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Dracula (Work): Stoker's Dracula
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Dracula (Orchidaceae) , and more.
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Bram Stoker's Dracula has been the definitive version of the vampire in popular fiction for the last century. Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease (contagious demonic possession), with its undertones of sex, blood and death, struck a chord in a Victorian Europe where tuberculosis and syphilis were common. Stoker's writings are ... adapted in many later works. In modern popular culture, book series by Anne Rice, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Stephenie Meyer, as well as many other popular novels, feature vampires.
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In the 100 years since its publication, Bram Stoker's Dracula has never been out of print. Once introduced to the world by the silent film classic Nosferatu in 1921, Dracula became an enduring icon of fear, forever immortalized as a frightful embodiment of evil and forbidden sexuality.
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Before writing Dracula, Stoker spent seven years researching European folklore and stories of vampires, being most influenced by Emily Gerard's 1885 essay "Transylvania Superstitions", and an evening spent talking about Balkan superstitions with Arminius Vambery. Though arguably the most famous vampire story, Dracula was not the first. It was preceded and partly inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu's 1871 "Carmilla", about a lesbian vampire who preys on a lonely young woman. The image of a vampire portrayed as an aristocratic man, like the character of Dracula, was created by John Polidori in "The Vampyre" (1819), during the summer spent with Frankenstein creator Mary Shelley and other friends in 1816 (Polidori had in turn based his vampire character, Lord Ruthven, on friend and fellow guest Lord Byron). The Lyceum Theatre, where Stoker worked between 1878 and 1898, was headed by the tyrannical actor-manager Henry Irving, who was Stoker's real-life inspiration for Dracula's mannerisms and who Stoker hoped would play Dracula in a stage version. Although Irving never did agree to do a stage version, Stoker modelled Dracula's dramatic sweeping gestures and gentlemanly mannerisms on those he had observed in Irving.
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On of the most well-known versions of Dracula today, Nosferatu's place in cinematic history is secure, though its role in the development of the contemporary Dracula myth is often misunderstood. Murnau attempt to steal Stoker's story, but immediately after the film's release, he was challenged in the court by Florence Stoker, who was able to halt its showing and have copies of the movie seized by the German government. Only a few public showing in Germany had occurred and only a few very private screenings of Nosferatu occurred prior to Dracula's moving into the public domain in 1962. Thus, the film's effect upon the pre-1960 history of the vampire cinema was negligible.
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Between 1879 and 1889 Stoker was business manager for the world-famous Lyceum Theatre in London, where he supplemented his income by writing a large number of sensational novels, his most famous being the vampire tale Dracula published on May 18, 1897. Parts of it are set around the town of Whitby, where he was living at the time. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells wrote many tales in which fantastic creatures threatened the British Empire. Invasion literature was at a peak, and Stoker's formula of an invasion of England by continental European influences was by 1897 very familiar to readers of fantastic adventure stories. According to modern writers Nina Auerbach and David Skal, the novel is more important for modern readers than contemporary Victorian readers, who, they assert, enjoyed it as a good adventure story; and allege that it reached its iconic legend status only later in the 20th century.[1]This assertion is contradicted... by the actual statements of Victorian readers and reviewers themselves who described Dracula as "the sensation of the season" and "the most blood-curdling novel of the paralysed century".[2] The Daily Mail review of June 1, 1897 proclaimed it a classic of Gothic horror:
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Of the many admiring reviews Bram Stoker's Dracula received when it first appeared in 1897, the most astute praise came from the author's mother, who wrote her son: "It is splendid. No book since Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein or indeed any other at all has come near yours in originality, or terror."
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Stoker's Dracula