165th Anniversary of the writer Bram Stoker the creator of Dracula.
Bram Stoker who born in Dublin in 1847, studied at Trinity College while working as a civil servant in Dublin Castle and moonlighting as a newspaper drama critic.
He moved to London in 1878 with his new wife, Florence Balcombe, and became an administrator of the Irving Company at the Lyceum theatre.
Stoker’s first full-length book, written earlier in Dublin, was a piece on non-fiction entitled The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, and was followed by novels, lectures, short stories, articles, serials and a two-volume memoir of Irving.
Dracula, his fifth novel, was published in 1897 after Stoker spent several years researching European folklore and mythological stories of vampires.
He died in London in 1912 after suffering a number of strokes. One hundred years after Stoker’s death, Dracula continues to fascinate and forms the basis for a film and literary industry based around vampires.
A new edition, with an introduction by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, was published this year to mark the centenary of Stoker’s death.
After passing the exams to practice law, his intention was to move to London and practice there. But a rave review for performance by the famous Henry Irving in the role of Hamlet won him the friendship of the star, who hired him as secretary and manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. While working for Irving, Stoker was a literary critic for the Daily Telegraph and wrote several novels as The Snake's Pass (1890), The Watter's Mou '(1895), The Shoulder of Shasta (1895), Dracula (1897), Miss Betty (1898), The Mystery of the Sea (1902), The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) and The Man (published as The Gates of Life in America) (1905).
Precisely in the figure of Irving, and also in that of Franz Liszt, was inspired to physically build the character of Count Dracula. While the story is obviously fictional, and a few scholars now dispute that Stoker knew of the existence of a former voivode of Wallachia known for his cruelty: Vlad Dracula "Vlad the Son of the Demon / Dragon", also known as Vlad Tepes "the Impaler." It may have been the Hungarian historian Vámbéry Arminius, whom he saw on several occasions, his main informant. despise Although sources are not as "Report on the principalities of Wallachia" Emily Gerard and his frequent visits to the British Museum , where we displayed some old documents in which foreigners reviled figure of the sovereign rigid.