walk
in and be like, hey, you know that rare book
that you don't even tell people you have. I would
like to see it. I mean, it's literally that strange.
Stoker then visited the Whitby Museum to work on that
route that we mentioned a moment ago for Harker to take,
including making notes about latitude and longitude, and next Stoker
(23:15):
consulted with the Royal Coast Guard at the nearby harbor
and discussed the topic they would figure prominently in the
story of Dracula. In eighteen eighty five, the ship Dmitri
had left the port of Narva in Estonia and had
run aground near Whitby. According to the locals, only a
few members of the crew survived, and there was a
black dog that emerged from the ship and ran off
(23:36):
while rescue efforts were underway. The Dmitri had been carrying
crates of silver sand that may sound mysterious, but silver
sand is actually a fine white sand that is commonly
used in construction mortar. But if you've read Dracula, that
might sound familiar, but not exactly the way you remember it.
Stoker borrowed the story of the Dmitri for the novel,
(23:59):
making the show the conveyance of Count Dracula from his
home country to London, but in the fictional version the
name is changed to the Demeter, which also invokes the
Greek goddess and its associations with the cycle of life
and death, and Narva changes to Varna, Bulgaria as the
departure point for the ship. In Stoker's fictionalized version, the
(24:20):
silver sand remains, but the ship is also filled with
crates of earth from Count Dracula's homeland, and then, of course,
the black Dog becomes an embodiment of the vampire himself.
Stoker's research wasn't confined to Whitby. He continued to consult
the library regularly to make notes that would contribute to
Dracula once he was back in London, but Whitby is
(24:41):
very closely associated with the book at this point. Vampire
stories long predated Dracula, and like there are vampire like
entities like all over the world in various mythology and
folklore and fiction. But Stoker's version of vamporism is really
what we've come to know as like the classic vampire tropes,
(25:02):
the vampire being able to shape shift into animals, the
count suddenly becoming almost crazed with thirst when Harker cuts
himself shaving, and the vampire needing to be invited into
a home. All that's present here in the nineteen oh
one Icelandic edition of Dracula, titled Macht Mirkrana, which translates
to Powers of Darkness. The preface that Stoker wrote includes
(25:24):
insistence that the events relayed in the Dracula story are true,
writing quote, I am quite convinced that there is no
doubt whatever that the events here described really took place,
however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight,
and I am further convinced that they must always remain
to some extent incomprehensible, although continuing research in psychology and
(25:48):
natural sciences may in years to come give logical explanation
of such strange happenings, which at present neither scientists nor
the secret police can understand. I state again that this
mysterious tragedy which is here described is completely true in
all its external respects, though naturally I have reached a
different conclusion on certain points than those involved in the story.
(26:12):
But the events are incontrovertible, and so many people know
of them that they cannot be denied. So this has
led to all kinds of speculation since it came out
about whether Stoker was referencing Jack the Ripper here. The
Icelandic version of the book is different from the originally
published version, though having been abridged quite a bit. When
(26:34):
it was translated back into English in twenty fourteen, it
became really apparent that the original translator of Stoker's work
into Icelandic, Vladimir Asmundsen, had reworked the plot significantly and
created a very different story. I remember when the English
speaking world found out about this and was like, what, Yeah,
(26:55):
it's actually really good if anybody wants to if you
seek it out. I think right now, as we record
this in October twenty twenty, if you have an Amazon
Prime account, I think you can download the Kindle version
for free, and Audible has the audio version available as
a freebie, and it's really quite delightful, and if you
(27:17):
are a person who loves Dracula, it's very interesting because
there are characters you have never seen before in the story.
There are events play out very differently. Some things are condensed,
some things are gone completely, and it's just a new
way to experience this piece of lore. Yeah. I also
feel like I should just clarify that most people in
Iceland also speak English. When I say the English speaking world,
(27:41):
I mean like places like the United States in Britain. Yes.
When Dracula was originally published in eighteen ninety seven, it
was really well received, but it really didn't hint that
the global long reaching popularity it would eventually achieve. It
was kind of like, you know if you see a
movie and it's like a great movie that year, but
you don't think, like, oh, this is going to launch
(28:02):
a kajillion things. Stoker's mother, Charlotte, is said to have
quite liked it and actually believed it would be a
huge success and be one of the things for which
her son would be remembered. Publishers in the United States
were not initially interested in this story, so Stoker actually
purchased the US copyright for himself. The first American edition
of the book appeared in eighteen ninety nine. Analysis of
(28:25):
the text alongside Stoker's life story has sometimes led people
to believe that Dracula as a character is based at
least partially on Henry Irving and his demanding nature. It's
also possible that rather than modeling it on Irving, Stoker
was kind of thinking about how Irving could play the
count in a stage version of the story that actually
(28:47):
did not work out. Stoker had arranged a reading of
the Dracula story in play form at the Theater before
the novel came out. Irving declared it dreadful the fool.
At this point in time, the Lyceum was faltering. The
plays that they staged were not doing as well as
they once had, and Stoker thought that Dracula might be
(29:08):
an opportunity to regain some interest in financial footing for
the business. But Irving would not have it, and then
the theater had a fire. The building was not destroyed,
but they lost a lot of their stock, props, and scenery.
It was expensive and messy as all of these problems
piled up, and the Lyceum had to enter into a
receivership so that its assets could be liquidated to cover
(29:31):
its debts. The productions continued, although in less grand stagings
than the theater had once seen. Henry Irving gave his
last performance in October nineteen oh five. He died that night,
just after returning to his hotel. Stoker got there soon
after his friend had collapsed, but it was too late
to save his life. After Irving's death, Bram Stoker wrote
(29:54):
about his own life and his long business partnership and
friendship with Irving in a two volume book titled per
Reminiscences of Henry Irving. This was Stoker's most popular work
in his lifetime. Although this was not some scandalous reveal
of the man behind the public face Brahm. Stoker wrote
of Irving in the most positive adulation, soaked way imaginable.
(30:17):
At this point, Stoker was without the job that had
required all of his attention for so many years, and
so he turned to writing full time. From nineteen oh
five to nineteen eleven, he published several short stories and
novels in addition to his Irving memoir. The last of
these was The Lair of the White Worm. It's a
very strange horror tale with a lot going on in
(30:38):
terms of plot threads, including a story about Mongoose's. Yeah,
there's a whole lot going on in that some of
it is very outdated in terms of how different people
so the world's are perceived. In his last year, Stoker
found himself financially strapped. He did some more theater management
to make ends meet, but primarily he continued to focus
(31:00):
on writing. Dracula continued to be popular enough to earn
some royalties, and Stoker also wrote a bit as a
journalist for the Daily Chronicle, profiling notable figures of the day.
He also did something that seems a little bit odd,
which is that he took up the flag of censorship,
as in he was pro censorship. He advocated for banning
inappropriate books and writing that quote, A close analysis will
(31:24):
show that the only emotions which, in the long run
harm are those arising from sex impulses. During that time,
his health also declined. He had a series of strokes
starting in nineteen oh six, and in nineteen ten he
had what he described as a breakdown from overwork. I
was on a petition for a grant from the Royal
Literary Fund and nineteen eleven. Continually dwindling finances led Brahm
(31:49):
and Florence to move into a more modest apartment. They
left the one that had been their home in London
for more than three decades. Bram Stoker died at the
age of sixty four in nineteen twelve. That was the
same week that the Titanic sank. In the days leading
up to his passing, he had, like all of London,
been transfixed by the story of the ship's demise and
the investigation that was soon to begin. Even in death,
(32:13):
Stoker left something of a mystery. There are three causes
of death listed. They are kidney disease, exhaustion, and locomotor ataxia.
So that last one, locomotor ataxia, was generally used as
a synonym for tertiary syphilis, and that, of course has
led to all kinds of speculation about various, usually salacious
(32:37):
ways that he could have contracted syphilis. But looking at
all of his symptoms and his behavior leading up to
his death, that doesn't really add up. It's possible that
he was misdiagnosed due to some of the lingering effects
of the strokes he had had, but we will not
ever really know. Yeah, I have read some biographers are like,
we're not even sure why the coroner put multiple causes
(33:00):
of death when just saying kidney disease would have covered it.
But this fascination with the possibility that Stoker could have
had ciphilists is really part of a much bigger speculation
that has gone on for over a century about the
author's sexuality. And he seems in so many ways to
be a tangle of repression and confusion regarding sexuality and
(33:21):
desire in his writing, with so much erotic content that
it sometimes seems he doesn't even realize he is including.
There are multitudes of papers analyzing the sexuality of Dracula
and the disdain for the Victorian new woman that is
present in a lot of Stoker's work. His obsession with
figures like Whitman and Irving, and his friendship with Oscar Wilde,
(33:42):
who he saw go through the trial that ultimately, you know,
kind of ruined Oscar Wilde's life have naturally led to
speculation about an attraction to men that he may never
have truly recognized. But this, like his childhood infirmity and
his cause of death, can never be conclusively known. Well.
We do know, though, is that Dracula has never been
out of print. It has been adapted into films and
(34:05):
musicals and ballet, and has inspired innumerable other vampire stories,
and it also just continues to do so. Oh, bram
Stoker's Dracula, we can talk more about it in the
behind the scenes. Yes, he's so fascinating and complex. And
I really did not know all of that Walt Whitman
(34:26):
stuff to the degree that played out well. And I
took a second while we were kind of in our
in a in a sponsor break movement to see I
don't think we mentioned any connection to Bram Stoker in
the Walt Whitman episode. Yeah, I don't think so. I yeah,
I want to rewatch all of the Dracula now and
(34:49):
think about him in this way. Thanks so much for
joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send
us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(35:11):
your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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