Some interesting tid bits about..
10 Blood-Curdling Facts About Dracula
BY JOY LANZENDORFER
OCTOBER 21, 2015
(UPDATED: OCTOBER 6, 2019)
PUBLIC DOMAIN, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Dracula needs no introduction, but we'll give him one anyway: Bram Stoker's vampire, a Transylvanian count who turns into a bat, sleeps in coffins, and drinks the blood of the living, is the quintessential horror villain. And in true undead style, he holds up well-he's as creepy today as he was when Stoker invented him in 1897.
1. DRACULA MAY HAVE BEEN INSPIRED BY A NIGHTMARE.
CARL SAVICH, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
As was apparently common among Victorian gothic fiction, Dracula supposedly came from a nightmare ... one possibly caused by bad seafood. According to biographer Harry Ludlam, Stoker said he was compelled to pen the tale after dreaming of "a vampire king rising from the tomb"-following a "helping of dressed crab at supper." While the fare might not have actually had anything to do with what he dreamt that night, Stoker's private working notes show him revisiting the frightening vision. In March 1890, he wrote, "young man goes out-sees girls. One tries to kiss him not on the lips but throat. Old Count interferes-rage and fury diabolical. 'This man belongs to me. I want him.'" Whether this is the actual nightmare or the beginning of Jonathan Harker's story is unclear, but Stoker returned to the dream repeatedly while writing the book.
2. VAMPIRES SHARE A HISTORY WITH FRANKENSTEIN.
In 1816, on a gloomy day in Lake Geneva, Lord Byron proposed a ghost story contest that led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. It was also the birth of The Vampyre by John Polidori, his first-ever vampire story written in English. Polidori was Byron's personal physician and he may have based his aristocratic bloodsucker on his patient-which would make Lord Byron the basis for the bulk of vampire depictions that followed. (Other accounts say that Polidori stole a fragment of fiction that Byron wrote and used it in his story.) In any case, The Vampyre influenced Varney the Vampire, a popular penny dreadful from the 1840s, and Carmilla, a novella about a lesbian vampire from the 1870s, and, of course, Stoker.
3. STOKER STARTED WRITING DRACULA RIGHT AFTER JACK THE RIPPER MADE HEADLINES.
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Stoker began Dracula in 1890, two years after Jack the Ripper terrorized London. The lurid atmosphere these crimes produced made their way into Stoker's novel, which was confirmed in the 1901preface to the Icelandic edition of Dracula. Stoker's reference links the two frightening figures in such a way that raises more questions than provides answers, but no doubt confirms the terrifying real-life influence on his fictional world.
4. DRACULA MIGHT BE BASED ON STOKER'S HORRIBLE BOSS.
Stoker's boss of almost 30 years was Henry Irving, a renowned Shakespearean actor and owner of the Lyceum Theatre in London. Stoker was Irving's business manager, press agent, and secretary. Like the Hollywood assistant of today, his job started early and ended late, with a lot of ego boosting in between. Some critics have suggested that the charismatic Irving was the basis for Dracula. In a review of A Biography of the Author of Dracula by Barbara Belford in theChicago Tribune, Penelope Mesic wrote:
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