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| Bram Stoker |
Bram Stoker (8 November 1847–20 April 1912) was an Irish author, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned.
Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula. The novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he may find new blood and spread the undead curse, and of the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing.
Dracula has been assigned to many literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, the gothic novel, and invasion literature. Stoker did not invent the vampire but he defined its modern form, and the novel has spawned numerous theatrical, film, and television interpretations.
The story is told in epistolary format, as a series of letters, diary entries, and ships' log entries, whose narrators are the novel's protagonists, and occasionally supplemented with newspaper clippings relating events not directly witnessed. The events portrayed in the novel take place chronologically and largely in England and Transylvania during the 1890s.
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| Count Dracula |
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 was very familiar by 1897 to readers of fantastic adventure stories, of an invasion of England by continental European influences.
Dracula is a work of fiction, but it does contain some historical references, though it is a matter of conjecture and debate as to how much historical connection was deliberate on Stoker's part.
More information: Count Dracula's Legend & The story of Vlad the Impaler
Popular attention was drawn to the supposed connections between the historical Transylvanian-born Vlad III Dracula of Wallachia and Bram Stoker's fictional Dracula, following the publication of In Search of Dracula by Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally in 1972. During his main reign (1456–1462), Vlad the Impaler is said to have killed from 40,000 to 100,000 European civilians: political rivals, criminals, and anyone that he considered useless to humanity, mainly by impaling. The sources depicting these events are records by Saxon settlers in neighbouring Transylvania who had frequent clashes with Vlad III. Vlad III is revered as a folk hero by Romanians for driving off the invading Ottoman Turks, of whom his impaled victims are said to have included as many as 100,000.
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| Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931) |
Historically, the name Dracula is derived from a Chivalric order called The Order of the Dragon, founded by Sigismund of Luxembourg, then king of Hungary, to uphold Christianity and defend the Empire against the Ottoman Turks. Vlad II Dracul, father of Vlad III, was admitted to the order around 1431, after which Vlad II wore the emblem of the order and later, as ruler of Wallachia, his coinage bore the dragon symbol, from which the name Dracula is derived. People of Wallachia only knew voievod Vlad III as Vlad Țepeș, the Impaler.
The name Dracula became popular in Romania after publication of Stoker's book. Contrary to popular belief, the name Dracula does not translate to son of the devil in Romanian, which would be pui de drac.
Stoker came across the name Dracula in his reading on Romanian history, and chose this to replace the name, Count Wampyr, originally intended for his villain.
More information: Vlad The Impaler-Vlad Dracula
For death is no more than a turning of us
over from time to eternity.
William Penn
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