Google is celebrating Bram Stoker's 165th birthday today. I, naturally, already knew that... obviously... right... hmm. Anyways, seemed apt timing to do a post on the Irish novelist.
Bram Stoker was born in Dublin in November 1847, just a month after the publication of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (under the pen name of Currer Bell) and a month before Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Perhaps there was something in the water but it seems that there was a good chance that either Stoker was going to go all Tiresias on us and morph into a Bronte sister or more likely, as a normal person might think, become fascinated by the Victorian Gothic and go on to write one of the genre's most famous novels: Dracula.
Despite his fame as a novelist, Stoker began his career in theatre. He worked for the likes of Victorian stage actor Henry Irving and, tellingly, Gothic short story writer Le Fanu who co-owned the Dublin Evening Mail for which Stoker was the theatre critic.
Stoker married Florence Balcombe, an old flame of contemporary, Oscar Wilde - pretty narrow escape for her I'd have thought... although I'd have always thought quite nice to be the muse of the gLitterati.... see what I did there?
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Stoker wrote his first novel, The Primrose Path, in 1875 while he was working with Irving. Irving's tours saw Stoker travel all over the world, on two occasions being invited to the White House! Not bad for someone who was yet to be known much in Britain, let alone the States, although Stoker did apparently love the US and set a couple of his novels there
Stoker's infamous novel, Dracula, originally entitled The Undead was published in 1897 and would eventually inspire more than 1,000 novels and 200 films.
There was some controversy surrounding Bram Stoker's eventual death in 1912 (no he didn't die on the Titanic). It is suggested in Stoker's biography by his nephew, Daniel Farson, in 1975 that Stoker may have contracted an STI... most likely, syphilis. His remains are at Golders Green where a plaque commemorates his life.
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