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Dracula's Bram Stoker

Name: Dracula's Bram Stoker
Rating: 2.56 (1 reviews)

McCamy Taylor

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In death, Bram Stoker is remembered as the author of Dracula. His creation has been portrayed more times in films and television than any other fictional character. However, in life, he was best known as the manager of the Lyceum Theater and the friend of actor, Henry Irving, the first thespian to be knighted and the most famous stage actor of his day. Bram was a sickly child. Bedridden until the age of seven, his mother entertained him with supernatural stories, tales of plagues, ghosts and other horrors. In later life, he became an athlete, a writer and a theater manager after falling under the spell of Henry Irving, whom he met in Dublin. Bram quit his job in the civil service and followed Henry to England where he helped create a theater company that would become the most acclaimed of its day. John Henry Bodribb, later to be known as Henry Irving was the child of poor parents. Sent away at a young age to live with relatives in Cornwall, he never got over the sense of loneliness and abandonment which his exile brought him. Though his mother wanted him to pursue a career in the clergy, he chose instead to become an actor. Ellen Terry, the child of a family of actors, had her own problems. Married off at a young age to a famous painter, she soon left her husband and began an adulterous relationship which produced two illegitimate children. Despite her scandalous past, she became the grande dame of the British stage. When the lives of these three misfits intersected, it was magic. Dracula's Bram Stoker is part historical fiction and part fantasy. Many of the characters in the book---Irving, Stoker, Terry and their friends including Oscar Wilde---are real. Others, including Stefan Dracula and his companion Gao from "Mack the Ripper" are fictional.

119 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 22, 2016