Abraham 'Bram' Stoker (1847-1912) was born in Dublin, Ireland, the third of seven children. He was bedridden with an unexplained illness until age seven and was told he might not survive childhood — an experience that gave him an intimate relationship with bodily vulnerability. He attended Trinity College Dublin, where he excelled in athletics (compensating for his sickly childhood) and drama. He became manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London in 1878 under actor-manager Henry Irving, a role he held for twenty-seven years. His relationship with Irving was intense and arguably vampiric: Irving was charismatic, domineering, and consumed Stoker's energies entirely, treating him as a personal servant rather than a colleague. Stoker managed every detail of Irving's theatrical life while nursing literary ambitions of his own. The character of Dracula — imperious, commanding, draining of those around him — is widely read as partially drawn from Irving. Stoker researched the vampire legend extensively, reading accounts of Eastern European folklore, specifically the Szekely people of Transylvania and historical accounts of Vlad the Impaler. He never visited Transylvania. The novel was written over seven years and published in 1897, the same year as Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee — the height of British imperial confidence and the beginning of its anxiety about decline.

How the Era Shapes the Book

Dracula is the anxieties of the 1890s in Gothic form. The vampire embodies everything Victorian England feared: invasion from the East, contamination of English blood, dangerous female sexuality, the failure of science to explain the world, and the possibility that the Empire's methods — extraction, conquest, occupation — might be turned against England itself. Van Helsing's coalition of professional men applying rational methods to irrational evil is the Victorian solution: not to admit the limits of modernity but to harness modernity in service of ancient values. The novel both endorses and doubts this solution.