Chapter 2
Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere….
His face was a strong – very strong – aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion.
The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor...
Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, was born in Clontarf near Dublin, Ireland, in 1847. A sickly child, he appears to have spent much of the first seven years of life in bed. During this time his mother filled many of his hours with stories and legends from her native Sligo, including narratives of a cholera epidemic. His early imagination was thus shaped by tales of the supernatural and of death.
It was there that he published his first book, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879), a book that was by his own later admission “as dry as dust.” During his Dublin period, he also published occasional short fiction, including a ten-part serial “The Primrose Path” in 1875 and wrote theatre reviews for a Dublin newspaper. One of these, a review of Henry Irving’s Hamlet, led to a meeting with the famous English actor and a subsequent friendship and business relationship that was to last until the actor’s death in 1905.
But most significant was the influence of Irving himself. Stoker would write at length about his idol in Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906), a glowing tribute to the man for whom he felt affection and loyalty. Of their first meeting, Stoker wrote: “From that hour began a friendship as profound, as close, as lasting as can be between two men” (1:33). In spite of speculation to the contrary, existing evidence confirms that what Stoker felt for Irving was essentially hero-worship: “my love and admiration for Irving were such that nothing I could tell to others nothing I can recall to myself could lessen his worth” (2:341).
Though he is best known for Dracula, Bram Stoker was the author of several other novels and collections of short fiction, including Under the Sunset (1882), The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), The Lady of the Shroud (1909), The Lair of the White Worm (1911) and Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories (published posthumously in 1914). In addition to Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, his non-fictional publications included A Glimpse of America (1996) and Famous Imposters (1910). He died in 1912, just five days after the sinking of the luxury liner, Titanic.
Thanks to the discovery of Stoker’s working notes for Dracula, it is possible to trace some of the origins of his masterpiece of gothic horror. Auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1913, these papers were acquired by the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia in 1970...
To get a better insight into the Dracula, continue this exciting adventure by searching our books on platforms: Amazon, Parkstone International website, Kobo, Google, Apple, Overdrive, Scribd, Bestfile Book, Goodreads.
