THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE…: Kate Ray and the Wollaton Gnome incident

Not every story needed to be handed down from the oral tradition either, a superb collection of tales in Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland by Thomas Crofton Croker published in 1834, could be found in many homes at the time and would provide a ready supply of stories for children as and when required.

Blood is a recurrent feature in Celtic folk tales and manifests in many forms, be it ‘bad blood’ of animosity, blood spilt in atonement or sworn pact, indelible blood stains or a blood red mark left on a body after an encounter with a paranormal entity. Blood in folklore is often treated as a life force that can be drained from unfortunate victims by diabolical creatures such as the blood-sucking demon the dearg-dul and witches to replenish or enhance their own dark powers.

There are several stories that are variations on a theme where witches use their magic to obtain entry to family homes or lonely taverns. Once inside they use their magic again to stupefy the family or weary travellers within and drain blood from their bodies. Once they had obtained their bowl of blood, the witches would proceed to mix it up with simple ingredients and cook them into cakes which they intended to gorge upon.

The hero of the story is often a servant girl, who has not succumbed to the witch’s spells. Guided by a good spirit or her own knowledge of folklore she saves the day by using water from a well that has been blessed to hold off the hags and send them on their way, then revives the family or travellers by feeding them small portions of the cake that had been made with their blood.

In 1858 the Stoker family moved again, this time to 17 Upper Buckingham Street in the Mountjoy district of Dublin City and at the age of eleven Bram commenced his first formal education as a day boy at Bective House College private Anglican school in Rutland Square East, (now the eastern side of Parnell Square).

Trinity College Dublin in the early 1880s

When Bram attended the school, it offered an excellent curriculum befitting a young gentleman including classics, mathematics, English grammar, writing and composition, history, geography, scripture, French, drawing and natural philosophy. Still quite a shy and introspective lad, Bram made his greatest impression while at the school as a promising rugby forward.

Many of the boys from Bective House progressed to become students at Trinity College, Dublin (TCD). Bram would be one of them, matriculating a few weeks short of his seventeenth birthday in 1864. Bram never made excessive claims about his academic prowess, a subject had to grip his attention for him to excel in it however, he came out of his shell as he achieved prowess in a variety of sporting activities and within the university societies.

Bram also found time to perform with the University Boat Club Dramatic Society, but his most significant achievement was to become both Auditor for the Trinity Historical Society (known as the Hist) and President of the Philosophical Society (known as the Phil). This was no mean feat for both these offices are the highest that can be achieved in both these esteemed university debating and literary societies, and it is a clear mark of the active and popular figure Bram was during his time at Trinity. When seeking employment Bram initially followed in his father’s footsteps and entered the Civil Service as a Clerk, Second Class in the Fines and Penalties Department in 1867. Both Bram and his father had a great love of the theatre but neither could attend as frequently nor in the style they wished because their pay was not that great. But still they saw some of the greats of their day on stage. It was during these nights at the theatre that Bram was struck by the outstanding performances of an up-and-coming actor named Henry Irving.

When local newspapers failed to mention his standard of acting or even the names of the players in the performance.

He approached Henry Maunsell of the Dublin Evening Mail to ask if he would allow him to perform the function of theatre critic for the paper, even if it meant he performed that role free. He was given the job.

The position of theatre critic provided Bram with the magical entree that transported him from theatregoer to a person and personality in the theatrical world. Soon becoming a familiar face to theatre staff, his preferred seat would be saved for him. Bram was welcomed backstage to mix with actors and actresses, often their meeting would move beyond a hale fellow well met meeting, Bram knew the meaning of true friendship, indeed, a friendship with Bram could be a friendship for life.

Above all, it was the relationship he had with Henry Irving that would prove to be life changing for Bram. Each time Irving came to Dublin the pair would meet and talk and in the autumn on 1877 Irving was close to achieving his goal of taking over a theatre of his own and broached the idea that Bram might consider giving up his job in the civil service and share in the fortunes of Irving as his acting manager. With his dream of a theatre life in the bright lights of London in sight it was too good an opportunity for Bram to miss.

Buoyed up with the chance to realise his dreams Bram began a relationship with Florence Balcombe in 1878. Florence was nineteen, bright, witty and above all beautiful. She was regarded as one of, if not the most beautiful woman in all Dublin. Forsaking her fiancée Oscar Wilde (yes, the Oscar Wilde) the pair soon became swept up in a whirlwind romance and were making plans for their marriage. Irving took on his theatre and Bram tendered his resignation to the Civil Service. Bram and Florence married at fashionable St Ann’s Anglican Church, on Dawson Street, Dublin on 4 December 1878. There was no time for a honeymoon so bringing Florence along with him, just five days later Bram joined Irving in England as the new acting manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London’s West End. Irving knew his audiences wanted to see performances in a comfortable and attractive theatre, where the sense of spectacle and occasion began on the street outside and swept on majestically through the entrance to the surroundings. Irving set out with the intention that his theatre, The Royal Lyceum, as he liked to call it, would be a place where his clientele could see and be seen among the better classes of society. This, he rapidly achieved and in doing so elevated the status of the acting profession to one of respectability and Irving would, in time, become the first actor ever to receive a knighthood. In those glorious days Bram had found his metier, Horace Wyndham would recall:

The Lyceum Theatre as Bram Stoker would have known it

Under the Lyceum Theatre portico after the play, 1881

To see Stoker in his element was to see him standing at the top of the theatre’s stairs, surveying a ‘first-night’ crowd trooping up them. There was no mistake about it – a Lyceum premiere did draw an audience that really was representative of the best of that period in the realms of art, literature and society. Admittance was a very jealously guarded privilege. Stoker, indeed, looked upon the stalls, dress circle and boxes as if they were annexes to the Royal enclosure at Ascot, and one almost had to be proposed and seconded before the coveted ticket would be issued. The rag-tag-and-bobtail of the musical comedy, theatrical, stock exchange and journalistic worlds who foregather at a present-day premiere would certainly have been sent away with a flea in their ear.

Bram was far more than a front of house manager; as Acting Manager his duties, as defined by theatrical convention, meant he had control of everything on the auditorium side of the curtain but the services he performed went far above and beyond the conventional duties of the job. Bram also organised publicity, tours, including America, Irving’s speaking engagements, he ensured the 48 retained staff were paid, he oversaw the box-office, looked after the comfort and welfare of the company of actors employed in the theatre and even found time to oversee the printing of the programmes for the performances. All this for £22 per week; not a bad wage, it was almost three times his income when the left the Civil Service. But make no mistake, Irving was omnipotent, his word was law in the theatre and no-one was left under any illusion that he was anything other than the name he was known by all employed by him –‘The Chief.’ Bram served his master loyally, even to the detriment of his own health and family life but he would counter no criticism of Irving and was at his beck and call, day and night.

It also fell to Bram to organise complimentary tickets for critics and influential guests. He would also arrange the invitations to dine as the guest of Irving in the exclusive Beef Steak Room at the Theatre after the show. It was through this role Bram would meet a cornucopia of royals, nobility, notable authors, explorers and characters of the aesthetic world but it was one man from these who would become Bram’s closest friend – Thomas Henry Hall Caine.

United by a mutual admiration for Irving, when they met, Caine was a theatre critic and a promising author and he would soon become one of the most popular writers of his day, in fact he was the first man to sell a million books in the English language. Bram and Hall Caine regularly corresponded and would try to catch up with each other when either was on tour. When they were together, they would sometimes write together but above all they would avidly discuss stories, plots, tales of folklore, legend and fate through the night until the first rays of sunlight were creeping under the blinds. Bram addressed his letters to his dear friend by the affectionate nick-name Caine’s Manx grandmother gave him – ‘Hommy Beg,’ Manx for Little Tommy. Bram also dedicated Dracula to his friend using that name which proved so enigmatic to most readers. Both men had a deep desire to create a book or play worthy of Irving to play its central character.

The Genesis of Dracula

By the time Bram wrote his first dated notes for the book that would become Dracula on 8 March 1890 his ideas and concept for the novel were already developed to the degree he was able to draft out four distinct ‘books’ entitled: Book I Styria to London; Book II Tragedy; Book III Discovery and Book IV Punishment; each with seven chapters and chapter headings by 14 March.

(Eighteen-Bisang, Robert and Miller, Elizabeth (transcribed and annotated by) Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition (McFarland and Company, North Carolina and London 2008) p. 16 and p.28)

The conception of the book had clearly been mulled around in Bram’s mind for some considerable time before, probably years. Bram had always loved the strange and the macabre since boyhood and he was drawing on his own interests, experiences and knowledge for the original draft of the tale but be under no illusions, Bram Stoker never set foot in Transylvania, and there is no specific mention of Vlad Tepes anywhere in his notes. Instead, he assembled his knowledge of the place by talking to those who had been there and by studying articles, travel guides, books and maps. The inspirations for his characters were also drawn from people he had met over the years. As Bram was beginning to draw his notes together, he was fortunate to meet Arminius Vambery the Professor of Oriental languages at the University of Budapest in Austria-Hungary when he came to see The Dead Heart at the Lyceum on 30 April 1890. Vambery had travelled widely across Persia in the 1860s, on journeys that had never before been undertaken by any Western European.

Vambery was described by Harry Ludlam in his 1962 biography of Bram Stoker as ‘ full of experiences, fascinating to hear, and spoke of places where mystery and superstition still reigned. Places like Transylvania’ but there is no written evidence he actually spoke to the gathering or directly to Bram about Transylvania, nor as others would suggest, that he was the first to mention the name Dracula. But it was Vambery’s stories that inspired Bram enough to write about him in Personal Reminiscences and accord him the honour of a mention in his novel Dracula in the character of a reliable factotum of knowledge of strange lands, customs and history called upon by Van Helsing to provide him with further information about the history of the Count.

Bram was always interested in the use of language to evoke a sense of place and authenticity in his stories and as Vambery’s phonetic pronunciation of ‘Wampyr’ would have been ‘Vampire’ this may have been why Bram adopted it as his first attempt as a name for his central character - ‘Count Wampyr.’

This would fit well for the original location of Styria in the south-east of Austria, a place believed by Stoker to be ‘where belief in vampires survived longest and with most intensity.’

(Bram Stoker interview with ‘Lorna’ (Jane Stoddard) British Weekly, 1 July 1897, p. 185). It was also the location of Sheridan LeFanu’s story of Carmilla, a story that Bram knew and drew upon, particularly in his story Dracula’s Guest.

Bram borrowed many of his distinguishing features of Dracula such as canine teeth, pointed nails, hair on the palm of the hand and the ability to shape shift from the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of WereWolves and for more about vampires and their folklore Bram found an article on Transylvanian Superstitions by fellow Nineteenth Century contributor Emily Gerard particularly fruitful, notably her passage:

More decidedly evil, however, is the vampire, or nosferatu, in whom every Roumenian peasant believes as firmly as he does in heaven or hell. There are two sorts of vampires — living and dead. The living vampire is in general the illegitimate offspring of two illegitimate persons, but even a flawless pedigree will not ensure anyone against the intrusion of a vampire into his family vault, since every person killed by a nosferatu becomes likewise a vampire after death, and will continue to suck the blood of other innocent people till the spirit has been exorcised, either by opening the grave of the person suspected and driving a stake through the corpse, or firing a pistol shot into the coffin. In very obstinate cases it is further recommended to cut off the head and replace it in the coffin with the mouth filled with garlic, or to extract the heart and burn it, strewing the ashes over the grave. That such remedies are often resorted to, even in our enlightened days, is a well-attested fact, and there are probably few Roumenian villages where such has not taken place within the memory of the inhabitants.

A point well made by Elizabeth Miller is the error Emily Gerard made when she ascribed the word ‘nosferatu’ as a synonym for ‘vampire’ rather than being a more generic name for any creature of the night be it a werewolf, ghost, walking dead or blood sucker. Bram copied it directly into his notes from there he perpetuated the error in Dracula. T he initial inspiration for the creation of the evil vampire character who would be named Dracula, was Henry Irving, the man Bram hoped would play him on stage. Some of the appearance, characteristics and features of the Count would undoubtedly have been inspired by a some of Irving’s most impressive theatrical characterisations over the years. Notably his portrayal of Vanderdecken the Captain of the infamous ghost ship The Flying Dutchman in which Bram would recall with some awe how Irving achieved an: ‘impression of a dead man fictitiously alive. It was marvellous that any living man should show such eyes. They really seemed to shine like cinders of glowing red from out the marble face’ There was also Irving’s masterful performances as the demon Mephistopheles in the stage spectacle that was Faust, and as the gaunt Macbeth with his supernatural powers. In the creation of such a loathsome character as Dracula, Bram may also have intended a side swipe at ‘the Chief’ for sucking the life blood of his best years; drawing the skills of Bram to make himself look good and for not always appreciating him. The character, however, is not drawn from Irving alone. For the appearance, features and characteristics of Dracula himself Bram would draw on a

Title page and map of Bram Stoker’s own copy of the Baedeker Handbook for Southern Germany and Austria including Hungary and Transylvania (1887)

number of remarkable individuals he had encountered over the years. Bram reveals three highly likely candidates in his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. There was the explorer Henry Morton Stanley who Bram first met upon his return from his expedition to Africa in October 1882 at a small dinner party Irving had arranged for him at The Garrick Club. Everyone present was anxious to hear of Stanley’s adventures and he held the guests entranced until the chimes of four in the morning. Bram recorded his observations of Stanley that night:

He was slow and deliberate of speech; the habit of watchful self-control seemed even then to have eaten into the very marrow of his bones. His dark face, through which the eyes seemed by contrast to shine like jewels, emphasised his slow speech and measured accents. His eyes were comprehensive, and, in a quiet way, without appearing to rove, took in everything. He seemed to have that faculty of sight which my father had described to me of Robert Houdin, the great conjurer. At a single glance Stanley took in everything, received facts and assimilated them, gauged character in its height, and breadth, and depth, and specific gravity; formed opinion so quickly and so unerringly to the full extent of his capacity that intention based on what he saw seemed not to follow receptivity but to go hand in hand with it.

(Stoker, Personal Reminiscences vol. I p.363)