Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula

By Barbara Belford

Book Overview

"What a splendid subject to sink one's teeth into," raved the Washington Post. Here was a six-foot-two Irishman with a red beard--a Victorian family man, a spirited debater, and the author of novels and short stories largely forgotten today. All, of course, except for Dracula, which has enjoyed countless stage and screen incarnations and haunted the dreams of many generations. Bram Stoker lived at the very center of late-Victorian social and artistic life and numbered among his friends Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, James Whistler, William Gladstone, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. But it was his relationship with the mesmerizing, domineering actor Henry Irving that may have played the most crucial role in Stoker's life--a real-life monster who ultimately led to Stoker's most famous creation. In this book that the Baltimore Sun called "superb," Barbara Belford draws on unpublished archival material to reveal the links between the reticent author's life, his vampire tale, and the political, occult, cultural, and sexual background of the 1890s.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0306810980
• ISBN13: 9780306810985
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Insight into Bram Stoker & His Life at the Lyceum.

Barbara Belford's "Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula" is considered to be the most scholarly and thorough of the 3 Bram Stoker biographies that have been published. But Mr. Stoker was a reticent person about whose personal life, opinions, and character there is precious little known. Whether out of humility or caution, he usually took care not to reveal himself. So what we know of Stoker comes primarily from his public life, which was thankfully shared with several grander, more loquacious personalities. Perhaps due to the scarcity of information about her subject, Barbara Belford gives Stoker's friends, colleagues, and the London theater community a lot of attention, especially Henry Irving, the great actor whose fame was dwarfed only by his ego, and whom Bram Stoker dedicated 27 years of his life to serving. Indeed, this biography of Stoker would serve well as a history of Irving's famous Lyceum Theatre for the decades that Stoker served as its acting manager. The book starts by describing Stoker's childhood in Dublin, the third child born to a middle class Anglo-Irish family in 1847 during the potato famine, and his apparent debilitation until the age of 7. He grew up to be a civil servant like his father, and pursued personal interests as an unpaid drama critic for the "Evening Mail", through which Stoker met Henry Irving. After marrying the lovely Florence Balcombe, whom Oscar Wilde also courted, the Stokers moved to London where Bram's efficient management would help make the 1500-seat Lyceum Theatre fashionable and profitable. Since the Lyceum dominated Stoker's life, it dominates his biography, but Belford also discusses his trips to America on tour with the Lyceum company, his effusive admiration for Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, and his novels and stories. The upshot of "Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Man Who Wrote Dracula" is that Bram Stoker was a modest, hardworking man, exceedingly courteous even by Victorian standards, whose tireless work for Henry Irving was acknowledged by many but unappreciated and unrewarded by Irving himself. Stoker's genial but reserved manner harbored passionate, worshipful emotions toward his heroes, invariably men of power with larger-than-life personalities. Belford draws an occasional parallel between persons in Bram Stoker's own life and characters in "Dracula". Most notably, she sees a "sinister caricature" of Henry Irving in the vampire Count. Actress Ellen Terry seems to be reflected in Mina, and Stoker's wife Florence may have lent some of her character to Lucy. None of this is a stretch as long as one recognizes that "Dracula"'s characters don't have a single source, but many. This biography includes a lot of good information for fans of Bram Stoker's work, but a couple of stylistic problems nagged at me. One is Belford's confusing tendency to refer to people by first or last name only, at the beginning of a chapter, instead of starting off with a full name. Another is t

Best Book I ever read!

The main caracters in the story are Jonathan Harker, Mina Murry/Harker, and Lucy Westenras. There are several different settings, so I won,t list them specifically. Most of the book, they are in Europe in the 1800's. The plot of the books is Jonathan is a solicitor and meets the "Count". Sopposably the Count is friendly and turns evil. My opinion of the book is it is great it has some diffficult words so I recommend it to 8th grade and above. It is very interesting and fun. I liked the way that the author set up the book and the way he used everybodys point of view.