Bram Stoker and Dracula
Everyone knows Bram Stoker. He wrote Dracula, of course. It was that book or rather the movies about that book that have shaped and molded our concept of vampires. Dracula is indeed one of the most influential books ever written. It has never been out of print since it was first published in 1897. There are hundreds of editions. It has spawn numerous movies, plays, and adaptations.
There is even Dracul, the Musical based on the novel, and now there is a book, Dracul, by Nancy Kilpatrick based, on the musical which is based on the novel. You can learn more about the musical, listen to some of the songs, and buy the book and the music CD at
http://www.dracul.com/index.html.
Who was Bram Stoker?
He was born November 8, 1847 in Clontarf, Ireland, near Dublin. Yes, I thought he was British, but he is an Irish writer and the Irish are justifiably proud. Both Clontarf and Dublin have pages devoted to Stoker.
http://www.clontarf-online.com/bram_stoker.htm
http://www.visit.ie/dublin/dublin_stoker.html
After he graduated from college, he worked as a civil servant at Dublin Castle and moonlighted as a free lance journalist, drama critic and editor of the "Evening Mail". It was in his job as drama critic that he first met the famous actor Sir Henry Irving, who was performing Hamlet. In 1878, Bram married the actress, Florence Balcombe, and moved to London to become secretary and stage manager for Irving. His friendship for Irving was a major factor in his life and he worked for Irving until the actor's death in 1905.
In 1878, Stoker published his first book The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland. He followed that in 1882 with a collection of short stories, Under the Sunset. His first novel was The Snake Pass in 1891. Best known for Dracula, Stoker wrote eighteen books and many short stories. His last novel, The Lair of the White Worm, was published in 1911 the year before he died.
Many of Bram Stoker's novels and short stories are available online at Bram Stoker
http://www.geocities.com/psmcalduff/index.html
For more information about Bram Stoker and Count Dracula check out Dracula's Homepage
http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/. Elizabeth Miller is a scholarly expert on Dracula and the President of the Canadian Chapter of Transylvanian Society of Dracula. She has written four books on the subject. In her latest, Dracula, Sense and
Nonsense, she exposes over seventy popular misconceptions, distortions and downright errors that have plagued books, articles and documentaries about Bram Stoker and his famous novel for the past thirty years.
According to Elizabeth Miller's research, Bram Stoker was going to call his vampire Count Wampyr until he came across a small section about Vlad the Impaler in a book he was researching entitled An Account of The Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820). According to Stoker's notes, what attracted him to the name "Dracula" was a footnote by Wilkinson which stated that "Dracula in the Wallachian language means devil". I wonder if Count Wampyr would have found the same popularity as Count Dracula.
The Shadow of the Vampireby Gabriel Ronay, the author of The Dracula Myth.
http://www.hungary.com/hungq/no151/117.html
This interesting article looks at how Dracula and Val the Impaler have been treat by both the West and the East. Did you know that during World War II, we portrayed German soldiers as vampires or that Dracula was for many years a banned book in Romania or that both Ireland and England issued Count Dracula postage stamps?
To see what these stamps and other vampires stamps look like visit http://ferncanyonpress.com/vampires/postage.shtml
For some more information, check out http://www.nhmccd.cc.tx.us/contracts/lrc/kc/dracula.html
Bram Stoker, Dracula, from the Kingwood College Library. The pages was designed as a student resource for an English class and includes an interesting biography, as well as analyzes the plot and characters and lists other resources for further study.
There are many eBook versions of Dracula available. One of the most interesting is a hypertext version created by Harold J. Hotchkiss for a Literary Hypertext class taught at the University of Buffalo in the spring '99.
Http://fiddlingfrog.freeyellow.com/dracula/hjh2.html
(-- You can eliminate the annoying Free Yellow pop-up window that appears with every page change by hitting the minimize button.
on the ads.
What makes this version unique is the different ways that one can read the book. In addition to the complete story and being able to go to a particular chapter, you can access the story in chronological order, or read all the passages written in one characters' viewpoint, or by clicking on a location on a map, read all the scenes written at that location.
Perhaps it is time to re-read an old classic.
Or how about Dracula's Guest, a short story that was cut from Dracula at the publisher's request and published in a collection of short stories two years after his death.
Or read The Lady of the Shroud which is supposed to be another vampire novel by Bram Stoker.
http://www.blackmask.com/Gothic_Tales/Bram_Stoker/
This article was first published in Vampire eBook Authors at
Suite101.com, April 1, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Linda Suzanne Melin
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