Context
B ram 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.
Stoker’s early fiction is not of particularly high quality. He wrote short stories for children and then a first novel, The Snake’s Pass (1890), which was unsuccessful. Stoker’s fortunes changed in 1897 with the publication of Dracula, which still stands as his greatest -literary achievement. Although the novel was not an immediate popular success, it has been in print continuously since its first publication and has inspired countless films and other literary works. Stoker continued to write until his death in 1912, producing several adventure novels, including The Jewel of Seven Stars ( 1904) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911).
Vampire legends have been a part of popular folklore in many parts of the world since ancient times. Throughout the Middle Ages and even into the modern era, reports of corpses rising from the dead with supernatural powers achieved widespread credence. The Dracula family, which Stoker’s count describes with pride in the early chapters of the novel, is based on a real fifteenth-century family. Its most famous member, Vlad Dracula—or Vlad the Impaler, as he