“There are darknesses in life and there are lights; you are one of the lights.”
SIX DEGREES OF BRAM STOKER
Stoker may have been the first Kevin Bacon with ties to and encounters with just about anyone who was anyone in the latter part of the 19th century.
THE DRACULA THAT NEVER WAS
Imagine presenting the fruit of your labor on stage to the man you admire the most only to have him respond, "Pathetic." That was the beginning and the end of the stage life for Dracula as Stoker imagined it. Unfortunately, a successful stage adaptation didn't occur until well after Stoker's death. Despite its success, it bore little resemblance to the novel Stoker penned. It paved the way for the Hollywoodization of the Count. One is left wondering what might have been had Irving not been so disagreeable. Stoker could never have foreseen the changes in theatre that would make presenting his tale faithfully possible and quite plausible. For this reason, Stoker himself is presented as a character in the play to give him a rightful stage turn.​
Abraham Stoker Jr. (Bram) was born in Dublin, Ireland on November 8, 1840. He spent the first seven years of his life bed-ridden with an unknown illness. Regaled with tales of terror and Irish things that go bump in the night, Stoker seemed destined to waste away until age 7 when he unexpectedly bounced back. From that point on, he became a giant of a man in Victorian terms and, despite his self-serious appearance in portraiture became a fixture in London art circles.
A meeting with Henry Irving cemented Stoker's career in the theatre where he worked for 27 years at the Lyceum Theater. In 1888, Stoker managed the production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring Richard Mansfield, whose transformation into Hyde was so convincing that many thought he could be Jack the Ripper.
In 1890, Stoker began work on a novel called The Undead until a chance reading of a history of Transyvania, introduced him to the name "Dracula." Drawing on his meticulous notes, he crafted an epistolary work incorporating letters, diary and journal\
entries and newspaper articles to tell
the tale of an evil Transylvanian count
with his sights set on Victorian London.\
Despite the later success, Dracula never
materialized into commercial or literary
success and Stoker died in 1912 nearly
destitute.
Since its publication in 1897, Dracula
has never been out of print and is one
of the best-selling books of all time.
Hollywood used the character to create
one of the first cinema franchises and
to date, Dracula remains one of the most
adapted literary works of all time.
However, few know the novel or its intricacies, relying more on film interpretations which frequently tending toward melodrama and camp. In the 1960s, scholars looked with fresh eyes at the old count and have since proclaimed the book a masterpiece of gothic literature that paved the way for the modern horror genre.
