Bram Stoker

Abraham “Bram” Stoker was born in Clontarf, on the north side of Dublin Bay, on 8 November 1847. He was so ill as a small child that he could hardly walk until he was seven, and he later said he spent those years in bed listening to his mother’s stories, including tales of the cholera epidemic she had lived through in Sligo. He recovered completely and became a champion athlete at Trinity College Dublin, then followed his father into the civil service at Dublin Castle.

In his spare time he wrote unpaid theatre reviews for a Dublin newspaper. A generous review of the actor Henry Irving’s Hamlet in 1876 led to a friendship, and in 1878 Irving hired Stoker as acting manager of his new company at the Lyceum Theatre in London. Stoker held that demanding job for nearly three decades, running the theatre’s business, organizing American tours and handling Irving’s enormous correspondence. The same year he married Florence Balcombe, whom Oscar Wilde had also courted. Stoker wrote fiction in whatever time was left over. Dracula (1897), which he researched for years, was one of about a dozen novels. It sold steadily but was not a great success in his lifetime, and Irving’s death in 1905 and the end of the company left Stoker in financial difficulty. He died in London on 20 April 1912.

The Judge's House first appeared in December 1891, while Dracula was still in its early stages. A mathematics student rents an empty old house in a market town to study in peace and ignores everyone’s warnings about the portrait of a hanging judge and the rats in the walls. It is Stoker at his most theatrical, which is a compliment.

Dracula's Guest was published in 1914, two years after Stoker’s death, by his widow, Florence, who explained in a preface that it was an episode from the original manuscript of Dracula. Scholars still argue about exactly what it was cut from. An Englishman in Munich ignores his coachman and walks alone on Walpurgis Night toward an abandoned village. It is a good companion to the novel’s opening chapters.

Read “The Judge’s House” first.