#William Thornley Stoker

[atundratoadstool]

hello! i have a question about this line from renfield's introductions speech in seward's diary on october 1st: "When an individual has revolutionised therapeutics by his discovery of the continuous evolution of brain-matter, conventional form are unfitting, since they would seem to limit him to one of a class." to me in 2022, "the continuous evolution of brain-matter" as a discovery that could "revolutionise therapeutics" scans as something like the concept now termed neuroplasticity, the idea that the brain retains some ability to physically change in response to stimuli throughout adulthood. i was curious about whether that would in fact be what stoker might have meant to refer to so i did some light googling and found that the concept seems often to be attributed to william james, writing in 1890, but also that it was not accepted by the field of psychology until later. so now i'm just curious if you can shed any light on this - what the line is in fact supposed to indicate van helsing's great discovery to be, and whatever it is, whether stoker thought of it as a real scientific discovery he assigned in his text to his supergenius scientist, or whether it was an idea he viewed as fictional that he thought sounded cool, and its resemblance to later science is a fun coincidence.

I had never considered that it might have been a reference to William James work (I'm completely delighted by the suggestion!), and I very much believe Stoker could have had at least passing knowledge of James's theories. Something I love to bring up (and that is especially pertinent in the wake of the end of Renfield's arc) is that Stoker's brother, William Thornley Stoker, has very firmly been established as a consultant for the novel, and that Thornley was a brain surgeon.

Part of the documentation in Stoker's notes for the novel is a diagram Thornley made him showing the motor cortex of the brain such that Renfield's injury could be accurately described. The actual trephination scene with Renfield is lifted more or less directly from an article Thornley wrote: "On a Case of Subcranial Haemorrhage treated by Secondary Trephining." Jack Seward's sentiments on vivisection also replicate some of Thornley's sentiments in the piece. Van Helsing's "We learn from failure, not from success" seems to have been taken from Thornley's "A Contribution to the Surgery of the Brain" and is echoed his 1894 "Some Lessons of Life" (where a Van Helsingesque "festina lente" also crops up). It is very very evident to me that Stoker had access to medical knowledge concerning the brain and that brain science is something constantly in the background of Dracula. While I have no present knowledge of a connection between James and Thornley, I would be completely unsurprised if Stoker learned of early theories of neuroplasticity through his brother and incorporated them in the novel.

#Bram Stoker #Dracula #Dracula Daily #William Thornley Stoker #William James #Abraham Van Helsing #R. M. Renfield #Jack Seward #Dracula Daily asks #medical

[ebookporn]

On the Victorian Science and Prejudices Behind Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Vidya Krishnan Looks at How 19th-Century Concerns About Disease Mirror Those of the Modern World

Like all great plagues, tuberculosis inspired great art, operatic tragedies and literature, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Panicked by a mysterious illness ravaging their village, residents of Exeter, Rhode Island, turned to a folk remedy popular at the time: if the heart of a corpse contained blood, it was believed that it showed it was living off the blood and tissue of living family members—that the corpse was preying on the living. As a result, the village exhumed 19-year-old Mercy Brown on January 17, 1892. She would go on to inspire the character of Lucy Westenra in Stoker’s gothic novel.

Before modern medicine, life was unpredictable, brutal, and, by extension, often short. Plagues were common, and the causes behind diseases such as yellow fever, smallpox, and malaria were unknown. What we do not understand, we fear.

In Exeter, people could see that the sickness in the Brown family was contagious. Three deaths in one family could not be a coincidence. They knew that whatever it was, it spread slowly but relentlessly. In this context, it is not difficult to understand why families would go to extreme lengths to find a “cure.”

The exhumation of Mercy Brown did not occur in a vacuum.

With the advantage of hindsight and science, we now under­stand vampire panics as moments in human history when the inexorable power of superstition collided with emerging medical science.

Five years after Mercy Brown’s exhumation, when Bram Stoker published Dracula, the book was more than a horror story. It referenced cutting-edge medical and scientific ideas of the time and wove in emerging technology of the late 19th century, such as photography, telephones, stenographs, and railroads.

Bram Stoker was fascinated by science, especially medical sci­ence. His uncle, William Stoker, was an eminent physician at the Cork Street Fever Hospital in Dublin, one of the most influen­tial organizations studying infectious disease in the Victorian era. Stoker’s older brother, Thornley, was a notable surgeon whose lec­tures on brain surgery appear in the notes for Dracula. Stoker, in Dracula, captured the anxieties people felt about infectious diseases, including blood infections.

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#covid #pandemic #dracula #literature #vampires #science #librarians

[issarrar-ben-kanaan]

DRÁCULA: A LITERATURA FANTÁSTICA NA ERA VITORIANA STOKER, ABRAHAM "BRAM" (1847 - 1912) Fig.1 Abraham Stoker (Bram) foi membro da ORDEM HERMÉTICA DA AURORA DOURADA (GOLDEN DAWN) - observação deste blog. Biografia Escritor irlandês nascido em Dublin, no histórico subúrbio de Clontarf, em novembro de 1847 e morto em Londres a 20 de abril de 1912. Chamava-se Abraham como seu pai (um oficial público civil e protestante na secretaria do Castelo de Dublin), mas sempre preferiu ser chamado de Bram. Bram Stoker passou os primeiros oito anos de sua vida confinado à cama por uma doença misteriosa que os médicos não puderam diagnosticar. A sua relação com a mãe, Charlotte Thornley, era excepcionalmente íntima e Sra. Stoker partilhou com o filho seu conhecimento e amor por contos de fadas, histórias de fantasmas e apavorantes narrativas da epidemia de cólera de 1832 que ela havia testemunhado. Aos dezesseis anos, tendo superado a enfermidade, Bram ingressou no Trinity College de Dublin, onde realizou seus estudos, diplomando-se em Matemática (Bacharel em Ciências, com louvor, 1870). Em 1866, iniciou uma carreira de funcionário público que transcorreu toda na Irlanda. Como burocrata, a serviço da Justiça, escreveu um manual intitulado "Deveres dos amanuenses e escrivães nas audiências para julgamento de pequenas causas e delitos na Irlanda". Desempenhou também cargos universitários e pertenceu a sociedades científicas e literárias, colaborou em periódicos, foi cronista, jornalista, contador, diretor de um jornal vespertino, agente teatral, secretário particular e administrador do Royal Lyceum Theatre, de Londres, para o famoso ator shakespeariano Henry Irving. Sir Henry Irving, ator shakespeariano que serviu de modelo para a descrição de Drácula Fig.2 Foi, aliás, Sir Henry Irving - "de voz sibilante e terrível" - quem inspirou a Bram Stoker a figura do diabólico Conde-vampiro dos Székes Transilvanos (grupo étnico que se localizou na Transilvânia, "a terra situada além das densas florestas" romenas, a partir do século VII ou no fim do século IX, como querem alguns, oriundo de tribos húngaras ou búlgaras), "descendentes de Átila e Hunos", "altiva raça que cruzou o Danúbio para bater o turco em sua própria terra" e "rechaçou de volta a suas origens os magiares, os lombardos, os avares e os turcos". Irving recompensou o seu fiel discípulo e colaborador fazendo uma leitura dos diálogos de Drácula no palco do Lyceum Theatre. Um ano após a publiçação de Drácula (em maio de 1897), a carreira de Stoker entrou em declínio. Um incêndio no Lyceum destruiu a maior parte do guarda-roupa, adereços e equipamentos do teatro, que fechou em 1902. Irving morreu em 1905 e a saúde de Bram piorava sensivelmente. Naquele ano teve um derrame e, logo a seguir, contraiu a doença de Bright que afeta os rins. Foi com grande dificuldade que Stoker escreveu seus últimos livros. O homem que escreveu Drácula faleceu aos sessenta e quatro anos, esgotado e empobrecido por longos anos de luta contra a sífilis, sem ter podido gozar o notável sucesso de sua criação. Drácula continua sendo a obra literária mais frequentemente adaptada para o cinema e seus personagens as figuras mais retratadas na tela, além de Sherlock Holmes e do Dr. Watson. Em 1987, a Horror Writers of America instituiu um conjunto de prêmios anuais em seu campo de atuação que foi batizado com o nome de "Bram Stoker Award". Publicações - The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1878); - Under the Sunset (1881); - A Glimpse of America: A Lecture Given at the London Institution at 28 December 1885 (1886); - The Snake's Pass (1890); - The Watter's Mou (1894); - Croken Sands (1894); - The Shoulder of Shasta (1895); - Dracula (1897); - Miss Betty (1898); - The Mystery of the Sea (1901); - The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903); - The Man (1904); - Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906); - Lady Athlyne (1908); - Snowbound: The Re-cord of a Theatrical Touring Party (1908); - The Lady of the Shroud (1909); - Famous Impostors (1910); - The Lair of the White Worm (1911). Publicações Post-Mortem - Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories (1914); - The Bram Stoker Bedtime Companion (1973); - Midnight Tales (1990); - Bram Stoker's Dracula Omnibus (1992); - The Essential Dracula, ed. Leonard Wolf (1993). (...) Uma análise do panorama intelectual da época em que Stoker viveu revela a forte influência dos movimentos espiritualistas na Inglaterra Vitoriana de Fins-do-Século e inícios da Era Eduardiana: a "Belle-Époque". Estranhas combinações de esotérico cientificismo e ritualístico misticismo eram dadas à luz, ganhavam notoriedade e esfumavam-se na pira da aclamação popular. Racional e irracional achavam-se estreitamente ligados, as distinções eram muito artificiais. Neste sentido, a figura e a obra do escritor e médico inglês Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), criador de Sherlock Holmes e de seu fiel biógrafo o Dr. Watson, são emblemáticas: aos domínios de raciocínio lógico e agudeza intelectual de Holmes não era estranho, graças ao poder de observação muito sutil, o Reino das Fadas... O pensamento e as doutrinas de Henri Bergson (1859-1941) exerciam considerável influência neste período de viragem histórica. O laureado Nobel de Literatura de 1927 postulava a "Ação" como ponto inicial de seu sistema filosófico que pretendia combater o Materialismo. Para Bergson, além do conhecimento científico, existia o conhecimento filosófico, assim como além do conhecimento pela inteligência existe o que é fornecido pela intuição. Intuição dos dados da consciência separados da ideia de espaço e matéria. O pensamento científico, pela análise e abstração, mostra-se incapaz de compreender ou captar a vida e o espírito, os quais constituem o fundo da Realidade... No que concerne a Bram Stoker, foi o convite feito por Henry Irving para assumir a direção do Lyceum em 1878 que o trouxe a Londres. Era o início de uma longa colaboração que perduraria até a morte de Irving. O trabalho com Irving põe Stoker em contato com a sociedade inglesa ou certa sociedade londrina apaixonada pelo sobrenatural. Bram sempre guardou certo gosto pelo fantástico. Stoker vai se filiar à sociedade secreta mágica-iniciadora da "Golden Dawn in the Outer" cuja história Pierre Victor escreveu com detalhes. Ao lado de Stoker, encontravam-se outros escritores tais como o poeta William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood e Sax Rohmer. A Golden Dawn, ordem iniciática embasada em conhecimentos ocultos e práticas de magia, deve ter influenciado os autores de Le Grand Dieu Pan, Fu-Manchu e Dracula (Machen, Rohmer e Stoker). Samuel L. Mathers, um dos três fundadores da Golden Dawn , era o marido da irmã de Henri Bergson. É possível supor que venha daí a familiaridade de Stoker com as ideias bergsonianas. Nesse fim de século, tudo é possível! Foi assim que ele pode encontrar em Londres "vampires personalities", "sugadores de sangue", cujas características permanecem contudo muito vagas. A presença do "jornalista" Stoker em diligências da Yard londrina, possibilitaram ao futuro autor de Drácula um contato em primeira mão com os corpos exangues de vítimas de homicídios que, na época, ainda apresentavam mutilações e cortes característicos de vampirismo e profanação satânica. Percorrendo as prisões britânicas, Stoker pode encontrar detentos obcecados pela compulsão de verter sangue, vê-lo fluir ou mesmo bebê-lo. Mas o vampirismo já havia inspirado o gótico britânico dos séculos XVIII e XIX e nutrido a imaginação do criador de Drácula bem antes de Bram Stoker começar a procurar a ambientação e a legenda para o seu nosferatu carpatiano. É interessante destacar o aparecimento de Carmilla (de Sheridan Le Fanu) em 1872 e d'O Estranho Caso do Doutor Jekyll e Mr. Hyde (de R.L. Stevenson) em 1886. Nos trabalhos de Ann Radcliffe, Coleridge, Byron, Polidori, Rymer, Le Fanu e Collins estão as raízes ancestrais do Conde Wampyr de Estyria! Ignora-se frequentemente que, embora Stoker tenha mudado o nome do seu Conde-vampiro ainda na fase inicial da elaboração do livro (por volta de 1890, quando leu os artigos de Emily Gerard e resolveu delinear o seu personagem como um nobre transilvano do século XV), ele só decidiu utilizar Drácula - como título - pouco tempo antes da sua publicação em maio de 1897. É o ponto central da carreira literária de Abraham Stoker, os outros livros apresentam intuições brilhantes, ainda que não desenvolvidas plenamente. Como se a partir de Drácula, a inspiração de Bram se interiorizasse, manifestando-se apenas em jatos intermitentes. Infelizmente! Foram muito poucos os que souberam reconhecer a sua importância e o compararam a Frankenstein. No dizer de J. Gordon Melton: "nenhum crítico percebeu que Stoker tinha chegado ao ápice da literatura, mas a verdade é que poucos autores chegaram ao cume que Stoker alcançou"... A decisão de contar a história por meio do testemunho de múltiplos registros (diários, cartas, notas, recortes de jornais, gravações) partiu provavelmente da leitura dos livros de Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone, The Woman in White). Esta alternância de pontos de vista dos diferentes personagens tem a propriedade de conservar intacto o mistério de Drácula, dado que este é sempre indiretamente aproximado do leitor. Negando-se uma voz narrativa ao Conde também se reforça textualmente o seu papel como o Outro. O estrangeiro, a criatura das trevas... Para localizar o cenário da sua lúgubre epopéia, Stoker valeu-se de um completo e pormenorizado guia de viagem, o Baedecker, bem como dos livros e mapas do British Museum, particularmente "The Land Beyond the Forest" de Emily Gerard. As longas conversações que manteve com um amigo húngaro também ajudaram... Por que optou pela Europa Central e pelos Cárpatos como sítio do Castelo de Drácula? O próprio Stoker responde à questão no Diário de Jonathan Harker (...). "Três de maio, Bistritz (...) Dispondo de algum tempo livre durante minha permanência em Londres, ali frequentei o Museu Britânico, consultando livros e mapas geográficos na biblioteca, a fim de recolher dados sobre a Transilvânia. (...) Verifiquei então que o distrito por ele citado se achava localizado no extremo oriental do território precisamente na faixa limítrofe de três Estados: Transilvânia, Moldávia e Bukovina, no centro da cadeia dos Cárpatos, um dos mais selvagens e desconhecidos sítios da Europa. Em nenhuma das muitas obras e mapas consultados me foi possível estabelecer a exata localização do Castelo de Drácula". [Drácula, 2ed, Porto Alegre: L&PM Editores, 1985, pp. 7 e 8] Dessa forma referencia-se o itinerário do procurador Jonathan Harker, cuja viagem pela Alemanha, Áustria, Hungria e Romênia pode ser traçada nos mapas com precisão matemática. Harker viaja de Budapeste para o norte da Transilvânia, então parte do Império Austro-Húngaro. Seu destino final era uma localização não-assinalada em qualquer mapa: o Castelo de Drácula. O percurso, duração e impressões da viagem equivalem a uma experiência real. Stoker informou-se tão bem sobre a Transilvânia que parecia lá já ter estado! A identificação do Castelo com o seu senhor é um tema que aproxima Drácula da primeira ficção gótica (O Castelo de Otranto publicado em 1764 por Sir Horace Walpole). Mas não podemos deixar de especular... Stoker leu algo a respeito de um antigo castelo no Borgo Pass? Sabia algo sobre o Castelo Bram? É claro que nada poderia saber sobre a fortaleza de Vlad Tepes nos Arges... Vlad Tepes Fig.3 Igualmente interessante é a questão do vampirismo em Drácula. Além da significativa influência das fontes literárias (Lord Ruthwen, o vampiro de Polidori; Sir Francis Varney de Rymer e a Condessa Karnstein de Le Fanu são os ascendentes mais prováveis), o artigo de Gerard "Transylvanian Superstitions" pode ter fornecido a Stoker uma explicação para o "estigma de Caim" do seu protagonista: o detalhe do Scholomance, a escola do Demônio nas montanhas da Transilvânia, aonde os Dráculas iam buscar os seus segredos. (...) Segundo Arminius, da Universidade de Budapeste, os Dráculas pertenciam a uma grande e nobre estirpe, embora vez por outra também apresentassem certas degenerescências que, na versão de seus contemporâneos, os levassem a manter estreitas ligações com o Maligno. Eles se apoderaram dos seus torvos segredos nos antros de necromancia, existentes às escarpadas margens do Lago de Hermanstadt, onde o Demônio ia recrutar o seu dízimo humano entre os indiciados para, a partir daí, submetê-los a seus serviços. Nos registros de então, as expressões mais encontradiças são stregoica, que significa bruxa; ordog e pokol que são o mesmo que Satanás e Inferno; e, num determinado manuscrito, este mesmo Drácula é descrito como um wampyr, cuja lexicologia conhecemos já perfeitamente. Houve neste clã muitas e sucessivas gerações de grandes homens e bondosas mulheres e até hoje seus túmulos santificam aquele chão onde somente o mal podia florescer. Pois não é certamente o menor dos seus terrores devermos admitir que este ser do mal ainda conserva suas raízes profundamente mergulhadas nas terras do Bem, visto como sobre os solos de sagradas memórias ele jamais poderia deter-se. [Drácula, L&PM, p. 301] É este Drácula fictício e não o histórico que conquistou a imaginação do mundo ocidental. "O fascínio de Drácula reside em seu mito, não em sua realidade" (Florescu & McNally). A ideia de um morto retornar para reivindicar o amor de um vivo era um tópico popular no folclore europeu. A mais famosa peça literária a abordar o tema foi a balada "Lenore" de Gottfried August Bürger, popularizada na língua inglesa graças a tradução de Sir Walter Scott. Segundo Roger Vadim (cineasta francês de Rosas de Sangue/Carmilla) "de todas as manifestações poéticas do Ocultismo, o mito do vampiro é a mais atrativa, duradoura, resistente e satisfatória". Uma justificativa para esse permanente poder de atração da legenda vampiresca pode ser encontrada na riqueza das tradições mitológicas (ainda que a geografia cultural da legenda seja eminentemente ocidental e européia, na forma sob a qual nos foi legada), no grande número de relatos e obras publicadas, na psicanálise freudiana e por extensão nas concepções sociológicas marxistas e marcusianas: Eros e Thânatos (amor, sexo e morte) são elementos chaves para o entendimento de nossa civilização. O vampirismo (enquanto relação sublima-da na arte, literatura, etc.) permite o pleno desfrute do binômio sangue-sexo. Transferimos para o nosferatu - ser vivente que se recusa a acatar a implacável lei natural e perecer - toda a magia de nossa sede de imortalidade que e também uma vontade de liberdade, uma reação contra os mecanismos de coerção e correção social que nos limitam e aprisionam. A busca de imortalidade é (pode ser), em última análise, a busca de liberdade e da felicidade. Segundo Marcuse, liberdade e felicidade são termos intimamente relacionados: "A felicidade, como realização de todas as potencialidades do indivíduo, pressupõe liberdade (...), no fundo é liberdade." (...) As personagens de Stoker são positivas (em graus diversos) porque agem. A vida é continua modificação e diversificação em sucessivas criações [Byron e Bergson]. Vendo por este prisma, não se pode compreender o mundo, a não ser que seja ele impelido por uma ação, seja ela mágica, onírica ou artística. Drácula, o príncipe negro da Transilvânia, ajusta-se a tais critérios mas é mais do que uma hipérbole da reprimida sexualidade vitoriana. (Reprimida e liberada pelas convenções, os vitorianos viviam intensamente uma vida dupla passada em clubes e casas noturnas...) Sombra especular de nossos egos, oferece a oportunidade de maior liberdade na harmonização das polaridades de uma personalidade pluripotente, em um ser uno, não mais dividido e fragmentado. Assim o mundo parte do sonho e ao sonho retorna tomando às vezes a forma de um pesadelo. Quando questionado, Abraham Stoker respondia que Drácula fora inspirado num pesadelo provocado por indigestão de frutos do mar... "La fête du sang" (the feast of blood - subtítulo de um livro de James Malcolm Rymer) celebrada por Drácula, o "Príncipe nas Trevas", deve dar lugar a uma ressurreição e ascese mais espiritual? Para Stoker, assemelham-se os dois caminhos; é preciso ir até o fim do terror e enfrentá-lo. O grão deve perecer para que frutifique (...). Depois surge a luz: as páginas finais evocam uma aurora radiosa sem as nuvens portadoras da angústia (...). Bram Stoker escreveu 17 livros, nenhum deles porém foi capaz de obliterar o fascínio crescente que ia se acumulando em torno da legenda do seu príncipe-vampiro transilvano. Quando Stoker morreu em 1912, "Drácula" estava em nona edição e já havia ganhado os palcos londrinos. O biógrafo de Stoker, Harry Ludlam escreveu: "Há um profundo mistério entre as linhas de sua obra... o mistério do espírito do homem que as redigiu...". Se existem respostas para o mistério de Stoker é nas páginas de sua obra que devemos procurá-las. (...) Fábio Silveira Lazzari Fonte do Texto e das Gravuras: http://www.carcasse.com/sepia/bram.htm (Os grifos são deste blog.) (Texto reduzido) Fontes Consultadas: ENCICLOPÉDIA VNIVERSAL ILVSTRADA EVROPEO-AMERICANA. Barcelona: Espasa-Calpe. 1930. v. 57. p.1024. McNALLY, Raymond T. & FLORESCU, Radu R. Em Busca de Drácula e outros vampiros. São Paulo: Mercuryo, 1995. 304 p. MELTON, J. Gordon. O Livro dos Vampiros. São Paulo: Makron Books, 1995. pp.731-32. MACINTYRE, Alasdair. As ideias de Marcuse. São Paulo: Cultrix, 1993. pp. 15-18. MILLER, Elisabeth. A Gênese do Conde Drácula in Megalon, São Paulo, 1997. v. 9. nº 43. pp. 22-25.

#golden dawn #aurora dourada #esoterismo #abraham stoker #drácula #literatura

[streetsofdublin]

MY FIRST TIME TO VISIT BRAM STOKER PARK [MARINO CRESCENT PARK]-158887 by William Murphy Via Flickr: Today I visited the area near Clontarf Railway Station and the first location that I visited was "The Crescent". The first thing that caught my attention was that there is a public park named "Bram Stoker Park". To the best of my knowledge the park was named Marino Crescent Park and i was acquired by the Corporation in the mid 1980's. According to some accounts there is a pavilion where bands sometimes perform but I did notice such a structure during my visit. Back in November 2007 two houses [13 and 14 Marino Crescent] were offered for sale at Euro 1.62 million each. At the time I had intended to visit Clontarf in order to photograph them but I forgot to do so. Both houses were built in 1792 and it was claimed that when they were being constructed the builders discovered bones which proved to be remains from the Battle of Clontarf. Bram Stoker, who created Dracula, was born at 15 Marino Crescent in 1847, to Abraham Stoker and Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley. He was one of seven children and spent the first seven years of his life in bed due to a mystery sickness. The Russian Crown Jewels, security for a loan of $20,000, were hidden in number 15 by Harry Boland's mother. They remained safely there during the Civil War when Harry was assassinated and Michael Collins killed. The jewels were eventually reclaimed by the Russian government and the $20,000 loan was repaid. www.thejournal.ie/russian-jewels-state-papers-4942636-Dec...

#bram stoker #marino crescent #the crescent #public park #clontarf #Battle of Clontarf #Abraham Stoker #Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley #Russian Crown Jewels #Harry Boland #2020 #twentrtwenty #ireland #william murphy #infomatique #fotonique #sony #A7RIV

[ericmorseblog]

Our next Writers in Horror Month profile is a classic:

Abraham "Bram" Stoker (8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912) was an Irish author, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned.

Stoker became interested in the theatre while a student through his friend Dr. Maunsell. He became the theatre critic for the Dublin Evening Mail, co-owned by the author of Gothic tales Sheridan Le Fanu. Theatre critics were held in low esteem, but he attracted notice by the quality of his reviews. In December 1876, he gave a favourable review of Henry Irving's Hamlet at the Theatre Royal in Dublin. Irving invited Stoker for dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel where he was staying, and they became friends. Stoker also wrote stories, and "The Crystal Cup" was published by the London Society in 1872, followed by "The Chain of Destiny" in four parts in The Shamrock. In 1876 while a civil servant in Dublin, Stoker wrote the non-fiction book The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (published 1879) which remained a standard work.[5] Furthermore, he possessed an interest in art, and was a founder of the Dublin Sketching Club in 1879.

In 1878 Stoker married Florence Balcombe, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel James Balcombe of 1 Marino Crescent. She was a celebrated beauty whose former suitor was Oscar Wilde.[6] Stoker had known Wilde from his student days, having proposed him for membership of the university’s Philosophical Society while he was president. Wilde was upset at Florence's decision, but Stoker later resumed the acquaintanceship, and after Wilde's fall visited him on the Continent.[7]

The Stokers moved to London, where Stoker became acting manager and then business manager of Irving's Lyceum Theatre, London, a post he held for 27 years. On 31 December 1879, Bram and Florence's only child was born, a son whom they christened Irving Noel Thornley Stoker. The collaboration with Henry Irving was important for Stoker and through him he became involved in London's high society, where he met James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (to whom he was distantly related). Working for Irving, the most famous actor of his time, and managing one of the most successful theatres in London made Stoker a notable if busy man. He was dedicated to Irving and his memoirs show he idolised him. In London Stoker also met Hall Caine, who became one of his closest friends – he dedicated Dracula to him.

In the course of Irving's tours, Stoker travelled the world, although he never visited Eastern Europe, a setting for his most famous novel. Stoker enjoyed the United States, where Irving was popular. With Irving he was invited twice to the White House, and knew William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Stoker set two of his novels there, using Americans as characters, the most notable being Quincey Morris. He also met one of his literary idols, Walt Whitman.

Stoker visited the English coastal town of Whitby in 1890, and that visit is said to be part of the inspiration for Dracula. He began writing novels while manager for Henry Irving and secretary and director of London's Lyceum Theatre, beginning with The Snake's Pass in 1890 and Dracula in 1897. During this period, Stoker was part of the literary staff of The Daily Telegraph in London, and he wrote other fiction, including the horror novels The Lady of the Shroud (1909) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911).[8] He published his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving in 1906, after Irving's death, which proved successful,[5] and managed productions at the Prince of Wales Theatre.

Before writing Dracula, Stoker met Ármin Vámbéry, a Hungarian writer and traveller. Dracula likely emerged from Vámbéry's dark stories of the Carpathian mountains.[9] Stoker then spent several years researching European folklore and mythological stories of vampires.

The 1972 book In Search of Dracula by Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally claimed that the Count in Stoker's novel was based Vlad III Dracula.[10] At most however, Stoker borrowed only the name and "scraps of miscellaneous information" about Romanian history, according to one expert, Elizabeth Miller; as well, and there are no comments about Vlad III in the author's working notes. 

Dracula is an epistolary novel, written as a collection of realistic but completely fictional diary entries, telegrams, letters, ship's logs, and newspaper clippings, all of which added a level of detailed realism to the story, a skill which Stoker had developed as a newspaper writer. At the time of its publication, Dracula was considered a "straightforward horror novel" based on imaginary creations of supernatural life.[8] "It gave form to a universal fantasy . . . and became a part of popular culture.”

Stoker was a deeply private man, but his almost sexless marriage, intense adoration of Walt Whitman, Henry Irving and Hall Caine, and shared interests with Oscar Wilde, as well as the homoerotic aspects of Dracula have led to scholarly speculation that he was a repressed homosexual who used his fiction as an outlet for his sexual frustrations.[14] In 1912, he demanded imprisonment of all homosexual authors in Britain: it has been suggested that this was due to self-loathing and to disguise his own vulnerability.[15] A friend of Wilde, Stoker commenced writing Dracula only weeks after his conviction, possibly fearful and inspired by the monstrous image and threat of otherness that the press coverage of the Wilde trials generated.

#writersinhorrormonth

[atundratoadstool]

Hello there! Thank you for sharing so much amazing information abt Dracula! Tbh your posts are making me nostalgic for literature classes, and that is HIGH praise coming from me (points to blog title).

Anyway, I'm really grappling with Jack Seward's character right now as I (re)read ahead in Dracula. I like him a lot, especially early on, but his treatment of Renfield is, shall we say, not quite up to the ethical standards of the modern day, and the way Jack talks about him gets uhhh, pretty fuckin uncomfy, as I know you're aware ("pet lunatic," indeed)!

In this vein, I'm curious to know more about the history of psychiatry at the time, both the actual practice and the public perception thereof, so I can begin to tease out how much of his behavior was accepted practice, vs how much was Bram Stoker's PERCEPTION of accepted practice, vs how much was, in fact, intended to not look Super Great to contemporary readers (and thus, among other things, contribute to the hints at Jack's own possible mental deterioration, as well as to his rather overly "cerebral" personality).

As far as I can tell, this is something you've studied in some depth, so I was wondering if you could recommend any resources? Preferably free or easily accessible ones, since I don't have logins for any academic institutions or anything.

Please feel free to take your time answering this btw, I know it might be a tall order and I can be patient! I also understand if you just don't have time or energy, so no worries if you can't get to it.

Thank you either way!

[Spoilers and content warning: Discussions of Seward and Renfield later in the text; mentions of vivisection and psychiatric abuse]

Answering this somewhat late, as I have--in fact--had a lot of things draining my time and energy. As always, I'll open with a caveat that it's been a while since Dracula was my primary research topic, so new and exciting insights into Jack Seward may have cropped up since I was last writing about him.

I by no means have a comprehensive understanding of nineteenth-century psychiatry, although combing my tags and my website will turn up some of the specific research I did for little details concerning Dracula (I discussed things a little bit here) . However, I will say that one of the better hints--in my opinion--as to Stoker's intentions for Seward and his perceptions of medical ethics is the extent to which Seward (and later Van Helsing) parrot statements made by Bram Stoker's brother William Thornley Stoker, who was--among other things--a brain surgeon, a visiting physician at St. Patrick's Hospital (a public asylum) in Dublin, and the inspector for Ireland under the vivisection act. There are elements of Dracula pretty clearly lifted from Thornley's articles, and without spoiling too much, R. M. Renfield appears to have had several elements of his character borrowed from an actual case study on one of Thornley's patients (available here, but be warned it has a major spoiler for later events).

We have every indication that Stoker was on good terms with Thornley and respected his medical knowledge (Thornley provided Stoker with notes as to medical procedures in the text), and I feel the choicest bit of Thornleyism we get in the text is a later moment where Seward, in what strikes me as an absolutely chilling passage, compares is plans for Renfield to vivisectionist experiments:

It would almost be worth while to complete the experiment. It might be done if there were only a sufficient cause. Men sneered at vivisection, and yet look at its results to-day! Why not advance science in its most difficult and vital aspect – the knowledge of the brain? Had I even the secret of one such mind – did I hold the key to the fancy of even one lunatic – I might advance my own branch of science to a pitch compared with which Burdon-Sanderson's physiology or Ferrier's brain-knowledge would be as nothing. If only there were a sufficient cause!

This echoes Thornley's pro-vivisectionist sentiments in the aforementioned case study, where he says:

To what, I ask, do I owe the knowledge on which this judgement was founded? Largely to the humane and benevolent investigationsof those biologist who weak, credulous, or mistaken people are actively pelting with the verbal filth of prejudice and ignorance--people who would prefer that this man, formed the image of his Maker, should die, rather than their feeble sentiment be offended by a painless experiment on an ape.

HOWEVER, it is also worth noting here that both Seward and Thornley specify the necessity of an overriding cause, and it is highly debatable whether Seward has one. Thornley elsewhere in his writing takes an anti-vivisectionist stance when it comes to procedures he deems to be unnecessary:

"[…] the arguments of want of necessity and cruelty apply to most, or all, of the experiments in illustration of lectures. Such demonstrations cannot but be demoralising to the young men and women who witness their performance. They seem to me an offense against humanity. (from this 1907 report)

The big question I have here, to my mind, is whether we should read Seward's treatment of Renfield as having "a sufficient cause," and I think how you answer this question will inform your understanding as to where Stoker probably stood with regards to Jack's ethics as a character and whether he intended us to read Jack as unnerving (although, as any 21st century literary scholar, I must offer a quick nod to the author being dead and Jack's creepiness not being contingent on Stoker's intentions for him).

If you want to take a deep dive into the sources with which I was most familiar back when I was fiddling with this argument and penning my unified theory of Seward, Renfield, and Dracula, I will link to my own masters thesis on the matter, which should have a pretty decent biography with regards to the works I consulted when I last really thought through this conundrum.

#Bram Stoker #Dracula #Dracula Daily #Jack Seward #R. M. Renfield #William Thornley Stoker #grad school life

[atundratoadstool]

Hello there! I really love your Dracula meta, and would like to ask something about Jack Seward's Asylum: how come Renfield could just hop out of the window to Dracula's house? Is his Asylum a private bussiness, or does it belong to the state? The way I understand it, Jack's methods of treating patients might have been one of the most humane at the time - am I right about this?

[Spoilers for later chapters re: Seward and Renfield]

Jack runs a private lunatic asylum, and as we'll discover, Renfield is a voluntary inmate who opted into inpatient treatment (and who also--given his connections to Arthur's father and command of philosophy--might have been reasonably upper class). While modern readers frequently imagine nineteenth-century asylums as uniform unsanitary nightmare realms where everyone is subject to continual restraint (and poor sanitation, abuse, and over-reliance on restraint were issues, particularly in overcrowded public institutions), it was not that out of the ordinary to allow patients to wander the grounds or to undertake projects and activities that we might think of as out of place in an institution for the mentally ill today (at least one patient at Ticehurst asylum, for example, was recorded as keeping hunting rifles with him). It’s also worth noting that Stoker’s brother, William Thornley Stoker, was an attending physician at a public asylum (St. Patrick’s Hospital) in Dublin and it is clear he helped Bram with his research for Dracula--in addition to having language from his articles and speeches seep into the words of the novel’s doctors. Stoker should have had at least some reasonable understanding as to how asylums worked, and I feel his depiction of the asylum at Purfleet is one that he would have thought to represent a reasonably well run and humane facility overall, even if it isn’t as radical--per se--as facilities fully committed to non-restraint and moral management. Straight waistcoats still come into play as does chemical restraint. Seward isn’t running the most terrible asylum in the 1890s, but he’s not as cutting edge with humane medicine as he is with his gadgets.

Furthermore, Thornley's influence certainly didn’t stop Bram from having Seward do any number of things that would have been illegal and read as unethical in  the 1890s. In addition to his later falsifying of documentation/death certificates, he intentionally arranges for Renfield to escape at one point, which was a criminal act that could have cost him of to three phonographs worth of fines. In a deleted manuscript fragment, he was even supposed to have had a gun on hand to shoot Renfield should he prove homicidal. While some of this is--in my opinion--just Bram not really registering certain criminal acts as bad if the Good Guys(tm) do them--I do tend to think that some of Seward’s behavior should ping a reader as inappropriate, particularly when Seward identifies his own actions as troubling. Seward, in ruminating on his relationship with Renfield is often aware of the reality of his own cruelty and can begin to draw the lines between Renfield’s unstable mind and his own. While I think Stoker tries his best to claw Seward away from full blown villainy and mad science, it is appropriate to view some of his actions as sinister and unacceptable even for his time period.

Overall, Jack is a tricky character to read. I feel modern audiences sometimes read additional malevolence into conduct that would probably not have raised alarm bells for Victorian readers, but I also feel that there can be a tendency to overcompensate and try to exonerate him his very real dehumanization and abuse of his patient. I find him fascinating for both his sympathetic and unsympathetic qualities, and I’m glad to see people grappling with him this early in the Dracula Daily read through.

#Bram Stoker #Dracula #Dracula Daily #Jack Seward #Dracula Daily asks #ableism #abuse #Dracula spoilers

[atundratoadstool]

Hello dear, I hope you’re doing well.

I have a question if you don’t mind answering; how can I find historical accurate knowledge of the late Victorian-era? I’m terms of at the time medical practices and social events and balls and parties for the upper class/nobility?

This is crucial to my own in depth analysis of Dracula but I either can’t find what I’m looking for or I get contradicted by sources.

I'm doing decently. I have finally gotten over a big batch of grading and am in a position where I have a little wiggle room in getting to the next batch. I have a more or less complete dissertation draft and Thanksgiving break to edit it. I'm finally more or less settled in to a new house.

When delving into my own research for the novel, I have generally taken two approaches. One is using my academic library access to get a variety of scholarly texts on specific aspects of Victorian life (case studies of asylums, monographs on manners/train systems/medical developments) and reading through them to get a broad idea of the topic. The other has been relentlessly and obsessively picking through caches of primary documents on GoogleBooks, archive.org, Hathitrust, etc... and seeing if I can find things that have the same vibes as the elements of society with which Stoker engaged. If you want to get into specifics about who Stoker knew and what his social/work life was like, his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving gives a pretty extensive overview as to who he hobnobbed with, and it's fun to trace the threads of various luminaries he met who have abundant records of their own professional lives. There are a lot of rabbit holes to go down with Stoker, and I think one can pivot from his personal relationships/encounters pretty easily to broader topics regarding the social spheres of people who frequented the Lyceum Theatre. This might not exactly cover the nobility/ballroom scene, but it should give an idea of what ideas about society would prove accurate to Stoker in particular. In terms of medicine, looking into documents relating to Stoker's brother William Thornley Stoker will really yield some fruitful results.

Hope that helps a little bit.

#Bram Stoker #Dracula #Dracula Daily asks

[atundratoadstool]

Oh. Thank. God. I finally found an 1894 address by Thornley Stoker in the 98th issue of the Irish Journal of Medical Science (Page 465) that I hadn't been able to locate for nearly a year. I am going to make a series of social media posts about this incredibly boring accomplishment so that I can ensure that I will know how to actually locate it again instead of searching in vain for the citation info that I probably wrote down in some godforsaken notebook like an actual normal person scholar.

#William Thornley Stoker #(I am an idiot.) #grad school life

[atundratoadstool]

Hi! Do you have any theories/headcanons about the Dracula characters' ages are? We know Jack is 29 and says Jonathan, Quincey, and Arthur are younger than him, and Jonathan would probably have to be a certain age to be a official solicitor. Do you have any thoughts? Thanks!

Okay! I do not have hard and fast headcanons for exact numbers here, but –as is often the case– I do have some overly zealous research facts that shape my impressions. So, because everyone knows I love to geek out about this stuff, I’m going to list out some of those assorted facts with my resulting thoughts about the characters’ ages and what their ages probably tell us. This will probably make this a much longer answer than this ask might seem to demand, but it’s Dracula Day (or it was when I started) and I am ready to Dracula as hard as I can.

So, just to set the stage, the generally agreed upon date during which the events of the book take place is 1893, based on the fact that Stoker’s timeline in his notes has days of the week that align with this year, and the mention of the recent death of Jean-Martin Charcot and the term “New Woman” position. This is the date I’m using in trying to extract fun pre-Dracula-timeline Dracula ideas. Some people, of course, tend to favor an 1890 date, given that the epilogue of the novel seems to indicate the events took place 7 years prior to the publication of the novel, but I prefer ‘93 because more minor details of the text make sense with it. (I won’t even get started with Leonard Wolf and his attempt to assign dates based on moon phases.)

R. M. Renfield: Renfield is explicitly 59 (b. 1834). We don’t know much about him; heck – we don’t even know his first name; and there’s not a lot we can draw conclusions about. It might be sort of interesting to someone, I guess, that Stoker initially gave his age as 49 in the typescript before crossing it out and that Renfield and that Patrick Rourke (a brain injury patient from whom some of Renfield’s medical info was drawn) was 50, but it’s not super interesting to me. Slightly more interesting may be the fact that he is within an age range where he feels chill speaking about Arthur’s dad as a peer, but there’s not a terrible lot to be extrapolated from that given that Renfield still has no past and Lord Godalming still has no personality.

Jack Seward: Jack is explicitly 29 (b. 1864), and if we take Van Helsing being his mentor as an indication that he studied in Amsterdam, he would have had to have spent 6 years of his life earning his M.D. in addition to spending however many it takes to wrangle himself into being superintendent of a private asylum and however many it takes one to go on adventures in Siberia and Korea with one’s bros when the latter country only opened its borders in 1882. This all feeds into my long held headcanon that he inherited his post as superintendent at a private asylum that was some manner of dynastic institution, as this makes more sense than Jack being some sort of savant who was able to get himself a superintendency immediately after a decade of med school and shooting wolves. Also, this allows Jack to join the “everyone’s parents are dead” club that has the rest of the novel as its membership.

Lucy Westenra: Lucy is explicitly 19 (b. 1874), but she is due to turn 20 in September of the year in which the novel takes place, and we do not know if she has a birthday somewhere in the midst of tragically dying that month. If we want to get super sad and well into the spirit of Stokerian Victorian melodrama, let’s just say that she was going to get married on her birthday (September 28) and instead of getting either married or having any sort of birthday celebration, she had a violent post-mortem confrontation with her fiance in which she was about to chew on a baby. On a tangential chronology-related note, her parents may have been a bit old or predestined to tragedy, given that her father has been dead for over two years at the time of the novel (She is described as wearing white – i.e. not in mourning.) and given that her mother has a heart problem that seems suited to those who are elderly, cursed, or shameless plot devices.

Mr. Swales: Mr. Swales is the character claims that he is nearly 100 (b. 1793?) and he was apparently already sailing around with the Greenland fishing fleet at the time of the Battle of Waterloo (1815), which means he was probably killing whales and speaking incomprehensible dialect with his bros from the age of 22 to possibly some time in his late 40s when the fleet was phased out of existence in the 1840s. What he did with his life afterwards remains a mystery until around 1873, when he started sitting on Geordie Canon’s grave and bothering tourists.

Jonathan Harker: Jonathan’s age isn’t given, but I’m going to put him at around 21 (b. 1872). Why this specific number? Because it required 5 years apprenticeship to a trained solicitor to qualify for examination in the 1890s, and while I haven’t looked up the laws, I imagine that you probably can’t start that sort of thing before the age of 16, even if the solicitor in question is your adoptive dad and you’ve probably been soliciting under him forever. While theoretically Jonathan could have started a formal apprenticeship later or gotten special permission to take the exam after a 3 year stint, I’m going with the narrative that he started his apprenticeship to Hawkins as soon as humanly possible. I also like this because I envision Mina as being of his age or slightly older, and as we’ll get to next, I envision her as being in her early twenties.

Mina Harker: Mina’s age isn’t given, and I don’t have any fun historical facts to help pinpoint it, but I’m on board with the headcanon that many adapters and annotators have, which is that she attended the same boarding/finishing school as Lucy, where they became friends, and was eventually taken by the institution on as an assistant schoolmistress. Somewhere between 21-23 (b. 1869-72) is my general estimate for her.

Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris: Arthur and Quincey are explicitly mentioned as being younger than Jack, but I don’t think they’re as young as Jonathan is. The only date we have that connects all three men is the Korea thing, and given that Jack was 18 when the borders opened and probably wasn’t out of med school until the age of 22 at least, I’m going to place the expedition around ‘87 and assume Arthur and Quincey were in their early twenties at the time, with Quincey being a little older to account for him having likely adventured more in his life than Art. I’d put them around 25 (Art, b. 1868) and 27 (Quincey, b. 1866) at the time of the novel.

Abraham Van Helsing: Abraham is given as being in his 50s. I’m putting him at 52 because this was William Thornley Stoker’s age at the time of Dracula’s publication, and I tend to imagine that Van Helsing is pretty solidly based, at least in part, on Thornley.

Dracula: I post about how i’m like... not at all a fan of the Drac = Vlad III from time to time, but if you want to get into specifics as to what age I think he hails from, it’s the 1500s to 1600s rather than the 1400s. I could explain, but this guy already did.

#general-sleepy #Bram Stoker #Dracula #vampires #Dracula headcanons

[streetsofdublin]

BRAM STOKER

BRAM STOKER PARK – MARINO CRESCENT PARK

When I visited Marino Crescent the first thing that caught my attention was that there is a public park named “Bram Stoker Park”.

To the best of my knowledge the park was originally named Marino Crescent Park and it was acquired by the Corporation in the mid 1980’s.

According to some accounts there is a pavilion where bands sometimes perform but…

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#2020 #A7RIV #Abraham Stoker #Battle of Clontarf #bram stoker #Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley #clontarf #Fotonique #Harry Boland #Infomatique #Ireland #marino crescent #Public Park #Russian Crown Jewels #Sony #the crescent #twentrtwenty #William Murphy

[streetsofdublin]

MARINO CRESCENT

MY FIRST VISIT MARINO CRESCENT

Today I visited the area near Clontarf Railway Station and the first location that I visited was “The Crescent”.

Back in November 2007 two houses [13 and 14 Marino Crescent] were offered for sale at Euro 1.62 million each. At the time I had intended to visit Clontarf in order to photograph them but I forgot to do so. Both houses were built in 1792 and it…

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#2020 #A7RIV #Abraham Stoker #Battle of Clontarf #bram stoker #Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley #clontarf #Fotonique #Harry Boland #Infomatique #Ireland #marino crescent #Public Park #Russian Crown Jewels #Sony #the crescent #twentrtwenty #William Murphy

[atundratoadstool]

Bram Totally Ganked his Older Bro’s Doctoring Quotes

“Our failures in surgery are generally more instructive than our successes, for calamity is a more direct guide to danger than it is to success.”

- William Thornley Stoker (”A Contribution to the Surgery of the Brain,” 1890)

“We learn from failure, not from success!”

- Abraham Van Helsing (Dracula, 1897)

#bram stoker #william thornley stoker #dracula #medical #vampires #gradblr #thesis