Trinity opens the lid on an undead archive

There were no vampires in Trinity College for the unveiling of a Bram Stoker archive yesterday: no doubt it was the atrocious weather that kept them away.

With the sun baking the streets, it was an afternoon for rolling over in your coffin and pulling the lid down tight. But if any night-creatures had made it into Trinity safely, they would certainly have enjoyed themselves.

For a start, the event took place in the ancient atmosphere of the old library's Long Room, where the sun never rises. And then, of course, there were all those exposed necks, craning to look at the small exhibition which will be on display for a month.

The new archive comprises papers and photographs of the Stoker family as well as materials relating to the family of Bram's wife, Florence Balcombe. The Dracula author seems to have stolen the latter's affections from his friend Oscar Wilde. Certainly, the exhibition features a quotation from Florence to the effect that the playwright had "the most beautiful face I ever saw, and not a sixpence of money".

Nobody had the bad taste to say it yesterday, but despite already having some Stoker materials, including an incomplete manuscript of the novel, Famous Impostors, the new collection is finally something for Trinity to get its teeth into.

"We see it as Stoker coming home," was how the keeper of manuscripts, Dr Bernard Meehan, put it. And with collections already existing in Leeds and Philadelphia, the new material puts the writer's old university more noticeably on the map.

Ireland's leading authority on the subject, Mr Paul Murray, was on hand to explain the importance of the college's acquisition, which has already helped with his biography of the writer, due out next year.

A diplomat in the murky underworld of Iveagh House's Anglo-Irish division, and shortly to become ambassador to Korea, Mr Murray described Stoker's Dracula as "a masterpiece" which was now getting the critical attention it deserved, partly due to Francis Ford Coppola's "unfaithful but valid" film interpretation.

Descendants of the author, including his great-grandson, Mr Noel Dobbs, who had until recently owned the papers, were in attendance; as was the secretary of the Bram Stoker Club, Mr David Lass, inviting new members to contact him c/o Regent House in TCD.

Mr Denis McIntyre of the Stoker Summer School was also there, to point out that the Trinity exhibition is a mere curtain-raiser for the ninth annual school, to be held in Clontarf from August 1st to 8th.