How did Bram Stoker’s life help shape Dracula?
What Bram Stoker brings to the genre comes a lot from his own professional background. He was theater manager for the famous Victorian actor Henry Irving, who did a lot of Shakesperean work and a lot of tragic roles. And if you say to people the word ‘Dracula,’ they think of the fangs and they maybe think a big, black cape. As a theater manager, Bram Stoker knew what worked onstage. You need big gestures. You need dramatic things. You need things that really make people sit up and take notice. I think a lot of those theatrical impulses he actually brings to the creation of his incarnation of the vampire. Fundamental to Bram Stoker’s identity, is that he was an Irishman who spent most of his life working in London. Though he was accepted in London society, he was a little bit of an outsider in that society. At the time, the Irish were a very noticeable group in London. Most were laborers working on all those big infrastructure projects — putting in sewage systems, building bridges, buil
