THE ALEXANDRA HOLZER FILES: The story of paranormal pioneer Catherine Crowe

125 years and Still Chilling A BITE size guide Introduction

On 26 May 1897 the advance copies of the first impression of the first edition of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula reached the offices of his publishers Archibald Constable at 2 Whitehall Gardens, Westminster, London. The first review copies were despatched to the newspapers and magazine critics of the day and Bram signed and sent the first of his complimentary copies to his most esteemed friends.

This year, 2022 marks the 125th Anniversary of the publication of Dracula and over that century and a quarter, the book has never been out of print. We all know vampires as characters in books, on tv and in films, most will know the name Dracula. Sadly, because Dracula the novel is not amongst the literary canon regularly taught in schools or many colleges, the name of the man who wrote Dracula, his own story and how he created the lead character in the book that was described in one of its first reviews (published in Punch Magazine, 26 June 1897) as ‘the very weirdest of weird tales,’ remains far less known to the wider public.

- Origins -

Abraham Stoker was born at 15 The Crescent (now known as Marino Crescent), in the Dublin suburb of Clontarf on 8 November 1847. He was third of seven children who would be born to Abraham and Charlotte Matilda Blake Stoker (nee Thornley). Named after his father, rather than being Abraham junior or any other nom de plume the boy was known as Bram from a young age. Bram’s father, Abraham, was born in Ireland in 1799. The earliest Stoker ancestors of their direct family line can be traced back to Northumberland in the North of England, one of whom came over to Ireland around 100 years earlier as a soldier in the army of King William, bringing his wife and children over with him and settled there. In June 1815, Abraham obtained a position in the Chief Secretary of Ireland’s Office at Dublin Castle as an Assistant Clerk. He proved to be a diligent, honest, sober and utterly reliable worker with strong Christian values. However, he clearly had no aspiration for promotion and remained in the same grade for almost forty years of his fifty-year career in the Civil Service. Bram’s mother, Charlotte, was a handsome woman with distinguished Irish ancestry dating back centuries. Among them were the famous duellist Richard ‘Pistol’ Blake and ‘General’ George Blake, who had led the Irish rebels at the Battle of Ballinamuck in County Longford in September 1798. Charlotte inherited that same valiant spirit, she was also forthright, intelligent and had a strong social conscience. Abraham and Charlotte married at the parish church of Coleraine, County Londonderry in 1844. Aged 25 she was not a young, blushing bride but she was nineteen years younger than her husband. When she married Abraham, it would have been for the qualities she saw and respected in him, especially his upstanding character and his good honest work ethos. And those same values would be instilled through word and example to all of their children.

Bram was baptized at the Church of Ireland Church dedicated to St John the Baptist at Clontarf on 30 December 1847, indeed, all of Abraham Stoker’s children would be baptised there but sadly only the ruined shell of that church remains today after a new church capable of holding a larger congregation was built for the parish in the mid-1860s.

When Charlotte fell pregnant yet again it was clear to Abraham that their family home at The Crescent could no longer comfortably accommodate his ever-growing family. The Stokers moved a short distance away to a larger villa residence known as Artane Lodge in Fairview and it was here that young Bram would spend the early years of his life. Unlike his siblings who could run and play in the garden and countryside around where they lived, Bram suffered from what still remains a mystery illness, in the unpublished section of his manuscript of Personal Reminiscences Bram recalled:

When the nursery bell rang at night my mother would run to the room expecting to find me dying. Certainly till I was about seven years old I never knew what it was to stand upright. All my early recollection is of being carried in people’s arms and of being laid down somewhere or other. On a bed or a sofa if within the house, on a rug or amid cushions or on the grass if the weather were fine. To this day if I lie on the grass those days come back to me with never-ending freshness. I look among the stalks or blades of the grass and wonder where the sound come from – that gentle hum of nature which never ceases for ears that can hear... Naturally I was thoughtful and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years.

And who knows what wonderful tales of folklore, legend and dark times were told to and inspired the mind of young Bram over those years by his family and their loyal and well-loved nurse Ellen Crone.

Bram and his siblings would recall the tales their mother Charlotte told of her personal experiences during the Sligo cholera epidemic of 1832. She witnessed a society gripped by mortal fear and the ensuing desperate and inhuman acts committed by neighbours and fellow townsfolk. She would also speak of the dead becoming undead at that time, when those believed to have succumbed to the cholera and were being prepared for burial or piled up among the bodies, were discovered to be alive and would live on for years afterwards. Bram would draw upon theme from these tales for several of his stories, notably in his early tale The Spectre of Doom, later reprinted in Stoker’s strange collection of children’s fairy tales Under the Sunset (1881) and manifest yet again in Dracula.