BiographySome fictional creations seem to break free of their authors and take on a vivid life of their own in the popular imagination.
Sherlock Holmes, Desperate Dan, Long John Silver, Frankenstein's Monster, Billy Bunter, Rupert . . . To these we can add Count Dracula, who first appeared before the reading public, complete with cloak, fangs and Transylvanian castle, in 1897. Dracula was the work of a 49-year-old, hefty, red-bearded Irishman living in London and employed as business manager to the actor Henry Irving.
It wasn't Bram Stoker's first excursion into fiction: he was already a prolific novelist and short-story writer, and fully au fait with literary conventions of the era, from the manly to the outré. But it was - with the possible exception of a single ghost story, 'The Judge's House' - the sole work on which Stoker's posthumous reputation would be founded. Founded, and then overshadowed: the mythic figure of Dracula, indeed, as far as most people are concerned, has a much more compelling presence than his down-to-earth creator. Hence the title of Paul Murray's painstaking new biography, which aims, among other things, to cry up the hard-working author over and above the blood-curdling count.
Abraham (Bram) Stoker came from middle-class Protestant Dublin, where he was born in 1847, the third of seven children of a government official from Co Derry and a formidable Sligo mother. He belonged to a brilliant generation of Trinity students and graduates which included Standish O'Grady, Alfred Percival Graves, John Todhunter, John Butler Yeats, Edward Dowden, Edward Carson and Oscar Wilde. Nevertheless, Stoker's Irishness is among the biographical particulars which tend to be obscured by the Dracula connection. It's easier to associate him with Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, and the Embankment along which he bicycled to work at Irving's Lyceum Theatre in a street off the Strand - and even with Whitby, where part of the action of Dracula takes place - but in fact he didn't leave Ireland until he was aged more than 30, he was and remained a supporter of Home Rule, and he never discarded what one contemporary journalist called "his rich Irish brogue". Before his fortunes were tied up with those of Henry Irving, Stoker had held a position in the Dublin Civil Service, for whom he wrote the handbook, Duties of Clerks of the Petty Sessions, a title which, if nothing else, demonstrates his versatile approach to authorship. His admiration for Henry Irving led to a meeting with the actor, then a friendship and finally a role as Irving's right-hand man. The move to London, in 1878, coincided with Stoker's marriage to Florence Balcombe, a Victorian beauty who - perhaps wisely - had turned down the chance of becoming Mrs Oscar Wilde.
Dracula, for all its full-blooded impact, was not without antecedents. Recent scholarship has placed the novel within a genre, albeit a flexible genre, "Irish gothic", stretching from Melmoth the Wanderer to Elizabeth Bowen. In a sense, Stoker's achievement was to create a synthesis of current "horror" elements geared to engender a frisson of the supernatural; Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, for example, is an obvious forerunner, while Horace Walpole, Wilkie Collins, John Polidori, Transylvanian superstitions, British goblins, even Henry Irving's practice of staying up throughout the night, all contributed something to the eventual masterpiece. Paul Murray's extensive scrutiny, in this biography, of the influences on Dracula, makes capital reading.
One great merit of Murray's biography is the way it garners and amplifies the available facts without resorting to conjecture. At the same time, the author dutifully reports all kinds of rumours and speculations concerning the creator of Dracula - rumours and speculations fostered by an absence of verification. There are gaps, indeed, in the Stoker story, things relating to his private life and attitudes that can never be known. The public circumstances surrounding him are pretty well-documented, but information about his childhood, for instance, is scant, and most of it comes from his own Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906).
His marriage, too, defies elaboration; the most one can say is that Stoker's prodigious managerial duties must have curtailed his home life, though it seems that the couple engaged in a good deal of social activity and remained on affectionate terms to the end.
"Poor old Bram," Florence Stoker wrote to Stoker's brother during her husband's last illness, "He is an Angel of patience, & never complains . . ."
This last illness (Stoker died in 1912) was itself a cause of scandal and surmise, as its symptoms had much in common with those of a venereal disease. Critics intent on getting to the bottom of Dracula latched on to the suggestion that Stoker's dark imaginings were the product of a syphilitic condition - though Stoker himself, in one of his lighter moments, preferred to attribute his vampiric undertaking to a nightmare following an injudicious supper of dressed crab.
Patricia Craig is an author and critic. Her biography of Brian Moore has just come out in paperback
From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker By Paul Murray Jonathan Cape, 340pp. £18.99